July sixth, my birthday, I share with Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, and with George W. Bush.

I mention this because on April 16^th of this year, I met the bodhisattva, Josie Ortez, also known as Sepha or dakinidancer. Over drinks I told her that she had been one of the people on OpenSalon I most wanted to meet. Nearly a year before I had met Josie through commenting on Joan’s blog. Although she supported Hillary and I supported Barack, in June of 2008 she gave me best compliment I’ve ever received, or hope to receive when said to me, “you are honorable.” I felt connected to her from early on, and again on opensalon when I became familiar with her sense of humor and deep, fascinating way of seeing the world. In April, 2009, we met over drinks at the Edinburgh Castle in San Francisco at the OS meetup I asked her about her blogging name and she explained what it meant to her. I said, “I know about dakini dancers because I once went to Tibet.”

“Have you heard of Alexandra David-Neel?”

“Yes, I love her!”

So over about fifteen minutes we had a conversation about a French woman, the first western woman to travel to Lhasa, and the birthday I share with the Dalai Lama and George Bush. We continued to discuss Asia later with Lonnie Lazar, who has also traveled, more extensively than I have, through Tibet. But it was so exciting for me to meet two people who had studied and cared about Tibetan culture, and who had read David-Neel’s extraordinary adventure into the rooftop kingdom. I told Josie, “soon, I’m going to write a blog about Alexandra David-Neel and my travels in Tibet,” so over two months later, and yet not quite soon enough, I am. This post is dedicated to my friend, Josie Ortez who I miss. Warning, this will be long and somewhat dirty, just like a trip to Tibet so frequently must be.

This is me and my friend, Patrick Wallace, standing on the Great Wall of China. I’m writing his full name in the hopes that he might someday stumble on this, since he’s one of the people I’ve lost track of in the world and would love to find again. But what are the chances, right? (Just in case, Hi Pat!)

After an eventful first year teaching English is South Korea which culminated in my English institute director threatening to deport me if I didn’t stop teaching private English lessons to Korean students, I gave notice I was leaving the institute, and I met up with Pat, who taught at another school, at a party where it turned out we were both planning to go to China at the same time so we decided to travel together.

We took a ferry from Incheon, South Korea, to Tianjin, China, where we might have been two of the only passengers aboard who didn’t spend the whole night throwing up on the decks. However, one passenger was giving another a long massage that resulted in long, moans of exquisite ecstasy, that seemed to go on for hours, which along side the sounds of people puking, made me want to giggle all the night long. When we arrived we boarded a minibus headed for Beijing. It was already dark again, and the bus pulled along the side of the road and the driver told us we could a) pay him more money b) thumb it to Beijing. Extortion was our welcome mat to China. We paid the driver the extra yuan which he promptly placed in his pocket.

It was my idea that we should go to Tibet. This was before Brad Pitt’s film, Seven Years in Tibet would come out, and I would later discover Alexandra David-Neel’s book in a Seattle bookstore. Josie and I had no trouble figuring out why Hollywood chose the hero it did, given this sexy Nazi,

or this woman,

even though David-Neel traveled to Tibet in 1923, nearly two decades before Harrer, and she traveled as a Buddhist scholar and fluent speaker of Tibetan, in the winter, disguised as a religious pilgrim and a peasant woman. And she was fifty-five when she accomplished all of this!

But I wasn’t a Buddhist scholar, or even a sexy nazi. I had barely heard of Tibet, but before I left South Korea, my friend and fellow English Teacher Mark Vetare gave me small photos of the Yishi Norbu, or the Dalai Lama that he suggested I give to Tibetan children. “It’s illegal, so don’t let anyone see, but the Tibetans cherish these photos.” Like David-Neel, (who, it’s worth mentioning, met the thirteenth Dalai Lama who was so impressed with her knowledge of Tibetan culture he declared she must be an incarnation of Thunderbolt, or Dorje Phagmo, the only Tibetan Buddhist female incarnation) who said that she only went to Lhasa on a lark because the British consulate along with Tibetan custom forbid anyone to enter the city, I, too, just wanted to go for the fun and adventure. But Pat planned to go to Shanghai instead, so we went as far as Shi’an together and by then I’d quietly decided to change plans to continue traveling with him. However, one morning three days before we were scheduled to separate he snapped the pages of the guidebook to China shut, “Let’s go to Tibet.”

Joy jolted through my veins to fingertips, toes, tip of my head. Tibet.

