On the Road to Everest

6/2/07

I am beginning to appreciate the old fashioned practice of journaling as I sit inside a very smokey Internet cafe in Shigatse. We headed out of Lhasa today, making our way towards Mt. Everest Base Camp. Again, we were lucky to find ourselves on paved roads for the entire day. Our first stop was Yumsto Lake. We had to take a windy mountain road to the look-out point. The road twisted and turned up the mountainside and if you had a window seat in the Land Cruiser it could be scary at moments. I was lucky enough to be sitting in the middle. When we reached the top, we had a very nice view of the lake. Like Namtso Lake, it was a beautiful turquoise color. We could see the snow capped Himalayas in the background. We all took a turn getting on top of a yak for a classic tourist snapshot. We were also hounded by Tibetan women hawking jewelery. I bought a couple of bracelets and am sure I paid too much, but it was hard to resist giving these women a few dollars.

Unfortunately, we had to go back down the windy mountain road to get back on the main road to Shigatse. We drove for another hour before stopping at a small "truck stop" area for lunch. We had four our five Chinese restaurants to choose from. The first restaurant we stopped in wanted 20yuan per person for lunch (less than $3). This what we had been paying for all of us to have lunch, so we moved on to the next place. As we ventured into new restaurants, we discovered that the entire row was engaged in price fixing. We settled on a little place the let us walk into their kitchen and point at the food we wanted. The cook was standing in front of two woks and next to him were several bowls filled with spices and seasonings. Behind him were an assortment of vegetables. In the end, we had stir-fried bok choy, spicy tofu, and some type of stir-fried squash. It was a tasty meal and we were quite happy to be able to tour the tiny kitchen before placing an order.

After lunch we hit the road again and spent several hours driving to Shigatse (elevation 3,900m). This is the second largest city in Tibet. The town has a building which looks like a smaller Portola palace, but it was only constructed a year or two ago. The original building was destroyed in the Cultural Revolution. Fortunately, the Tashilhunpo Monastery (constructed in 1477) survived. The monastery is the home to approximately 800 monks. The monastery includes many beautiful buildings and houses the largest Buddha in Tibet. It also included several tombs for the Panchen Lamas. We were surprised to see that they were charging $10 to photograph each of the chapels or $200 to video tape. According to one of the monks, the Chinese government is requiring these fees. We will bringing back lots of pictures, but not of the largest Buddha in Tibet!

Our hotel is another Chinese run establishment. It is clean and the room does not smell like toilet. This is my one wish for every hotel that we stop at......that it does not smell like the bathroom. I think our accommodations will be less comfortable in the upcoming days.

For dinner, we ventured out on our own. We took a cab to the section of town recommended by our guidebook, but all of the restaurants looked dark and grimy and there were no customers. We've had plenty of meals in dark and grimy places, but they all had customers. We decided to head back to the Chinese section of town and after poking our heads into several places, we finally settled on a place were we could see many customers and the kitchen in the distance. Freshly cooked food was our priority. Since we were without our guide and the menu was six pages of Chinese, we had to use the few phrases in our guidebook to order. We also used the "we'll have what they are having" technique. We ended up with another meal of spicy tofu and stir-fried greens. We also ordered a pork dish which ended up to be a little strange, so we are going to stick with vegetarian cuisine from now on.

Tomorrow we head to Shegar, near Mt. Everest. We probably won't have Internet access until we return through Shigatse in three days. We hope our peanut butter and mini-snickers bars will hold out!

Sound of the night: Medical emergency siren.