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Going to Tibet
Entry 34 of 39 | show all | print this entry |
Hi again,
Now onto the most difficult part of my travels so far, a hard seat for 36 hours down to Lhasa, Tibet.
The journey started with a 6am rise, as my train to Xian from our city was at 6.50am - uugh, great. But, to make things better, Sean and Alex decided to come back to Xianyang for a few days before they left china and their plane was meant to land at 1am and I was the lucky one who had to hand over the keys to them - great again. But, (there's a lot of but's already!) amazingly their plane was delayed and they landed on my doorstep at 3am instead. Plus they were wide awake - I was a tad sleepy and they wanted to chat etc etc, but I eventually managed to shoe them off to there lodgings and crawl back into bed for a few more hours sleep.
The first bizarre thing was, standing on the platform at Xianyang station, I hear this girl talking English - now there aren't many foreigners in Xianyang, so first of all I presume I'm dreaming it as it's stupid o'clock and I've had disturbed sleep, but after a while I realised that it def was English, so I had to find out why they were there. Apparently the girl was a teacher at the Tibetan college in Xianyang and was going to Tibet for the hols, so I had a friend - yay, but she had soft sleeper - they're obviously paying her too much there!!! Random that I met her here and never before in Xianyang.
I get on the train and find my comfy seat - right in the middle of a 3, perfect - NOT. I meet a few other foreigners in hard seat and we are all doing our best to upgrade to a hard sleeper, with no avail, so we decide to camp out in the restaurant carriage and play cards. After a while of not ordering food we begin to piss off the waitress who trys to order us out as we're not eating, but we refuse and decide to order a drink - great she can't do anything now!! We went for a wander along the train to find my new Xianyang friend in soft sleeper and come across two Italians also in soft sleeper, so we move our lodgings to their soft sleeper room - much more comfy than the restaurant was. We then watch the world go by here for a few hours (there's not a lot to do on the train) and then when it came to bed time we had to fight - quite literally - our way back to hard seat. First of all the staff on the train had locked the doors of the restaurant, which we had to go through to get back and we had to explain that we actually had hard seat tickets to get them to let us through. Then I had to walk through 3 carriages of hard seat to get to mine, there were people sleeping everywhere, I mean everywhere! I had to jump over peoples legs, heads, bodies, there were some people lying under seats, some across the seats over the isle, pretty much a nightmare and impossible not to wake people up!
I find my seat and also find another girl fast asleep over my seat and the one next to it, so I find a spare seat only 5 mins later a guy comes and wants his seat, so I have to wake this girl up - I don't fancy sleeping on the floor! It's kind of noisy in Hard sleeper, and the lights don't go off, so I put in my ear plugs and pull my hoodie over my head and pull the strings tight, so only my nose is left to be seen, trust me, it's a good look!!! I eventually drift off into sleep and am quite happy till I get woken up by this guy who is trying to tell me I'm in his seat. Me being half asleep and not having my brain in Chinese gear looks at him as if he was speaking - well Chinese! The girl next to me who was in my seat steps in and tells him to go sit somewhere else, so I can get back to sleep. I finally give up on any more sleep at 7am - the Chinese wake up at like 5 everyday, so there wasn't much hope of any more quiteishness (I don't think that's a word, but hey). So again I make my way to the restaurant where I meet up with the other hard seat foreigners who had been there since 6am! The soft sleeper guys are all still happily fast asleep - grrrrr.
For the rest for the day we watched the world go by again, we were on the Tibetan plateau most of the day and finally ended up in Lhasa at 8pm. I made arrangements with the two Italians travel round Tibet together, so I got to my hostel and had a good nights kip.
First day in Lhasa, everyone said that we'd feel the altitude, but me and the 2 guys (Francesco and Luca, or Pinco and Mastiff as they came to be known) had no problems in Lhasa whatsoever. We met up and decided to go and try arrange our trip to Everest base camp. Due to the stupid Americans things were again very difficult. Now, each tour has to have a 4x4, driver and fully licensed guide. Before this wasn't a problem as no one checked the guides licence and most of them had fake licences, but now everything was being scrutinised, so the majority of the guides were out of business for the time being! Next there was the alien's permit we needed to get to leave Lhasa, to get this you needed a Lhasa permit, again before the Americans it didn't matter. So, we handed in our permits and they go away to check them and come back to me saying "sorry, but your permit is fake, we'll have to confiscate it". Ok, not the best thing in the world, officially now I can't be in Lhasa, but I can't leave Lhasa either cause I need a permit to buy a train ticket. With some gentle persuasion the guys kindly put me onto the 2 Italians permit, which is probably as illegal as my actual permit! We have to then leave everything in their hands, they go to find out if they'll give us aliens permits or not and are told to come back tomorrow for an update.
So, with that kind of on its way, we head to the Jokong temple. The people praying there are crazy, they are standing up praying, then slide along the floor and stand up again, I don't know how many times they repeat this, but it's a hell of a lot, there are also all the pilgrims who walk round the temple in a clockwise direction, again a load of times. We went inside and had a good look round, then spent some time wandering around the stalls outside, the Italians lived up to their reputation and were buying things left right and centre, more like girls than guys!
The next day, we went back to the travel agents, to be told that they were still waiting to find out if we would be allowed permits, so off we went, we decided to go to the Potala palace, but when we got there all the tickets were sold out for the day, so we had to go and queue up for an hour to get tickets for tomorrow. After we'd done this we decided to hire bikes and go for a ride. We decided to ride out to a monastery, which involved a 1km ride up hill, not too bad you may think, but at 3000ish meters above sea level, it's pretty darn difficult! Me and Pinco eventually managed to get to the top and waited for Mastiff, but he didn't appear, we found out he'd given up and turned around and gone home! So, me and Pinco wandered round the monastery for an hour or so, and then rode home - soooooo much easier and faster!
Hannah had arrived back from her Everest trip today, so we met up for dinner and then had some drinks with the Italians and the couple of Germans who had been on Hannah's tour. Hannah had to catch the train back to Xianyang the next morning as she was teaching on sat, so after all we didn't get to spend much time together on our holiday, but never mind.
Again, in the morning we made our trip to the travel agent and for the first time it was good news! We had the permits and they had found a guide with a licence, so we would leave tomorrow - whoo.
We went to the potala palace, an amazing place, I think it's the only place where the Dali lama is talked about in quite a free way, there are the tombs of many of the Dali lamas here and they are massive structures. The palace itself is built on 13 storeys, so again to walk around it actually takes some doing at that altitude. There are lots of pictures of a young boy in every Tibetan temple/monastery you go in in Tibet, this is apparently the next Lama of some kind (I can't remember which one!), but the Tibetan people believe that he is not the real Lama and he's just the one chosen by the Chinese government, but the real one, chosen by the Buddhists is in hiding in Chad. If a Tibetan person is caught talking about the Dali lama, or any of the lama's, they are thrown into prison!
We went to another monastery in the afternoon, I opted to walk around the place rather than g in, as once you have seen one monastery, you've pretty much seen them all. Around the outside were some amazing cliff drawings, which were probably far better than anything inside!
Rach xxx
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