Shandong Mansion Xigaze

... good he attracts the attention<br>of another group of tourists who start asking him questions &#8211; they<br>tell us later that we have a good guide and look wistfully at Sonam<br>as we walk away. <br><br><br><br><br>The<br>most impressive sections are the chapel with an enormous gold painted<br>Buddha and the chapel holding the remains of the 10th<br>Panchen Lama who died in 1989. There is some political intrigue <br>attached to the 10th Panchen Lama ...

We're in the town of Shigatse now, an interesting mix of old Tibetan people and architecture and the much more modern Chinese part of town. The sudden injection of civilisation (if you want to call it that) - traffic, street lights, shops, supermarkets - is a bit of a shock to the system after the barren expanse of the plateau, dotted with the odd lonely, bleak village, but as I mentioned earlier the hot showers and ...

... second largest city in Tibet but it seemed more Chinese to us.<br><br>Today we went to the Tashilhunpo Monastery - the seat of the Panchen Lama, the second most important spiritual leader in Tibetan Buddhism behind the Dalai Lama. The most impressive thing in the monastery was the Chapel of Jampa, housing the world's largest gilded statue. Standing at 26 metres high ...

... in lhasa's periphery is easy...leaving lhasa is ****ing hard. well, as with most things, money makes everything go much smoother. i've discovered, too late, that the only reliable way to get around tibet, both physically and bureaucratically is to hire a jeep. toyota land cruisers seem to be the truck of choice. land cruiser tour groups include all the requisite permits. of course, a 3-5 day tour in a land cruiser costs 6000-8000 yuan. unless the truck is full it's ...

Shigatse sits at an elevation of approximately 3,900 meters, or approximately 12,800 feet. This is less than 1,000 feet of elevation gain from Lhasa (3,650m/12,000 ft), but the air is definitely getting thinner, and those of us who've struggled to aclimitize can feel the difference. Located some 250km southwest of Lhasa, Shigatse is also Tibet's second-largest city, with a population of around 80,000. Some reports say that the Qinghai-Tibet (trans-Tibet) railway will ...

... paintings of different Buddhas), all incredibly ornate and colourful. It's a multistoried structure, that visitors circumambulate clockwise, stepping in (and often leaving donations) at each of the small rooms filled with images. The images may look quite similar, but I looked inside of all 60-something chapels and don't think I saw any repetitions of statues or configurations, so each room was unique in its own way. After that ...

... had already vanished, getting a ride to the next town in a car where she could actually sit down, instead of curling up amid our backpacks in the back of the landcruiser, as she'd done since the border, and her cellphone was out of service. The hotel staff managed to get one of the travel agency's reps in Lhasa on the phone, and once I was certain the change of driver was kosher, and the Germans had got in their obligatory 20 minutes of scowling, we headed off for Gyantse.

... to Kathmandu, but we took several sidetrips off the road. And I mean OFF the road. The first place on our itinerary was the town of Gyantse, connected to Lhasa by a sort-of-paved highway past Yamdrok Lake. The road was to Yamdrok was closed. So Passam and a caravan of other drivers took an alternate "route" which basically meant following tire tracks through mud dunes in Yarlung Tsampo valley. Awaiting us at Gyantse was the Kumbum Choerten. A Choerten is a stupa ...

... levels of sanitation than we enjoy in the Western world. We save our bottled water for drinking, and pretty much just go without washing now. It is too cold and the availability of fresh water is so limited,(ie. nonexistent) brushing our teeth with bottled water and rinsing our face using some of the boiled water for tea is the best option. I am dirty, smelly and by some miracle (thank Buddha!) have not been sick like many of my comrades. I packed enough drugs into my ...

... current (11th) Panchen Lama is controversial because the exiled 14th Dalai Lama considers him illegitimate. Tashilhunpo monastery, with its golden roofs and beautiful row of large white stupas, is better maintained than all the Gelugpa monasteries in Lhasa, likely because it is the seat of the one high lama, or ...