Tenzin Hotel Xigaze

<br>Today<br>we set off to Shigatse: Tibet's second largest town and where the<br>Panchen Lama is seated at Tashilhunpo Monastery. And just who is the<br>Panchen Lama? &#8211; as far as we understand, he's the second highest<br>lama behind the Dalai Lama. <br><br><br><br><br>It's<br>impossible to talk about Tibet without mentioning Buddhism and the<br>Dalai Lamas because religion has played such a dominant role in the<br>history of the country. Before the ...

Morning time around 08:00am we depart from Lhasa stop at budda carved into mountain and then the water burial where they chop up dead bodies and put tsampa onto the parts after the break all the bones then fling them into the river.<br>Chinese evident in trucks and multitude of checkpoints we had to check in almost hourly<br>We were supposed to stop at Shigatse <br>Stopped for lunch at Gyantse and visitied the Kundum and ruibs of Brittish tYounghusband Expedition <br>We passed through and ...

... ring the bell (it seemed). The Tashilhunpo Monastery itself was lovely and housed one of the most impressive tombs we had seen, for the fourth Panchen Lama. <br><br><br> <br> <br><br>Shigatse gets a good write up in the guidebooks for being a relaxed town and one which has vied with Lhasa for the position of political centre. We didn't see that town. Instead we saw a very low-key, quite poor town, with one ...

... estabamos muy cansadas, pero aun asi nos andamos un poco mas y entramos a comer en un sitio totalmente tibetano. Donde habia una familia comiendo y el pequeno de la familia haciendo los deberes. El menu estaba en tibetamo y en ingles, asi que tuvimos suerte. Pero chiel se puso malito por la comida. Fueron muy amables los del restaurante, aqui siempre es costumbre ponerte te, aunque no lo pidas, pero yo me pedi una ...

... beds in a hotel near the monastery, and fortuitously also right beside the official chinese travel agency where information about permits and further travel might be had. our original plan was to try to get a bus to a town called tingri about two thirds of the way to the border from shigatse and then hitch the rest of the way since as far as we could tell there was no longer any bus service all the way to the border. we quickly learned how naive an idea that had been when we ...

... we'd end up with a small flood on the bathroom floor. At least it meant the bathroom floor got washed daily. And the drain in the floor came in handy as well. Before departing for the frontier town of Sakya, our group walked over to Tashilhunpo for a tour. Like the Potala, this monastery is built against a hillside, and you'll want a bottle of water handy for the slog up the hill. (It never ceases to make me feel incredibly out of shape as I pant and gasp my ...

... for the Chinese gov't: heard that one visitor got arrested after giving one of them a picture of the Dalai Lama, illegal in Tibet) dragging their asses around disinterestedly. The only real highlight was a 26metre statue of the future Buddha, which I expected to be massive but was nevertheless impressed when I actually saw it. After just 4 hours of sleep last night, I needed an afternoon nap to get my energy up, and then walked around the old town (Tibetan quarter), and ...

... di Shalu dove, sorpresa sorpresa, abbiamo assistito alla preghiera dei monaci con tanto di canti in sanscrito molto gutturali, incenso, piatti, tamburi e pseudo pifferi. Scena da film che sono anche riuscita ad immortalare (molto di nascosto e rigorosamente senza flash!). Chi di voi si immagina che visitare un monastero sia come visitare una delle nostre chiese, si sbaglia di grosso! A parte un'atmosfera tutta ...

... for the European parliament in Brussels who was on a six month hiatus to travel Central Asia from Mongolia to Iran. Sitting next him was Kelly, a school teacher from Columbus Ohio, spending the summer traveling China. In the back seat was Stefan, a German engineer studying in India and Bangkok. And wedged in between Stefan and myself was my sister Angela. We all hooked up in Lhasa via message boards and put the trip together after several days of painful ...

... of Lhasa River, then upstream along the Yarlung Tsangpo (Bramaputra River, the main river in central Tibet). After an hour or so the road deteriorated into a dirt road clinging to the side of a scenic canyon of the Tsangpo. By about 1 pm we arrived in Shigatse (3900 m./12,700 ft), the second largest town in ...