China Rapes Tibet's Holiest Valley for Olympics

Live Night & Day

Bulldozing Everest

By SIMON PARRY

http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/pages/...icle_id=469789

China has a spectacular wheeze for next year's Olympics - the torch
bearer is going to climb Everest. What they don't want the world to
know is that they have to tarmac a road to Base Camp for the
procession - and are forcing Tibetan workers to desecrate their own
holy ground to build it

The north face of Mount Everest dazzles a majestic white in the
sunshine of a July morning as a monk in customary crimson robes steps
out of the highest monastery in the world.

He wanders across the courtyard and joins a huddle of people gathered
outside.

The Chinese government are building a road right through the area of
the peaceful monastery of Rongbuk in Tibet

This is how every morning begins for the monks of Rongbuk Monastery,
an idyllic, remote retreat lying in the shadow of the world's highest
mountain. But this morning, the peace is about to be destroyed
forever.

The monk stares across the remote landscape in bewilderment as a
bulldozer belching out black smoke tears up the ancient dirt track in
front of him.

Rongbuk Monastery is three miles above sea level in the Tibetan
Himalayas.

For decades it has been the last point of civilisation for many
expeditions up Everest; it provided the base for the British climber
George Mallory on his famous - and fatal - 1924 attempt to reach the
world's highest peak.

But apart from the few groups of mountaineers who pass the retreat on
their ascent, the 30 monks and nuns who live in the monastery are
rarely touched by the modern world. Earlier this month, all of that
changed in a spectacular manner.

At 9am on July 6, with a clatter and a smoky roar, an extraordinary
and controversial project by the Chinese Government to build a 66-mile
tarmac road halfway up Everest was announced in blunt manner on the
doorstep of the monastery.

It came in the prosaic shape of a dirt-caked bulldozer with a red flag
flying from its roof.

After hearing the rumours - the Chinese are not shouting about this
project - I came here to see it for myself.

Frankly, I sensed I might have been wasting my time; it seemed too far-
fetched a notion.

But here it was: by midday I saw the solitary bulldozer, joined by a
small convoy of steamrollers, cranes and trucks and a ragtag mob of
labourers, some in their teens, carrying crude pickaxes and shovels.

This was the advance guard of an army of peasant workers commandeered
by the Chinese Government to blast a road all the way to Everest Base
Camp in just four months.

For China, which annexed the mountain kingdom of Tibet half a century
ago and has ruled it with an iron fist since, this grandiose scheme
will pave the way for a spectacular curtain-raiser to the 2008 Beijing
Olympics.

Next May, 300 runners will carry the Olympic torch along the new road
to Base Camp and then pass it into the hands of a relay of
mountaineers who, witnessed by the world's media, will attempt to take
it to the summit of Everest.

It is a bewildering idea on so many levels. For green groups,
campaigners for a free Tibet and many serious mountaineers, the road
is a travesty that will bring disaster to an already fragile and over-
burdened environment.

Not only will the road bring busloads of tourists to the pristine
north face of Everest but it will also act as a powerful symbol of
Beijing's desire to quash the Tibetan culture that clings to this wild
western outpost nearly 2,000 miles from China's capital.

But no one can be quite as put out as the monks of Rongbuk.

It has come, to put it mildly, as something of a shock.

The monastery sits close to a site reputed to have been visited by
Guru Rinpoche, the man who brought Buddhism to Tibet in the eighth
century.

"We had no idea this was going to happen until the machines began to
arrive," said Lobsang Choedeng, a 57-year-old monk who has lived for
20 years at the monastery.

"I am very worried about what this road will bring to us."

A further mile or so up the mountain is the North Face Base Camp.

A group of tents house a few dozen trekkers who are here out of
season. They have come to marvel at the peak and climb in its shadow.

This is the peaceful face of the great mountain.

Fewer people come to this side than the more accessible south face,
where the better known Base Camp has become something of a fairground,
overflowing with rubbish and rich amateur climbers desperate to tick
the great mountain off their list of adventures completed.

It had taken me two days in the back of a robust 4x4 vehicle to get to
this remote part of the world, and as we progressed along the bumpy
dirt track I was overwhelmed by the beauty and tranquillity of the
landscape.

At night, as I lay in my tent struggling against the reed-thin air and
taking in the quiet of the setting, I realised that I may well be one
of the last people to savour the peace of this side of the mountain.

