When Vivien Lougheed was growing up in Winnipeg in the 1940s and 1950s, her two favorite escapes were the vast outdoors and the indoors of the local library.
"I used to take off on my bicycle and spend hours exploring the countryside. My mother was so busy at work that she thought I was safely at home,"; says Lougheed.
Her other passion was looking at the faraway places featured in the glossy pages of National Geographic - not the regular reading fare for a young prairie girl. "My mother actually thought the magazines were pornographic because they showed bare breasts,"; says Lougheed laughing.
These two childhood pastimes set the foundations for a life of unconventional travel. "I came from a very poor background so I didn't think I could ever travel,"; says Lougheed, who has visited five of the seven continents during the past 25 years. "I feel incredibly fortunate to have been able to do that.";
When Lougheed, 54, and her friend Joanne Armstrong decided that they wanted to see Tibet for themselves - without paying the exorbitant fees charged by the occupying Chinese - they snuck illegally into Tibet from northern Pakistan.
Forbidden Mountains (Caitlin $16.95) is Lougheed's autobiographical account of their year travelling into Tibet from Delhi via Pakistan, over the Karakoram Highway into Kashgar in Western China, and east toward Xian along the northern train route across the Takla Maken Desert in the early 1990s.
"Tibet has long been the ultimate challenge for addicted travellers,"; says Lougheed. "It has been the Shangri La of travel because it encompasses the physical and cultural isolation that has not been available elsewhere.";
En route to their destination, Lougheed and Armstrong endured all manner of setbacks...
Rickshaw robbers in New Delhi take them down an unlit alley where they barely escape with their packs. A nasty sinus infection causes Lougheed to snot up blood while malnutrition makes her hair come out in clumps.
"At one point, we were very sick with altitude sickness and could have died,"; says Lougheed. "Thanks to some amazing truck drivers from Kashgar - who fixed a clutch in the middle of the desert and used hot coals to seal inner tubes - we got to the border.";
In Tarchen, Tibet, Lougheed and Armstrong stayed with a Tibetan couple, Ringin and Terzin. They were treated to traditional food, such as yak butter tea and momas, unstuffed wheat dumplings. After spending a few days with the Tibetan couple, their hospitality seemed to wear thin.
Late one evening the women were unceremoniously kicked out by a drunken Ringin, who started shouting at them, waving a knife and flicking a thick wad of bills at them. When Lougheed tried to pay him for the day's lodgings, he angrily crumpled up their money and threw it back at them.
"Ringin obviously didn't want us in his home,"; writes Lougheed, "but we didn't know why."; With hindsight she realized that Ringin was scared because he had collaborated with the Chinese by servicing high paying tourists and trying to show that there's nothing wrong with Tibet.
"We stayed on longer than others had and saw a side of life in Tibet where most people didn't have what Ringin and his wife had,"; says Lougheed. "We made him nervous. We were reminding him that he had collaborated against his people.";
After Lougheed and Armstrong left in the middle of the night, they staggered into the darkness without a flashlight, stepping over broken glass and past chained dogs. When they arrived at a monastery nearby, they were greeted by five monks offering them food, drink and a place to stay for the night.
During the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese destroyed monastaries, closing some permanently. Others were spiffed up, polished and painted for profit - tourists.
At Mount Kailash, one of the holiest places in Asia, one monk pulled Lougheed aside and said, "What you see is not happening, it's not true."; A second monk pulled the first one aside, reprimanding him.
"It was very dangerous for anyone to criticize the system like that,"; explains Lougheed.
Although Lougheed acknowledges that there are huge problems in Chinese occupied Tibet, she says that the political issue is far from clear cut.
"To disturb such an ancient culture is problematic. But I can't take a side. Culture is always moving, changing, being influenced by trade, politics and the outside world. I can't judge what is happening in Tibet and we won't know for 200 years what the effects will have been,"; she says, pointing out that both the Chinese and the Tibetans treated them with kindness.
Lougheed, who lives in Prince George with her partner John Harris, has previously published Central America by Chicken Bus and Kluane Park Hiking Guide.
ISBN = 0 920576 61 3

[BCBW 1997]