The Hotel on the Roof of the World (19 page)

Finally, the great Miss Tibet election itself. The girls, all preselected by the Tibet Cultural Bureau, paraded along the stage wearing costumes from different parts of Tibet. Who knows what the judges were doing, or even if their votes were counted.

The ‘housewives' and ‘teachers' ran to the front of the stage with their ‘home videos' and souvenir snap cameras and after some confusion, Conny announced the winner as a Miss Droma, wearing a costume from Gyantse. Gesang, the head of hotel security, rode into the Everest Room on his motorbike with sidecar and Miss Droma was driven away to the sound of the Filipino band. Never mind that Miss Droma was a married 26-year-old mother and pregnant with her second baby. No one would know.

The exhaust fumes from the motorbike filled the room and several guests became nauseous. The hall emptied. The evening had been a great success and Barba's ego swelled to Everest dimensions.

The next morning the hotel also emptied and we were left alone again. The day after a big party always has a strange feeling to it. The corridors which had echoed to the laughter of happy guests in their dinner jackets now stood empty, the only sound being the whistling of the wind. All the excitement was over. None of us had been fired. The hotel was freezing again. Charlie tried in vain to stop a large icicle from returning to the urinal opposite the coffee shop, but within a few minutes of breaking it off it would be back again.

Barba was exhausted, and left for Christmas vacation. So too did the rest of the expats. I was left alone with the ‘English teachers' Nancy and Bob, which was rather a depressing thought, and with Conny, whom I had the task of training in the Sales Department. This was a far more enjoyable prospect.

Thankfully, I had not seen much of Nancy and Bob since their arrival in Lhasa. Tashi would come back from the English lessons and tell me more than I wanted to know about them. They seemed to treat the lessons more like Sunday School junior class than adult education. Tashi asked me if it was normal that the staff should be made to play the games of small children. They had been told to tie balloons to their feet and then jump around in the courtyard (or ‘playground' as Nancy and Bob looked at it) and try to pop their colleagues' balloons. Nancy shrieked with laughter at every pop and gave away her precious Mr Smiley stickers to the winners.

It was a strange concept to me. The Tibetans had a wonderful religion of their own which had seen them through untold hardships and deprivations and yet Nancy and Bob were intent on converting them to Nancy's particular off-beat brand of Christianity.

Not surprisingly, their methods were having little impact on the local population. Tibetan Buddhism had withstood the extremes of the Cultural Revolution – it could certainly withstand Mr Smiley stickers. With the Chinese, who were caught between the atheist principles of Communism and the overpowering spiritualism present everywhere in Tibet, Nancy and Bob had a better chance. They focused their attentions on a Chinese boy who had left his job as a receptionist as he was bullied by the bell boys. They renamed him ‘Jacob' and concentrated all their efforts on him. Thankful that they were easing off the Tibetans and had left the expats unmolested, I put aside my personal thoughts on their business in Tibet and acted as Christianly as possible by promising to invite them to the hotel Christmas dinner.

I was determined to save something special for Christmas. Since Chef had left on vacation, the variety of food, which had never been good at the best of times, reached its lowest ever levels. There was virtually nothing to buy in the local market, the stores were bare and Mr Han, the local Purchasing Manager would not be going on a purchasing trip until the spring.

Cabbage and spam became the only supplements to yak meat. Fried spam, diced spam with cabbage, boiled spam strips on a bed of cabbage, spam cut into imaginative shapes to pretend it isn't spam with cabbage. The choice was becoming very depressing and my diet grew progressively unhealthy. To mark the occasion, I taped the chorus of the Spam song from Monty Python in the middle of a section of Vivaldi's
Four Seasons
. Every so often, ‘Spam, Wonderful Spam' would blurt out over the PA system and startled guests would look up from their food. A few seconds later they would go back to their plates of spam as Vivaldi's ‘L'Inverno Allegro' blasted through the squeaky in-house music system again. Had they been dreaming? Tibet had a profound effect on many visitors. They returned to the West with unanswered questions on spiritualism, the meaning of life, and whether they had really heard the Spam song while they were eating.

I sat in the coffee shop, decided against the special of the day, which was yet another enticing combination of spam and cabbage and instead ordered a large plate of chips. After twenty minutes a small plate arrived with ten miserable chips.

‘No, no,' I said, ‘I ordered a
large
plate of chips.'

The waitress sighed visibly, returned to the kitchen, and came back into the restaurant with the same ten chips on a large plate. After all, that is what I asked for. They really must think we are stupid.

The coffee shop kitchens were kept warm by the stoves boiling cabbage, but the steam also caused some of the salt cellars to clog up. I asked Zhang Li to put a few grains of rice in the salt pots to dry them out again. She looked at me with a completely bewildered expression. I explained again. ‘Oh, yes Mr Alec,' she said, the penny finally dropping.

One of the greatest problems with the staff was that they had no interest in thinking, or coming up with any new ideas. We would give our big speeches about ‘we are all Holiday Inn together, working as a team, all for Holiday Inn' and they would just look at us blankly. They thought it was a very peculiar notion that they were expected to work hard just because they worked for Holiday Inn.

Conny and I tried to change this attitude in the Sales Department. We gave our staff a sheet of paper each and asked them to write on the left-hand side what they were doing at the time and on the right-hand side what they would like to be doing. We thought that secretaries might want to be more involved in PR or take on more responsibility with the local agents or go on sales trips abroad. A week later, not one of the staff had filled out any part of the form. I asked Tashi what was going on. I explained that we wanted to develop the staff, train and motivate. Tashi shrugged his shoulders. ‘It doesn't matter what we write Mr Alec. We have to do as you say.'

So this was the system. Good old Communism. It was no use thinking for yourself because you always have to do what you are told.