For the road that will bring the Olympic torch will also bring
busloads of day-trippers, fast-food restaurants, and possibly hotels -
a level of intrusion never witnessed before, even on the far more
visited south side of the mountain. And it's little wonder that China
has been remarkably secretive about its £10 million road-building
scheme.

It was quietly announced by the Chinese Government on June 18 as the
first pieces of heavy machinery arrived lower down the dirt track that
the new highway will replace.

The monks, the Everest tour guides and the mountain businesses that
eke a living out of hikers and climbers knew nothing until gangs of
labourers began to arrive.

There have been no previous eyewitness reports of this great Chinese
road because in recent months it has become extremely difficult for
foreign journalists to get into Tibet.

The permits westerners need to get into the Everest area have been
tightly restricted by the Chinese.

Independent travellers have been banned from Tibet since April. The
Chinese are deeply concerned about how the story will be reported in
the foreign press.

They intend their great road to be unveiled in glory at the start of
the Olympics and they are doing all they can to keep the construction
under wraps.

I had been warned by a Tibetan friend in Lhasa that it would be almost
impossible for me to get near the road-building site.

"It is very sensitive in that area now," he told me.

"I have been told there are many government spies watching the
movements of any foreigner."

To get the paperwork I needed to enter Tibet, I had to pose as a would-
be trekker and spent five days dealing with Chinese bureaucracy.

The visa was issued on condition that I be escorted by an official
guide, Phuon, whose job it was to stay at my side throughout the whole
trip and keep me away from anything controversial.

But as we neared Base Camp I managed to shake off my minder and head
over to the monastery where I became the first journalist to witness
the mammoth effort that China is co-ordinating in Tibet to burnish its
national image at next year's Olympics.

I had come up the mountain expecting to find one or two bulldozers -
if, indeed, any at all.

But in front of me were dozens of earth-moving vehicles and hundreds
of workers - and this was just one section of the work.

I was stumped by the epic scale of the project.

From the valley floor through barren, stony mountain passes to
Everest's North Face Base Camp 17,000ft above sea level, whole
villages of workers have been trucked in to live in tent camps and
work in teams of 100 under the command of officers from China's
People's Liberation Army.

The planned large, broad road with guardrails means significantly
widening the present narrow cart track, clearing it of rocks and
putting in adequate drainage.

Judging by what I had seen along the route, there must be hundreds of
vehicles and thousands of people employed on this development.

Ironically, many of the workers are Tibetans forced by poverty to
drive a road through one of their most sacred mountain valleys in
return for money.

Men, women and teenagers are paid two pounds a day to work 12-hour
shifts in extreme heat at oxygen-thin altitudes, digging out trenches,
breaking rocks and heaving boulders out of the path of bulldozers and
diggers.

A third of their wages are retained by contractors in return for food
and a tent. Time is short.

The first snows arrive at the end of September, and the pressure is
obvious. All day, army officers in four-wheel-drive vehicles dart
between the groups of workers and bark orders at the work teams.

At a spot just half a mile downhill from Rongbuk Monastery, I spoke to
a 15-year-old boy.

As he took a break from shovelling and sifting stones, Chisu, who is
from a village 50 miles away in western Tibet, said cheerfully, "I
came here with my family and friends.

"The work is hard but if we arrange our own food we can earn 30 yuan a
day. In our farming village, no one can earn that much, not even the
grown-ups."

I asked if he knew about the Olympic Games and the torch relay. Chisu
looked blank and shrugged.

"What is that? Nobody has told us what the road is for. They just said
that there is work for everyone and the road must be built quickly,
before the winter comes."

As he spoke, Chisu's foreman tugged his arm and ordered him back to
work alongside a girl and boy who looked as young, if not younger,
than Chisu.

The Chinese have been very organised about the project. They have
spent the last few months rounding up thousands of workers from local
villages so that labour was already in place when the project was made
public.

Construction worker Dawa Tsering, 42, explained, "The contractor came
to our village and told us he needed 30 to 50 workers, and that anyone
who wanted to go could go.

"I don't know what this road is for. I suppose they just want to make
it easier for Chinese people to visit Mount Everest."

Other workers have flooded in from poor provinces thousands of miles
away in western China such as Gansu, Henan, Sichuan and Anhui,
travelling for days by bus to reach the site.

The work is very hard, even more so because it is at such high
altitude.

