Tibet

I Had written out my blog to Tibet yesterday and was quite proud of it when i had to run off to Yoga and left the blog up, telling the lady running the Yoga place to just leave it up so i can finalize it afterwards.. i came back and it was gone! So i was pretty peaved off and now have to start it all over again! Sooo here it goes!

The airplane ride to Lhasa the capital of Tibet was filled with anxiety, I could hardly contain myself from running off the airplane when we landed. Immediatley the surroundings changed and I was in a scortching hot, hilly desert. Driving to the Hotel we passed through the town where the streets still had an old style and the people were dressed in the old traditional style, it felt like i had gone back in time! When we reached the hotel, I ran up to the rooftop to see the famous Potala Palace, it was stunning and i am surprised that it isnt as popluar as the taj Mahal or considered one of the 7 wonders of the world because it is a spectacular sight! The next day we actually got to go inside the Potala palace and climb the thousands of steps to the top and see where the Dalai Lama stayed before his exhile. The best part by far was taking all our jumping in the air photo's outside in front of the Palace. Because of the Altitude we were always out of breath but we got some good ninja photo's. Our group was actually extremely lucky, not getting any signs of altitude sickness.. Apparently the Intrepid group before us there was a guy who had to get flown out because it was so bad. There was also a guy we met who was leading a motorcycle gorup that were driving from Lhasa to Kathamndu and one of the guys got so sick he was in intensive care for 3 days and finially had to get flown out in an emergency.. So i feel extremely lucky and the hike to base camp probable helped out with adjusting to the altitude. Later that day I went back to the Potala palace to sketch the building. I sat down in the sun ready to relax and draw when a police guard came and was eyeing me, looking over my shoulder to see i wasnt up to no good. Soon after i had two police guards sit next to me for the rest of the time i sat there drawing. People who were passing by were constantly looking at what i was doing and watching me draw which was really intimidating but it was funny to see how curious they were of me. There was a boy about my age who wanted to sit down and chat so we talked for a while about Canada and school and than out of the blue he just said “the Chinese are bad people!” I was shocked because we were told never to mention anything about the political situation going on in Tibet because there are Chinese spies everywhere and if they hear any mention of it you will be in serious trouble, and some people just mysteriously “disappear”. For those of you who are unaware of the political situation in Tibet, the Chinese will not allow Tibet to be a free country, they have banned the Dalai Lama, the Tibetans ruler from the country and the people are never allowed to mention his name or have any photograph of him. This is extremely sad because Religion is such an important aspect of the Tibetans culture and not allowing the Dalai lama to be a part of is like going to school to learn but having no teacher. I am extremely curious about the whole political/ religious strife in Tibet but because we are not allowed to mention it without putting ourselves and others in danger I was really curious to hear more from this boy who was so blunt about the Chinese people. He tried to explain some things in the little English that he knew and when I nodded over to the guards who were sitting next to me as if saying “are you sure you should be saying this with these guys sitting here” he said not to worry they probably don’t speak English and I will be safe because I am a tourist but he would have to face the consequences. Luckily he walked away without the guards doing anything and left me with my thoughts about Tibets plight. Everywhere I went while exploring Lhasa there were military. There is said to be 200 000 people in Tibet but the actual number is 400 000 because of the military, that’s 1 soldier for every Tibetan! Its absolutely insane. Most of the time you don’t even know who is the military or not because there are so many undercover people and spies that you can never trust anyone. Its an awful way to live, always having to watch their backs and trust no one!
