The Hotel on the Roof of the World (27 page)

We waited by the car while the preparations were carried out. There were dozens of people about, many in uniform, including a Chinaman who seemed to be the official photographer of the event, who zoomed in on all of us with a video camera. We were called up when everything was ready and the son was able to pay his last respects. The tour leader had cut a bouquet of flowers from the hotel greenhouse. A monk sat cross-legged by the pile of wood, reading aloud prayers from the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

A very cheerful Tibetan then arrived wearing overalls spotted with brown flecks. The Chinese travel agent motioned for us to go back to the car.

‘No. No. You don't understand,' said the son. ‘I have come all this way just to be here for this moment.'

The Chinaman became anxious. ‘You really must go now. Please!' He looked at me. ‘Please go now!'

My mind clicked into action. Of course there are no cremations in Tibet as we know them in the West! I suggested that we could go down to the car and return when the fire was going. Reluctantly the son agreed with me. As I hurried him down the slope, we could hear the sound of steel against steel – the Tibetan was sharpening his knives. I glanced around and caught the glint of sunlight on the sharpened edge of his rusty sky burial daggers. ‘Just some preparations they have to make before they can start,' I said quietly.

‘Look out there! Some trees,' the tour leader pointed out to the valley, continuing our inane conversation from the car. The minutes seemed like hours. At long last we heard the crackle of the fire and saw smoke rising from the hill above us. We returned up the path to the cremation site. A Chinese policeman was urinating over the track from on top of the mound and we waited for him to finish before we could pass. They were pleased that everything was going so well and had already started on the beers.

The funeral pyre was in a spectacular setting – with the view of the surrounding hills, the town of Lhasa far below and the Potala Palace framed at the bottom of the valley. It is going to happen to all of us one day and as I watched the flames lick the sky I thought that there can be no better ending than this. To pass away peacefully in the night and then go up in smoke with the Potala in the background and a Tibetan monk chanting prayers for your soul. It was a moving experience for all of us.

Our profound thoughts were interrupted by the Tibetan in the splattered overalls who approached the fire carrying a bucket. He flung the contents onto the fire and a gigantic fireball engulfed the sky. The son and I dived for cover, but the monk who was sitting cross-legged could not get out of the way quick enough and had his eyebrows singed. The Tibetan came up to us with his empty petrol bucket, grinning from ear to ear. His gold tooth flashed at us in the sunlight and he gave us the thumbs-up sign as if to say, ‘It's a good one!'

We shared a gritty bottle of Lasa Beer and returned to the hotel in a daze. It had been quite a day for all of us and I was not in the mood to face the pack of guests who were shouting in the lobby. They had been down to the airport two days in a row and had returned again to the hotel, having been refused boarding passes for the aircraft. Some of them were at the CAAC office, staging a sit-in – the first demonstration by foreigners in Tibet. Our Holiday Inn tour groups had also been victims of the over-booking and we were doing our best with cartons of cigarettes and invitations to dinner to try to get them seats. CAAC were in a bit of a sticky situation. Their plane to Kathmandu had 123 seats and they had sold 420 tickets.

That evening I had a call from Mrs Simkins' son. He had been given a black metal box to take the ashes back to England in but there was a problem. They rattled. He was right, he couldn't go back with his mother rattling under the seat. I suppose a few twigs and a bucket of petrol does not match the fierce heat of a Western crematorium.

‘Do you have a cloth to wrap them in? And a piece of string?' he asked. I promised I would find some. I managed to persuade Charlie to open up the Housekeeping store and I found an old bath mat and a piece of telephone wire. This would have to do.

I returned to room 3101 to give them to the son. He thanked me for them and said, ‘There's just one more thing. Do you think you could wrap them up for me?'

He did have a point. To me they were just pieces of bone but I could understand his feelings.

‘Of course.'

He went off into the bathroom. I spread out the bath mat on the luggage stand in the room, opened up the metal box and tipped out the bones. I had expected there to be a small pile of ash and a few larger pieces but no, the box had been full. Splinters and bone fragments went everywhere – rolling off the luggage stand onto the carpet and across the floor.