* * * *

Somehow I’m not surprised that today’s guidebooks to Tibet don’t even mention Golmud as a gateway. Since we were traveling by train anyway, we planned to go as far as the train would take us, which was the dusty, dirty, old western Chinese town of Golmud, and then overland across the Tibetan plateau to Lhasa by bus.

To entertain ourselves as we traveled, Pat and I frequently made bets on various things we noticed along the way. One long standing bet we based on whether or not the enormous soup bowls we could order in Chinese restaurants for fifty cents were recycled, with the soup we left in the large bowl in the center of our table poured back into the pot in the kitchen after we left. He voted yes, I said no, though I suspected he might have been correct. “What do you want to bet it’s THAT bus,” he said as we walked into the bus lot. Nearly a dozen shiny, sparkling brand new buses lined up side by side, and in the front of the line, one dirty, moldy, rusty piece of junk that looked like it wouldn’t make it to the end of the block. Sure enough, that very bus was the one heading for Lhasa.

Not to worry, we told ourselves as the rickety vehicle had to have a tire changed not two hours into our journey. It looked like the bus traveled with it’s own five man crew of Chinese mechanics. They sat together en masse in the front, and whenever the bus had problems, each had his tools already at hand to repair it. We thought this could be a brilliant tactic for lowering the unemployment figures in Golmud but it was definitely an odd way to travel. The extra time we sat on the bus waiting for repairs we noticed things inside the bus like a sign on the wall noting, among other things, that no one was permitted to spit, or to transport corpses in their luggage.

Spitting was huge in China while we were there, and we would later see a peasant woman in a train station in southern China get ticketed for spitting, which only made her curse passionately at her ticketer. But the possibility of corpses in the luggage captivated our imaginations completely.

For a while I sat in the back of the bus while Pat sat in front where he could smoke while leaning out of the window, a technique he had seen perfected in Beijing and had determined to master. His perseverance in smoking I found truly endearing. My favorite instance of it came later when were riding bicycles to a monastery near Lhasa where, at a very high altitude, as we were bicycling up a fairly steep hill, he carried his cigarette in one hand and steered with the other. However, I was going through my own private hell in the back of the bus though as it is an unmistakable rule of the universe that if you are twenty three and female your body will betray you in exactly this way of beginning to bleed as you are traveling by bus to Lhasa on a thirty hour journey that keeps getting extended as the bus breaks down, and even with ibuprofen you cling to your knees, racked with pain, crying to the universe (inside your head) “why me???” I was too shy to mention this so when Pat came back he saw all the color drained from my face and me looking like I might faint, he asked if I was okay and I said, “fine.” He soon went back up to the front of the bus again to smoke some more.

Outside Magazine labels Alexandra David-Neel’s account of her journey to Lhasa, “One of the best adventure books of the last one hundred years,” and this is probably in part due to the fact that David-Neel does not indulge, as I do, in whining. Her adrenaline in travel bursts through her story through every hardship and fear. She traveled with her adopted son as her companion, and both of them carried concealed pistols under their Tibetan robes along with money that they had to keep hidden or they would tempt the roving bandits. Even being discovered as a European would have meant facing almost certain death for breaking the law, so she had to keep ink in her brown hair to make it darker and a covering of dirt on her face to disguise her pale skin. Occasionally her disguise would slip as she accidentally washed her hands and then terror would seize her. One night as the were sleeping by the side of the road she heard soldiers approaching so she blew her nose through her fingers as Tibetan peasants do only to realize a few seconds later that there were no soldiers, it was only the wind. She was that committed to her disguise. However, by the time she took her journey into Lhasa she had already mastered her body through meditation for several years in Tibet, enough to know a technique called thumo reskiang which involves raising the body’s internal temperature without an external heat source.

In short, she was very nearly made out of magical atoms.

In our more prosaic bodily experiencing of the journey to Lhasa, worse was still to come. We stopped in a town where I had to use the facilities and I was directed to an outbuilding that turned out to be a room where people (maybe only travelers?) had been sent. The floor of the room was a toilet. I couldn’t breath through my mouth or my nose because of the smell. “Don’t faint! Don’t faint!” I told myself faintly as I held my breath, and by the time I returned to the bus I felt that there must be some award for heroism and bravery waiting for me, but alas, none was. We all had a bad feeling getting back on the bus at that time of night, but since there weren’t many other options, we did it anyway. And sure enough about five miles outside of that town the bus broke down again and this time even the mechanics, all five, were stumped. “Broken down,” one explained helpfully, and they proceeded to hitchhike back into town maybe to get more parts. It was around 2 am. Here’s a photo of the bus after that breakdown, and our companions, who helpfully offered to share their strips of yak jerky and mysterious fermented juices with us.

