Tibet
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Asian Adventures: Tibet
(11.12.03)
So many highlights....
Lhasa
Wow! A couple of months ago I told you to pack your bags and go to Thailand? Well, I take it all back now! Pack your bags and go to Tibet. (Ryan and Matt: Katie and I thought about you constantly and I have something in my bag for each of you when I get home!) It is simply amazing here. The sky is pure blue. We are above all the clouds and also above the tree line. Very few things can live up this high so there aren't any bugs either. The houses are plain and all look the same but the windows and doorways are intricately painted. The air is crisp and clean. I can't even explain how gorgeous this barren land is. We went to a monastery that they consider the center of the universe. We also went to the Potala Palace. Both were pretty amazing. There were loads of Westerners and we continued to hang out with our Canadian friends. We ate great food too. It was so nice to eat something other than Chinese food.
The People
Now let me tell you about the Tibetan people. I cant figure out how they make money. They are too high up to grow anything so most of them don't have jobs. When you don't have a job this gives you plenty of time to walk around a monastery clockwise several times, chant, twirl your prayer wheel thing and prostrate. When you get tired of this you can sell yak products or sit in the street and play some type of game with tiles. When you are bored of this, then you put away your tiles and beg for money. That is pretty much life in Lhasa. It was pretty sad to see so many people, especially children, begging. We tried to give them our leftover food anytime we had the chance.
Yakity Yak!
What is a yak? Hmmm...a large creature that looks like a walking shag rug. Why is such a big ugly thing useful, you ask. Useful! Let me tell you what they can do with a yak. They pile all of their belongings onto one and march it over 5000 meter mountain passes no problem. They drink yak milk and make yak butter. The yak butter is used not only on bread but also instead of wax for candles. They also use the yak butter to make yak butter tea to drink and of course there is yak cheese. They use the yak fur to line coats, blankets and hats. They spin the yak wool into yarn and knit sweaters and hats (The Canuck girl knitted me a hat out of yak wool). If you pick up the yak dung and dry it out then you've got fuel for your fire and boy does it smell nice! Now slaughter the thing and you've got loads more options: For starters you can use the skull to decorate and use the other bones to make necklaces and other jewelry. Then there's the food: ya! k steak, yak hamburgers, yak curry, yak meat noodles, yak fried rice and my personal favorite yak-on-a-stick! America needs to import some yaks. That is one delicious animal. You stick some chunks of it on a stick and one ball of pure yak fat and smoke it over a grill and you've got yourself a tasty pre-dinner treat. The meat is juicy and smoky tasting and the ball of fat, oh the ball of fat! I've never enjoyed eating pure fat before but this was amazing. So juicy, a little crunchy and also a bit greasy. It sticks to the inside of your mouth a bit so you still taste it a few minutes later. Ah, the yak, the yummy yak! Ben the Australian (see below) and I bonded over yak meat. We just couldn't get enough!
The Gang's All Here
We decided to take a jeep trip around Tibet and decided in the end to just head to the Nepal border. Perfect since Katie and I dislike China. After answering an ad we saw posted we ended up filling 2 jeeps. 5 in a jeep plus an English speaking driver. So 10 westerners including Katie and I. Let me introduce them to you. First we have a French girl (Stephanie) who smells like a French girl. When you are about to go 5 days with no shower this is a great start. Second we've got a harmonica playing Australian (Ben) with admitted psychological problems who hooks up with French girl. Third we have a German couple (Kathrine and Patrick). Both are incredibly nice and Patrick is incredibly immodest. He has no problems parading around in his whitey tighties after knowing us only a few hours. Fourth is a Russian guy (Sergei) who is fluent in English and Chinese. A lifesaver really, except when he was smoking a joint.! Fifth is the American guy (Sean) who knows everything about everything. He doesn't think he knows, he really actually does. Including a vast knowledge (and experience) of illicit drugs on which he converses regularly with joint smoking Russian, French girl and Australian guy. Sixth is the slightly creepy Serbo-Croatian (Volleyball-or something- that's the best I can do at pronouncing it) who is in love with me. He asked me if I wanted to get married. I assumed (and hoped) he meant in general and not to him. Last, but certainly not least, is my personal favorite, the camera crazed Hungarian named Attila. Get it, Attila the Hun. Is that great or what!? He has been traveling for 6 weeks and has taken over 6000 photos. At the end of every day he would say "Today I make good pictures. I blow my mind. Today f**king mind blow. Amazing photos." We called ourselves the UN. We all got along pretty well and had an amazing trip. Read on...
Mt. Everest
We get to our guest house 8km from the base camp. This is where I experienced the wonder of altitude sickness. When we climbed out of our jeeps there were two Norwegian guys on the sidewalk. They were really anxious to leave that day and paid OUR drivers $350US to take them to the border. Needless to say, our drivers accepted and left us there with no form of transport and no idea of when they would return. So we're stranded at the highest monastery in the world when Ben and Sean walk up and tell us that the BBC is filming a documentary and is spending a couple of nights there too. Guess who was the host of the documentary: None other than Michael Palin of Monty Python fame (and the stutterer from A Fish Called Wanda). So I'm stranded at the highest mountain in the world with cool British people and Ben the Australian who plays his harmonica in his green and black striped long johns. It was so much fun...until the sun set. Then came the 60mph winds and who knows how cold it was. I burrowed under blankets and my sleeping bag and slept in 3 pairs of pants, 3 shirts, my hat, scarf, socks and gloves. Kari-that night in Paris was a walk in the park compared to this! Now add altitude sickness!