‘Just a minute!' I called out, frantically picking up pieces and stuffing them into the rolled up mat. ‘Just a minute! Nearly ready!'

Happy that I had collected everything I gave him the all clear. Just as I was leaving I saw one more piece – right down by the bedside, precisely where he would step with his bare feet when he got into bed. I started the same ridiculous conversation that the tour leader had struck up in the car. ‘Oh lovely weather today wasn't it? Look! Have you seen that picture over there?'

As he turned, I dived for the floor, scooped up the fragment and put it in my pocket. After bidding him farewell and wishing him a safe trip home I emptied my pocket into the rose bed of the Holiday Inn Lhasa. Whether in heaven, nirvana or back as a reincarnation, I hope that Mrs Simkins approves.

Ever since, I was known by the expats as ‘Alec the Undertaker'. Fortunately, I never had to deal with any more cases. The only other fatality that year had taken place in the no-man's land between the borders at Zhangmu. A Frenchman had died on the slope. The rest of the group travelling with him just thought he wasn't feeling very well and carried him up the three-hour hike to the Chinese customs post. The Chinese pointed out that he was dead and refused to accept him. The group had to carry him down to the Nepalese customs again who also refused to accept the body. ‘He was definitely alive when he left here. The Chinese must deal with it.'

I never did find out the end of the story – perhaps he is still there.

The closest we came to a fatality in the hotel was not through natural causes or altitude sickness but as a result of ‘Karaoke Night'.

A Hong Kong film crew came up to Lhasa to make a karate film in Tibet. Although the reservation of thirty rooms for two months had been very tempting, we had calculated that we would need these rooms for higher-paying tourists, as indeed was the case. So the film crew stayed at the Tibet Hotel next door to us. Each night they came to the Holiday Inn to drink in the bars, the disco or their favourite – the karaoke.

Karaokes have been a phenomenal success in Asia. They are bars where
you
become the entertainment. You choose a song from a jukebox but only the music is played – you have to sing the words. You are presented with a microphone and a giant video screen shows you the lyrics. A little dot passes over the words to show you which syllable you should be on. You have to pay for making an exhibition of yourself with each song . The Holiday Inn Lhasa karaoke had a rather slow system. You had to give your choice of song to the waitress and wait for her to come back and call out the song name when it was your turn.

On the Saturday evening of the infamous Karaoke Night the bar was packed. It was the karate film crew's last night in Tibet and they were out celebrating in force. Chef had also chosen this night to throw a party for his cooks as a celebration for coping with no leave and preparing 3,000 covers a day.

The karaoke room was crowded – too crowded. Burly Chinese and Tibetan chefs squeezed into the sofas, while the kung fu stars perched on each others' laps on the chairs around the drinks tables. The waiting time for songs lengthened. A waitress called out the name of a popular Chinese song and one of our chefs jumped up to take the microphone. The same song had also been ordered by the film crew and one of the karate stars leapt to the stage to grab the microphone from the chef. It was all that was needed to ignite the powder keg. Chairs and sofas were hurled across the bar and a real-life scene from a karate movie was re-enacted in the karaoke.

The waitresses ran for cover. The security guards ran for help and the Tibetan and Chinese chefs fought a pitched battle against the kung fu movie stars across the hotel grounds. They fought them all the way to the perimeter fence, with only twelve casualties. Seven were kept in hospital and most of the chefs were absent from work the following day. Chef had 3,000 covers to serve and an empty kitchen.

It was not only the staff who were missing. We were also suffering from a terrible lack of supplies. In order to become more self-sufficient, the previous General Manager had started a farm in Lhasa. But this had fallen into neglect and had been closed down after the problem with rabbit stew. The menu had been prepared, the dishes on the buffet table were ready, the pots in the kitchen on the boil – but as the farmer was a Buddhist, he had released all the rabbits into the wild the previous day.

‘No rabbits.' Tu Dian laughed.

Chef was not in such a funny mood. Overbooked, without rooms, chefs or food – and yet the tourists kept pouring in. Our own tour group sales, even with their obligatory ‘unforeseen circumstances' fees and the new ‘CRAP' fees were still selling like hot yak-dung patties. We had been particularly successful with small, personalised groups and we had organised a very special tour for the Shoton Festival in August.

