We left Lhasa at night and headed for the mountains. We walked for 17 days,' Kelsang Dolma, sitting in her small rain-battered room in Dharamsala, tells me her story. 'The snow was deep and my shoes kept slipping. We had to help each other walk. Nights were so cold and the days so long. We had to cross a high pass because the Chinese soldiers wouldn't go that way. On the pass we found a body of another Tibetan in the snow. That terrified me. But we were lucky, we made it to the border.' Kelsang's village is in eastern Tibet. When she got to Lhasa, she had to find an 'agent' who would take her across the border into Nepal. The agent was looking for other Tibetans who wanted to flee, so Kelsang had to wait around for a month. 'That was a nervous time,' she says. 'Whenever I stepped outside I felt like the Public Security Bureau officers could tell what I was planning to do.'
Kelsang's trials did not end at the border. Her Nepali guide took Kelsang and the others to his house. But when he had gone out, the Nepali border police found them. 'They made us lie down at gunpoint – I thought they would kill us,' she recalls. 'They left in the evening to get reinforcements, maybe even to find Chinese border guards to hand us over. But our guide came back and we sneaked out of the back window. He dressed us as Nepalis and we made our way on foot to Kathmandu like that. Every night the police scanned the hillsides with giant torches to find us. I thought my heart would burst.' Eventually the group made it to Boudha, on the outskirts of the Kathmandu Valley, the centre of the Tibetan community in Nepal.
'Tenzing Palden' (not his real name), now a film editor in London, made the same journey that Kelsang undertook. When he and the friend he was travelling with arrived in Lhasa from their home in eastern Tibet, the first thing they did was to find a guide, who they paid 900 yuan (about USD 140). After buying blankets, they had just 10 yuan left to buy food to last until Nepal. 'Will I be able to make it?' Tenzing kept asking himself. Thereafter, for eight days and nights on the road, Tenzing huddled together with 75 others on the back of a truck, standing periodically to let some of his compatriots get some sleep.
When they reached Saga, a garrison town nearing the Nepal frontier, they left the truck and began walking towards the Dargye Tsangpo River. It was starting to freeze. 'When the soft ice over the river hit your thigh, it cut,' he recalls. A young monk was taken by the river's current. 'We buried his body in a sand dune and continued our journey.' The group walked at night and slept during the day. One day they ran out of food, just before they started to cross the Himalaya. 'Hunger, tiredness and thick snow – they almost took us,' he says. 'Sometimes we met yak traders from whom we could buy an apple or banana, but it was really expensive. Most of the time we ate snow, which kept us on our feet. We saw dead bodies, people who had not made it across the pass. I kept thinking that could have been me.'