Altitude Sickness
Imagine a narcoleptic 500 pound man who has done nothing but eat for the past 2 years. Now stick a gun to that guy's head and tell him to sprint a marathon. Now imagine his heart about to bang out of his chest and him gasping for breath. Now pretend this same man is suffering from a little too much tequila the night before. I'm sure many of you are familiar with that queasy feeling and dull throb in your head. As if all of this isn't bad enough stick a pregnant woman's bladder on the guy and you've just about got altitude sickness. Except for the fact that neither Katie nor I are 500 pound men, we do exercise on a fairly regular basis, we haven't consumed any tequila and I'm pretty sure neither of us are pregnant. However on our night at base camp I thought my heart was going to beat right out of my chest after merely rolling over. I laid still for a long time and took my pulse and it was 128 beats/minute. That's pretty high for just trying to sleep. Ah, the joys of sleeping at 5200 meters!
Take it to the Limit
We weren't actually riding in jeeps. They were Land Cruisers with tape decks inside. So Sean and Ben bought a tape for their jeep. It was the dual cassette of the Eagles. Unfortunately it was 2 B sides so they gave my jeep the second one. We popped it in on day 3 of 5 and it never came out again. One the way to the border from base camp we took a "short cut". Basically our drivers just pulled off the gravel road on which we were driving and just started driving across the mountain. It was VERY rocky since there are no trees or anything up here. They said if we go this way we will save 85km and about 3 hours. We thought great until they told us we were basically offroading for 50km. Talk about jarring the internal organs. We drove over ice, through rivers and straight through a pack of yak herding nomads. A couple of times we had to get out and walk because there was too much ice and they need to get a little of the weight out. The cars were in 4-wheel drive th! e whole time except when we would go straight down a mountain in which case the driver would just turn off the car and ride the brake the whole way down. I felt like I was in a Land Cruiser commercial. It was so much fun. Definitely in the top 5 of things I have done on this trip. Every time the road seemed really extreme and at it's worst the tape would play "Take it to the Limit" it was hysterical.
On the Road...Again
On the last day my jeep (blue) decided to fall apart. The day before the other jeep (white) had a problem on the off roading experience. Our drivers pulled out a tube of some sort from under the car and my driver started to do a dance with it and then chucked it to the white jeep driver who chucked it in the back. When my driver returned we asked him, is that not important? He said with a shrug of his shoulders oh it's important but we'll fix it when we get back to Lhasa. About 5 minutes later he turns around and says this car lost that piece 3 days ago and you are still okay so no problem. The next day (our last) we have to get to the border before it closes and our wheel almost explodes or something. We stopped the car and the wheel was smoking. Something with the bearings. I don't know really. All I know is that it took 2.5 hours to fix it. Good thing our drivers can fix cars. So we're slightly behind schedule now but wit! h a working wheel so no problem. They have us stop for lunch an hour and a half from the border. We hike back up to the jeeps after we eat and there is blue jeep, jacked up again with a different wheel on the ground. This time it is the brakes. Supposedly the last 1.5 hours of road is bad so they check the brakes and discover ours has to be repaired. So we wait and wait and wait and finally at 4:27 we leave for the longest stretch of downhill in the world with exactly 1 hour and 33 minutes to do the 1.5 hour road before the border closes and we have to hike all the way back up to the top to spend the night again in China. Here we go.
Death Becomes Her
Thank goodness the break was fixed. The road may be the longest downhill in the world and I would argue that it is one of the windiest. Plus our driver was racing to get us down in time. You have sheer cliff face on one side and sheer drop off on another, hundreds of meters down to a raging river. A one lane gravel road that frequently had to fit two cars (when we decided to pass people). Our driver was flying down the road and we would fish tale on the turns. It was one of the most gorgeous roads I have ever seen, coming down out of the clouds into the trees and color with mountain streams and waterfalls. Too bad I had my eyes shut tight much of the time. Katie and I both had a death grip on the seat in front of us. It was wild. Not to mention "Take it to the Limit" still kept coming on. Once we drove through a town and I can't tell you how many people we almost ran over. Our driver didn't seem to mind. He just said, oh, no problem, Chinese f**ker. I don't think t! he Tibetans think too highly of the Chinese. We finished alive in 1 hour and 8 minutes. Even the driver said whoa that was fast. I would love to do it again though at a much slower pace and with time to stop and take photos. It would be amazing.
Well that is Tibet. Start packing your bag. You won't regret it. I'm in Nepal at the moment having a marvelous time and buying way too much stuff. More on that later. Sorry this was so long.