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Good Luck, Tibetans
As my trip to India approaches, I face the disturbing realization that there's no way I'll have time to finish posting entries about my 2007 Egypt trip before I have to go overseas again. The closing entries on Egypt will have to wait 'till after I get back.
Originally I was supposed to go on a GAP Adventures tour of Tibet and Nepal (with a brief pass-through of India), but the recent protests and repression in Tibet forced the tour companies to change their plans. Tourists and even foreign journalists were all forced out of the region, which was wracked with ethnic and political violence -- Tibetans vs. Chinese -- for most of the second half of April. The Chinese side is winning, of course, unless you count a little bit of bad P.R. (but not nearly enough to stop the Olympics). Lhasa, the main city of Tibet, has become gradually more touristy and ethnically Chinese over the last few decades, but after this recent struggle, the thought of going to some hastily-cleaned-up, Potemkin Village tourist version of Lhasa is particularly unappetizing. It's too bad my tour didn't leave a month earlier or I could have been there right in the middle of it -- and neither side is particularly mad at Westerners, so I don't think I'm being too reckless. For now, the future of Tibet is anyone's guess, but a speedup of repression -- as opposed to the previous gradual assimilation policy -- seems likely. I've been checking Phayul.com for Tibetan news.
Anyway, good luck, Tibetans. Maybe I'll get to see your country eventually, if it's ever quite the same as it was before. Instead, I'll be wandering about the ricefields of Bhutan dreaming of politics and shrines and gods. See you all later, sometime far from now.
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khyungbird) wrote,
