10-2-19 - Shigatse - Stunning vistas!
/Day 108. Kyle & Leanne joint blog.
This morning we leave Lhasa for our three-day trek overland to Mt Everest. We have spent a few days here to both see Lhasa’s many treasures and to acclimate to 12,000 feet elevation. Today our drive will take us over mountain passes at 17,000 feet elevation before arriving in Shigatse at 12,500 feet.
The drive is expected to take about 12 hours with about 9 hours of driving and several stops built in to see the sights and the magnificent mountain and lake vistas. A couple hours in, we realize this is not going to be an ordinary 9 hour drive. Once outside of Lhasa, we start to ascend and descend mountains with hair-raising, steep switch back turns. The switchback turns are so sharp that the van tires screech around every turn as we are pinned against the van window.
Even worse, the roads are two lanes, one in each direction. There are vehicles on the roads that range from cars, vans and trucks to scooters, tractors and motorized carts carrying hay. And add to the mix, people who are walking horses, yaks and herds of sheep right down the middle of the road. So it is fully expected that the faster vehicles are to pass the slower vehicles and people walking their animals in the opposite lane of traffic while avoiding a head-on collision.
It doesn’t take long before Kyle is praying to God, rubbing the happy Buddha and looking up on Google to see if there is a Shinto God of switchback roads while closing his eyes around every turn.
Will the drive and sore bottoms be worth it? “Heck yes!” says Leanne. She points out that the skies are deep blue, the clouds are puffy white and the mountains ranged from rocky to green lushly. Great photo taking day! Kyle will trade all the puffy clouds and photos just to get safely to the hotel room tonight.
Our first picture stop is over a valley and we photograph ourselves sitting on yaks and with Tibetan Mastiff dogs with the mountains as our backdrop. Justin points out one of his fun facts that Tibetan Mastiffs are one of the most expensive dogs in the world with a price tag of USD $10,000. The local Tibetans charge 10 yuan (~USD $1.25) per person for pictures with one animal. Leanne, John and Kyle pick the Yak and get dressed up in a Tibet outfit and climb on the Yak. The rest of the kids choose the Tibetan Mastiff for their animal pictures. Kyle suggests to Justin that he check if there’s a business model buying a Tibetan Mastiff back home and charging people $10 for pictures with it.
Our second photo stop is from a lookout point high above Yamdrok Lake, one of three Holy Lakes in Tibet. The name in Tibetan translates to “the jasper lake in the upper pastoral area.” Surrounded by mountains, the lake is very large at 638 square meters and very deep at 30 – 40 meters and has a deep blue color accentuated by the puffy pure white clouds. The only lake we have seen with that deep blue color is Crater Lake in Oregon which is the deepest lake in the US. The pictures are amazing as Leanne pointed out earlier.
Our third photo stop is down at the actual lake front where we can put our hand in the Holy Lake. There are little peninsula outcroppings jutting into the lake. Of course, the first couple have a Yak where you can pay to get your picture with a Yak with the lakefront in the background. With our Yak and Mastiff picture budget having been depleted, we have to settle for pictures on the outcroppings with no animals. Leanne gathers the kids on the outcropping and is getting pictures of them jumping on the count of three. Apparently this was amusing to the other tourists as the next 5 groups after we did the jumping picture. Leanne the trendsetter. We pile back in the van and exit with a lot more Holy hands than we when we arrived.
Next we hit lunch in Gyantse City where there is definitely no “western” food in the vast expanses of land with just a road running through it. The kids mostly pick at their food but skipping a meal after all the Chinese buffets of the past couple weeks isn’t the end of the world.
Our fourth photo stop is a gigantic Karola Glaciers. Tibet is often called our world’s third pole because of all the frozen glaciers that hold that previous glacial water. Justin fun fact - 46 percent of the world’s population relies on drinking water that originates here in Tibet. The weather is noticeably colder up at 5,020 meters (~16,000 feet) as we take in the glaciers and those puffy clouds.
Our fifth photo stop is at a dam built in the mid-1990s that has created a turquoise lake in this valley. As soon as we get out of the van at this stop, a local woman pitches Leanne on a colorful rolled cloth but she politely declines. But Leanne has no clue what she just passed up. No room in Leanne’s backpack typically means an immediate polite decline anyhow. But then we walk out to the gorgeous cliff viewpoint and see thousands of these colorful prayer flag banners flapping fiercely in the wind.
“Oh man, I missed a frigging big culture opportunity here!” Leanne says to herself.
She runs back to the woman to buy one for our friends and family members whom are in need of prayer negotiating the woman down from 20 Yuan to 10 Yuan. We hang the prayer flag in a windy spot and say our prayer requests. We also manage to get stunning photos of the blue lake underneath us and help John negotiate the price of a Tibetan singing bowl which he buys. The bowl is a purchase he has looking forward to buying way back before we left California.
Our last stop before reaching Shigatse is to a mountain monastery with 700 monks. We visit the chapels and dozens of Buddha statues. Fortunately in this one, you can take some inside photos for roughly a $1 donation. We snap away to get our money’s worth and because this is the first one that we even had an option to photograph as all the others thus far were strictly no photos. Again we are blown away by the architecture, the art, the faithful, the studious monks and even the layout of the monastery. It is so different from our own faith yet still there are themes we can find similar.
We arrive at our Tibetan style room at Gesar Hotel wiped out from our journey. The mattress was super soft (unlike the concrete bed of Lhasa hotel) and we nearly skipped dinner to just melt right in it. However, a skeleton crew ventured out to find all local Tibetan and Chinese restaurants. We find a kebab and noodle place that was hopping with a lot of people (good sign we felt) but definitely no English spoken by the employees. Without our guide, we stumbled over our order but two nice people helped us enormously. It was also our most successful use of Google translator with the waiter. Experiences like that can be both so extremely humbling and terribly embarrassing at the same time.
As we try to sleep, we are first woken by a sick Ashley and then a sick John two hours later. With two of seven down, and Kyle and I touch and go, we might need to adjust our high-octane schedule a bit.
We will see in the morning.
