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October
30, 1999
Good
morning people. This is Doug with Around the World 1999. Today is October
30th, roughly the 24th day of our journey (depending on when you started
counting). Today's journal entry covers our journey from Xegar to the
Rongpu Monastery; both of those are in Tibet.
Nick is not
feeling too well today, and it must be pretty serious because Todd is
driving Alaska. We were on paved roads for roughly 10 kilometers out of
Shegar and then you hit a military checkpoint where you have to show your
passports and all your papers and everything. Then it's an absolutely
brutal road all the way to the Rongpu Monastery. The road is offset by
the views and the different types of geology that we get to see. Rock
ridges that resemble the backbone of a Stegosaurus and all kinds of
amazingly folded rock, just up and down, sideways, you name it. We see it
all. It's a relatively quick assent from 14,000ft up to 17,000ft in 4WD
low the whole way. There are incredibly steep switchbacks that lead up to
the Pang La Pass. Basically, the lottery prize at the end is that you get
an amazing view of the Himalayas from the north. Within that view are
four of the fourteen 8,000 meter peaks. From left to right you see
Makalu, Loutse, Mt Everest, and Chou Ouy. The weather was absolutely
perfect; there wasn't a cloud in the sky. It was literally a view of a
lifetime. It was amazing. We all took pictures. Mt Everest in person is
incredible, it is a massive mountain, it's kind of an asymmetrical
pyramid.
As I
mentioned earlier, both Nick and Earle were sick. Nick was a little bit
worse off, and unfortunately he could not admire the view. He was slumped
on the ground, not feeling well. For those of you that are lucky enough
to see our home movies when we get home, you'll see exactly what I am
talking about because, of course, I took some footage of him. And those
of you that will not get to see the video, take my word for it, the kid
was in bad shape.
We spent a
good half-hour to 45 minutes at the pass. There were some other tourists
up there, mostly Chinese. Like I said, the view was just incredible,
these huge mountains, you look at them and you can see all the northern
routes on Mt Everest. You can see the great Kular where Reignhold Messner
made his solo attempt in 1981. He was the first man to climb all 14 of the
8,000 meter peaks. You can see the first and second step where Irving and
Mallory disappeared in 1924. His body was just found last summer. They
still don't know whether he made it, whether they were last spotted going
up or last spotted coming down from the summit. Most people generally
agree that they did not make it, but who's to say. Either way, for 1924
it was still an incredible altitude that they reached.
From the
summit you have another rapid decent down to actually below 14,000ft and
you're in the Rongpu Valley. There you see some amazingly ancient
structures; they look kind of like Stonehenge because all that's left of
them are just mud and kind of an ancient brick.
You go past
a village or two, a couple of monasteries, and we actually passed the
hotel we were going to stay in that night. When I say hotel, it's very
relative; mud walls, mud floors, and there's rooms for about four people
and we actually had five people in our room. Of course there is no
running water, the bathroom is outside and is just a slit in the floor,
and there is no electricity and we have a lantern for our room at night.
It's not a five-star setup, but it was actually a really neat hotel.
Our goal
for the day is actually to carry on to the Rongpu Monastery, which is
less than a fifteen minute drive away from the base camp for climbing Mt
Everest from the north. But it also another 2 1/2 hours from the valley
floor where our hotel is. We started to go and then we stopped and had
lunch, but Earle and Nick were feeling too poorly, so they decided to
turn back with one of our guides. Jeff, Todd, our guide Ninda and I
crammed into Hercules for the bumpy, dusty, dirty two-hour drive to the
monastery. At times the road got really dicey. It was just sliced into a
hillside with a river raging below it, and it was just one lane only. If
another car came, somebody had to back up until he got to a safe spot.
To the
monastery, we made it no problem. From the monastery you are literally at
the base of Mt Everest, very close, and you're looking at the Kangjung
face. It's a massive 9,000ft face almost straight up. At the monastery we
ran into the Australian guy that we met on the pass the day before and we
talked to him. We stayed there for half an hour, and we talked to him,
talked to the little kid, took some pictures. There was also a Danish
couple that was there, so it was kind of nice to hear some English.
Unfortunately we could not stay any longer, and we did not press on to
the Everest Base Camp, which like I said was supposedly only a fifteen
minute drive, but given the snow conditions I am sure it would have taken
us a lot longer. It was really late in the day and we had to make it back
to the hotel by dark. So we turned around and came back.
On the
drive back, Todd kept hearing kind of a strange thumping noise coming
from underneath the car, so we stopped and checked it out, and we had
blown out both of our rear shocks. Where they were welded onto the frame,
the welds had just broken. So basically what we did, we got out and took the
shocks off completely. So hear we were in the roughest road in the
roughest part of Tibet and we had no rear shock absorbers, we were riding
strictly on our leaf springs. We have no chance for a fix until
Kathmandu. There just aren't any welders in this part of Tibet. So
basically we've got hundreds of miles to go in a vehicle without any rear
shocks. So that's about it. We got back to the hotel and it had just
become dark...
This is
Doug signing off for Around The World 1999. I'll talk to you soon. Bye-bye.
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