Day 64, 65, 66

Okay, so its the twenty-seventh now, and I'm in Kathmandu, but since this journal is getting behind, I'm actually trying to write about what went down last week.

So, last week I was in the Tibetan countryside. Myself and my five new friends piled into a minibus around 8:00 one Monday morning and set off, with a driver and guide along for the ride.

The company was nice. But really, as a trip, the whole thing might have been a little ho-hum. We visited three monasteries over the first few days. They were nice, but all of the temples and monasteries sort of blend together after awhile. And also, the whole temple experience is tainted by the obnoxious presence of touts and hawkers at the entrances... and also by the exorbitant admission prices charged by the Chinese regime.

We drove along the "friendship highway" to Nepal, with the border to that country being our ultimate destination. Along the way we visited a few nice towns. Tibet seems to be an empty place, and most of the settlements inside the territory are quite small. Many are just one street, with homes and shops built along that street in a straight line that stretches for a kilometer or two with expanses of crumbling highway plugging into each end. Restaurants in these places are a treat, each looking rather identical to the last (dirty, with big padded seating along the walls) and with identical menu items (noodles, fried greens and rice with egg).

After a few days of driving through the small towns and monasteries we hit the big time - Mount Everest Base Camp. The clouds parted long enough for us to snap a few pictures, and also long enough to give our group ample time to gawk at the awesomeness of that 8800 meter peak, which is made more impressive by the fact that the mountains on either side reach almost as high.

P,D and N decided to spend the night in a hotel near the camp, while O,R and myself stomped four kilometers uphill to reach the "camp" (really a tourist trap of sorts, since the climbing season is long over), at an elevation of 5200 meters. There we spent a very cold night sleeping in a tent hotel dubbed "Hotel California" by its operators.

And that was sort of the end of out journey. The next day we spent a good 15 hours on the road pushing through the town of Zeungmu, the last stop on the Friendship Highway. The last three hours were a harrowing trip around the side of a mountain on a road where a skid a few meters to one side would result in a 3000 meter fall down a sheer cliff. This drive we made through the dark, through the fog and through enough mud to require us to get out and lay down rocks and branches to make a road, at one point. I was more than a little scared of dying, so I passed my Beatles CD to the driver and we twisted and turned along the mountain side while singing along (bravely) to "I want to Hold Your Hand."

After getting through THAT, we spent one night in Zeungmu, I made a trip to the post office to send some final Tibetan postcards and we walked down to the Nepalese border post.

Next time: Kathmandu!