Silk Road — Class 11 English

Nick Middleton's travelogue records his arduous journey across the Tibetan plateau towards Mount Kailash to complete the kora (a sacred circuit). Leaving Ravu with a farewell sheepskin coat from Lhamo, he travels with his guide Tsetan and friend Daniel, taking a short cut south-west across vast open plains where they see gazelles, herds of wild ass (kyang), nomadic drokbas and fierce Tibetan mastiffs once prized in China's imperial courts. The route climbs high mountain passes, and Tsetan skilfully negotiates dangerous patches of snow and ice, while the narrator suffers from altitude sickness as they cross a pass at 5,515 metres. They pause at a salt-encrusted lake, then reach the grim, rubbish-strewn town of Hor on Lake Manasarovar — a sharp contrast to the rapturous accounts of earlier travellers. After Daniel and then Tsetan depart, the narrator settles at Darchen, where sleeplessness and breathing trouble force a visit to the Tibetan doctor, whose herbal medicine restores him. Finding no pilgrims because he has arrived too early in the season, and reluctant to do the kora alone, he is relieved to meet Norbu, a friendly, ill-equipped Tibetan academic from Beijing who has also come to do the kora. The two decide to team up, and the narrator's positive-thinking strategy seems, after all, to have worked. The piece vividly captures landscape, hardship, hill-folk and the spirit of pilgrimage.