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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. |
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China Rapes Tibet's Holiest Valley for Olympics
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 |
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China Rapes Tibet's Holiest Valley for Olympics
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? |
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China Rapes Tibet's Holiest Valley for Olympics
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. |
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China Rapes Tibet's Holiest Valley for Olympics
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 |
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