The Hotel on the Roof of the World (18 page)

This was a very odd concept. Medicine for rats? I made a note never to take any Chinese medicine while I was in Tibet.

On a predetermined date little piles of pink rice, tainted with ‘rat medicine' were placed outside each door along every corridor of the hotel. The kitchen floors were covered in medicine, the store rooms, the garage, the staff canteen and the telephone operators' chamber. There was not a room untouched.

Conny, the new Sales Manager, was given the task of writing a letter to each guest telling them not to touch any of the pink rice piles which were there entirely for the good of the guests and from our commitment to maintaining the highest possible standards of service. None of the guests complained.

By early morning, there was no more pattering of tiny feet along the air-conditioning ducts. The effect of the medicine had been catastrophic. The highest head count came from the staff canteen, where barrels were loaded with the bodies of 224 dead rats. Before I could stop them, the rat-catchers wheeled the open barrels across the courtyard from the staff canteen and straight through the lobby. I chased after them to intercept any guest who might become disturbed by the sight but fortunately there was no one around. The rat-catchers were on their way to the kitchens, which had the next-highest toll. When the bodies from the storerooms were added, the total for the hotel came to over 440. It was a sad day for the rodents of the Holiday Inn Lhasa.

But Barba was still not pleased. The rodent problem was temporarily solved but the cold was getting unbearable. ‘We have to get that twenty per cent occupancy.' He was thinking aloud at the breakfast table. ‘We need to do something different. Something sensational. We need to bring the press in.'

‘You know journalists aren't allowed here, Mr Barba,' Harry answered. ‘They were banned after the rioting.'

‘I don't care! They can fire me! You think I want to stay here? I have an idea that's going to get the heating on! I like being fired!'

He stood up to shout this last sentence and brought his fist down on the table harder than all of the previous General Manager's table thumps put together. The guests paused with their breakfast and turned to face our table. This man was not normal. He glowered at them. ‘You want to complain to the manager?' he shouted.

No one did. He ran his hands through his hair, sat down again and started telling us calmly why he had been sacked from every major hotel chain in the world.

‘At Sheraton it was for sleeping with the owner's daughter,' he chuckled. I had not worked with an Italian before and did not realise that this would mean having intricate details of his previous sexual experiences relived second by second at the breakfast table.

‘At Hilton it was even better. I opened the Okinawa Hilton but was fired after the opening party. It was a great party. Everyone enjoyed it. I put hash in the cakes. Can you get hash in Lhasa?'

None of us answered. Mr Liu gave his forkful of food an extra examination and decided not to continue with breakfast.

We were late for the Morning Meeting and Jig Me gave us a condescending look when we entered the meeting room. Barba announced his idea to the assembled managers; ‘I am going to hold the first ever Miss Tibet contest!'

The Tibetans and Chinese looked blankly at him. Heather had trouble translating. They still looked blank when it was said in Chinese. Chef chuckled. I groaned. I was getting the measure of Barba. He would come up with the crazy idea and Conny and I would have to make it work. While Conny had the dubious task of staying with the crazy Italian to plan the Miss Tibet arrangements, I left for Hong Kong to hold a press conference at the Foreign Correspondents Club.

The journey on CAAC was as eventful as ever. The departure from Lhasa had been fine but the descent into Chengdu is engraved on my memory. The old Boeing dropped though the cloud over Chengdu, undercarriage down, patchwork of rice fields beneath us, the airport buildings are coming into view through the mist, closer now, coming in to land, concrete runway beneath us, another plane is on the runway. ANOTHER PLANE IS ON THE RUNWAY!

Fortunately the pilot had the same reaction. He slammed the Boeing into a 45-degree ascent on full thrust. The seats shuddered as the engines roared and the oxygen masks all popped out. The Tibetans thought it was hilarious and stood in the aisle talking in loud voices while the pilot circled again and came in to land once the runway was clear.

