The Hotel on the Roof of the World (24 page)

No one was sure exactly what this fee was for but they all knew that we had to charge it. It was only ten dollars but when all these little fees had been added to the accommodation and transport costs, guests could be paying up to $300 per day.

Every so often, new regulations would come out, with extra fees which had to be charged. Consequently, the prices quoted and already confirmed to tour operators in the West would have to be increased. We could not operate in this way – if we had sent out a price we would honour it – so I built in an extra margin on the tour costs to cover any price rises. I named it the ‘Comprehensive, Receiving And Promotion' fee whose initials spelt exactly what I thought of the regulations. This ‘CRAP' fee had to go to the government to receive official permission, and the ‘CRAP' papers were duly returned to me with the greasy red stamp of government approval.

Once Western tour operators knew that we were organising the tours ourselves, the sales boomed. All efforts at the hotel went into preparations for the high season. Barba had workmen brought up from Chengdu to speed up the work on his pool. We looked at the food and beverage outlets to see what changes were necessary. First, the Coffee Shop. The Communists who had set up the tourism master plan for Tibet had used the same logic inside the hotels as they had when they named the hotel in Lhasa the ‘Lhasa Hotel' and the hotel in Shigatse the ‘Shigatse Hotel'. Hence the coffee shop was called, imaginatively, the ‘Coffee Shop'.

After much deliberation the Coffee Shop was rechristened: the ‘Hard Yak Cafe'. It had been a difficult choice and YacDonalds had come a close second. The Giant Yak Burger could have been renamed the Big Yak – but the Hard Yak Cafe won the day. The name change was an instant success with the first tourists who came in and Barba commissioned T-shirts with the slogan ‘Hard Yak Cafe – Lhasa' in the style of another cafe with a fairly similar name. These sold even faster than Giant Yak Burgers.

The Picnic Corner also needed revamping. The Chinese spam was out of stock and we were only left with some seriously out of date and rather soft ‘fruity nut bars'. We threw them out and changed the shop into a tavern, calling it the ‘Tintin Bar', after Herge's cartoon character and his book
Tintin in Tibet
. Our hotel artist painted an incredibly good Tintin as a mural on the back wall and the bar was decorated with pages from the book.

Unfortunately the bar did not survive long. Unlike Mr Herge, who wrote all his books without leaving his armchair in Belgium, Mrs Herge is an avid traveller. Her voyages took her to the Holiday Inn Lhasa – where she was somewhat surprised to find the Tintin Bar. Apparently the Herge Foundation is very strict on use of the ‘Tintin' name and will not allow it to be associated with cigarettes or alcohol. Tut, tut. The Tintin Bar was closed down.

Somehow, the stock of ‘Tintin in Tibet' T-shirts which Barba had commissioned managed to reappear and we could not fill the lobby shop with them fast enough.

The T-shirts were brought in from Kathmandu under very difficult conditions. First there were problems with foreign exchange – we were not allowed to spend any of the dollars earned outside China so we had to barter the T-shirts for hotel rooms from tour operators based in Kathmandu. It was all very complicated. Then there was the physical problem, as each box of T-shirts had to be carried by porters over the landslides at the border and then face a four-day ride through the dust.

For the rest of the supplies we relied on China. Mr Han was sent off on a purchasing trip to look for foodstuffs and essential equipment such as new woks for the kitchen. His reports were read out daily in the Morning Meeting.

Unfortunately, it was Mr Pong who read them out. Heather translated as we ducked; ‘Today Mr Han has arrived in Beijing. He has looked for food like you asked and has found fresh fish. He will send samples to Lhasa. He has sent melons from Chengdu.'

The supplies from Chengdu faced an even worse journey than the T-shirts arriving from Kathmandu. We employed a fleet of truck drivers to ply the twenty-day return trip. Ten days down to Chengdu and ten days back again. Some of the lorries never returned and at least one driver lost his life on the treacherous roads.

