Lhasa

Excerpt from my travel journal September 3 2006:

Waking up early in Chengdu, I took a short shuttle ride, provided by the hostel, to the airport. I meet an interesting American guy and we chat up a Dutch couple while we wait to depart for Lhasa- the capitol city of the Tibetan Autonomous Region. The flight is short and we pass over some white-capped mountains.

Upon arrival in teh city, the American, Justin, and I take a bicycle rickshaw to a budget hotel and get a couple beds in a four-bed dorm room. Minutes after we sat down to rest our altitude-sick heads (Lhasa sits at 12,000 ft above sea level) our dormmates arrive.

Trevor Murphy is a 29 year old Irish primary school teacher in London, and Andre Schaffer is 31 and lives in Dresden in eastern Germany. After the normal pleasantries and questions are exchanged, we begin talking about things to do in Lhasa and Tibet. Trevor describes an eleven-day journal out to sacred Mt. Kailash where a 3-day trek around the mountain comes in the middle of 8 days at 12 hours per day of driving in a bus on a horribly bumpy road. Im glad I have no time for this trip.

Then the Irishman casually drops in that he is trying to get a fourth person to join him and two Thai girls on a four-day trip to Mt. Everest Base Camp- known throughout the tourist agencies in Lhasa as EBC.

I had done smoe research, but frankly was a little unprepared for what to do in Tibet because of the length and size of my trip. But when he said "Everest Base Camp," my interest immediately peaked. I've read books and articles on the mountain, seen movies and even talks about people who've climbed the epic peak. But I never thought, even though I was going to be in the area, I'd ever get a chance to go to base camp and see the mountain itself.

[The way to travel to the numerous monasteries, lakes, cities and treks around Tibet is to hire a Land Cruiser and a driver from one of the multitude of agencies around Lhasa. Even solo travlers are able to do this by putting their information with an agency and then posting messages on boards at the common hotels in the area. Sometimes it takes a long time to find others who want to do the same trip that you want to do. For example, Trevor said he waited about 5 days before getting together some Israelis for the Kailash trip. I imagine many solo or paird travelers can wait a few days between every trip, and often time is wasted staying in Lhasa. This is significant when considering that on my first day in Lhasa, I was able to book a trip to EBC for the next morning. After I returned to Lhasa, I had the fortune to find a trip to the Nepal border in the same amount of time. But thats another story...]

After talking to a couple agencies in Lhasa about hiring a car and driver, Justin and Andre voiced that they also may want to go and we could make it a 5 day trip with an extra night at EBC instead of the shorter trip the Thai girls were trying to organize. We went to lunch to decide and before our food had arrived we were all committed to the journey.

The rest of the day was spent similarly to the start of my one day in Chendgu. The four of us set out in search of an ATM and after scouring the city for hours, we finally found one that worked. We payed the agency, saw the car and met our driver, whose name is Tibetan for "Friday," and we were all set for our Everest adventure...