York_tyke's travel blogs:
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Tibetan Plateau
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I booked myself on 7 day/8 night trip travelling overland from Kathmandu to Lhasa in Tibet. The trip cost $463 on a B&B basis, which isn't bad. Although a few year ago it was supposed to have been a lot cheaper.
The trip began on Christmas Eve, so I would spend Christmas and New Year in Tibet. The first leg of the trip was the bus journey from Kathmandu to the Tibetan border, bit bumpy but quite scenic. There were seven other people on the trip, 1 Brit, 2 Canadians, 2 Australian, an Israeli and a Russian. Crossing the border was pretty painless, although they did spray our bags with disinfectant and take our temperatures. We met our Tibetan guide and drivers at the border and drove to the nearby border town of Khasa in the Land Cruisers that we would make the trip in. We stayed in Khasa for the night rather than the next town that was at a much higher altitude, over 3000m's.
The next morning we drove to the top of the valley to begin our trip across the Tibetan Plateau. Our first stop was the Lalungla Pass at a whopping 5140m above sea level (Pic 27-31). And it was cold, I only had a few minutes outside the car taking photo's before my hands started to freeze up. The view was spectacular with snow capped peaks to be seen all around. From the pass we crossed down onto the plateau, the landscape is very rugged and wild, with mountains and hills on both sides of the road and villages dotted here and there. It must be a hard life living out there. I could have taken pictures all along the route but we only stopped now and again. Our second high pass of the day was Gyatchula at 5254m. We only got out for a few minutes here as there was a bit of a blizzard blowing. Then it was onto our hotel for the night in Lhatse.
In Kathmandu I made up a litre of Bloody Mary to take with me to keep out the cold and it proved to be well worth the effort. There was no heating in the hotel room and after ten minutes in my sleeping bag I needed to have a pee, but didn't fancy getting dressed and going to the outside toilet. So I pee'd into a couple of glasses that were in the room and put them on the window sill. The next morning when I got up the pee had frozen solid. I managed to get some out of one of the glasses, but the other wouldn't budge. I ended up leaving them in the toilet and hoped they didn't check the room before we left and come asking were the glasses were.
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