Chengdu to Rilong, 2004

The bus had no springs and was full to the roof. Before we had even left the city the driver stopped, opened the engine cover, knocked something, pulled something, spat and closed it. Then he took in bloody parcels of meat through his window for somebody up the road. I watched these two mysterious rituals on every Tibetan bus afterwards.

At the lunch stop I learned that washing hands before a meal is sacred: all fifty passengers washed them in one basin.

The driver raced up the hairpins at a mad thirty kilometres an hour. Two hours later we could still see the same village below. On the Balang pass, at 4,487 metres, a Chinese passenger on his way to see real snow fainted in the aisle from the thin air.