Tongren: Monks on Motorcycles

Photo: The Tibetan elder who sat with us at the Tongren intersection while we waited for the bus to Henan Mongol Autonomous County (July, 2010).

After three days in Xining, Sander and I boarded a bus for Tongren. The drive was a journey into old China, but with a new twist...such as those satellite dishes on so many old adobe homes. Meanwhile, farmers still threshed their grain by spreading it in the road for vehicles to drive over before they winnowed it in the wind along the roadside. It was a gorgeous drive to Tongren.

Tongren, according to the guidebooks, was a small town of huge importance concerning art and Buddhism. The 3 1/2-hour drive through the mountains was as incredible as our arrival was disappointing. Tongren was not a small town focused solely on art and religion. It was a large Chinese town built around the commercialization of Tibetan art and religion. I would not claim that Tongren has reached the stage of Chinese theme park, but we knew as soon as we arrived that this place was not what we'd come for. We felt the urge to move on as quickly as possible. Given the time, however, we had to spend the night.

We tried to book a room in a cheap hotel but were refused entry because we were not Chinese. Being foreigners, we had to go to another hotel, the Re Gong Binguan, and pay twice as much. We did. We paid. And the following morning we threw on our backpacks and hiked to an intersection by a bridge. I had learned the day before that bus tickets would not be sold from the Tongren bus station. What one had to do was wait at the intersection for a bus with the Chinese characters in the windshield showing the bus's destination. We did not know for sure when the the bus we wanted would arrive, but based on what I learned the day before it should arrive by 12:30 pm. Not wanting to take any chances, Sander and I hung out under the shade of a tree at the intersection with an elderly Tibetan man and, from time to time, many passersby.

On the corner, we were never left alone for long. The Tibetans have taken a wonderful interest in Sander. One Tibetan woman thought Sander was a doctor (he was wearing a Red Cross tee-shirt) and was getting up the nerve to ask him to check her out. She never did, but she did hang around us for a long time. Meanwhile, the intersection was fascinating. Men and women dressed in traditional Tibetan chubas (heavy tunics with sashes) walked by. So did many monks in their burgundy robes.

Photo: The woman whom we met at the Tongren intersection who thought Sander was a doctor and wanted him to check her out (July, 2010).

The monasteries, appearantly, have shared in the profits of Tongren's commercialization. It seemed every monk we saw had a cell phone. Many had digital cameras. And still others raced past us on brand new shiny purple motorcycles. Others of red ones. When we ate, sharing a table with a poor Tibetan family eating from bowls of square noodle soup, the monks near us at an adjacent table were devouring huge cauldrons of sizzling beef. Some monks were actually fat.

Photo: Detail of a woman holding beads in Tongren (July, 2010).

Suddenly, a bus with the characters for Henan (the Qinghai town, not the province in the east) appeared and it wasn't stopping for long. I leaped to my feet, raced across the intersection, and flagged down the bus. I confirmed that it was the bus we wanted and asked if there was room. It was. And there was. I ran back to get Sander and my gear but Sander already knew that this was it and was loaded and handed me my pack. We shook hands with our Tibetan friend and ran to the bus.

On the bus we were given seats. The bus drove across the bridge and stopped before taking on more passengers. One man, who I took for the driver, said that I was in someone's seat. Then a man stood by me and told me that I was in his seat. I gave it to him. But then I realized that the first man was not the driver and instead another passenger. Since I was paying like everyone else, I had the feeling that I had just been taken advantage of. What followed was my first argument in Chinese. Some people laughed at the scene. Then another man said that it really was that guy's seat and I backed off. I felt like an ass and kept my mouth shut. But then the last man who spoke to me offered me his seat. I insisted, in Chinese, that he sit...over and over. But a minute later he was sitting with the driver in front and I was in his seat.

The drive was breathtaking! The young mountains were of vertically folded layers of sedimentary rock often capped over with a hundred feet of loess. The slopes weren't vertical but not far from it. This was landslide country and, indeed, we did see the results of some. The drive on the narrow, windy, gravely road and the steep deep cliffs were enough to give one the willies to say nothing of the heart-stopping action that took place whenever our driver passed other vehicles in the most unusual circumstanses: like on the curves. At other places, the road had been washed out. Nevertheless, we continued to climb in elevation and eventually we found ourselves driving on a beautiful hilly steppe with white Tibetan tents, gray Mongolian yurts, yaks, dri, sheep, and horses. In Zeku we stopped to let someone out and I stepped off the bus to snap a few quick photos of a huge pack of tightly grouped horses and Tibetans in what might have been the prelude to a horse race during a festival. There was definitely a festival taking place in Zeku. But the driver called and I hopped back on the bus. Our next stop was Henan. Henan is the county seat for Henan Mongolian County. Ninety percent of the people in Henan County are Mongolian. Sander and I had high expectations for Henan.

Photo: Monks, like many others, gravitated toward Sander. The monks around Tongren, unlike those in Tongde or Heri, showed many signs of wealth, from buzzing around on new motorcycles to talking away on cellphones to snapping photos with digital cameras and so on. Here, Sander stands with a monk between Xining and Tongren during a break in our bus ride (July, 2010).