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Published: August 31st 2007
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We rose early and left the Yak hotel in search of a 'local bus' to Shigatse, second main city in Tibet. Fred bought some fried bread sticks for breaky, but unfortunately they were from the day before, and therefore cold and nasty! We set off on our journey. It was quite a scenic trip, and mildly worrying at times. Shigatse is part way along the 'friendship highway' linking Tibet and Nepal, and this winds its way through gorges, with fast flowing rivers bellow. At one stage we passed a group of parked vehicles, people were peering over the edge into the abyss bellow... I can only assume someone took the plunge. Thankfully we didn't. Some local women provided entertainment for most of the journey in the form of Tibetan singing... a few hours later we arrived in Shigatse.
The city itself seems much like Lhasa, but smaller and without the bustling markets. There were noticeably less westerners hanging around. We made our way to the PSB (Public security burro) to see about obtaining a permit for the trek we were hoping to do... however being the weekend, it was shut. Our hostel owners put us in touch with a travel
agency, and we were told that no such permit was currently required.
My stomach had been feeling restless for a time in Lhasa, and i now suspected I had contacted Giardia or some such bug... I'd brought some seek & destroy medicine from New Zealand, and began to dose up on it... this seemed to do the trick.
The next day we took another local bus to Shalu, where the trek route begins. Hauling our back packs onto our backs, we set off along the dusty track leading to the village. We passed groups of farmers in their camps, and forded a braided river. After looking around Shalu monastery and stocking up on supplies, we set off into the remoteness of the mountains, armed only with the lonely planet to navigate.
It was reasonably tough going with a full pack at this altitude, but we coped ok; all good training! There were times when navigation was difficult. Maps of Tibet are hard to come by and we hadn't gotten hold of one. So we were finding our way based on general direction and written description... there were times when it was hard to know which stream to
follow, but we seemed to stay reasonably on track the whole way. In the afternoon thunder and lightening caused us to pause and take refuge for a time, but it seemed to pass after a short time.
We camped in a small village, on a patch kindly approved by locals for this use. The entire village seemed to pay us a visit at some point that evening, to gander at us and our curious possessions. The gas stove was particularly interesting to them... and us eating diner in our tents proved to be a spectacle not to be missed... you couldn't help but think "ok, i'm eating diner now, go on, go away!" That evening we heard thunder again and became slightly concerned about our exposed position, we made quick contingency plans incase things got bad (something like 'run out of the tent and find a place to sit for a while'!), then went to sleep.
The second day took us up to a high pass, from which we could look down upon the mountain monastery of Ngor. We descended to the monastery and looked around before continuing on our way. Further on, we passed a group of
farmers having a picnic break. They called us over to sit with them for a while, and seemed to gain much amusement from trying on our heavy packs! They also plied us with 'Chang' - Tibetan barely beer, and in this case, homebrew... though I declined, not wishing to catch giardia again unless i really needed to. Fred's constitution is made of a tougher steel than my own.
Later that afternoon, after crossing a wide plain, we came to Nartang monastery. We were pretty tired at this point, having done 40k with packs at altitude... we were also becoming 'monastery-d out' so opted to hitch straight back to Shigatse, rather than look around Nartang. Monasteries are interesting places, and very beautiful, but the interiors seem quite formulaic after you've been to a few.
We were picked up by the first land cruiser we thumbed... which was lucky. A tour group from Nepal, and they took us back to Shigatse. Just as we left the vehicle, we saw Tom and Gerald go past in another land cruiser (they were now on a tour to Everest), thinking this quite a coincidence we ran after them, and they got out to
greet us. They'd been delayed, but were now on course. It'd been an excellent experience for us... we hadn't seen another tourist for the entire two days (quite a contrast to Lhasa), we seen some beautiful remote areas, and met some locals. It was satisfying to do this under our own steam, on the cheap. Rather than dish out the big bucks to have someone else arrange a tour for you. All in all, we were happy trekkers.
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