"We've got work at the highest part of the road. It's very tough for
us, but we need the money to support our families back home," said one
32-year-old worker from Gansu province.

"We're not used to working at these altitudes and the bosses always
insist we work faster and faster."

Half a mile further up the mountain, in a small settlement where
groups of hikers and mountaineers can sleep beneath the stars at
17,000ft in large tents heated by cooking stoves, 58 small Tibetan
businesses are waiting anxiously for the bulldozers and labourers to
come into view, putting their livelihoods under threat.

"They might come up here next week. They might come next month.

"But when they come, I suppose we will have to leave," said Tashi, who
is hosting a group of four trekkers paying £3 a night each.

"Nobody has told us anything officially and we don't know what will
happen.

"We didn't know about the road until we heard about the workers
further down the mountain.

"Then tour guides began to tell us that they were going to build a
road all the way to Base Camp.

"We couldn't believe it at first. We thought it was a joke."

Although they pay tax on their earnings and some have run their
rudimentary guest houses for four years, the Tibetan locals who own
the tents with colourful names such as "Everest Hotel" and "Base Camp
Holiday Inn" say they will have no redress if they are told to pack up
and leave.

"That isn't the way it works under the Chinese Government," another of
the tent owners told me with a wry smile.

"If they say we have to go, we have to go. There is no argument.

"We haven't been told anything yet so all we can do is carry on as
normal. But I don't think the government will want us here when the
Olympic torch comes through.

"I think they will build new, modern guesthouses here instead."

Another group of Tibetans watching nervously for the approach of the
bulldozers were the two dozen pony-and-cart owners who take visitors
up the final mile of dirt track to Base Camp, charging £3 for a return
trip.

Of course we want to stay," said Tashi, as he prepared to take his
first fare of the morning up the steep, winding shingle track.

"But when the new road is built, it will be for tour buses - not for
ponies and carts."

A spectacular display of stars lit up the sky over the Base Camp
Holiday Inn as we settled down for a chilly, breathless night more
than three miles closer to the heavens than we were used to.

Phuon, our 23-year-old tour guide, relaxing with a bottle of Lhasa
beer after a day spent chasing us anxiously across the lower slopes of
Mount Everest and pleading with us not to take photographs and bother
people, told us the new road will bring big changes.

"Five years ago, no Chinese came here, only westerners," he said.

"Westerners ride up in four-wheel-drive cars, then hike up to Base
Camp and they don't mind staying in places like this.

"Chinese people like to come in a tour bus and they don't want to
hike. They like to come and take photographs and return on the same
day.

"When the road is built, more Chinese people will come because they
can ride all the way to the top in a tour bus.

"Maybe they will build a better hotel or some guest house here. They
are planning many special things for 2008 but we don't know what they
will be. Maybe it will be better for us. We don't know."

Beyond Tibet and China's borders, news of the road to Everest is
starting to cause rumblings of concern.

British climbers are shocked by the development and are worried about
the number of tourists the road will bring to the area.

They are worried about the effect the influx will have on the
environment and the destruction of its remoteness, but they are also
deeply concerned that it could also cause many more deaths on an
already overcrowded mountain.

Climber Doug Scott, who in 1975 became the first Briton to reach the
summit of Everest, describes the road as "a desecration".

"That area happens to be one of the most holy valleys in the
Himalayas," he says.

"Most of us go into the mountains not just to achieve the summit but
also for the solitude, to get away from it all, and to make a
connection with the natural environment.

"This road will bring the city to the mountains. All the
infrastructure of a modern resort will be up there, as much as the
high altitude will allow.

"There's going to be an endless stream of Japanese and Chinese
tourists going up now, especially with the new railway to Tibet that
opened last year," he adds.

"There will be bus tours and coaches around Everest. I wouldn't be
surprised if they make the road a dual carriageway. I am just glad I
saw it before all of this happened."

Stephen Venables, who in 1988 became the first Brit to climb Everest
without supplementary oxygen, says, "A lot of the magic and romance
has already been stolen by the dirt road that is there now.

"When the first British expeditions went there in the Twenties and
Thirties, they had to walk all the way from Darjeeling, 100 miles
away, and that was a real adventure."

Environmental groups are livid. Greenpeace has questioned whether the
road has "followed necessary environmental impact assessment
guidelines."