The CAAC flight from Chengdu to Hong Kong was less nerve-wracking. Chengdu has a growing number of foreign-managed factories and the flight to Hong Kong is used regularly by expats on their way out of China for ‘R & R' (Rest and Recuperation). All the expats on board were in good humour. This could have been caused by the sign on each seat, which should have read, ‘Your life vest is under your seat,' but instead proclaimed, ‘USE BOTTOM CUSHION FOR FLOTATION.'

The in-flight magazine was equally entertaining. There was an article about a pilot, Mr Liang Luxin, ‘the owner of civil aviation first grade safety medal.' Apparently, Mr Liang Luxin has ‘flown safely 10,645 hours in 30 years, is boundlessly loyal to our Party and flies for more than 300 days a year.' This is what they call safe!

A drink advertised on the back page looked interesting; ‘Guoguang Fushoule – a high grade tonic wine with low alcohol.' It could cure all sorts of ills but advertised its main ingredients as gecko and dog's kidney. I crossed it off my shopping list.

The plane glided effortlessly between the apartment blocks of Hong Kong and came to a perfect landing on the runway stretching out into the harbour. Perhaps Mr Liang Luxin was flying us today, clocking up a few extra hours of safety in the sky.

Inside the aircraft was CAAC, outside was Hong Kong. It was always an exciting sensation. From drab Communism to vibrant capitalism. You could say whatever you wanted, think whatever you wanted and buy whatever you wanted. A taxi took me to the Holiday Inn Golden Mile – paradise after months in China. The sheets were soft and white, there were no Himalayan Hamsters, no yak burgers, no Party A. There were yellow bananas. Everything smelt different, tasted different. But I was not here to relax, I had to keep my appointment at the FCC.

At 5 p.m. I faced the press of Hong Kong.

‘We are organising the first Miss Tibet contest in history,' I announced to the packed room; ‘you are all invited.'

They scribbled notes.

‘But none of you can come.'

They stopped writing.

‘At least none of you
journalists
can come. But over there I think I can see a housewife, and over there a teacher and over there a technician.'

It was painfully simple. Every visitor to Tibet had to apply for a permit and one of the questions on the application form asked for the profession of the traveller. All you had to do to get a permit was write any answer other than ‘journalist'. Suddenly we had seventy-five enrolled on the tour. It was an immediate success. The travel arrangements from Hong Kong for the Miss Tibet extravaganza were put together by an excellent tour operator and by the time I returned to Lhasa, 120 seats were sold.

Barba had been working hard on the plans for the evening but had not actually sought any permission for the event. Jig Me kept insisting that no further arrangements could be made until a meeting was held with the ‘parties concerned'. This sounded ominous to those of us who could read the warning signs, but Barba was in a bullish mood. He shouted at the Morning Meeting, ‘It will just be one of those rubber stamp schmucks. Give me a few minutes with him and then I can get on with the preparations.'

The ‘rubber stamp schmuck' turned out to be a delegation of twenty people. There were representatives from the Public Security Bureau (PSB), the Foreign Affairs Office (FAO), Tibet Tourism Bureau (TTB), Tibet Cultural Bureau (TCB) and Tibet Television (TTV). Barba proudly announced that I had been in Hong Kong and the major press and television stations of the world had been invited to witness the great event. The PSB solemnly reminded him that journalists were not permitted to enter Tibet. The FAO stated that they had received a request from NBC television to film the event. Barba bluffed; ‘We have eight TV crews already on the way to Lhasa! You can't stop it now!'

Heather translated. Jig Me was furious. He was responsible for the behaviour of the expats and was rapidly losing massive amounts of face amongst the powerful elite of Lhasa.

‘We can stop anything,' said the PSB man. The meeting grew tense. A small man wearing a blue Chairman Mao suit stood up and asked what a beauty contest involved.

Heather translated Barba's reply. The man in the Mao suit stated that there could be no contest as such because that would be unfair. Instead, a rally with banners saying some good Party slogans and some dancing would be more appropriate. The rep from the Cultural Bureau stood up and gave a fifteen-minute speech about dancing. Heather diligently translated. Now it was Barba who became furious.

