Falling is more efficient

It was nearly six am when we met outside the Johkang Temple and the air was already tainted with incense. We were informed by a man I couldn't see in the darkness that there were three seats left exactly and so we got on the crowded bus. After my student inquired as to whether I had eaten lunch or not yet, I promptly fell asleep against the grungy, faded seat in front of me.

When I awoke it was to ice cold breezes and mountain passes covered with snow. I realized with immediate terror that my t-shirt and fleece jacket were hardly suitable. My ears popped and my fingers began to chap as my eyes watered in the glare from the snow.

We got off the bus and my two students were accosted by alarmingly forceful women selling frostbitten bags of incense. Ganden monastery looked appropriately dingy in contrast to the startling whiteness of the snow. After a bowl of warm noodles in a relic of a teahouse we dutifully made our way through a few dank rooms filled with idols and darkness before my students got bored. Let's go to see something really Tibetan, one remarked, gesturing to the snow covered mountains, to my joy at answered requests and relief at loosened chains. 

Snow ball fights, slippery passes, breath-taking views, and a few random moments of hilarity later and we decided not to wait for the afternoon bus but instead to walk down to visit another former student who was teaching at a primary school at the foot of the mountain. The road looked like a snake had swallowed something both jagged and loopy and it wasn't long before my students began to bemoan our fate and ask nearby yak for rides down. The yak slowly blinked in the snow. It is more efficient to fall down this mountain, declared one student, shaking snow and mud off his shoes.

So we flagged down a grinning Tibetan driver who seemed amused that I could sing along to the songs on his radio as we wound our way down and he dropped us off at my former student's school.The school looked more like a construction site and the children giggled wildly as I crossed the muddy yard arm in arm with their new teacher. Her home was sparse and messy but otherwise comfortable and we boiled potatoes together with fatty meat and cracked walnuts as snacks. Getting to spend time with her was like all the sunshine that our day had thus far lacked.

We ate lunch in an extremely hospitable families' small restaurant nearby and saw the buses coming zig zag down the road back to Lhasa later that afternoon. As we sprinted to the foot of the mountain waving our bus tickets in an effort to stop the buses, I bid my student farewell and hoped that I might see her once more before I leave. Our bus driver miraculously remembered us and stopped just long enough for us to squeeze on. We crashed into our stained seats and, exhausted, fell very nearly asleep as it rattled back to Lhasa.

As my drowsy head bumped against the smudged window of the bus I thought about the jagged, loopy, mostly obscured road of my future. I know I will walk it slowly step by snowy, muddy step, and I know I don't walk it alone and I know there will be people I must meet along the way... but I'm inclined at this point to agree with my student... to simply fall would be much more efficient.