In the coffee shop the salt cellars had gone from bad to worse. No matter how many I tried, I couldn't get a single grain of salt out of them. I opened one up. Zhang Li had put cooked rice inside. True, I had not told her that I wanted dry rice grains. So how was she to know?

Christmas approached and a steady trickle of guests came through the hotel. These were the expats from companies in China who had fallen for the direct mail shot (that had gone out in the envelopes with the stamps on the reverse). They loved Lhasa, but complained bitterly of the cold. There was no hope of the heating being switched on again and the temperature inside the hotel dropped to below zero. On the coldest day in the office the thermometer on my desk sank to –11 °C. I opened the door in the morning to find that a water pipe had burst in the ceiling above the sofa and our filing cabinets. Clusters of icicles hung from the ceiling tiles in great cascades of frozen stalactites. The filing cabinet was a block of ice and files left out overnight on the sofa had to be cracked open.

I wore my Chinese long johns, layer upon layer of T-shirts, my thickest suit and then a down jacket. I walked around like the Michelin Man and just kept my teeth from chattering. Charlie had leant us a small electric fan-heater which had no effect whatsoever on heating the office, but was quite good at keeping the feet warm. I had brought in two laptop computers from Hong Kong when I came back from the Miss Tibet promotions and these also needed warming with the fan-heaters to start them up in the morning. Any coffee which Conny and I had left in the cups would be solid ice if we forgot to clean the cups out. This was seriously cold. I could see why the other expats had all found a reason why they absolutely had to take their leave over the Christmas period.

Christmas Day itself felt special in Lhasa even though life outside the hotel continued as usual. Herds of yak were driven along the roads to the market, and the Barkhor, as vibrant as can be, was packed with pilgrims. Inside the hotel, I carried on with my plans to celebrate Christmas. I asked Tu Dian to decorate the coffee shop and we went through the Christmas dinner menu for the handful of guests who had chosen the Holiday Inn Lhasa as their Christmas home.

I also invited the local travel agents to the lunch and accompanied by Tashi, visited their offices to hand them the invitations personally. This was a mistake. I had not been inside their offices before and it would have been better if I had left it that way. We called first at the office of China Youth Travel Service (CYTS). Their previous manager had been banished in disgrace for allowing a journalist on a tour in Tibet. The new manager, a Mr Zhang, had been sent to Lhasa from Beijing and I wondered what he had done wrong to be sent here. More to the point, where had they sent the previous manager? What place did the Chinese consider to be worse than Tibet? Mr Zhang didn't know the answer and quickly changed the subject. He said that he was always shown around travel agents' offices when he went abroad, so he would show me around his.

Mr Zhang's offices were on the second floor of a large rambling Tibetan house which he said had belonged to a noble family. They wouldn't have recognised much now, apart from the beautiful stonework of the exterior. Large rectangular blocks of granite were hemmed in place by smaller slithers of granite and covered in the ubiquitous whitewash. Concrete stairs led up the outside in an obvious post-1959 addition and then it was hard to tell what was new and badly decorated and what was original but falling down. Mr Zhang proudly showed me the various offices: the guides' office with the group code numbers chalked up on a large blackboard, the accounts office with piles of papers covering the desk and the floor and then his office, complete with frilly nylon settee covers and jam jars of tea.

From there everything went downhill: the scramble over piles of mountaineering gear at the office of TMA in the Himalaya Hotel, the dingy office of Lhasa Travel in the Sunlight Hotel to the filthy office of China International Travel Service (CITS) Xigaze branch in the Tibet Hotel. I thought this was as low as you could go until we walked a few doors down the corridor in the Tibet Hotel, to the office of the CITS Shannan branch.

We knocked on the door. There was no reply but we could hear noises from inside, so Tashi nudged the door open. The time was 12 noon. There were two beds in the office. One was unmade. The other had one of the office ‘workers' in it, stretching and yawning loudly. The one who was standing up was not in much better shape. Hair standing on end in typical post-siesta style, one trouser leg of the crumpled, crimplene suit rolled up to the knee. He burped loudly in our direction and we were hit by the stench of yesterday's garlic.

The entire office was an absolute pit. Piles of soiled clothing lay heaped in the middle of the floor. Piles of rubbish in the corners. A rotting black and green banana skin stretched tentacles of mould across the carpet. We had to wait for one of them to look for some important papers, which he thought might be in one of the piles, or in a drawer, or perhaps in a pocket somewhere. I picked up a new brochure of the CITS Shannan Branch. In English it described their services; ‘It is expensive but worthy of it, while it is inexpensive but beneficial to it.' I thought about this for quite some time. No. It really doesn't make any sense.

While waiting, Tashi asked me for some words in English. I pointed out objects in the room: video, photocopy, photocopier and finally – lost for pleasant words in that airless, odour-filled room – I introduced him to the meaning of the word ‘disgusting' and we left.

Holiday Inn Lhasa, despite the first impression of some of our guests, was heaven on earth compared to the other hotels of Tibet. Back in the safety of the Holiday Inn, Tu Dian proudly called me to the restaurant to show me the decorations he had prepared for Christmas. He had dug up a stunted, half-dead conifer from the hotel grounds and covered it with fluffy cotton wool and the remains of last year's Christmas baubles.

For some reason, Christmas baubles were highly prized by the staff and each year a significant proportion were stolen. Sometimes they even took the imitation snow. The tree stood by the doorway, where the security guards could keep an eye on it, and in the centre of the room, on a table with Charlie's best red tablecloth, was Tu Dian's pièce de résistance – a cage containing four large white rabbits.

Tu Dian was so pleased with it that I hadn't the heart to tell him that rabbits were associated with Easter and not really a necessary addition to the dining room at Christmas time.