Greenpeace China spokesman Sze Pang Cheung says, "Ecologically, it is
a very sensitive area, and if you create massive tourist traffic in
the area there is also a possibility that you will change the
microclimate."

But the objections have all come too late. The stealth and speed with
which China used its central control to swing the mammoth project into
operation meant that work was already irreversibly under way, and the
landscape of the approach to the north face of Everest irredeemably
altered, before the first crescendo of concern was heard.

It is a striking lesson in how quickly things can change in modern
China, particularly for Tibetan Buddhism, which has famously resisted
the influences of China since the 1949 invasion, leading to annexation
in 1951, despite the destruction of many monasteries during the
Cultural Revolution.

With Everest towering protectively above it, the monks and nuns of
Rongbuk must have felt especially immune.

Immune, that is, until the morning of July 6.

As the work continued outside his monastery, Lobsang Choedeng talked
in the cautiously diplomatic tones that Tibetans customarily deploy
when addressing sensitive political issues.

"Modernisation is good," he said.

"But it will bring many more Chinese people flowing into the area and
I am afraid that Tibetans will lose their jobs.

"Most of the four-wheel-drives that come up here now with tourists and
trekkers are operated by Tibetan people.

With a good road, people will come here with big tour buses operated
by Chinese people."

For the few Western climbers in Base Camp looking up from the shelter
of their tents at the majestic mountain as night falls, the sun really
does appear to be setting on this peaceful scene for the last time.

Actually from a travellers' perspective this is a positive development,
because it will make it easier for travellers to get to the Everest base
camp.

I travelled last year on the Karakoram highway until Khunjerab pass. A
very cool trip, which would have been not feasible, if there wasn't an
excellent road up to the Khunjerab pass. By the way, there weren't loads
of tourists in the area, only very few and the environment around the
Karakoram highway was still pristine:
http://www.molon.de/galleries/China/Xinjiang/Karakoram/
--

Alfred Molon
http://www.molon.de - Photos of Asia, Africa and Europe

On Jul 22, 6:35 pm, SB wrote:
Live Night & Day

Bulldozing Everest

By SIMON PARRY

http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/pages/...live.html?in_a...

China has a spectacular wheeze for next year's Olympics - the torch
bearer is going to climb Everest. What they don't want the world to
know is that they have to tarmac a road to Base Camp for the
procession - and are forcing Tibetan workers to desecrate their own
holy ground to build it

The north face of Mount Everest dazzles a majestic white in the
sunshine of a July morning as a monk in customary crimson robes steps
out of the highest monastery in the world.

He wanders across the courtyard and joins a huddle of people gathered
outside.

The Chinese government are building a road right through the area of
the peaceful monastery of Rongbuk in Tibet

This is how every morning begins for the monks of Rongbuk Monastery,
an idyllic, remote retreat lying in the shadow of the world's highest
mountain. But this morning, the peace is about to be destroyed
forever.

The monk stares across the remote landscape in bewilderment as a
bulldozer belching out black smoke tears up the ancient dirt track in
front of him.

Rongbuk Monastery is three miles above sea level in the Tibetan
Himalayas.

For decades it has been the last point of civilisation for many
expeditions up Everest; it provided the base for the British climber
George Mallory on his famous - and fatal - 1924 attempt to reach the
world's highest peak.

But apart from the few groups of mountaineers who pass the retreat on
their ascent, the 30 monks and nuns who live in the monastery are
rarely touched by the modern world. Earlier this month, all of that
changed in a spectacular manner.

At 9am on July 6, with a clatter and a smoky roar, an extraordinary
and controversial project by the Chinese Government to build a 66-mile
tarmac road halfway up Everest was announced in blunt manner on the
doorstep of the monastery.

It came in the prosaic shape of a dirt-caked bulldozer with a red flag
flying from its roof.

After hearing the rumours - the Chinese are not shouting about this
project - I came here to see it for myself.

Frankly, I sensed I might have been wasting my time; it seemed too far-
fetched a notion.

But here it was: by midday I saw the solitary bulldozer, joined by a
small convoy of steamrollers, cranes and trucks and a ragtag mob of
labourers, some in their teens, carrying crude pickaxes and shovels.

This was the advance guard of an army of peasant workers commandeered
by the Chinese Government to blast a road all the way to Everest Base
Camp in just four months.

For China, which annexed the mountain kingdom of Tibet half a century
ago and has ruled it with an iron fist since, this grandiose scheme
will pave the way for a spectacular curtain-raiser to the 2008 Beijing
Olympics.

