EBC Day 1

Starting early as we had a long day ahead, we drove up to Kamba-la Pass which- when clearer than our foggy day- affords views of the magnificent many-armed Yamdrok-tso lake. Our path took us back down the pass to teh Friendship highway- which links Lhasa with Kathmandu- and on to the second largest city in Tibet, Shigatse.

We stopped for a couple hours in Shigatse to visit the impressive Tashilhunpo Monastery. It was magnificent and I loved the architecture, and religious sculpture, paintings and artefacts. I am not what I would call a spiritual person, but I felt uplifted by the aura around the stupas. After taking many pictures our time was up and Trevor, Andre and I headed back to the car because we couldn't find Justin.

At first it was nice to have a little time to buy a snack and people watch. But our driver, Friday, was getting impatient because we still had hours and hours to drive. Soon I was impatient too. I contemplated going back up to look for him again, but the calmer Irishman pointed out that, as the oldest of the foursome, Justin should be responsible enough to not need a young'un like me to look after him. But as we saw in the coming days, age is not a direct indicator of maturity or responsibility.

Arriving 45 minutes late, Justin just seemed to laugh off our unhappiness of his cavalier treatment of all of our time. Although he did apologize in a joking way, I remember him saying that if we had said we would stay 2 hours instead of only 1 hour and a half, he would have only been 15 minutes late, which would have been reasonable. Totally justified.

The rest of the 6 hours of the drive was highlighted by getting stuck stuck behind a line of cars who were themselves stuck in the mud that had formed with the combination of heavy rain and dirt road over another pass. It was very dark and I got out to help and tried to push a van through the mud. But the traffic jam was not cleared until Friday appeared with a shovel and in only a minute had the van moving forward again- a significant improvement over the sideways sliding it had done for the hour we were there.

Back on our way again, we didn't reach our night's stop at Shegar until 11:30pm- over 14 hours after we left Lhasa. Dirty and exhausted, we all shared what we ordered at the hotel restaurant and headed up to the loft for a short night's sleep.