Day 55

Tibet! Lhasa! Shangri-la??

The train ride was okay. It took about fourteen hours, reaching all those high passes with great gusto, ending up at Lhasa, at an elevation of about 3800 metres. I got a little sick towards the end, but playing cards with my three new pals helped keep me in one piece (barely).

I did a bit of wandering around the city with E today, checking out Lhasa's sights (though saving actual entrances for tomorrow). Lhasa is a visually striking city with a style I've not encountered any time before. It's divided into a strongly Tibetan old town and a strongly Chinese influenced New Town. Both are very busy places. The old town is a maze of restaurants, shops, hotels and a general morass of tourist stuff that keeps it from getting gobbled up by the more commercial and boring new town. That place contains a collection of shops targeting the city's upper crust.

The people of Lhasa are really something special. In addition to the Tibetan and Han residents of the city, the streets are overflowing with visitors from the Tibetan countryside. These people, visiting mostly on pilgrimages to Buddhist holy sights are wonderfully dressed in the bright heavy tunics that are practical in the cold countryside, but merely curious in the city.

The smell of the city, too, is nice. The whole place smells of incense and yak butter which is burned as part of the religious tradition of the region. E and I saw great concrete "burners" (something like incense burners in temples) along a river in the new town. As we stopped to take pictures, many pilgrims stopped to add yak butter to the fires inside.

And the geography? Also rather nice. The city seems hemmed in by great mountains which forever seem to be "twenty minutes" away as one walks the street. And in the centre of town is a great hill, upon which sits the Potala Palace, a massive 1000 room building that was once home to all incarnations of the Dalai Lama.

Uhm... more next time. I'm awfully tired right now.