Day 19: One Day Too Many in Tibet

Where yesterday I didn’t take any photos worth posting here, today I didn’t take any photos.  Period.  Carriage Return.

The Battered Leather Journal says we went shopping today, but I don’t remember it.

In the afternoon, we took one last ride with Sijila (and his little son – it was fun to see Sijila as a caring father) to the airport – an hour and a half backtracking on the route we took to Everest.  This all looks verrry familiar.  Sijila laughed at one of our jokes before we could even respond to it ourselves, reinforcing our suspicion that he is full of lies about not speaking English.  He is the type that would pretend so he wouldn’t have to interact with annoying tourists.  We hand Sijila his and Choedak’s tips, Sam hands his son an authentic American dollar bill, and we are off on the next leg of the trip: Qingdao (think: CHING-dow), via Beijing.

Day 18: Still Driving to Lhasa

Well, here we are.  In the car.  Still.

It is day four of what seems like an endless journey back to Lhasa.  Did some sort of spacial vortex develop on this damn highway since we passed through a few days ago?  It really feels like we aren’t making any progress.

It would seem that the thrill of Everest and Rombuk has chilled since yesterday.

Day 15 part 2: The Road to Everest – Pelkhor Chode Monastery

More hours and minutes in the 4Runner, winding through the Himalayas, laden with the uncomfortable knowledge that when we get to Gyantse there could be another tour guide waiting for us.  And there aren’t any more seats in the car, so someone is going to have to go back to Lhasa.

But before we reached that apex of awkwardness, we made our final tourist stop of the day at Pelkhor Chode Monastery.

Day 15 part 1: The Road to Everest – Yamdrok Lake

This morning we all piled into the trusty 4Runner (the same model that every other tour group drives around in this city) and started the trip to Everest.  Sijila driving, Tsering in the back, and James, Sam, Kristy and I out-of-our-mind excited about seeing Everest (hopefully.  It will depend on the weather).  But Everest is a couple of days of driving away, and I assume there a few things to see on the road.

The road to Everest slinks along the hips of the lower Himalayas.

Lhasa: A Map of Our Old Haunt

While in Lhasa I sketched out a map of the city in my battered leather journal. It’s an outrageously inaccurate map, containing such trivial sites as “the place where we always bought water from the woman with horrible teeth,” “the place the cop lost control of his motorcycle and went into a slide,” and “the place Sam always wanted to go shop in because it had pretty paper lanterns hanging outside.”

I’m not sure if anyone other than Sam and Kristy will get anything out of this (or if they will even get anything out of it), but click on the pic and then mouse over the notes to see the captions.

Day 14 part 2: Drepung Monastery

Drepung Monastery is the biggest monastery in Tibet.  At times it has housed ten thousand monks, but today its population is closer to a few hundred.  I took so many pictures here, we’ll just let them guide our little tour.

A young monk walk with his hot water canister.  Happily, this idyllic shot does not include the open sewer to his right, sweeping away the waste of hundred of monks.  It was about as literal as the expression “holy shit” gets.

Day 13 Revisited: Phenomeblonde!

How could I have forgotten about the phenomeblonde moment that occurred upon leaving the Potala Palace?  As if these moments were…*gasp*…unimportant.  What a profane thought.

The battered leather journal lists this as the sixteenth stranger photo-shoot of the trip, a number far beyond anything I was expecting.

Cheers.

Day 13 part 2: Jokhang Temple

After Potala Palace we toured Jokhang Temple.  It is considered the most important temple in Tibetan Buddhism, so pilgrims from all over Tibet make the journey to Lhasa at least once in their lives to prostrate themselves here.  The pilgrimage itself must be back-breaking work, considering the Tibetan plateau is one of the most remote places in the world and not many can afford to make the trip in a 4-Runner.  So many people trek on foot, stopping along the way to meditate and pray.  The most devout will travel the last miles on their hands and knees and stomachs, performing prostrations by kneeling with their arms in the air then sliding their hands on the ground in front of them to lie flat.  What I would think of as an excruciatingly slow and painful ordeal, these pilgrims probably consider transcendent.

I’ve re-posted this picture because 1) I think it’s awesome, and 2) that white building on the left horizon is the temple.

Day 13 part 1: Potala Palace

We finally have our fourth tour member!  He’s a Chinese man from Taiwan who studies immunology at UCLA (small world!).  (If I remembered all that correctly.)   He’s very nice, if a tad incapable of filtering his…enthusiasm.  While we are pretty flexible, James seems a bit more…aggressive.

We went to the Potala Palace in the morning.  It seemed very important to get there at a designated time, I think because you have to reserve your entrance time beforehand and you only have a limited  duration to actually be in the palace.  But the whole time we were there, I couldn’t figure out how anyone would know your entrance time.  I think it was all a hoax.  Even so, James wasn’t the picture of patience when we wanted to take some shots of the facade of this incredible building.  It looks ancient and harsh and foreboding and vaguely Siberian – built on a little mountain so it towers over the city that grew around it.  I would say that it is one of the most impressive buildings I’ve ever seen.

Potala Palace.  You have to walk up all those switchbacking steps, so it took a while because it’s like we have emphysema and mono in this altitude.

Day 12: Ramoche Temple

For breakfast we went to the same place as dinner last night.  I could claim that the magical view of Jokhang drew us back,  but really is was the menu’s promise of pancakes that did us in.  Honey pancakes, maybe?  Or apple?  Anyway, this battle was over last night when we saw it on the menu.  We didn’t have a chance.

We sat next to this beautiful little girl and her family.  She was entranced with Sam’s unique and confusing combination of her vaguely ethnic Chinese appearance and her western clothing and obviously foreign counterparts.  The girl really could not take her eyes off  Sam.  Affording me the opportunity to steal some surreptitious just-gonna-set-this-camera-on-the-table-with-the-telephoto-lens-pointed-at-your-face-don’t-mind-me candid shots.