The Grasslands
In the morning, we head up the churning course of the
Somang Qu (River) into the mountains. The foaming cascade rushes
between steep valley walls that attest to the youth of this
landscape. The drive is beautiful and peaceful, through patches
of fir and willow in the valley bottom. However, a ravenous
Chinese lumber industry has stripped bare extensive swaths of old
growth timber from the hillsides. We encounter trucks loaded with
huge pine logs, but logging operations have moved westward. Rough
logging trails scar the ravaged valley walls of the Somang Qu.
Debris litters the desolate slopes; abandoned dirt runs, down
which the logs had been slid, have gouged the ground. Tibet's
forests covered about 222,000 square kilometers in 1949, but by
1985 deforestation by logging had reduced this by 40 percent-to
about 134,000 square kilometers. Except for the seemingly endless
cavalcade of logging trucks, the road is empty.
We start up a long switchback. The precipitous drop to the
side makes the road seem even narrower. Whenever we must squeeze
past oncoming traffic, I am glad we are on the inside edge of the
road (Chinese drive on the right). Truckers squat beside their
vehicles near some small buildings halfway up the pass, spraying
water onto overheated brakes with rubber hoses. One would not
wish to lose the brakes on this narrow road. The descent on the
far side is equally steep. The road winds precariously down the
treeless slopes. We continue to encounter long lines of loaded
lumber trucks. The procession bearing Tibetan timber seems
endless.
After another, more gradual, ascent, the landscape opens into
broad yalleys surrounded by rolling grasslands. Grazing herds of
yaks are scattered along the river. We are now high enough that
these creatures can survive; at elevations below about 3000
meters (about 10,000'), they sicken and die. It's unclear to me
why the surfeit of oxygen at lower elevations should hurt a yak.
However, I've heard this fact repeated some many times and take
it on faith. Tibetans call all domesticated animals nor, a
term denoting wealth. A yak is the male of the species; the
female is a dri. A male offspring cross between these
animals and cattle is a dzo, the female a dzomo. In
theory, the crossbreeds look more cow-like, but they seem
impossible to distinguish at a distance; even up close it is very
hard for the untrained eye to identify them.
The
Tibetan nomads attending the herds live in tents scattered over
the open plains. A series of faceted slopes in the distance mark
a fault (left). The tents - ba in Tibetan - are made of
heavy flet and woven yak hair, and are either black or white.
They are firmly staked out against the assault of the winds,
which can blow savagely across the treeless expanses. Clouds of
smoke rise from many of the tents.
These herders were curious and friendly. Whenever we make
a stop, we are soon joined by smiling individuals (left). The
roads across the grasslands are often muddy and rutted, requiring
frequent stops to avoid getting stuck. People climb out of the
vans to raise their clearance and walk along the roads as the
drivers carefully negotiate between deep puddles. Eventually we
enter the mountains surrounding the grasslands.