Next May, 300 runners will carry the Olympic torch along the new road
to Base Camp and then pass it into the hands of a relay of
mountaineers who, witnessed by the world's media, will attempt to take
it to the summit of Everest.

It is a bewildering idea on so many levels. For green groups,
campaigners for a free Tibet and many serious mountaineers, the road
is a travesty that will bring disaster to an already fragile and over-
burdened environment.

Not only will the road bring busloads of tourists to the pristine
north face of Everest but it will also act as a powerful symbol of
Beijing's desire to quash the Tibetan culture that clings to this wild
western outpost nearly 2,000 miles from China's capital.

But no one can be quite as put out as the monks of Rongbuk.

It has come, to put it mildly, as something of a shock.

The monastery sits close to a site reputed to have been visited by
Guru Rinpoche, the man who brought Buddhism to Tibet in the eighth
century.

"We had no idea this was going to happen until the machines began to
arrive," said Lobsang Choedeng, a 57-year-old monk who has lived for
20 years at the monastery.

"I am very worried about what this road will bring to us."

A further mile or so up the mountain is the North Face Base Camp.

A group of tents house a few dozen trekkers who are here out of
season. They have come to marvel at the peak and climb in its shadow.

This is the peaceful face of the great mountain.

Fewer people come to this side than the more accessible south face,
where the better known Base Camp has become something of a fairground,
overflowing with rubbish and rich amateur climbers desperate to tick
the great mountain off their list of adventures completed.

It had taken me two days in the back of a robust 4x4 vehicle to get to
this remote part of the world, and as we progressed along the bumpy
dirt track I was overwhelmed by the beauty and tranquillity of the
landscape.

At night, as I lay in my tent struggling against the reed-thin air and
taking in the quiet of the setting, I realised that I may well be one
of the last people to savour the peace of this side of the mountain.

For the road that will bring the Olympic torch will also bring
busloads of day-trippers, fast-food restaurants, and possibly hotels -
a level of intrusion never witnessed before, even on the far more
visited south side of the mountain. And it's little wonder that China
has been remarkably secretive about its £10 million road-building
scheme.

It was quietly announced by the Chinese Government on June 18 as the
first pieces of heavy machinery arrived lower down the dirt track that
the new highway will replace.

The monks, the Everest tour guides and the mountain businesses that
eke a living out of hikers and climbers knew nothing until gangs of
labourers began to arrive.

There have been no previous eyewitness reports of this great Chinese
road because in recent months it has become extremely difficult for
foreign journalists to get into Tibet.

The permits westerners need to get into the Everest area have been
tightly restricted by the Chinese.

Independent travellers have been banned from Tibet since April. The
Chinese are deeply concerned about how the story will be reported in
the foreign press.

They intend their great road to be unveiled in glory at the start of
the Olympics and they are doing all they can to keep the construction
under wraps.

I had been warned by a Tibetan friend in Lhasa that it would be almost
impossible for me to get near the road-building site.

"It is very sensitive in that area now," he told me.

"I have been told there are many government spies watching the
movements of any foreigner."

To get the paperwork I needed to enter Tibet, I had to pose as a would-
be trekker and spent five days dealing with Chinese bureaucracy.

The visa was issued on condition that I be escorted by an official
guide, Phuon, whose job it was to stay at my side throughout the whole
trip and keep me away from anything controversial.

But as we neared Base Camp I managed to shake off my minder and head
over to the monastery where I became the first journalist to witness
the mammoth effort that China is co-ordinating in Tibet to burnish its
national image at next year's Olympics.

I had come up the mountain expecting to find one or two bulldozers -
if, indeed, any at all.

But in front of me were dozens of earth-moving vehicles and hundreds
of workers - and this was just one section of the work.

I was stumped by the epic scale of the project.

From the valley floor through barren, stony mountain passes to

Everest's North Face Base Camp 17,000ft above sea level, whole
villages of workers have been trucked in to live in tent camps and
work in teams of 100 under the command of officers from China's
People's Liberation Army.

The planned large, broad road with guardrails means significantly
widening the present narrow cart track, clearing it of rocks and
putting in adequate drainage.

Judging by what I had seen along the route, there must be hundreds of
vehicles and thousands of people employed on this development.

