I’m in China with an Indian traveller

Vikram Seth is an Indian writer whose novels include the enormous A Suitable Boy which I have read but of which I now sadly remember little. As a younger man he studied in China and learned the language, travelling within the country when he could. From Heaven Lake is the story of his travels in Tibet and North Western China in the early 1980s – these were not easy areas to travel to as a foreigner at that time and I don’t think that they are any easier to access now.

The author persuades an official to grant him a travel pass for Tibet and then has to work out how to travel there. He intends to travel across the region and then cross the border into Nepal and thence to India and return home but the bureaucracy continually gets in his way – as a foreigner he needs a plethora of passes and visas to travel across China. In the end he travels by bus occasionally but mainly by hitchhiking lifts on lorries.

This is a fascinating insight into an area of China which sadly, these days, only gets attention when there is conflict and associated human rights abuses. At the time when the book was written the minorities who live in this area of China were discriminated against and generally ignored and the author has few illusions about the behaviour of the government and authorities.

There are excellent descriptions of the landscape and the way that people live. The author visits religious sites, is welcomed into people’s homes and sees a traditional disposal of a dead body by sky burial. He stays in hotels and mixes with lorry drivers, ordinary people who are travelling and working people. Although the bureaucracy annoys, and occasionally angers, him he finds the people whom he meets to be hospitable, generous and very welcoming. He also learns that he needs more patience as he loses his temper too quickly because he is not used to the pace at which things happen. There are physical barriers to travel including missing roads and too full rivers which cannot be crossed. There is a lot of mud and he has to walk on occasion. Everyone seems to smoke far too much.

This is an excellent travel book because it tells me a lot about the area and the people, even though it was written about forty years ago. The author tries to understand how and why people live as they do and often compares the region to India. I enjoyed reading this book which is not very long. I am passing it on now to the Oxfam Bookshop where I think I obtained it originally ! I don’t usually keep travel books although I enjoy reading them – I have quite a few remaining on my to-be-read piles.