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October
25, 1999
Hello
everybody this is Doug with Around the World 1999 and today's journal
entry is for Monday October 25th, the 19th day of our journey. First off
I would like to apologize for the heavy breathing but here in Lhasa we spent the time at high altitude and
everybody is kind of sucking wind, so just bear with me.
Today we
awoke in the tiny village of Pagnag and we slept until 8:30 AM after only
getting in about 2 in the morning because as Earl mentioned previously we
decided to push through Lhasa in two days instead of three, to get back
on schedule. We packed up and hit the road, and breakfast consisted of a
large piece of flat bread, roughly the size of a good sized pizza and it
was smeared with melted butter. We never asked our guide but we assumed
it was probably yak butter. Whatever it was though it was very good and
it hit the spot. We gased up, and there was a little discrepancy between
our guide and the gas station attendant. Apparently the price of gas had
gone up. So after a little finagling. We finally got filled up and
everybody was happy.
The road to
Lhasa is mostly good and paved. There are some dirt stretches. The final
gorge pulling into Lhasa where you're following the river, the gorge
itself just releases rock, so what pavement is there is absolutely
hammered. Kind of like the face of the moon. It's definitely a bumpy ride
for the 100 clicks or so. We cruise around 55 for a long time. We stop at
Nagqu for lunch.
Nagqu
orginally was going to be one of our overnight stays. This wasn't a huge
town, but it was certainly larger than where we spent the night, and we
were going to have lunch, but - depressing though - right before we got
into town we noticed a big truck wreck. And laying on the ground was a
Tibetan boy probably early teens and he was laying on his back and his
arms and legs were splayed out and his face was covered with blood. We
were thinking about stopping but our guide just pressed on through. There
was plenty of people around him. So we didn't stop. It kind of bothered
us. We had no idea what had happened. He was in bad shape. Hopefully,
he'll make it. It didn't look too good though.
If he did
happen to die, he would have received a Tibetan sky burial. I'm a little
sketchy on the details. Our guide wasn't overly helpful so I dropped the
issue when I asked him about it. I did do some reading in the Lonely
Planet before I came over here. So basically what happens, for three days
the body sits in a sitting position and its blessed. After three days a
good friend or family member will carry him up to a high mountain. Then a
bone crusher will chop up the body in little pieces and it's eaten by local
wildlife. Probably a vulture. We have seen some vultures.
Haven't seen coyotes or wolves but they may be out there.
It sounds a
little strange to the western mind but it makes perfectly good sense when
you see the terrain around here. There's not a lot of arable land. Its
just tradition, that's what they've always done. I did ask my guide if
they ever bury anybody. He said yes, if someone dies that they think
might be diseased, then they bury them because they don't want the
animals to get the disease. Pretty thoughtful.
After lunch
we took off. More driving. Typically we saw a bazillion sheep, yaks and
goats. We did happen to see a big flock of vultures sitting on hillside.
They're actually kind of beautiful. They have golden heads instead of red
headed monsters we have in the US. There was a whole bunch of them. We
saw some amazing snow covered mountains and we stopped numerous times
along the way to take pictues. As Nick mentioned before on many of these
summits there's all these little pieces of paper with Tibetan writing on
them. At one point we saw why. There was a truck load of Tibetan pilgrims
drove by returning from Lhasa as they passed the summit they started
whooping and hollering and they tossed all this paper out. They were
pretty exicted about their stay in Lhasa.
We saw a
lot of people on the side of the road. Mostly farmers. Everyone we wave
to, always waves back. Everybody is pretty friendly. Often a little boy or
girl will run a quarter of a mile a way just to get to the road to see
our vehicles pass and give us a big wave and a smile. It made us feel
pretty good. At one point when we stopped to take some pictures and
elderly woman came up to Chanda and kept saying Dalai Lama over and over.
Basically she was asking for a picture of the Dalai Lama. The Chinese
have banned all images of the exiled political and spiritual leader of
Tibet. We briefly discussed bringing some of the pictues because people
ask more. In the end we decided to respect the Chinese authorities, so we
didn't. We didn't want to make any waves. It would have been nice to hava
one to give this old woman.
The last
100 clicks into Lhasa, as I mentioned before, is pretty rough. You follow
the river that flows through Lhasa. The name escapes me right now. I
don't have a good map. But I will get that to you people as soon as
possible. Probably the coolest thing we saw was, the river itself and the
gorge itself was impressive, but there was this sheperd that was bringing
his goats down from the mountainside blocking the road so we had to stop.
The goats would cross the river on this little bridge, one by one. The
bridge itself was no more than 2 feet wide and it was a good 150 feet
long. At one point he had his entire herd on the bridge crossing the
river. Todd caught some video footage of it.
Right
before dark disaster struck. Our lights went out. They'd been flickering
for a while. We were only about 50 clicks from Lassa and I was driving.
No way are we going to stop. Finally, Earl and Todd convinced me of the
wisdom of stopping. In hindsight, I couldn't have gotten 10 feet on that
road in the dark. Unfortunately, when we tried to fix the light, a hot
wire hit the dash and we ended up frying the ignition. So Earl and Nick
went to work and fixed the light and basically hot wired the vehicle. So
that's how we made it into Lhasa. All and all it only took a half an hour
to repair and turned out to be a great job. It certainly not the first
gerry-rig setup that we've had and it certainly won't be the last. In the
end, everything worked out. The next day they put in a new switch.
Our hotel
in Lhasa was the Himalaya or the "Shimalaya" as our guide Jack
says. Jeff and I still refer to it by the latter name. We end up cracking
up every time we say it. Jack was a good guy, we appreciated his work.
Speaking of Jeff, we finally hooked up with him. He spent the last four
days in Chengu partying with Mr. Dao and Mr. Zhang Jian-Ping and he will
tell you all about that in tomorrow's report. But it sounds like he had a lot more
fun than we did. Our was kind of brutal but it was definitely worth it
I'm going
to sign off for now. Talk to you people soon. Bye bye.
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