10-4-19 - Drive to Tingri
/Day 111. Kyle & Leanne joint blog.
Having spent the extra day in Shigatse, we’ve adjusted the schedule. Today we drive to Tingri and tomorrow we will do a day trip to Mount Everest instead of spending the night there. We are looking at a ~7 hour drive but are feeling modestly better so we head off after breakfast.
The driving is similar to the drive two days ago. We are getting more used to the switch backs but still hold our breather around every blind curve when we are passing a tractor or moped carrying bales of hay. We take a required 20 minute rest break for the driver. Leanne wanders off and buys some local jewelry. “Look at all this I got for 30 yuan (~USD $4),” Leanne beams holding up her purchases. “Yeah, but it’ll cost USD $40 to ship it across the globe since we have no room in the bags,” Kyle quips which is met with a Leanne look that says “let me enjoy my $4 purchase or I’ll ship you across the globe.”
We are running low on snacks so John and Kyle wander into the closest equivalent to a convenience store in the Tibet central plains. After canvassing the store, they are unable to identify any snacks that resemble ones we know from the US. John holds up a bag and says “dad, how about these?” Kyle has to adjust his glasses before identifying them as fried lizards. Yes, actual whole lizards fried but still in-tact and identifiable. Now if these were gummy lizards, we’d be all over it, but going to have to take a pass on the fried ones.
Our next stop is the entrance to Qomolagma National Nature Reserve (QNNR) which is effectively the national park that is home to Mount Everest and the Himalaya mountains from the Tibet side. We are now 5,000 kilometers from where we started our China journey in Beijing. Signs indicate we are back up at 5,200 meters (17,000 feet) which means we’ve donned our winter jackets, hats and gloves which we’ve been lugging around with us but haven’t used the entire trip up until now.
As there are essentially no suitable restaurants between Shigatse and Tingri where we will stay overnight so we have to wait until we arrive in Tingri @ 4pm for lunch. The supply of snacks purchased in Chengdu which is supposed to last the week is dwindling to dangerously lower levels.
Upon arriving in Tingri, we stop at the only restaurant with “western” food in Tingri. We are far from the capital city of Lhasa and in the remote Tibetan central plains so we have to temper our expectations knowing the journey to Mount Everest and then the Nepal border is going to be some tough sledding. As we sit down (we are the only patrons given the late lunch time we arrived), there are flies circling around and the outside perimeter of the table. Content with flanking us from the side for now, the flies are apparently waiting for our food to arrive before assembling in attack formation and commencing their serious attempts to eat our western chicken and fries.
The waitress takes our order and brings out tea for us. The teacups are dark brown on the inside with white dots of chipped out clay creating a stark contrast. The flies apparently don’t drink tea as they wait for the real deal and several of us pass on tea.
Almost all of us have ordered the grilled cheese and tomato sandwich with fries. Usually the menus doesn’t have any pictures of the food but this menu proudly displays a picture of the most mouthwatering grilled cheese sandwich we’ve seen since we left the states. When the plates are served, we quickly realize that the picture on the menu must have been copied and pasted from the Google images as the grilled cheese we are served looks nothing like the one in the picture.
We have to transform into our best “Lord of the Flies” characters and do our best to protect our grilled cheese “that don’t look like grilled cheese” sandwiches from the battalions of flies. Three bites in, Kyle spots a dark black hair about 12 inches long sticking out the side of the other half of the grilled cheese sandwich. At that point, appetite gone, Kyle is waiving the surrender flag and turns over the entire meal to the flies.
The waitress asks how the food is and Kyle points to the hair. She gets a crazed look on her face, grabs the plate and marches back throwing the door to the kitchen open so hard it cracks the wall and almost shakes the building. At this point, Kyle was going to say keep it and don’t charge us as he doesn’t really want to attempt round two but she took off in such a fury that he didn’t have time.
In the back kitchen, the waitresses is yelling bloody murder at presumably the long haired cook that made the grilled cheese sandwich. This is followed by a dramatic shattering sound which Kyle presumes is the waitress throwing the plate against the wall and shattering it into pieces in a fit of rage. The waitress comes back out throwing the kitchen door open again with the same wall cracking result and stands there glaring at Kyle with steam coming out of her ears. She shakes her head violently and marches off to another part of the restaurant. Apparently, she was just as mad at Kyle for catching the hair in the food as she was at the cook for letting it end up there.
We tell this anecdote with humor infused not to complain about the restaurant but to highlight that experiences like this are actually what we desired and signed up for so we can all see how challenging life is in under-developed and poorer regions of the world.
After lunch, we check in the hotel and they blissfully have tanks of oxygen we can rent / use. The next two hours are spent cycling all seven of us through 15 – 20 minute oxygen sessions. The tanks are the real deal and are deemed to be far superior to the hospital oxygen. By comparison, we joke that the hospital oxygen which was hooked up to a wall outlet had a guy behind the wall breathing into the tube as fast as he could. The oxygen definitely helps as we try to adjust to 14,500 feet and get ready for tomorrow’s big day.
Dinner is in the hotel restaurant and we are all glad we don’t have to venture outside and can eat quickly and head back up to the rooms in preparation for our 5:30am wakeup call so we can catch Mount Everest at sunrise.
