As usual with Nepalise roads they are windy and dangerous. The drivers dont help and we are in a bus traveling for the first time. I miss the bike and it is only day 1, hour 1.Tibet

Kathmandu to Border
As usual with Nepalese roads they are windy and dangerous. The drivers dont help and we are in a bus traveling for the first time. I miss the bike and it is only day 1, hour 1.

The place where we stop for breakfast is a lovely spot ( clouded over this morning) and it is our first chance to meet everyone else on the bus. A couple of hours of sitting on the bus and we get to the border. This place is even more crazy than normal Nepal. Trucks lined up for kilometers, unloading stuff to be carried across the border. Everything done the hard way, nothing made easy, some of the loads that people are carrying are amazing. We have to change money here at the border and we find a money changer easily enough. Like usual though he is trying to rip us all of with his pathetic exchange rate. Bron changed some money with him but she got 100yuan less than she should have, so I intervened and he offered to give us back the money he had exchanged. We did this but I held back 50yuan which I said was my exchange rate to him. He wasnt happy but I refused to give him his 50 back and stated to him that the way he was feeling was the way he leaves people feeling every day.
The Border formalities were quite extreme. The Chinese really know how to make a formality of something that others can make relatively simple. After 2 xrays and 2 body checks, with baggage checks for Tibet books that may contain material about the Dalai Lama. Talk about paranoid.
This all gave me a chance to use my school Chinese for the first time. All 2 sentences of it, gee it went over well(hahah)

Over the border, onto a Chinese bus and of we go until the first town that is. Then the most ridiculous of roadblocks or traffic jams happened. Even though everyday they have trucks and buses going through the city from both ends, and this situation must have been happening for years they just drive these massive trucks and buses up and down the streets, there are trucks cars and buses parked down both sides with one lane through the middle for through traffic. The problem comes when there is a truck, bus or car coming the other way. Usually if it is a truck or bus they have 10-20 cars, trucks or buses behind them. When they meet another vehicle coming the other way which also has 10-20 vehicles behind it a jam occurs. Then people run around yelling at everyone to move their vehicles in this way or that so that the traffic can move. After 1 and ¾ hours and a number of jams I was wishing that we were on the bike and well and truly clear of this crap.
The day brought some fantastic scenery and it was interesting to have the opportunity to see some Chinese, sorry, Tibetan villages.

The mountain scenery of Mount Everest was lovely, although from the bus was a little restrictive to our veiw at times. That night we stayed at Nyalam in Dormatory accommodation.
The next day brought some beautiful mountain scenery with 3 more mountain passes. W|e stayed at Xigatse for the night and it was a relief as we had gone up to a elevation of 5220 m. Most of the group was feeling the effects of altitude sickness, with headaches, body aches and shortness of breath. I had never experienced this before and it surprised me how it affected me. Bron went through the whole trip without any hint of any ill effects.

The natural scenery for the day was lovely with Goats,sheep,yaks, prayer flags and mountains everywhere.
We spent a day in Xigatse acclimatising and looking around. The town/city was quite developed and clean compared to anything we had seen since |Europe. The Chinese seem to have this sorted pretty well. The local monastery was nice enough with lots of shiny things and some lovely architecture.

The Chinese have checkpoints along the way, just in case we have smuggled someone on the bus with us. One of these checkpoints was interesting, not for anything else but the toilets. They were quite modern looking on the outside, but inside they were, how do I say it, dry wretch invoking. They were just concrete slits letting all og the raw sewerage run straight, untreated, into the "pristine" mountain stream/river next to it. Oh so beautiful. And this stream/river runs all the way into India and on to the ocean.

Autumn in Tibet was surprising, from what we had seen in pictures and on TV there didnt seem to be any trees but all throughout the landscape is littered with deciduous trees, and it was clear from their colour that autumn had set in here.
Next stop was Gyangze.

En route there were more high passes to test our acclimatisation, we hadn't done well.

Some of the main sites we saw for the day were Baiju temple and Kumbum stupa. (and I forgot - shit creek)

Next stop after a big day on the bus with lots of lovely scenery was Lhasa.
It came as a total surprise to me that Lhasa is the way it is. It is what I see as a modern Chinese town. Wide concrete streets with mostly modern buildings. We stayed at a lovely traditional hotel with a nice courtyard and restaurant.

The main attraction of Lhasa is the Potela palace. The palace is situated on a hill overlooking the town and it makes an impressive sight. Looking around the palace there was lots and lots of ornate brass statues of the various gods. The various rooms in the palace were amazingly ornate, the work that goes into some of these statues must be amazing. There were lots of really impressive areas with colourful ties hanging from the roof and shiny things everywhere. Our guide kept on telling us about this and that to do with the Dalai Lama but it all made me wonder, if all of this money was spent on assisting poor people, and all the monks were made to be laborers instead of demi gods the country would be in a different state.

The bazaar/market in the inner streets of the old town were interesting. Still lots of touristy stuff but not the hassles when you look at the items. It was hard to believe and understand the amount of Chinese army troops partolling the streets in full riot gear. I cant for the life of me understand the reason why they are there, unless it is some sort of intimidation and even then why intimidate these people.

The Jokhang temple was nice enough with lots more colour and some shiny stuff again.

Bron and I explored the city at night and seeing the palace and how it is lit up at night was really impressive. It is far more impressive at night than during the day.
The next day we went to the Tsankhung Nunnery in the old part of Lhasa. This was the first truly spiritual place I felt I had been to in Tibet. There seemed to be some feeling, some heart in what they were doing. As the Nunns did their stuff there seemed to be a really nice feeling around them, far more joy there than anywhere else in Tibet.

We found some lions (statues) in the market that we decided we wanted. The amazing thing was they were everywhere, this was nice as we knew we had the bargaining on our side. All the stall holders started out wanting between 1500-1800 yuan. We started with an offer of 80-150yuan. I started to think we were a bit low but soon stumbled on the real price after a tough negotiater slipped up. We finished up getting them for 250yuan.

The Sera Monastery in town was the second biggest in Tibet. It was pretty run down but had lots of shiny things and lots of monks arguing with each other. The guide told us to watch for pick pockets where the monks were doing the arguing, that I thought was a nice touch.

Tea that night was Yak goulash and some other Tibetan delight followed by banana fritters and icecream. We thought it was nice touch to mix tibetan and chinese.

The next day after 8 days in Tibet it was back to Kathmandu with Air China. I cant believe they still let people smoke on planes. It was a good veiw of the Himalayas and only an hours flight. After a week away from the madness I cant say I am glad to be back.

What a contrast to Lhasa, the rubbish, the madness on the roads, (Lhasa was far from perfect)
the lack of any sort of organisation, the hawkers, the rudeness. A day to finalize all the things we had to in Kathmandu and then off to Kuala Lumpar.