‘Do you think the world's press are going to come here to see a bunch of Commie dancers?' he screamed. ‘That's it, I cancel everything.'

THE RACE TO RESIGN

Barba had no intention of cancelling Miss Tibet. He was doing what he was best at – bluffing. He called another meeting with Jig Me and the group of Communist cronies and this time tried another strategy. ‘There will be no press, just a group of housewives and teachers from Hong Kong.'

With this new, toned-down approach, he won the support of Mr Hu from the Tibet Cultural Bureau and so started the preparations in earnest. A great extravaganza was planned, with a picnic at 14,000 feet, a barbecue with roast yak on Jarmalingka Island, a surprise buffet on the roof of an isolated monastery, and then the grand finale – the Miss Tibet Gala evening, with music from a Filipino band, especially flown in for the occasion.

With two days to go before the arrival of the guests, Mr Hu asked for a meeting with Mr Barba. He wanted to show Barba his gala performance. Jig Me acted as mediator.

‘No, no, Jig Me,' said Barba, ‘you must be translating wrong. You mean that he wants to see
my
gala performance.'

‘No,
he
has prepared the gala performance. You cannot do one.'

It was quite a surprise. Two sets of preparations had been going on, each oblivious to the other's work. Barba's blood surpassed boiling point. I have never seen anyone capable of summoning up greater anger.

Everything about him oozed rage; his facial contortions, the little beads of sweat that appeared on his forehead, the maroon colour which spread across his face, his stammering voice and the vast array of imaginative swear words accompanied by Italian sign language. He stood up from the table and shouted, ‘You mean that this little
Communist
has prepared a show. Am I, described by
Playboy
magazine as “the Felini of the hotel industry”, not able to produce a show good enough?!'

It had been a great insult to Barba's gigantic ego. But Mr Hu realised that he too was being severely insulted and hurled abuse back in Chinese. Jig Me visibly aged ten years and Barba stormed out of the meeting.

Later in the afternoon, a compromise was reached. Barba would view Mr Hu's show in the evening to give it an appraisal. He laughed all the way through it.

‘Call this a show? Chinese girls, prancing around to disco music twenty years out of date!'

Mr Hu thought Barba was enjoying the performance and made him an offer – he could have the show for $15,000. The atmosphere became electric and Barba shot to his feet. He was just saved from assaulting Mr Hu by Jig Me's very simple solution. Mr Hu could have his show on one night and Mr Barba could have his on another. With careful scheduling, Mr Hu's evening show was put on at a time when the hotel was practically empty and Barba's was kept as originally planned for the last night of the Miss Tibet tour.

The group of ‘housewives' and ‘teachers' had no difficulty reaching Lhasa and on the day of their arrival, occupancy hit the magic 20 per cent. It was the first time in the history of Holiday Inn Lhasa that a day in December had reached this prized figure. Derek was triumphantly given the order to switch the heating on. Barba had achieved his goal although he was a little disappointed that he had not yet been fired.

Conny and I took the group to the Barkhor on their first afternoon. Some of the ‘housewives' carried suspiciously large home video cameras, and many of the ‘teachers' took notepads with them wherever they went and looked everywhere for Tibetans who could speak English and tell them about human rights.

We were starting to gain too much attention for a normal tour group and we bundled the ‘tourists' through the crowd of ‘You how much?' Khampa girls and back onto the tour bus. You never knew whom to trust at the Barkhor. Any one of the harmless-looking Tibetans or Chinese could be an informer. No matter how much Barba was savouring the risk of being fired, I was enjoying working in Lhasa and had no intention of being deported for organising his group of illegal journalists.

Back at the hotel, the guests complained of the cold. The long-awaited heating was completely ineffectual in the massive marble-lined lobby. The staff had the annoying habit of leaving doors open at either end of the hotel, turning the corridors into wind tunnels. We tried all sorts of methods to keep them closed but nothing worked. The heating, however, did have an effect in the rooms, and when I opened the door to room 3205 I was hit by the heat of a sauna and a rather curious smell. I looked around my room but couldn't find anything out of place, so I decided the smell must be coming in from outside.

