A story to tell

First day into my twenty day Three Passes trek (which explores the 3 valleys around Everest), I met a Tibetan walking to Lhasa. There was a communication gap and at first I thought he was an exiled monk. After 3 days of walking and a Nepali interpreter one night, I learnt of an intriguing story.

Mr Free Tibet (no names required) now resides in Dharamsala, India, after escaping from a Chinese jail and I met him on his way to visit is family in Lhasa. It’s not a long journey, 2 days bus ride then twenty days walking over a 5500m pass, hiding from Nepali and Chinese authorities and bribing anyone sympathetic to the Chinese.

We will all travel to see our family... so why not catch a plane or a bus??

Lets start at the beginning, several years ago there was a Tibetan who enrolled in the Chinese army for many reasons but that is not the point. As a Tibetan soldier in the Chinese army there was propaganda around the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet, ie: the Dali Lama on toilet paper. The younger soldier became disillusioned with army life and joined the Free Tibet movement.

The next step was to actively protest about the occupation of Tibet. Maybe a little more extreme action than you and I, my new friend threw some sort of petrol bomb at an important building in Beijing, first bomb worked as planned but the second somehow exploded near him and badly burnt his leg which caused him to be caught by the authorities.

After 2 years in jail his father paid the equivalent of €10,000, with assistance from the outside world, to the prison guards which enabled him to escape to Dharamsala. Now his family is persecuted by the Chinese authorities, sister has received a broken leg and he can only visit his family at night. After a month in Lhasa, its time to walk back to Dharamsala, India.