Ironically, many of the workers are Tibetans forced by poverty to
drive a road through one of their most sacred mountain valleys in
return for money.

Men, women and teenagers are paid two pounds a day to work 12-hour
shifts in extreme heat at oxygen-thin altitudes, digging out trenches,
breaking rocks and heaving boulders out of the path of bulldozers and
diggers.

A third of their wages are retained by contractors in return for food
and a tent. Time is short.

The first snows arrive at the end of September, and the pressure is
obvious. All day, army officers in four-wheel-drive vehicles dart
between the groups of workers and bark orders at the work teams.

At a spot just half a mile downhill from Rongbuk Monastery, I spoke to
a 15-year-old boy.

As he took a break from shovelling and sifting stones, Chisu, who is
from a village 50 miles away in western Tibet, said cheerfully, "I
came here with my family and friends.

"The work is hard but if we arrange our own food we can earn 30 yuan a
day. In our farming village, no one can earn that much, not even the
grown-ups."

I asked if he knew about the Olympic Games and the torch relay. Chisu
looked blank and shrugged.

"What is that? Nobody has told us what the road is for. They just said
that there is work for everyone and the road must be built quickly,
before the winter comes."

As he spoke, Chisu's foreman tugged his arm and ordered him back to
work alongside a girl and boy who looked as young, if not younger,
than Chisu.

The Chinese have been very organised about the project. They have
spent the last few months rounding up thousands of workers from local
villages so that labour was already in place when the project was made
public.

Construction worker Dawa Tsering, 42, explained, "The contractor came
to our village and told us he needed 30 to 50 workers, and that anyone
who wanted to go could go.

"I don't know what this road is for. I suppose they just want to make
it easier for Chinese people to visit Mount Everest."

Other workers have flooded in from poor provinces thousands of miles
away in western China such as Gansu, Henan, Sichuan and Anhui,
travelling for days by bus to reach the site.

The work is very hard, even more so because it is at such high
altitude.

"We've got work at the highest part of the road. It's very tough for
us, but we need the money to support our families back home," said one
32-year-old worker from Gansu province.

"We're not used to working at these altitudes and the bosses always
insist we work faster and faster."

Half a mile further up the mountain, in a small settlement where
groups of hikers and mountaineers can sleep beneath the stars at
17,000ft in large tents heated by cooking stoves, 58 small Tibetan
businesses are waiting anxiously for the bulldozers and labourers to
come into view, putting their livelihoods under threat.

"They might come up here next week. They might come next month.

"But when they come, I suppose we will have to leave," said Tashi, who
is hosting a group of four trekkers paying £3 a night each.

"Nobody has told us anything officially and we don't know what will
happen.

"We didn't know about the road until we heard about the workers
further down the mountain.

"Then tour guides began to tell us that they were going to build a
road all the way to Base Camp.

"We couldn't believe it at first. We thought it was a joke."

Although they pay tax on their earnings and some have run their
rudimentary guest houses for four years, the Tibetan locals who own
the tents with colourful names such as "Everest Hotel" and "Base Camp
Holiday Inn" say they will have no redress if they are told to pack up
and leave.

"That isn't the way it works under the Chinese Government," another of
the tent owners told me with a wry smile.

"If they say we have to go, we have to go. There is no argument.

"We haven't been told anything yet so all we can do is carry on as
normal. But I don't think the government will want us here when the
Olympic torch comes through.

"I think they will build new, modern guesthouses here instead."

Another group of Tibetans watching nervously for the approach of the
bulldozers were the two dozen pony-and-cart owners who take visitors
up the final mile of dirt track to Base Camp, charging £3 for a return
trip.

Of course we want to stay," said Tashi, as he prepared to take his
first fare of the morning up the steep, winding shingle track.

"But when the new road is built, it will be for tour buses - not for
ponies and carts."

A spectacular display of stars lit up the sky over the Base Camp
Holiday Inn as we settled down for a chilly, breathless night more
than three miles closer to the heavens than we were used to.

Phuon, our 23-year-old tour guide, relaxing with a bottle of Lhasa
beer after a day spent chasing us anxiously across the lower slopes of
Mount Everest and pleading with us not to take photographs and bother
people, told us the new road will bring big changes.

"Five years ago, no Chinese came here, only westerners," he said.

"Westerners ride up in four-wheel-drive cars, then hike up to Base
Camp and they don't mind staying in places like this.

