Tsampa for breakfast and a good warm at yak dung stove. Gave Derbyshire postcard to nice lady. Off to Lhasa on the Freindship Highway again. We climb and we climb and come to a first beautiful and intensely blue lake. It is high and very cold and pretty airless and exhilarating. There is a souvenir stall up here in the middle of nowhere and strong saleswomanship but too expensive for me. Take photos of babies and pay for them. I cannot imagine their life up here - apart from the living with babies bit.
Just as I am fretting about having no photos of yaks, we stop again and there are two dressed-up yaks and two dogs with red ruffs - all decorated and waiting for us. It is all so friendly and fun that we misread the situation. Devin climbs on a yak - at the edge of a cliff yet - and I photo him and the dogs and the view. Of course, the men want payment - this is their living - and, as we are all really short of cash by now, it gets unpleasant. Jon gets angry and erases his photos.
We reach the last pass at 5,200 meters (I think) and then descend, or rather hurtle down thru hairpin bends and turns that heave us from one side of the car to the other. I clutch Jon's arm and brace my feet as scared to lean against the door.
Lhasa is not at all as I imagined it would be, being a bright, modern, level city and cold and FULL of soldiers and policemen. We walk round. This is Paris, 1941.
Hotel Flora is another luxurious hotel with a bath (again!) snd loads of hot water - and the same basket by the loo for used paper as the drains in forn parts cannot cope with paper. I still find this difficult to do and hope to god that I have dropped the habit by the time I get home.
Hotel is in the Muslim quarter by the mosque and run by Yusuf and his son, Ahmed who are both Nepali. Ignorant of me but cannot get my head round the idea of Tibetan and Nepali Muslims in white caps and there is a bookshop selling copies of the Qu'ran and posters of the Kabba.
