Kham, 2004

Coming down off the plateau in the dark: a dog, a shot, a torch in our faces. I thought: that’s it, we’ve walked ourselves to the end. A more senseless ending would be hard to imagine. It was a nomads’ black tent. The host, embarrassed by his poverty, asked whether we could drink plain tea. Who would have thought that sausage from a meat plant back home would end up on a Tibetan nomad’s table? In the morning they braided the horses’ tails for the road. Nobody braids tails and says goodbye the way they do there.