The next day Joanna, Michael, Nick, An and I rented some bikes and went for a cruise around Lhasa. After a while we passed by a college where we saw some boys playing a game of basketball. We really wanted to join in their game to have some local interaction but when we went to the entrance of the school the security guard would not let us “foreigners” play with the students for whatever reason. It took a lot of sweet talking by An to finally convince him to let us play one game of basketball with them. It was a good game Foregoers vs. Tibetans.. I am pretty sure we won the game but there was so much fouling and cheating going on that its hard to say. Eventually the Security guard even joined in our game and probably had the most fun out of all of us and did most of the cheating and dirty work, it was all in good fun though and he turned out to be an extremely goofy guy. After we were exhausted from playing basketball at such a high altitude we hopped back on our bikes and explored all the old alleys and maze of old streets, getting lost but eventually finding our favorite street food and heading back to our Hotel. I found my favorite little café to sip on Coffee and look out onto the streets of Lhasa and play a few games of Darts with Nick, which I found out I actually kick ass at! The next few days we went to some monasteries where we watched the normaly very reserved and quiet monks debating with each other. As one of the monks asked a question to the others sitting in front of him he would lift one leg and with a violent slap of the hands he would land with his foot and his hand right in the faces of the other monks. If the monks answered the question “wrong” than he would get all upset and make some more crazy violent gestures. This went on for hours and was extremely entertaining to see this different side of the monks. The other monastery we visited there were people building the roof and would pack the cement down on the roof to the rhythm of their dancing and singing. Outside people were praying either in front of the monastery or going around it in a circle, laying down, stretching their arms out, standing back up again and repeating this over and over sometimes for days on special holidays. Its amazing to see their dedication to their religion. Afterwards I went crazy shopping at the local market, so excited to see all the amazing Tibetan jewelry to choose from. We had a cooking lesson one night where we made delicious momo’s and after eating them all we were craving a good ol movie night since the restraint in our hotel had a DVD player. We went out side and grabbed a Brad Pitt marathon package, get this, 20 Movies and only 2 DVD’s I was shocked! They were really good quality too and we watched Fight club. It was extremely uncomfortable and embarrassing when some of the staff came in and watched the movie with us right at the sex scenes and they giggled away in the background as the older woman just shook her head in disgust!
Eventually on the 5th day we had to leave our precious Lhasa behind and work our way slowly to Nepal, driving in our van and visiting little places on the way. We started at Namsto Lake which is the highest lake in the world and it was freezing cold when we were there but it was a beautiful clean blue with the snow capped mountains in the background and Yaks chilling by the lakeside. On our drive we found a place that sold VCD’s since our van had an old school TV set and we had some long days of driving ahead of us. We watched Charlie and the chocolate factory, Indiana Jones, Jack and Crocodile Dundee a couple times. The roads were so bumpy and winding what we couldn’t really read any books and the scenery was great to watch from our windows but after you have seen the same view for 5 hours or so you start to get a little bored and need some entertainment. We visited SOOO many monasteries, that’s really the main thing to see in Tibet which I was a little shocked at and became very bored of the same information about Buddha and Tara’s and what’s a god and what’s a Buddha and so on that I started to just tune it all out at the end. It didn’t help that our Tibetan guide had REALLY bad English and didn’t really know what he was talking about when he was explaining different Buddha’s so we were all far beyond being confused.
We had to take a boat across a river to the first monastery built in Tibet and unfortunately we had a little sand storm that kicked up and our boat kept on getting pushed to shore, when we eventually made it to the other side we were covered in sand! The town was so quiet and old it felt almost like a ghost town. I got some great photo opportunities here and had one of the best sleeps of my entire trip in the comfiest bed I have ever slept on! Maybe I just haven’t slept on a good bed for so long my standards are really low but it felt like heaven! The next few days are a blur because we did so much driving along the windiest roads I have ever seen! The worst part about it was you could see all the bends and turns ahead so I could anticipate how long it was going to be and they pretty much never ended. We would stop for short breaks and stretch our legs appreciating the beautiful scenery. As I looked out the van window as we drove on I would see little kids waving frantically at our bus, a boy blowing me a kiss, Yaks blocking the road and sheep scurrying out of our way and heading down the steep mountain side. Our driver was really good and the drive was not half as bad as all my many drives to Pokhara where I would pray around each corner, still the only way to avoid crashes was by honking the horn around the sharp corners so if there was anyone coming from the other side they could hear you. A festival celebrating Buddha’s birth was going on at this time and we saw many pilgrims walking along the road with their prayer wheels constantly in their hand carrying big bundles on their backs making their way to the nearest city and some of them trying to make their way all the way to Lhasa.