Here it’s important to say that an experience that in any other country might have been scary or dangerous in the company of the Tibetans felt almost like a lark. They told jokes across the language barrier that I’ve now forgotten, but the sweetness and generosity was unmistakable. Still, after a while, we got out of the bus, in part to examine the burnished jewel quality of the stars that looked like they were hanging down closer to earth because the sky was so exposed and free from the usual light pollution and fog.

The Tibetans and ourselves sort of came to an informal consensus that the bus we were traveling on probably wouldn’t make it to Lhasa that night, or possibly ever, so we decided to hitchhike the rest of the way into Lhasa. Moments like these, by the way, are exactly why good company matters as much or more than the most magical of destinations. It's basic physics.

After a while, a minibus came along and picked us up even though it was full of passengers, and as we and our companions squeezed in, it took off down the highway. However, a man immediately started collecting money from all of us for tickets. Pat became very red in the face and angry. I thought he was thinking of the extortion we’d experienced on the way to Beijing but he said later he didn’t want to dig his wallet out of his bag in front everyone. The driver and the ticket collector on the bus started to speak more harshly with him and then to shout, and I had a sudden vision of us being deposited by the side of the pitch dark highway, so I scrambled through my bag and waved my yuan where the men could see it, “two piao, please.” Pat looked like he would like to stab me with one of the cute Tibetan daggers we saw on display in shops along the way to Lhasa. But we didn’t get kicked off the bus, so all was forgiven.

* * * *

And we did arrive finally in that city of the Gods in the pink early hours of morning as the sun had just begun to rise. We trudged through the quiet streets until we found our small hotel that was shaped around a central courtyard, and someone opened a door and gave us a room, and we collapsed in it.

In the morning I looked outside the window and saw a little goat tied to a fence post in the courtyard below, and prayer flags blowing in the wind, and pretty much the same pictures you see in magazines or in films now of a startling blue sky, and people in dark red robes with sweet, broad, improbably beautiful faces. In the streets, in the Tibetan quarter where we spent most of our time, buses and trucks intermingled with yaks and chickens. We walked part of the Lhasa pilgrim’s circuit through the Jokhang Temple where the scent of yak butter candles filled our noses, and later we wandered over toward the irreplaceable Potala Palace, and stood gazing up in awe and not a little bedazzlement.

I'm including here two more photos, one is of our journey to Samye monastery where we had to travel part of the way by tractor and when we got to this lake some men took the motor out of the tractor and put it in the boat and it motored us across the lake. Tibetan ingenuity!

And here I’m standing in front of one of the stupas at Samye with a half silly, half geeky look on my far away face. Who, me, here? But I was.

The colors of these photos aren’t a trick of photography by the way, the sky is that rich color every day, like no place else I’ve been.

Not far from there we went on a hike up a mountain to a little hermitage, and when I came across a group of children, we pulled out Mark’s photos of Tibet’s Yishi Norbu, handed them to them, and, just as he’d said, they giggled in shy pleasure, dancing away down the steps on the steep path in front of us.

* * * *

On a t.v. gameshow I recently learned that most Americans surveyed said the longest they’d gone without showering was one day. So maybe most Americans would not have enjoyed this trip to Lhasa with it’s primitive accommodations and god-awful toilets. But for Pat and I, despite the hardships, it was worth every moment. That was my first journey I took entirely for curiosity and pleasure, and not for work or to attend school. Maybe I sensed that I would later need to remember a time in my life when I’d been brave.

Yet, even here Alexandra David-Neel had us beat by miles as she went months and months without bathing, since dirt was part of her disguise. This is a photo of the filthy, irreplaceable Alexandra David-Neel in Lhasa in front of the magical Potala Palace. That’s her to the left.

In rereading her book recently, I remembered that Alexandra David-Neel and I do share a Tibetan phrase as our motto in life: “Ngay rangshi la phamgoon Khyerdo med!” translated, it is not in my nature to admit defeat.

Gé -o! Gé-o! Gé-o!

May all beings find happiness!

Dedicated to Josephine Ortez.