Today is our final day in Tibet so we thought we'd finish off with a recap of the past couple of weeks.
When we last wrote, we were about to set off on a trek between two of the major monasteries in the vicinity of Lhasa. The trek started off well with a trip to Ganden where we were lucky enough to catch a ceremony in the main assembly hall. About 200 monks were seated drinking butter tea and chanting. Sometimes this involved repeating incantations, at other times it was more of a gravelly throat noise that Tim does a reasonable
impression of.
From Ganden we headed down the valley to meet our yaks and yak-herder. Once they had been blessed with incense they were saddled up with what looked like enough equipment for a small army and we started off up the valley towards the first pass.
The first night camped at 4300m passed fairly uneventfully aside from being a little cold. The next morning we got going as soon as we could to defrost our feet and headed towards the highest pass on the trek at 5200m. We dragged ourselves up and over and made our way to the second campsite, a little higher than we would have liked due to not being able to find any running water, at 4900m. This one was really bloody cold, and despite having a dung fire after dinner we got into our sleeping bags almost before it had gotten dark.
At this point things took a turn for the worse. Choosing possibly the worst place to do so, I got some sort of food poisoning. Unpleasant at the best of times, when it is so cold your breath is turning into icicles on your sleeping bag you do not want to be running in and out of the tent all night and vomiting into a plastic bag.
Needless to say, we both had a pretty bad night that night and there wasn't much hope for me getting over another 5000m+ pass. Instead we opted to end the trek early via a six hour walk downhill to the nearest
village with a road. Fortunately this was a good walk and we got to see nomad encampments with barky dogs and yak hair tents.
Back in Lhasa we recuperated for a few days (by this point Tim had picked up a throat infection), finally braved the queues to get into the Jokhang Temple and enjoyed new scenery as it snowed heavily making everything look rather christmassy.
The day before yesterday we ventured out of Lhasa again on an early morning pilgrim bus back through the Yarlung Tsangpo valley that we had visited a couple of weeks ago. This time we stayed on the bus all the way to Samye Monastery (the one we should have made it to at the end of our trek) and despite a small boy behind me being violently sick all over the floor, we had a very pleasant morning. We took the bus back towards Lhasa in the afternoon, but got off at the side of the road 8k from another monastery we wanted to visit called Mindroling.
All the money we could offer wasn't going to persuade the bus driver to take his empty bus up the road to the monastery so we hitched on the back of a tractor. With a heavy load of Tsampa, a friendly Tibetan chap and Tim and I, the tractor overheated after a while, but fortunately we weren't far from the monastery so we continued on foot, arriving just before dark.
The monks showed us to the guest house, 'guest house' was probably stretching it a bit, but we had a bed and were brought hot water and some truly disgusting tsampa and rancid yak butter flapjack type things that looked like they'd been iced with candle wax. With my delicate constitution I didn't give them a try. Tim had to though. Most amusing.
After settling in we got talking to a group of Tibetan men eating thukpa (noodle soup). From my limited Chinese we managed to gather that they had come from Samye and were fixing the monastery prayer wheels. It seemed that they had been paid in kind, firstly with the god awful flapjacks, but also with a cow that they'd slaughtered just outside our room if the axe, blood and cow's head in a bag were anything to go by.
After a brief chat they were off back to Samye, one of them giving us a toothless grin as he hopped of down the hill, a bag of cow parts over his shoulder dripping blood all down his back.
The rest of the evening was punctuated only by various locals walking into our room, staring, smiling and walking out again. I'm not sure that many western tourists had come to spend the night before.
The following morning we took a look around the monastery and huge new white chorten before making our way back to the main road. We managed another lift on the back of a tractor and then hitched a ride with some
Chinese removal men (or perhaps burglars, we couldn't quite work it out) all the way back to Lhasa.
So now we are back in Lhasa again, getting ready for the next leg of our journey. Tomorrow we take the insane sky train to Xi'an to see the Terracotta Warriors before heading to Beijing for a few days. We will certainly be sad to leave Tibet. Despite things not always going to plan, we've had a great time here. It's hard to do anything but like a place where the people are always smiling.
Sam and Tim.
