After one day of walking around Lhasa, we were to spend the rest of our trip to Tibet inside a jeep, looking at its views and people through the window: the impracticality of independent travel in this land forced us to settle for a “Land Cruiser tour”. We set off in the morning and started our long drive eastwards. The scale on the jeep’s altimeter topped out at 3000m; there isn’t a single spot in Tibet where this scale is valid, so the needle climbed back to the zero mark and passed it, crawling up on its second round, along with our jeep.
Our first destination was Yamdrok lake, one of the four sacred lakes of Tibet. We climbed a 4700m pass and descended to the lake shore. Tourism has definitely brought many changes to Tibet. A traditional feature of mountain passes had always been strings upon strings of prayer flags, fluttering in the wind and sending their messages into the distance. The flags are still there, but now in their shadows lurk indefatigable souvenir sellers who descend upon every arriving car and start nagging. “Looki looki!” they shout, tapping your shoulder and pulling at your shirt. Mandarin Chinese only has closed syllables ending in “n” or “ng”, therefore “look” became “looki”, and in any case everybody understands what they’re talking about. Sitting in our retained jeep, besieged by the souvenir sellers, we were feeling fist-hand how this trip was different: at least for the duration of this week we were definitely tourists, not travelers.
And in Tibet you barely have a choice. Various permits are required for travel in different parts of the country, and they are checked at countless police checkpoints along the road. Along with the soldier patrols we’d witnessed in Lhasa, this demonstrated very well the iron grip that China has placed on Tibet. The question of Tibetan independence is a difficult one: the iron grip is certainly disconcerting and the cultural pollution of Tibet by the Chinese is very evident, but on the other hand it is difficult to imagine Tibet without the infrastructure investments that China has made — there were no roads, schools or hospitals prior to the Chinese “liberation”. It is somewhat similar to the USSR’s annexation of the Central Asian republics: if China pulls out tomorrow, Tibet immediately plunges deeply into third-world territory. The question is, how much is freedom worth to you? There is no right answer to that one.
A prayer wheel was spinning on the jeep’s dashboard. Technology has brought automatically spinning prayer wheels, this one powered by a small solar panel soaking Tibet’s bright sunlight through the windshield.
After leaving the lake we ascended to the highest point we’d reach on this trip — 5500m, at the base of a beautiful glacier. This place was another photo-op: the jeeps stop “so you take photo”, and women in traditional dresses, together with yaks in traditional dresses (apparently there’s such a thing, at least in tourist-land) aggressively pose in front of the glacier in order to be able to extort money from the photographers. Angry, we asked Tsewang not to stop in those places anymore. A minute later we took our words back: those views were simply too wild and unique to give up. We’d just have to adjust to our new tourist status.
We made a stop at Gyantse, home to the Palcho monastery and Kumbum, a nine-tiered stupa with 108 prayer chapels, the biggest in Tibet. In the late afternoon we arrived at Shigatse, the second-biggest city in Tibet, where we stayed in the Everest Friendship Hotel, hinting at our next destination.
In the morning we boarded our jeep again and set off in the direction of the Himalaya. A few hours later we were at the last high pass before our destination — and the destination unfolded itself before us in one powerful moment: we were looking at a stretch of the Greater Himalaya, with the peaks of Makalu, Lhotse, Everest and Cho Oyu strutting up from the jagged horizon. We were headed to the Everest Base Camp, and although we could see the mountain clearly, we still had many hours of driving ahead of us.
A dirt track led us up the Rongbuk valley, which seemed to had been especially designed with Everest visitors in mind — it terminates right at the feet of the mountain, and during the whole drive we were looking at the magnificent Everest revealing itself between the valley slopes. The Rongbuk monastery, a few kilometers shy of the base camp, is the highest religious building ever built, and without question the one with the best view on the planet.
The jeep unloaded us at the tent city at 4900m of altitude. This is where we would stay for the night. We hiked the remaining few kilometers to the alpinist base camp itself, at 5200m. The place was devoid of alpinists, since the climbing season ended in June, and instead was teeming with Chinese tourists unloaded from buses that kept ascending every 15 minutes. The Everest Base Camp is higher than the highest peak in the Alps, and the altitude made itself noticeable — our hike was not easy. The satisfaction however was worth all the sweat and then some: from here we could see the north face of the Everest in its entirety — the whole 3.5 vertical kilometers of the Kangshung Face that separated us from the peak. It seemed so fitting that the fifth and last major mountain range that we were visiting on this trip would be the highest of them all. We stood there for a while, trying to wrap our heads around the enormity of what we were looking at, and then took the bus back down to the tent city.
The tents are similar to yurts in that they have a central stove used for heating and cooking, and due to the lack of trees at this altitude it is fueled by yak dung. It also devours oxygen, making the air feel even thinner than it already is, so quality sleep was out of the question. The next morning we boarded the jeep for the way back down into comfortably habitable zones. We stopped for the night in Shigatse, 1200m lower and very pleasant for that reason alone, and the next day returned to Lhasa.
Here our overland journey came to its end. Sleeper train tickets were only available on the black market at a markup of more than $100, so we gave up that option. Getting by bus to our next destination would take 3-4 straight days and nights of driving, so we gave that up too. We figured that our mission of getting overland from Europe to China had been completed. By that point we had traveled around 20,000 kilometers by bus, train, car and ferry. Now we took a domestic flight to Xi’an. The journey time of two hours and 40 minutes seemed ludicrous for the distance we were covering, but this is the wonderful reality of air travel. We ascended a little from the Lhasa airport and then descended a lot more, right into the smog and heat and humidity of Xi’an.
August 30, 2011