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Published: December 6th 2006
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Last issue left us back in Beiing after spin, often near speed of sound, round Japan. Took recently built train for 2 days to Lhasa in Tibet. The trip began with the Chinese couple we were sharing a cabin with cordially asking us to move to another cabin. The request was then withdrawn when they could not find anyone who wanted to swap with us. Great start, only 48 hours of friendship to go! Relationhips later thawed to the point where they offered us oranges and we reciprocated with chocolate. The train was state of the art with each person in our 1st class carriage having own T.V. screen and headphones. The genius in our cabin found that if he turned the volume up max he did not have to live with the cranial incumbrement of the headphones and we could all listen on his pendulent phones blare through about 20 episodes of the Chinese version of Remington Steele. Intermingled was constant info over the intercomm in Chinese and English giving facts about the undeniably impressive train track they said couldn't be built - it was finished this year a year early, 100,000 people built it over permafrost and generally inhospitable
terrain and only about 1% of the workforce died - and how the benefits to "China's Tibet" were innumerable. The verbal onslaught was generally designed to convince migrating Chinese they were right and foreigners that the migrating Chinese were right too. Arriving in Lhasa's spanking new station left no doubt hat all the rhetoric about Lhasa's new found magnificence on the train was true until we stepped outside the station. A scramble for banjaxed taxis ensued and at the end myself and Bla couldn't believe our luck when we bagged the first taxi in the queue as others fought over those behind. When the driver started pouring petrol into the taxi from a can I smelled a low octane rat, but we got in. Sure enough it would not start and we were soon being pushed away from the landmark station by Chinese police trying to kick start it. No go, so we got our bags out and were forced to take the one remaining taxi in which the engine worked but the metre not. I fixed the metre ( i.e. I turned it on) and it showed 10 Yuan when we got to our hostel. The driver wanted 40
and so in what was once the most peace embracing nation on the earth I immediately found myself in a handbag brawl with one of its invaders - very symbolic I thought.
Independent travel is basically illegal in Tibet as Chinese prefer high paying controllable groups, a bit like the Russians - we had to get a permit saying we were part of a group to get a ticket to go there - foreign individuals are not allowed in private vehicles but there are many independent travelers like us there. To get anywhere you have to cobble together a group and then rent a jeep 'as a group', get permits to go to the places you want to visit and you're off. Forming a group, when you are not already one, involves putting up posters around the hostels of Lhasa having candidates turn up at a restaurant at a certain time and then trying to talk to them all separately before some of them leave thinking you haven't turned up. We ended up with a Welsh/Swiss couple who had planned their trip and just before going decided to get married thereby making their holiday a low budget honeymoon. Despite
Chinese efforts to make travel difficult for backpackers in Tibet it makes it more fun as you meet alot of people trying to organise trips.
We saw the sights of Lhasa, the unique/spectacular/sad Potala where the Dalai Lama lived before legging it in '59. The Jokhang, the holiest temple for Tibetan Buddhists, who must be the most devout people on the planet, most making pilgrimmages, sometimes 'prostrating' themselves all the way to Lhasa - easiest to watch 7 years in Tibet to see what that means - for 100's of kms. There and in other remaining temples they offer Yak butter to keep Yak butter candles burning, offer money, - often unashamedly giving 10 yuan and then taking 9 change back - worship statues of Buddhas and photos of lamas that have fled in fear of persecution, making it difficult for Tibetan Buddhism to survive in style, but they certainly do try.
We then headed for the hills with our honeymooning accomplices planning to trek from one monastery to another using a Yak - a woolly cow - guided by a Yak man to carry our equipment. The venue had to change when mad Yak disease broke out
in a village on the way and no yaks were allowed pass. We chose two other monasteries to start and finish at and spent 4 days trekking each day recovering from nights of no sleep due to -10 degrees cold, near frostbite and fighting altitude sickness @ 5000+ metres and escaping kids from villages near where we camped who greeted us with fiendly phrases like "hello pen", "hello money", "hello sweet" - more terms of entreatment than endearment. First night we bought a bag of Yak shit for 50c to fuel a fire, but it was too cold to sit around for long after we had boiled water for our pot noodles. The last night we were to stop at a nunnery to camp again but since it was only 1 pm when we reached it and none of us wanted to camp another night we said we were heading off on our own to try to make it back to Lhasa that night. In 2 hours we were stuck in a Chinese base sheltering from a blizzard, haggling ith a guy to bring us 2 hours on the back of his tractor to the destination monastery. When the snow
stopped, he brought us and at the terminating temple we found a guy with a Chinese CinqoCento ( i.e. a very small car) to sardine can 4 of us and all our bags back to Lhasa - 50km - and relative comfort. We have since sold most of our camping gear and promised ourselves never to camp in cold at altitude again - unless climbing Everest....
Next adventure was a more predictable jeep trip, again with the honeymooners, from Lhasa to Kathmandu in Nepal stopping in various Chinafied towns with important but decrepit monasteries. The highlight was a 2 night stay at a monastery 8km from the base camp for climbing the North Face of Everest. Spent a day hiking up to and around the base camp which was deserted - because too cold and not summitting season - except for the monuments to those mad people who have died climbing there. Mornings and evenings were spent watching the sun rise and set on the roof of the world and thinking it doesn't look too difficult to climb from the left.
The end of that trip was a descent off the desolate Tibetan plateau which is brown, brown,
brown, brown, brown - a decor disaster, into the lush green vegetation with bright colors leading to the Nepalese border and beyond. Left Tibet as we had entered - arguing about taxi fares to border. Only spent a bit over 2 weeks in Tibet buts its religion, politics, dramatic landscape, altitude and temperature made it seem longer.
Nepal is a story for another day, good night.....
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