The trucks were occasionally stopped en route and goods confiscated or drivers imprisoned. When the trucks did arrive in Lhasa, their contents often had to be thrown away. Chef went to inspect Mr Han's melon trucks as they pulled in to the hotel courtyard. Water dripped out of the back of the trucks and when he opened the doors a great fruit cocktail sloshed out onto the concrete. The melons had been loaded without any packaging and had been turned into melon purée during the journey.

Mr Han had also sent up trucks containing the bottled water supply for the summer. This was an excellent sales item. In the welcome talk we gave to each group, Conny and I would emphasise the medical advice that you should drink at least three litres of water per day to combat altitude sickness. While we drank the hotel tap water, which was perfectly safe, most guests and especially super-sensitive Americans insisted on drinking bottled water. This was a beautiful arrangement for the hotel, which sold horrendously overpriced bottles of water in vast quantities to each new batch of tourists.

One of the reasons for the high price was to cover the losses incurred in bringing the water to Lhasa. Mr Han's first convoy of trucks carrying bottled water spent one of the nights on the way at the top of a mountain pass. The temperature dropped below zero and one by one the bottles shattered as the water froze.

We learnt our lesson from this experience and gave instructions that liquid supplies could only be brought over the passes by day. This safeguard still did not help all our supplies. One in three cans of Indian Tonic Water exploded as they were brought up to higher altitudes. Coca-Cola cans seemed to last longer but would pop in the storeroom months after arriving in Lhasa, oozing out in a black treacly pool across the floor.

We did occasionally try flying in supplies with CAAC from Chengdu but this was even worse. Cases of fresh foodstuffs would be forgotten about for days on the Chengdu runway and then delivered to us when the food was rotten.

But we did not accept defeat. It was our job to make the hotel function as best as we could despite the circumstances. Our problems were not to be passed on the guests. For a VIP banquet we gave CAAC one last chance. Mr Han had found a ‘very good' supplier of frozen prawns in Chengdu and he arranged with CAAC that the frozen consignment must be sent up to Lhasa without delay.

For once, everything went like clockwork and Chef went down to the airport to collect the blocks of ice. He took them back to the hotel and defrosted them in the sinks. As the ice melted our high hopes began to fade. In each block of ice there was just one prawn. One miserable, lonely, crustacean. The ‘prawn salad' on the menu became literally ‘a prawn' and ‘salad'. The cost per prawn worked out at $12 apiece.

Mr Han was useless and yet the local management insisted that his work was excellent. The daily news bulletin in the Morning Meetings became farcical; ‘Mr Han reports that there are no woks in Beijing.'

‘No woks in Beijing!?' screamed Barba. For once Party B could turn the screws on Party A. Barba signalled for Mr Liu, our Party B accountant, to make clear our knowledge of a fiddle concerning the delivery of yaks. Mr Liu read out the charges.

‘We have an invoice for three yaks. Also an invoice from the trailer driver for the transport of three yaks but according to our records, only two yaks arrived at the hotel.'

Party A immediately found the explanation. Heather translated. ‘Yes, there had been three yaks. But one of the yaks jumped out when the driver went over one of the passes and he couldn't catch it again.'

‘What was it, a homing yak?' asked Bonetti.

We knew they were up to something but catching them out was very difficult. There was a very great temptation for the local staff in positions of authority to cook the books. Their wages were pitifully low and yet vast sums of money, the equivalent of many lifetimes' salary, passed through their hands every day. But if ever there was a deterrent against large-scale corruption, the Chinese had one.

Tashi told me one morning that a Chinese girl at the Lhasa branch of CAAC had been caught fiddling. When work units booked flights, for example for twenty employees to travel down to Chengdu, she would write out twenty tickets but put the money for only two of them in the till. The rest she put in her pocket. She had carried out this system for a staggering four years without being caught. The girl was known as the ‘Queen of Lhasa' and was a regular at the Holiday Inn disco, had a motorbike, limitless money and a range of handbags which would rival Imelda Marcos' shoe collection. No one had questioned how this lowly CAAC employee should have all this money or why the CAAC office in Lhasa made such a drastic loss each year.

