Tibet here we come
Trip Start
Oct 28, 2009
1
5
14
Trip End
May 14, 2010
Zhangmu, Tibet, China
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Up at 3.30am to beat the protests and whilst we were driving to the border bus loads of Maoist protesters were heading to Kathmandu, thank goodness we didn't get stuck in all of that.
We made it to the border and had to wait 3 hours for our Tibetan guide to turn up; he hadn’t been told we were leaving early. Our Nepal guide had friends who could go through the border as they were locals in the border town to see if our guide had turned up. One guide came back with new Nike trainers on; he’d seen a bargain (about £5.50) and thrown his old ones in the river.
Our guide turned up and we went through the border, Neil was stopped as they saw a book in his luggage
Halo of cloud - guess who came up with that one?!?
. The borders are quite strict and you’re not allowed to take in any pictures or information on the present exiled DL or any political information. We drove to the Chinese border town of Zhangmu, which was grim and wandered around looking for food. This place really was awful concrete and corrugated tin and we wondered what we’d let ourselves in for. We found some food through the power of pointing and it was actually quite food, we managed to miss the pork tongue and beef throat and plumped with chicken and peanut and capsicum. So with stomachs lined we headed back to the dive we were staying in just as the heavens opened!We ended up drinking Lhasa beer, playing cards and Boggle with some NYC girls, who were intent on trying to find a club so we left them to it, arh to be mid 20’s again!
13th November 2009
Crikey the mornings are dark here! The sun and people don’t seem to rise until about 8.30am, time difference is the same across the whole of China including Tibet so I suppose Beijing in the east wins it. Weird being up at 7 and nothing is open and no sign of life anywhere, our guide was late as he’d been on the beers watching movies the night before so things didn’t get off to a good start
Xixapangma - 8013m
. We headed to Tingri and got there just in time for lunch. We chatted to a few tourists and headed out for a walk through the town. Hmmmm it looked like something out of a warped wild west film – dust blowing everywhere, people dressed traditionally with leathery faces and staring at us two aliens. Lazy dogs lying everywhere as well as the cows, goats and donkeys, then dead goats hanging from wooden racks. We walked up to a fort and saw our first sight of Mt Everest or Mt Chomolungma, in Tibetan, at a staggering 8844.43m the walk was pretty slow due to the altitude we were at over 4000m and seeing Everest was pretty cool.
Our first taste of Yak was dinner, Yak chilli, quite nice actually and then huddled round the crude Aga type oven powered by Yak dung we drank numerous cups of green tea before heading back to our little hut to sleep. Thankfully they’d taken pity on us and given us extra blankets for the night. One of the joys of altitude we’ve discovered is the lack of sleep we’re getting. We both lay there for 3 hours trying to sleep and when we did the dogs all started fighting so we were awake again trying to get back to sleep, another joy is the constant need to pass green tea! I’ve peed on the road, off the path, in long drops and in short drops, there’s people peeing everywhere and it really isn’t a private thing round these parts. The trick seems to be to time it with the wind, I can’t count the number of wind related accidents I’ve had now, much to Neil’s amusement.
