We’ve both got altitude sickness, but she’s got it worse.
The symptoms are not pleasant; a screaming headache, fever, disorientation, nausea, and in Sandra’s case, vomiting and diarrhea too, to add to the fun! The strangest effect though, is the permanent shortage of breath. Your instinct is to counter it with long deep breaths, but this only makes things worse. What you need to do is take lots of short, shallow breaths, like a panting dog. The slightest exertion, like getting out of bed to take a pee, leaves you wheezing and your heart pumping.
Even sleeping becomes a skill you have to relearn. When we sleep, our breathing instinctively slows and becomes deeper. This is not a problem at normal altitudes, but at 4,000 metres, there isn’t enough oxygen getting from your lungs into your brain, and your heart beats faster and faster to try and make up the deficit. Soon, you wake up with a start to find your heart is racing, and you’ve got to breath like you never breathed before. This happened to me last night every twenty to thirty minutes, so my sleeping was fitful at best. At about 2.30, I woke up for the last time, and spent the rest of the night staring at the ceiling and listening to my heart pound. It wasn’t very interesting-pretty repetitive actually. Even when lying in bed, my heartbeat was over a hundred beats per minute, and a slow walk, with frequent stops to drink water, as the dry mountain air robs your body of moisture, brought it to well over 120.
Our room was nice enough, but freezing. Well, not freezing really-I suppose it was about 15 degrees during the day and 10 degrees at night, but after Bangkok’s 30 degrees at night, it felt freezing. There was no heater, and the hotel staff said there wasn’t one to give me. I didn’t really believe them, so I tried begging and then bribery, but I guess they were telling the truth. Moreover, none of the other backpackers I met had heaters in their rooms either. This is very odd, when you think about it. Even now, in April, the temperature can fall to zero at night, and in the depths of winter, it can plummet to minus 20. How can these people survive, I asked myself, without heating? How many layers of clothes can you wear? How tough could they be?
I felt sure there had to be heaters somewhere, so tiring of lying under my four blankets, I decided I would need to purchase a small one here in Llasa, or my memories of the place would mostly be hiding under the blankets trying to keep warm and worrying about hyperthermia. I set off into the heart of Llasa to find one. With the naivety that comes from growing up in the shopper’s paradise of Western Europe, I thought it would only take five minutes, but hour after hour went by without success. Night was beginning to fall, and I knew out room was only going to get colder and colder, and I also knew from previous experience in China that restaurants and bars here never have heating, so I trundled on and on, determined not spend the evening eating my dinner, through chattering teeth, in my coat in a freezing restaurant with nothing to look forward to but returning to an even colder room. It took on the feeling of a holy quest-the Search for the Holy Heater. It would have been easier to find the Holy Grail in a meeting of the Central Committee. I was all over the beautiful old town of Tibet, and then I ventured into the ugly Chinese new town, but heaters were not to be found. I looked in more shops in four hours than I’ve looked in in my whole life, but without success. There are no heaters in Tibet! This may not count as spiritual enlightenment, but it sure shocked the Hell out of me. Tibetans have no heaters! They cannot be bought for love, nor money, nor yak’s milk.
Old Llasa was like something out of a medieval museum. The people dress in colourful traditional costumes, layer upon layer, and spin prayer wheels clockwise with upturned wrists, chanting softly but melodically. Many of the young men from outside Llasa carried daggers. The thinness of the Ozone layer and the blue skies leaves their skin deeply tanned and tough. Indeed, tough is the best word to describe them. I can barely survive here in a comfy hotel with all the creature comforts money can buy, except a heater, of course. These guys from outside Llasa eek a living from the most barren and inhospitable land I’ve ever seen.
Before Buddhism gained a hold here, the Tibetans were regarded by their neighbours much as the Huns were regarded by Europeans-fierce savage warrior creatures, intent on pillage, rape and general destruction. And, to be honest, they still give me the willies. If I were some kind of Hemmingway figure, I’d strike up a friendship with some of them over hot Yak milk and whiskey, and head back into the mountains with them to see how real men live, and experience life at its toughest. Of course, I’d probably be dead in a week. Even the Han Chinese, a pretty sturdy bunch themselves, tend to stay within towns, and leave the herding in the Wastelands to the Tibetans.
Even the monks, who I had expected to display a glowing serenity, are a little on the scary side. One of them approached me yesterday, smiled with a touch of menace, and showed me a scabby piece of paper requesting money to rebuild some monastery or other. I took some crumbled notes out of my pocket and went to give him a five yuan one. He grabbed the other notes out of my paw too, and took off smiling, spinning his prayer wheel as he went. “What a naughty monk,” I thought to myself.
This happened several times in Llasa, so that pretty quickly, I learned not to make eye-contact with any red-robed fellow, and to ignore their many “hellos and commands to parley. They were insatiably greedy-an avarice even the Catholic church would balk at.
Ignoring them wasn’t always enough though. A few days later, after staggering down from the Potala palace, and falling into the nearest restaurant, hopelessly out of breath and desperately in need of something cold, liquid and sweet, I looked aghast as my just opened can of coke was lifted from my table by the claws of a middle-aged monk. He gave me a quick nod and scampered off with my coke, the sod. The owner of the restaurant (a Han Chinese) shrugged his shoulders sympathetically, and I was left to wonder how his helping himself to my can of coke was going to bring either of us one step closer to enlightenment.
