Tom: Shigatse (July 11)

Shigatse (July 11) · Jul 15, 11:50 AM

I said I would sleep badly. I woke up in the middle of the night, aching and needing to pee. One problem was solved with an empty water bottle. The other — with a couple ibuprofen. I didn’t get much contiguous sleep. Still, I was up at half seven for the sunrise; to bad it’s cloudy out. But the cloud cover lifted off everest as the morning passed. By eight thirty the peak was visible and brightly lit by direct sunlight. There’s a hill just outside base camp that affords good views, though I prefer a spot next to the glacial runoff river. Emmarie and Julie are here with me, but we can’t stay long; the caravan is supposed to leave at nine. We negotiate for donkey carts back down, and they continually try to take back their word and charge me the full per-cart 60 yuan price rather than the 30 yuan per person price they OK’d once. It’s because each cart holds two people and there are three of us. In the end, we’re all upset, and I hold them to the agreed-on thirty. We arrive at the monastery at quarter past nine. Adele took a cart earlier this morning. Shawna and Mikael also left earlier, on foot, and we pass them about 1km from the monastery. I think we left around ten. The drive back to Lhatse is quiet — we’re exhausted and falling alseep in the car. When I came down from base camp my fingertips where blue from the cold and from oxygen deprivation.

At Lhatse I bring the Canadians trio to the muslim noodle shop. Mikael finds a fly in his soup. The girls eat for the first time in a while. I later find good ice-cream on the street — it’s actually creamy, instead of icy. We don’t have to wait for any road to open this time, so we head off to Shigatse. The road is nice when we are on it, but we do a lot of off-roading. Once, we are stopped at a checkpoint where a Chinese policeman harasses our Tibetan driver about his seatbelt.

In Shigatse we check back into our familiar six-bed dorm. Emmarie and Julie and I go for Chinese dumplings down the street. We have a surprisingly hard time ordering, despite all three of us speaking some Mandarin. We end up with two rounds of thirty (split three ways) small boiled dumplings with peanuts. Yummy yet odd. I eat a second dinner with the Canadians in the Tianzin hotel restaurant on the second floor — I try their special pizza. It’s a strange thing. Beer goes well with pizza, did you know?

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http://tom.spacing-guild.net/2006/07/15/namtso-july-12

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