"Chinese people like to come in a tour bus and they don't want to
hike. They like to come and take photographs and return on the same
day.

"When the road is built, more Chinese people will come because they
can ride all the way to the top in a tour bus.

"Maybe they will build a better hotel or some guest house here. They
are planning many special things for 2008 but we don't know what they
will be. Maybe it will be better for us. We don't know."

Beyond Tibet and China's borders, news of the road to Everest is
starting to cause rumblings of concern.

British climbers are shocked by the development and are worried about
the number of tourists the road will bring to the area.

They are worried about the effect the influx will have on the
environment and the destruction of its remoteness, but they are also
deeply concerned that it could also cause many more deaths on an
already overcrowded mountain.

Climber Doug Scott, who in 1975 became the first Briton to reach the
summit of Everest, describes the road as "a desecration".

"That area happens to be one of the most holy valleys in the
Himalayas," he says.

"Most of us go into the mountains not just to achieve the summit but
also for the solitude, to get away from it all, and to make a
connection with the natural environment.

"This road will bring the city to the mountains. All the
infrastructure of a modern resort will be up there, as much as the
high altitude will allow.

"There's going to be an endless stream of Japanese and Chinese
tourists going up now, especially with the new railway to Tibet that
opened last year," he adds.

"There will be bus tours and coaches around Everest. I wouldn't be
surprised if they make the road a dual carriageway. I am just glad I
saw it before all of this happened."

Stephen Venables, who in 1988 became the first Brit to climb Everest
without supplementary oxygen, says, "A lot of the magic and romance
has already been stolen by the dirt road that is there now.

"When the first British expeditions went there in the Twenties and
Thirties, they had to walk all the way from Darjeeling, 100 miles
away, and that was a real adventure."

Environmental groups are livid. Greenpeace has questioned whether the
road has "followed necessary environmental impact assessment
guidelines."

Greenpeace China spokesman Sze Pang Cheung says, "Ecologically, it is
a very sensitive area, and if you create massive tourist traffic in
the area there is also a possibility that you will change the
microclimate."

But the objections have all come too late. The stealth and speed with
which China used its central control to swing the mammoth project into
operation meant that work was already irreversibly under way, and the
landscape of the approach to the north face of Everest irredeemably
altered, before the first crescendo of concern was heard.

It is a striking lesson in how quickly things can change in modern
China, particularly for Tibetan Buddhism, which has famously resisted
the influences of China since the 1949 invasion, leading to annexation
in 1951, despite the destruction of many monasteries during the
Cultural Revolution.

With Everest towering protectively above it, the monks and nuns of
Rongbuk must have felt especially immune.

Immune, that is, until the morning of July 6.

As the work continued outside his monastery, Lobsang Choedeng talked
in the cautiously diplomatic tones that Tibetans customarily deploy
when addressing sensitive political issues.

"Modernisation is good," he said.

"But it will bring many more Chinese people flowing into the area and
I am afraid that Tibetans will lose their jobs.

"Most of the four-wheel-drives that come up here now with tourists and
trekkers are operated by Tibetan people.

With a good road, people will come here with big tour buses operated
by Chinese people."

For the few Western climbers in Base Camp looking up from the shelter
of their tents at the majestic mountain as night falls, the sun really
does appear to be setting on this peaceful scene for the last time.

That certainly has to be China's damnedest engineering feat since the
Great Wall. What makes this worse is that the mess will likely be
used only for one event. What's next, freeways into the Grand Canyon?

Alfred Molon wrote:
Actually from a travellers' perspective this is a positive development,
because it will make it easier for travellers to get to the Everest base
camp.


MEBC certainly doesn't need MORE travellers and absolutely no new
developments.

in 2006 i hired a 4x4 [with 2 other companions] from Lhasa to MEBC and
back. this trip shot straight to number one spot on my "most memorable
places/journeys" list. absolutely and utterly incredible! nobody but
the 3 of us all the way as it was low season [and bloody cold!]. still
marvel at the photos and remember many details vividly.

the 'road' is at times treacherous but looks like the commie is
determined to build a motorway straight to base camp blowing up
mountains everywhere along the way to make way.

In article , Saudades
says...

MEBC certainly doesn't need MORE travellers and absolutely no new
developments.

What about all those travellers who would like to get there but can't
afford a 4x4 ?
--

Alfred Molon
http://www.molon.de - Photos of Asia, Africa and Europe