Escape from the Border!

We ended spending the rest of the Sunday in Zhangmu, the border town between Tibet and Nepal. Repeatedly the guide the would show up and tell us he needed the visas and passports, then a little while later, he'd return them. In any event, we would not be able to continue on the right to Nyalam until around 1 a.m., and the plan was to leave at 11 p.m. So we tried to kill time as best we could. We spent 2-3 hours at lunch just hanging out at the Himalaya Restaurant, in the best European style of lunch. We found an internet cafe (called Internet Bars in Tibet), but the connection was maddeningly slow. We took some pictures of the mountains and the town, sat outside the restaurant for a few more hours till dinner, spent another couple of hours chatting over dinner, then it was time to leave.

The road has been blocked, as I said before, by road construction. It turns out that literally they are constructing the road. This turns out to be true wherever we hit road work on the Friendship Highway, the main (and only) road between Zhangmu and Lhasa, our final destination. The roads are still being built, and are currently just a muddy outline of where a road should approximately be. Conditions have not been helped by the day-long rain we have bad.

The scene is very surreal. There are no lights, of course. It is dark and foggy. Occasionally, despite the late hour, people pass us on foot, like refugees. The atmosphere is even more spooky when we see the distant lights of the work trucks, looking like something out of star wars in the nighttime.

As we approach the checkpoint, our car, which has clearly had better days, struggles and stalls out. Eventually, Tashe (our driver) gets it started again and we are off. We make our hotel at 4:30 in the morning, adn are told we will leave at 7 to make it to Shigatse, skipping past Lhatse to make up for lost time.

After driving another 4 hours, we reach Tingri, another small town along the Friendship Highway. We stop at the the Snowland Hotel for breakfast, which pretty good, and bathroom breaks, which are really scary. We continue to Lhatse for a quick lunch break, then continue to stop at a pass with elevation of 5200 meters (about 15000 feet, or 3 miles above sea level).

Let me pause to tell you about AMS - acute mountain sickness. Whenever you go up in elevation, the air gets thineer, so there is less oxygen. Your body works harder to get the oxygen, and to send the depleted red blood cells where they need to go. The reulst, is that without adequate time to acclimate, you feel dizzy, short of breath, nauseous, and have what is known as "altitude sickness". In extreme cases, your body starts to leak fluid into the tissues of the brain (HACE - high altitude cerebral edema) or lungs (HAPE - high altitude pulmonary edema). Both of these are potentially fatal.

Now, as I said, the way to manage AMS is to take it slowly and get acclimated. We have just compressed two days into one, so we have compressed the adjustment period. So pretty much everybody feels crappy, with headaches, dizziness, and a few people throwing up. Fortunately, we will be sleeping at lower altitudes.

We finally arrive at Shigatse around 5:30. I am the only one in the car (apart from the driver) who has not thrown up. But I am having some other GI issues, which makes getting assigned a hotel room rather critical. The hotel has actual western-style sit down toilets, which makes everybody very happy. About two thirds of our group goes to sleep, leaving a small contingent to go to the restaurant next door for dinner. I notice that many of those least affected by AMS are smokers, which is puzzling until I realize that they are used to feeling short of breath and dizzy. For some reason, Luce (from Holland) and I are the last to get served (by almost 2 hours) even though we were first at the restaurant. We notice a large rat running around the floor, and are almost reassured to see it again after the food arrives, since it makes it less likely that the unidentifiable meat bits (which is billed as yak, but who knows really) is rat.

In the morning, we have breakfast at another restuarant, and head out to Ta Shi Lhun Po monastary in Shigatse before heading out to Gyantse. Our new hotel also has western toilets, so things are looking up. We head out to lunch, where I enjoy "Cheese Yak Burger", which is served with fries and is actually quite good. WE go to Khuman Monastary, but I am feeling a little monastaried out. I wander in the main floor of one building, passing up the chance to visit the stupa with it's 115 rooms of Buddhist art. The daughter and I hang out in the courtyard watching the many mongrel dogs that make this their home, before we head back to the hotel.

Overall, we interact less with the locals and more with the other memebers of our group, which is pretty international. Apart from the daughter and myself, there is only one other American in the 21 people. So it is very interesting to talk about how people's customs and lifestyles vary, not to mention hearing how America is viewed around the world (short version, things will be better for our standing after November 2008, if you know what I'm saying...)

Tomorrow we head to Lhasa for the last couple of days of our Tibetan journey. If I find a decent connection, I will get up pictures from the last couple of weeks.