What’s it like to live in a far-off place most of us see only on a vacation? Foreign Correspondence is an interview with someone who lives in a spot you may want to visit.
Gary McCue, author of “Trekking Tibet: A Travelers Guide” ($29.95; The Mountaineers Books), grew up near Rochester, N.Y., took a river-rafting job in New Zealand and became a trekking guide to Nepal in 1983. He visited Tibet as it was opening to Westerners and has spent 2- to 5-month stretches trekking there most years since. McCue, 57, lives in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, Australia.
Q: Given its location and the political situation these days, is it complicated to trek in Tibet?
A: It’s easy if you go through a commercial company, and there are quite a few in the U.S.; I do contract work with one of them. You can look in the brochures to see what trips are offered and just put your money down. The company gets the permits, and off you go.
Trekking on your own suddenly 8became complicated after the 2008 uprising.
Q: Will this change?
A: Hard to say. In the past, whenever there are uprisings, the Chinese tighten the rules. Within a few years, the rules loosen because there’s a whole industry of small companies catering to people who do this. The trekking scene in Tibet has been popular. At this point, individual travelers are just starting to sneak back into Lhasa (Tibet’s capital). Cracks in the restrictions are starting to show, but the Chinese get better and better at tight controls.
The Chinese carved up the Tibetan plateau, and now there are five provinces: the main one — the Tibet Autonomous Region — plus parts of the plateau in four other provinces of China. Central Tibet — the TAR, including Lhasa — is tightly controlled.
If you’re on your own and on a budget, you should go to the other places, which have a lot of potential for trekking. I discuss this in the book.
Q: Is the trekking itself arduous in Tibet?
A: It’s not for couch potatoes. But in general it’s not as arduous as treks in 8Nepal, where there’s extreme high-low terrain change. On the Tibetan side of the Himalayas, the land is more flat even in the higher altitudes. That doesn’t mean there aren’t ups and downs: Some of the most extreme terrain in the world is in eastern Tibet.
The Tibetan plateau is about a third bigger than Alaska. Maybe half is quite barren — a high alpine desert with a rich wildlife, like in the American Plains before settlers arrived. Instead of bison, there’s wild yak. There are antelope, gazelle and a native wild ass that looks like a burro with a reddish color.
It’s a harsh environment.
Q: Ever have “Indiana Jones” discovery moments?
A: I typically am looking for routes I can repeat commercially; I’m not looking for something just stunningly beautiful. I use books by earlier explorers — some written in the 1920s and 1930s — to find out where those routes may be.
Nomads in the high country will have three or four places where they move their tents in the course of the year. They’re naturally traders in the offseason, going around selling things to make cash, so they’re not necessarily folks who haven’t seen Westerners before. Before the Chinese came, most Tibetans had a subsistence type of economy. There were no cash crops, so they would trade. So many bags of barley would equal this much yak butter, and so on.
Q: Yak butter! What’s that taste like?
A: It’s different from cow butter. It has a tang to it. It’s kind of gamey in comparison, like goat milk or goat yogurt. You can dilute yak milk by half and it’s still too strong. There’s probably good potential for someone to commercially make yak ice cream: It has high butter-fat content and is absolutely delicious.
Unlike milk, butter can be stored. We’d get bottles of yak milk and by the time we’d make camp that evening, there’d be balls of butter in them from our walking. I’d make flatbreads and we’d spread yak butter on it. It’s really fresh.
Q: Do people also eat yak?
A: It’s delicious, and a bit more lean than beef. Like any animal that’s running around, it can be tough. Our staff often purchases yak for cooking. They also buy sheep meat, which is delicious. It’s desiccated — dried in the air. All they do is hang the carcass; there’s no cooking involved. It becomes light and paper-y. It rehydrates when you put it in your mouth, but the flavor stays.
