Mission Accomplished: Tibet

The Norwegians and I woke up and left Chengdu at 5:30 am and flew to Lhasa. I was in the middle of the 8 seat across Airbus A340 but I could still see the mountains outside. I turned to my Norwegian bud Merius who was a few rows back and we both grinned.

 

Location: Lhasa, status: motivated.

 

The plane was full of tourists and a bunch of us from the hostel had a bus waiting for us for the 1 hour ride to the city. The drive was nice, along the flat valley between mountains, with shallow rivers that branched off into different courses through the valley. The mountains are rocky and brown, which is sweet.

 

Lhasa is a small city, there is nothing special about it, since all of the Han Chinese that China ships into Tibet make it look like all the other cities. Except for the Potala palace, which is famous, and extremely awesome looking. It sits on top of this small rocky mountain in the middle of the valley, it looks like a fortress with its huge walls, all painted white. I tried to imagine what it would be like to be on a caravan through the mountains back in the day, and to emerge from some mountain pass to see this huge white and brown palace commanding the valley from its rock. Definitely sweet.

 

We went to a new hostel and ate yak meat for lunch. Yak tastes basically like beef, but a little different. At this hostel is a cafe that offers rock climbing, and the guide there has been to Yangshuo and knows some of the guides I climbed with back there. So it looks like I will be doing some climbing later.

 

Two friends of mine from Beijing Ultimate, Stephanie from Beijing and Jason from Vancouver, got to Lhasa a few days ahead of us and we met up with them today. We are currently planning how to get to Everest Base Camp and do some hiking somewhere while coping with various people's headaches. I don't have one yet, but I really have to wait until after the first night to find out. I think we are at 3600m. But not going to Everest is not an option for all of us, so we'll get there. Its a 3 day trip in a Toyota Landcruiser, costing about $100 per person.

 

Tomorrow we will tour the palace and probably purchase some outdoors clothing (even though we have enough) because the prices are good here and the quality of the fakes is also good. My bag is quite heavy though and fairly large, so we'll see.