Road trip with 2 monks and being future Buddha

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N.B. my China and yak in a bath posts are now accompanied by photographic evidence!

I awaken to the melodious strains of a donkey braying. Its parents reply with a chorus of horrendous noises. I am wearing a woolly hat in bed and shivering under my 5 blankets. I can see my breath, so I'm thankful that it's time to get up. Then I look at my clock and realise it's in fact 4am and I have at least 4 more hours of shivering before I can get up and enjoy "Tibetan breakfast", which is generally inedible. Breakfast is always followed by a gag-inducing encounter with a Tibetan toilet (usually just a big hole down into the most horrendous pit filled with steaming Tibetan turds). Tibetans don't seem to care about whether they hit the hole or not, so you have to perfect a hovering squatting manoevre, which is a compromise between not putting your feet within a metre margin of the hole, but also not slipping or breaking your knees in the process. Such is life on the road in Tibet. You are there for the scenery and the "spiritual experience", rather than for cafe lattes and Western toilets.

Our guide and driver were ex monks and took it upon themselves to give us a crash course in "Buddha recognition". I found this difficult, apart from the ones who have the dead giveaway of red and blue faces - they are protector Buddhas. The rest look very simlilar, but I will always remember FUTURE BUDDHA. The reason for this is that I was gracefully edging my way down some tiny steps in a temple - monks were galloping down them with big water carriers on their heads etc, but I needed both hands to hold on and was mincing my way down. The guide looked back up at me as I tentatively tried to fit my enormous foot in its hiking boot onto the tiny step and admiringly said: "Jenny, you are like future Buddha. Future Buddha has big feet too and is very big and strong." The Buddha he was comparing me to has outsize features, like huge ears down to its waist and feet like planks. This Buddha symbolises a strong future and towers above past and present Buddha. I think this was supposed to be a compliment. Shortly after a nun told me I was beautiful, so I felt a bit better about my status as a giant Western Buddha woman but then the nun saw my mother and said she was more beautiful than me!

So having resigned myself to being perceived as a big fat clumsy westerner I focused on the scenery. I'll post some pictures, but the scenery was really really worth the horrors of Tibetan countryside toilets and getting hypothermia every night. It was like New Zealand, but everything a hundred times bigger e.g. the lake we saw had a whole range of mountains reflected in it etc. And despite my poor performance at recognising the Buddhas and lamas, the temples were really cool too (though I'm afraid I still can't say I would consider becoming a Buddhist).
Everest will have its own blog!

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Photos

Lake between Lhasa and Gyantse
This was when I started wondering why I'd ever though the New Zealand scenery was impressive....

the offending donkey
Donkeys lived in the streets of the villages - they liked to wake us up at approx 4am, but they were quite sweet really (and cleaner than some fo the locals)

village
This is one of the villages we stayed in - we ended up going 5 days with no showers, but we did see some proper countryside!

the "road"
A lot of the trip was v much "off road". Not quite sure what would have happended if we'd broken down....

first sight of Nepal range
This was our first sight of the Nepalese side of the Himalaya. We did actually drive off the edge of this stuff - mother almost had a heart attack, but tyres seemed to work!