The tour was going superbly. What they saw, where they ate, what they did, had all been carefully planned to bring them on to a new and more thrilling high each day. The momentum gathered at breakneck pace and they returned to the hotel on the final afternoon of the tour in eager anticipation of the
grand finale
– the Miss Tibet election itself.

Three hours before the election was due to start, the small man in the blue Chairman Mao suit who had been at the initial meeting reappeared at the hotel. He announced that the Filipino band was forbidden to play rock 'n' roll, that the lead singer of the band was not to look too sexy and that the election had to be cancelled. There could be no Miss Tibet. We would be allowed to continue with the show, but the Tibet Cultural Bureau would provide the pre-selected contestants and the title from now on would be the ‘FASHION PARADE EVALUATION'. Conny was ordered to take down all the posters and signs which read ‘Miss Tibet' and change everything to the ‘FASHION PARADE EVALUATION'.

That evening, as I changed into a dinner jacket for the gala evening, the smell in my room became unbearable. It was not just in my room but in all the rooms. There was a tinge of it on the air in the corridors and it worsened as you approached the coffee shop.

It suddenly hit me. I recognised the smell. This was the same odour that had spread through my garage back in Jersey when I had baited a mouse trap and then forgotten to look at it for a few weeks. The difference now was that this smell was not just from the body of a tiny dead mouse – this was the rat population of the hotel which had been poisoned in the air-conditioning ducts. The rat-catchers from Chengdu had long since gone, having only picked up the bodies which were out in the open. No one had thought of the air-conditioning ducts, where the corpses had initially been preserved in the dry, chilled atmosphere. But now the bodies were being blasted with hot air and were rapidly defrosting and decomposing. The stench throughout the hotel was excruciating.

The heating was immediately switched off. The windows in the Everest Room were opened wide and Derek ran around the hotel instructing his Engineering Department staff to block off all the vents. A bend in the air-conditioning ducts above the coffee shop produced the bodies of thirteen rats. No one knows how many lay out of reach in the five storeys of the hotel.

Once the temperature had been lowered the smell started to decline. I put on several layers of T-shirts and my thick woollen long johns under my evening suit and went to the Everest Room, to see if there was anything I could do to help with the final preparations.

The Everest Room was usually home to the notorious group buffet but tonight Barba had transformed the area into a Hollywood set. He had ordered a Tibetan tent village to be constructed in the hotel grounds outside the Everest Room, so that yaks grazed on the lawn by the windows. Charlie, who was responsible for the grounds of the hotel as well as the housekeeping inside, kept prodding the yaks away from the flower tubs, but to no avail.

Inside, gigantic
thangkas
– Buddhist paintings on scrolls – hung from each wall and a vast stage had been knocked together by Derek's engineers (which would serve as the catwalk and set for the Filipino band). An arch spanning the width of the stage had been created by the hotel's Art Department and emblazoned with Barba's favourite phrase: ‘The Best is Yet to Come.'

All references to ‘Miss Tibet' had been painted out at the last minute and there was still a smell of fresh paint. No one complained as it made a change to the smell of defrosting rats which hung in the corridors.

The panel of judges and VIPs took their seats at the head table. For each of the ten foreign judges that Barba had asked for, the authorities had insisted there be two locals – so the table stretched from one end of the room to the other. Us mere mortals sat at the round tables.

Conny took the stage as hostess for the evening. She was stunning, dressed in a beautiful black velvet ball gown, which definitely had not been made by Communist tailors. Her big brown eyes sparkled with excitement and she kept up a beaming smile despite the mayhem behind the scenes. Barba had donned his impresario outfit and lurked in the background, wearing a pale lilac shirt and a blue silk neckerchief beneath his dinner jacket. From behind the ‘The Best is Yet to Come' banner, he shouted commands and directed the players of the evening.