Along the trip An and I became really good pals and we could confide in eachother which was so nice because traveling alone can get lonely sometimes when you don’t have someone you can talk to and trust. I am so grateful for her because the rest of the group was really hard to start conversations with, they were very quiet and I felt like I was constantly keeping the conversations going. An told me if I wasn’t on this trip they probably wouldn’t talk at all.
We stopped in a place called Gyantse where our hotel had another great rooftop view of the old town which looked like a castle on a mountain. The next day I finially couldn’t handle it anymore and told our local Tibetan guide, Tashi that we are sick of monasteries after seeing the 100th one and everyone was complaining about it. I told him we wanted to see the real culture of Tibet and meet and learn about the people. So later that day he took to an old village and we ended up having Yak Butter tea with a random family. He just asked the family if we could come in and look around and they were so open to sharing their home and served us tea and bread which was so better than wandering around a monastery. The Yak tea in Tibet is something everyone has to try because its part of heir main staple diet but GOD is it awful!! The thing is everytime you take a sip they refill the glass to show that you’re welcome to stay. It’s a great gesture but when its so hard to choke down you have to be rude at one point and just tell them you have had enough. After our tea An and I went and explored the castle-like old town we saw from our roof which was abandoned and we explored old rooms, imagining what was in them and what they looked like in the past. Shigatse was our next stop and the second biggest city in Tibet which was pretty small considering. They had a mini Potala Palace and we walked around the huge monastery spinning the prayer wheels that are lined up outside the entire way for good luck. While I was spinning the prayer wheels a little girl came up and grabbed my hand, it was so unexpected I was shocked but it was SO cute my heart just sank. She was so playful and cute and when her grandma was yelling for her I had to run her all the way and switch hands from mine to her grandma’s so that she wouldn’t follow me home. That night we grabbed some Lhasa Beer (1$ for 1.5 L) and played some pool which were outside and the locals joined in to couch An and I to victory! We ended up getting a little information about the Dalai Lama from Tashi the next day. The Panchem Lama is second in power to the Dalai Lama. Usually when one of them dies the other one chooses the substitute through a bunch of random visions they get where they eventually look into a lake and see who will be the next Panchem Lama or Dalai Lama. The Chinese government got involved in the decision making for the Panchem Lama who is in Power now after the Dalai Lama was exiled and therefore chose who it would be, making it a Chinese guy who they could manipulate. So pretty much once the Dalai Lama dies, the original religion and traditions die with him. This is because the Chinese panchem lama with the government backing him up. The chinese government will then also control religion … I hope that all made sense.. It’s a pretty sad situation.
