Colliding Continents by Mike Searle

Author:Mike Searle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2013-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

Kangshung Face of Everest

In the autumn of 2003 Rick Law, an expatriate Brit who was a professor at Virginia Tech in the US, and I managed to get a three-year grant to work on the structural evolution of the Everest massif. We had two new PhD students, Micah Jessup, an enthusiastic American climber and geologist based at Virginia Tech, and the following year John Cottle, a New Zealander who obtained a scholarship from New Zealand to come to Oxford to work for a D.Phil with me. In 2003 we made another trek up to Everest from the Nepal side and collected samples for both thermobarometry and strain analysis for Micah to work on. The following year, after meeting John in Lhasa, we headed to the Kangshung Glacier on the remote east side of Everest in Tibet. Flying over the Himalaya from Kathmandu to Lhasa, we had a spectacular view of the Everest massif and its eastern neighbour Makalu towering high above a sea of cloud.

Lhasa was a completely different city from when I first visited twenty years earlier. The only old part of town left was the Barkhor area surrounding the Jhokang Temple where old mud-brick, yak-dung, and straw houses radiated around the central Jhokang, with its golden roofs and gilded statues. Elsewhere all the old houses had been torn down and replaced with monstrous new blue glass and concrete Chinese constructions appearing just like any other modern Chinese city. The Potala Palace, the home of the Dalai Lamas, of course remained, but it was a dead building, devoid of any normal life and unlike all the active living gompas in Ladakh. There is no doubt that the life of many Tibetans in the cities has improved under the Chinese, but at the cost of a devastating cultural decapitation. Many of the nomadic pastoralists in the remote Chang Tang region had been housed in appalling concrete box houses in new cities along the truck routes. Chinese colonialism has, however, not dimmed Buddhist fervour, or the devotion to the now exiled Dalai Lama.

In Lhasa we met up with Réne Schrama, a Dutchman who was something of a legend in Lhasa and was running a travel agency in partnership with my friend in Kathmandu, Shiva Dhakal. Réne and his wife Kris, together with another Dutchman, Fred Madern, were also running a bar, the Dunya, attached to the Yak Hotel. Fred was another Lhasa legend, standing head and shoulders taller than most Tibetans with his huge handlebar moustache and chef’s hat. The Dunya was an oasis for tourists and travellers who wanted a decent cup of real coffee, a beer, or a good meal. Fred helped us shop for a six weeks’ supply of food from the amazing new market in Lhasa near the Potala Palace, where you could buy almost anything trucked in from China. We set off in a couple of Land Cruisers once again for the remote Kharta Valley to the north of Everest. We hired a few local porters

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