Conny was ordered to commence. She welcomed the VIPs and the first act of the night – a Tibetan yak dance. This becomes rather tiresome after you have seen it a few times, but the first occasion is always very impressive. To the fast beat of a drum and the sound of crashing cymbals, a yak herder enters the restaurant with two pantomime yaks in tow. He cracks his whip on the floor and skips from side to side. The yaks also jump continually to the rhythm of the drumbeat while, still skipping, the yak herder pulls out two white silk scarfs,
khatas
, and places them on the floor, one in front of each yak. The drum beat quickens and the yak herder skips even faster and shouts at the yaks. Between dancing from side to side, the yaks try to scoop up the silk scarves on their horns. Several attempts are made and the yak herder has to shout louder and crack his whip even harder until finally we are all put out of our misery when the yaks each hook the scarves onto their horns. This brings cheers and rounds of applause and a great sense of relief that it is finally over for the poor men inside the yak costumes.

As the yak herder led his animals away, Barba shouted his commands to the next act. The Filipino band came on stage and the waitresses appeared from the kitchen bearing plates with the first course, while dancing the Chinese Thirty-Six Steps. It was an amazing sight. Thirty waitresses following a carefully choreographed dance routine, while carrying bowls of vegetable soup.

Discos were big business in Lhasa. New ones were opening in town virtually every day and the hotel was home to one of the hottest nightclubs of Lhasa. Every night over 600 Chinese and Tibetans crammed in to the Holiday Inn Lhasa disco to hear the latest from Boney M and Abba. During the Cultural Revolution dancing had been suppressed in China as being something inherently bourgeois. After the fall of Mao, dance halls opened up across the country and the population, both young and old, took immediately to this newly allowed form of pleasure. Couples waltzed the night away to the sounds of old Chinese folk songs, moving Communist propaganda ballads which they had all learnt when they were in the Red Guard, and they waltzed too to the new disco imports from the West.

The discos became the places for girls to meet boys.

Waltzing close with a partner in the dark of a nightclub, particularly when inhibitions are subdued by alcohol, has always been a good way to find romance. But as in all nightclubs, the atmosphere can become tense when charged with alcohol, love and lust. Khampas were not allowed into the Holiday Inn Lhasa disco carrying their daggers and Chinese soldiers were not permitted to enter with revolvers. Despite the efforts of the hotel Security Department, fights were fairly common. I was once called down by Dr Grubby who was refusing to treat a patient in the clinic. It turned out to be a blood-stained Chinese soldier who was sitting on the couch, waving his handgun at anyone who came near. On another evening a bullet hole was left in the glass door as a memento from an unhappy customer. Fortunately, there were not too many of these.

Despite the occasional dangers, dancing was a popular pastime in Lhasa. It was not used exclusively for romance. Girls danced with girls and boys waltzed with boys. The disco was particularly popular with the young Chinese soldiers and they would often dance together in their uniforms, arm in arm to the slow numbers.

After the Chinese waltz, the next favourite dance was synchronised disco. The most complicated of these was The Thirty-Six Steps. One person would start and soon the entire dance floor would be a solid mass moving in perfect coordination. Bend the knees three times, kick with the left leg twice, walk forward three paces, right foot first, kick forwards with the left leg, turn, kick back with the left leg, side-step three paces to the right… and so it went on for thirty-six steps.

The waitresses at the Miss Tibet gala evening were doing it superbly. No one seemed to mind if the soup was little bit cold and half of it was in the saucer. Barba crammed the evening full of surprises. A Tibetan magician made bowls of noodles from paper, the entire Housekeeping Department dressed in their brown Mao-style uniforms came on stage and sang Communist propaganda songs. There was even a Miss Foreigner in Tibet competition. Barba had chosen his favourite foreigner, Mary-Anne Bishop, who had been in Tibet studying Black-necked Cranes. A horse-drawn carriage came in, pulling a pair of enormous weighing scales. Poor Mary-Anne had to sit on the scales and receive as her prize her own weight in yak cheese. As the horse departed, it stopped in front of the head table, lifted up its tail and dropped a huge pile of steaming dung on the dance floor. Everyone roared with laughter. Everyone that is, except for Charlie, who had to scoop it up.