I laughed when Tashi told me the story. ‘What a joke,' I said. ‘How can CAAC have let it happen?'

There was no reply.

‘Well,' I continued, ‘I hope the CAAC auditor loses his job. And what will the girl get? A few years in Trapchi? Four years? Five?'

No one in the office laughed. They normally had such bright faces, so ready to smile and joke, but they looked back at me with cold expressions.

‘No, Mr Alec.'

Tashi clenched his fist, holding two fingers out in the shape of a gun, put his hand up to his head and pulled an imaginary trigger. I could not believe it. The poor girl's artefacts were put on display in a museum building beneath the Potala Palace. Queues formed outside to see the exhibition of her motorbike, her handbags, her expensive clothes. She was paraded around Lhasa in the back of a truck and a week later she was executed. Her family was sent the bill for the bullet.

While Mr Han trod on dangerously thin ice in Beijing, we continued with preparations in Lhasa. Charlie sent his lawn-mowing team out into the grounds. They had no lawn-mower – just a pair of shears. Six of them crawled across the lawn on hands and knees, clipping the turf as they went. It took so long that by the time they had completed a circuit of the grounds it was time to start again. Bonetti opened up eight food and beverage outlets. Harry converted two of the Economy Rooms into a massage suite and we supplemented the Western health care offered by Dr Grubby by opening a Tibetan Medicine clinic.

The clinic was run by a Dr Ga Ma Qun Pei, who had been the private physician of the Panchen Lama. On first consideration this was not such a good advertisement, as the Panchen Lama had just died, or passed on to his next incarnation, but Dr Ga Ma was an excellent physician. He decorated the room with
thangkas
from the Tibetan Medical Hospital and brought in dozens of packets of little brown pills. He came to the hotel every evening with his interpreter and they waited patiently in the clinic, sitting on Tibetan mattresses drinking tea. Dr Ga Ma had been trained in the Medical College which stood on Chagpori, the hill opposite the Potala Palace. Fortunately he had graduated in 1950, a few years before the college was blown off the hill by Chinese troops.

He was a quiet man but you could see that he had many stories within and he exuded an aura of wisdom. He diagnosed his patients by reading their pulse. First the left wrist for two minutes and then the right wrist. He would then nod slowly and speak in Tibetan to his interpreter. While Dr Ga Ma was short and stocky, his interpreter, an equally gentle man, was tall and skinny. He had been one of the children sent for schooling in India before the Chinese ‘peacefully liberated' Tibet. In the new Tibet he had not been able to practise his English and it had become rather rusty. A lengthy diagnosis in Tibetan from Dr Ga Ma was often translated as a smile and ‘you have a cold', or ‘you are OK'.

Although I liked Dr Ga Ma and his translator enormously, I have always been sceptical of anything that cannot be explained by strict scientific principles. Yes, Dr Ga Ma has had a medical education as long as it takes a doctor to graduate in the West, and yes, he did seem to be a very special man, but apart from telling that someone is alive, how can reading the pulse possibly give any idea of someone's medical condition? It was not until I accompanied a French couple to the clinic that my views changed. The French spoke no English, so I was to translate for them. First Dr Ga Ma to the interpreter in Tibetan, then the interpreter in English to me and I would translate into French for the guests. It sounded like Chinese whispers and I was very doubtful about the outcome.

Dr Ga Ma read the pulse of the French lady. He nodded. Through the various translations I apologised and told the French lady she had a problem with her kidneys. Amazingly, she did. She was receiving treatment every week in France.

The husband's turn was even more startling. The interpreter mulled over the doctor's words and said to me, ‘Dr Ga Ma says he has a problem with his spleen.' I had to look up ‘spleen' in a French dictionary.
‘Ma rate! Mais comment il le sait?!'
exclaimed the Frenchman. It turned out that his spleen had been removed following a motorbike accident twelve years previously.