In the dizzy and disorientated state of my first day, as I walked around the Barkhor temple, Llasa’s holiest shrine, I was accosted by uncountable numbers of beggars, and enthusiastic stall owners who enjoined me to purchase large quantities of prayer wheels, yak’s butter, prayer mats, prayer flags and hand-woven carpets. Everything proffered was accompanied by the mantra “luck-ee luck-ee” and “cheap-ee cheap-ee.” Nobody offered to sell me what my heart desired-a heater. The sounds and smells of the crowded market street were overpowering. As I crawled along, zombie-like in short shuffle steps, I was struck by how alien the place was compared to everything I had seen in my life before. I was also struck by how close to fainting I was, and worried by my inability to remember how to get back to my hotel. Eventually, I found my way back to the freezing hotel room, checked that Sandra had not frozen to death in my absence, and began the roller coaster ride of sleep and heart palpitations.
Slowly the worst effects of altitude sickness subsided, but the racing heart beat and the shortness of breath continued. I also managed to pick up a cold and a TB-like cough. I almost thought about giving up smoking, but luckily sanity prevailed. I’d already given up alcohol, and you shouldn’t overdo it. After morbidly dwelling on the nature of mortality between coughing fits and Chinese cigarettes that went under the ludicrously inappropriate brand name ‘Lights’, I paid a second visit to the clinic. I’d gone on my first day in Llasa for some altitude sickness potions and industrial strength disprin, and to check I wasn’t about to keel over. My earnest attempts to locate a heater dispensary were unsuccessful.
This time the ‘doctor’, if indeed she was a doctor and not a witch doctor, or just a witch, took my heartbeat, but I was worried by the amount of time it took her to find my pulse with her rusty stethoscope. She was a woman of indeterminate age, but certainly over a hundred and eighty, and her long frizzy grey hair gave the impression that it had only had a passing acquaintance with water, and had yet to be introduced to shampoo. Her ‘medical’ apron had once been white, but also showed evidence of having a dim view of cleaning. In fact, everything in the clinic was dirty, and the whole place was in dire need of a good bleaching. I was tempted to do it myself, but I feared this would not fall within acceptable bounds of behaviour, even for ‘big nose’ foreigners, so I tried to forget that if this had even been a café in the west, it would have been closed down by the health inspector on hygiene grounds.
The ‘doctor’, who was beginning to look more and more like one of the three witches from Macbeth, right down to the cackling laughter, had breathing problems as bad as my own, or even worse, and her swaying made me wonder how stable she was on her feet. She had about 50 faintly recognisable words of English, and an unwillingness to speak Mandarin with foreigners, a trait common to every Tibetan I tried to speak to. To make up for these linguistic deficiencies, she affixed ‘ee’ and ‘upa’ to the end of Tibetan words, hoping this would made things clearer. It didn’t. The witchdoctor stuck a thermometer under my armpit, and was then called away by another client at the counter, or maybe she had to add some frog’s legs to her cauldron-I don’t know. I think she forgot about me, as I’m sure a thermometer, whatever its age, doesn’t require 20 minutes to get a reading.
In her absence, we chatted to a young woman from Chengdu, who lay fully clothed, even to the extent of having her chunky coat done up, in the bed beside where we were sitting. There was an enormous rusting oxygen bottle beside her that looked like Captain Nemo had used it on an disastrous underwater dive when trying to find the lost city of Atlantis. Pulled over her, the girl had some blankets that looked like they had last been used to infect the American Indians with TB. The clinic, like everywhere else, had no heating.
She said she was suffering from a cold and had come in to have a drip put in her arm. No, come to think of it, the she said the drip had been placed in her bum. Apparently, that’s where they stick it in these parts. Don’t ask me why. The Chinese often go to a hospital to have a drip inserted when they have nothing more than a cold to worry about. In view of the highly questionably hygiene standards of the establishment, I refused the doctor’s later offer of a drip for me. Indeed, as long as I could maintain consciousness, I was determined not to let the wheezing, grey-haired old doctor insert a needle into any part of my anatomy.
By the time the doctor returned, the thermometer had fallen form my armpit and was resting on my hip, but she said it didn’t matter. She diagnosed a cold, and gave me the same prescription as yesterday, dispirin and altitude sickness potions. I got the impression she sold these to everyone who visited her clinic, regardless of their complaint. You could walk in with your arm in shreds and hanging off the shoulder after a savage attack from a flock of marauding vultures, blood-crazed after a traditional Tibetan funeral service, and you’d probably leave with nothing more than a few past their sell-by-date dispirin . She also advised me not to climb any tall mountains in the next day or two. Ha! I had problems enough climbing the single flight of stairs to my hotel room. Everest was definitely not on my agenda.
After some frantic phone calls from deep under the covers in my hotel room, I managed to find a hotel that promised to provide me with a heater. It cost triple what I was paying for the other hotel, but it was still only 35 Euro a night. |