Most of the activity for the Shoton Festival takes place in the grounds of the Norbulingka – the Summer Palace of the Dalai Lamas, next to the hotel. Thousands of Tibetans cram in to watch performances of Tibetan opera. The crowds love them, especially the comic routines, but if you are a foreigner and not fluent in Tibetan, it is difficult to last longer than ten minutes. The music consists of alternately slow and fast clashes of cymbals and drums and is accompanied by high pitched and very rapid shouting from the men and a group of dancing girls singing through their noses. No doubt that, as with yak-butter tea, there are some Westerners who can appreciate Tibetan opera, but it leaves me begging for the silence of the mountains.

The highlight of the Shoton Festival is the unveiling of a giant
thangka
at Drepung monastery and this was to be the central part of our tour. It is an amazing event, with thousands of Tibetans covering the hillside at Drepung monastery to see an applique banner, the size of a football pitch, unrolled down the monastery's
thangka
wall. It only takes place at dawn – on the thirtieth day of the sixth month of the Tibetan calendar. On this occasion it would be on 21 August, and our special tour group of just four people would be arriving on 19 August.

On 17 August we were told that the date had changed and it would now be on 19 August. Our guests, who were on their way from America and Europe to see the
thangka
, were going to be disappointed. Conny sent out telexes with the bad news.

On 18 August we were told that the date for the
thangka
ceremony had changed again and it would now be on 20 August. Conny sent out telexes with the good news.

On 19 August it was confirmed that the ceremony would definitely be on 20 August, but that it had been decided that foreigners would not be allowed to attend. We gave up sending telexes. We decided never to organise a tour around a festival again. I had heard of a worse scenario, when a group of Western lawyers had travelled for weeks to see a horse-racing festival in eastern Tibet – only to find when they arrived that the Tibetans had decided to hold the festival a week earlier and that everyone had packed up and gone home.

On 19 August, late afternoon, Jig Me appeared triumphantly from a meeting with the Public Security Bureau. He had arranged a permit for the foreign staff of the Holiday Inn to attend the
thangka
ceremony – our four guests suddenly became enrolled as new staff and we were back in business.

We met up at 6:30 a.m., well before dawn, in the hotel lobby. It had rained heavily in the night and a steady drizzle continued as we jumped across puddles in the forecourt to board our minibus. The road to Drepung was packed with Tibetans trudging through the rain. Over 30,000 would be present at the great event. There were several checkpoints on the way and we were expecting to be turned back at any moment. We stopped in the traffic jam beneath Drepung and Jig Me looked anxiously at the confusion outside. If anything happened, he would be held responsible for our conduct and our safety.

Hundreds of trucks, buses and Landcruisers lined the route up the hill to Drepung. It was pitch dark and pouring with rain when we reached a muddy car park and left the minibus, setting off up the steep, winding path around Drepung. Jig Me called out; ‘We must stay together. Everybody keep in a line.'

At this stage he disappeared into the darkness, swept upwards in the moving crowd. Our group fragmented, stumbling through streams and carried on upwards by the laughing, soaked Tibetans. I managed to latch on to Miss Houghton – an 81-year-old from California – the keenest member of our group. Despite having no time to acclimatise, Miss Houghton was determined to see the
thangka
. But the altitude, the hill climb, the crowds and the smell of yak butter proved too much and I took her to rest in a small outhouse of the monastery.

I carried on up the slope and bumped into Jig Me with a guest from Austria. He was easy to recognise – he had a plastic bag on his head. ‘I alvays go viz my plastik bag!' he called out to me. I left him as soon as I could – he was completely crackers – and climbed up to find a good vantage point amongst the Tibetans. Daylight came but the rain was still falling and the Tibetans told me that nothing would happen until the rain stopped. I thought I had better go and pass the news on to Miss Houghton, as two hours had now passed since I left her in the dark outhouse. I hurried past the mad Austrian who was still telling Jig Me about the use of plastic bags, and started searching the monastery for Miss Houghton. In the dark, one Tibetan building looked very much like another and it took some time before I found the right one. When I did, I found her sitting happily on the steps exactly as I had left her.