The next place we stopped at moving higher and higher in altitude, was Sakya. There was a while bunch of random ruins and old monasteries up on the huge hill that I saw as soon as we entered the town and I immediately wanted to go explore them. Nick decided he would come along and we and we hiked up to the top were we found a random mysterious monastery that we tried to brake into with no luck, we explored some more and found a nunnery where we were ushered in kindly and they were all so friendly one even grabbed curiously at my nose ring with no hesitation. It was nice to explore these monasteries without having to learn all the details about the history of it and so on. Nick and I sat down at a stupa overlooking the old town and had a really good chat about life and travel forgetting about the time, before we knew it, it was dark and we had to head back down. Having a good heart to heart with Nick really lifted my spirits about the group and kept me in good spirits. The monastery that Tashi brought us to in the city was like all the others we saw but there was a man who was sitting in the big room where the monks do all their chatting. We were allowed to ask this guy some questions who we assumed to be a monk but he told us he was “security” working for the government. We didn’t press on further but we chatted after and we assume that he was one of the spies we heard about that are even watching over the monks to make sure they don’t talk about the Dalai Lama or anything against the Government…
After a night of hardly any sleep because of the high altitude and all the dogs barking out my window we headed out for another long journey to reach Everest Base Camp from the Tibetan side! We arrived at our accommodations which was a tent city a ways back from the actual Base camp. We were all so pumped about spending the night in their tents with a little stove to cook our food and keep us warm with an Amazing view of Mount Everest in the background, so close to us. We got tucked in by the Tibetan lady in our tent and tried to sleep. I was very snuggly warm even though it was freezing outside but the altitude made it hard to breathe and felt like I was suffocating. Apparently we all felt the same way because no one got a very good sleep. In the morning we set off on a hike to the base camp and used up our oxygen tanks to help us breathe. The oxygen tanks were 100% oxygen so we were hoping for some sort of mini high but unfortunately there was none, it just helped us breathe slightly better for a short period of time. It was really neat to see Everest for the second time on the other side. From the Nepal side it was hard to see the top at base camp and I had to hike up a mountain to actually see the tip of Everest but on the Tibetan side I saw the whole mountain from bottom to top in all its glory! It was also Joanna’s birthday so we had a little cupcake and present waiting for her when she got there. What a perfect place to spend your birthday! It was a beautiful day so we took our time looking out at Everest; I even had a short nap in the sun. I could have stayed there all day but unfortunately we had to do some more driving, back along the windy roads. Its funny when the only traffic on the road was horse drawn carriages or guys riding on their horses in their traditional clothes, our mini van felt so out of place. We passed so many tiny villages situated in the sides of hills, in the middle of no where. After a few more nights we made it to the boarder town between Tibet and Nepal. The drive was good until the end where there was lot of construction and than muddy roads around steep cliffs. Tashi only told us later once we arrived at our hotel that he had so many near death experiences on that road that he actually took a break from his job to avoid the road all together and wait until the road was finally finished being under construction. Yikes! The town appeared out of no where in the mass amounts of trees and was built along the side of a hill so we had to zig zag through town, going down like stairs. We went out for dinner and a few drinks and got Tashi a bit drunk. There was a nightclub next to our hotel that we decided to check out. There wasn’t many people inside just a few really young teens dancing around and drinking so we just all goofed off and made a fool out of ourselves dancing and not caring about how funny we all looked grooving to the Macarena! It was all fun and games until we realized that all the beautiful young girls in there were prostitutes. They were SO young and guys in army outfits would walk in and they would all hover around him feeding him beer and negotiating prices. It was so sad to see and I just wanted to grab them and steal them away! I don’t think any bar or club in that border town was just a regular place…
The next day we crossed the border into Nepal! Leaving China and going through customs and security was a long process where they checked everyone in the long line ups’ bag. As we got into Nepal and everyone got their visas sorted out I was informed that I couldn’t get a new Visa even though it was to expire the next day because I still had one more day.. So I had to wait to get it extended in Katmandu but they are only open on Mondays and so I would have to wait an extra 4 days, making me illegally in the country for 3 days… We arrived in Dulikhel, a small town outside of Katmandu to relax afer the long journey in Tibet. We stayed two nights in this amazing little “resort” hidden away with our own balconies over looking the villages and rice terraces below. While we stayed here Nick, An and I went on a day trek through the villages and went to a monastery where they did burning of the bodies. I have seen so many bodies being burned on my trip that it hardly phased me when we saw another one here with its feet hanging out the side of the wood but this was An and Nicks first time seeing it and An could hardly stand being anywhere near it. We walked back to our hotel room and I realized how much I missed Nepal, it really does feel like a second home to me now.
On our last day with the group trip we went to Kathmandu where I was the guide showing everyone the nicest places to eat and where to find the best bargains and so on. Its funny, I am even recognized by the locals here too some of the restraints and internet cafes are always shocked to see that I am back again! We went out for a nice last dinner and went to a rooftop bar for some sheesha to re-cap our great adventure together!

WOW that has got to be the longest Blog yet, it took me way too long to write it but its nice to go over it in writing and remember all the experiences I had.