Kathmandu catch up

Apologies to all the loyal readers (you know who you are, mum) for not updating you all sooner. Left Lhasa last Sunday and since then finding an internet place has been tricky.



But here's the skinny on the last week or so: Lhasa is nice enough. You can see it in 2 days, but everyone stays longer because they are so scared they haven't acclimatised to the altitude. I give it five days, but I feel no symptoms of AMS and feel no acclimatisation either. They say everyone has a trigger altitude and I guess the 3500m of Lhasa isn't mine. It gives me time to see The Potala Palace and the Joakeng though. I could go on for ages describing those, but only if I'd bothered listening to the guides. Essentially, lots of chapels, with lots of Idols and lots of pilgrims giving lots of yak butter to lots of monks. Over the course of the next five days I see this a lot. Each time the guide describes how it is different to the previous one. But it isn't... ever.



So I get the hell out of Dodge on Sunday in a big Land Cruiser with Ghia trim but no spare tyre - It's not like we are going more than a mile from a starbucks at any point... oh wait...

First stop is Gyantse. Have to drive through a river to get there, so glad we shed the weight of the spare tyre, it could have easily pulled us down. Elevation is 4050m. There is a fort that was once defended from a British assault (or as the Chinese now put it an unprovoked Imperialist massacre - They are probably right - I wasn't there). Climb to the top and feel the altitude at each step. There isn't even a good view.



Accomodation is nice. For the first time I'm not in a dormitory as there are no dormitories out here. I even have a TV in my room and watch about five minutes of Cats in mandarin before I decide that I'd rather not have a TV in my room.

So Monday we head to Shigatse. It's got a big monastery (awesome) and an internet place (even more awesome). Shoot round monastery chapels in about an hour and spend two hours in the internet cafe. Some may consider that uncultured on my part, but in my defence - it's another f**kin monastery. Onward to Sakya, where apparently there is a really nice example of a monastery.

The monastery in Sakya unusually has a bit of gray paint on the outside where all the others have black. There is a reason for this, but by this stage I'm ipodded up and miss what I'm sure will come up in a pub quiz someday. These guys are big believers of karma and maybe I should pay more attention because after Sakya we decide to shoot to Shegar for the night rather than acclimatise in Shigatse (I think everyone had seen enough monasteries) and that's were it all goes wrong for me.



To get to Shegar we have to cross a high pass (5200m) into a valley. It's an hour and a half to get up and at the top there is about 40% of the Oxygen that there would be at sea level. I guess somewhere between 4000m and 5200m is my trigger point for acclimatisation. My heart goes into overdrive, I get pins and needles over every inch of my body and when I try to explain this to the others I can't make sense. Fortunately (very fortunately) I am travelling with people much more sensible than me who had bought along emergency oxygen which they administer to me. We aren't at the top of the pass at this point, but the driver decides it's quicker to go over and down than turn around and down. So two hours and a near death experience later we pull into Shegar. I can breathe on my own, but the tingling is still there and now I feel nauseous and my body temperature is all over the place. The place we are staying is at the low end of basic. There is no heating, no lighting when we arrive and they considerately built an out-house but in the house, so the smell isn't helping my nausea. First thing I do is dig out my insurance documents to figure out how quickly I can get medivacced out (in hind-sight I may have been over-reacting a tad).

A crisis meeting later and we figure out that I can't go any lower - we are at the bottom of a valley and the three passes to get out are all +5k. We also think that a chopper can't fly at this altitude so the medivac option is out. The only thing left is to sit it out and acclimatise to 4000m. We have a Gamow bag on standby if I start coughing blood and there is additional oxygen available.

The next morning and miraculously I survived the night. The plan today is to go to Everest base Camp, but in my condition it is decided that I should stay in Shegar for at least another day and night. So the English speaking contingent leave to Everest and I am left with 10 tibetans all staring at the strange white man sitting in their lounge in his underwear. I spend the entire day breathing (something I can normally do in conjunction with other things). At 7pm I get convinced that the people I am travelling with have gone on and I am left in Shegar to make a new life for myself. If you ever get to see Shegar you will know just how upsetting this possibility is.

But they come back and amazingly I feel better that evening and even manage to eat something. By the morning I feel up to travelling, but I'm in no mood to see another monastery so we all agree to shoot straight for the border in one day. The first test, an hour later is our first 5000m pass. I get the difficult breathing back, but don't need the O2, so when we reach the second pass (5124m) we actually stop to admire Everest - the closest I, sadly, will come to it. From then on the journey gets really interesting. We drop to 2100m in about an hour and a half on dirt tracks on the edge of ravines the likes of which I've never seen. At various points overloaded trucks are coming up from Nepal and we have to negotiate our way past them on this single dirt track, with no barrier protecting us from what at times is a sheer 2km vertical drop. Oh and by this stage it's monsoonal so the dirt track is more like a river. On a few occasions I actually jump out of the car while our driver tries to get round vans. To add to all the fun the chinese are dynamiting the overhangs above the track and every so often after what sounds like thunder our windscreen is pelted with small rocks. You can't buy an adrenaline rush like it (unless you buy a syringe and some adrenaline - but I think that is illegal).





The border is yet another bizarre chinese custom. Our driver, being Tibetan, can't leave the country, so we have to walk through. It's closing by the time we get there and still the rain is coming down in a big way. After showing the Chinese customs guy all the pictures on my camera I'm allowed out to discover that Nepal is 8km away and 800m below me. This is no-mans land. The Americans get through too and bizarrely for no-mans land there is a taxi there waiting. I spend the next few minutes trying to work out if I could kill the Americans with impunity since technically I am nowhere. But when we reach Nepal there is a bridge and apparently this no-mans land is still in China - so they live.

The Nepalese don't care who comes in - they've already got enough problems inside. So we cruise through and grab another taxi to Kathmandu. It's 140km, but 4 hours thanks to checkpoints and poor roads.

And that's where I am now. I checked into the kathmandu Guesthouse - an institution. I've had 2 days of proper R&R. The weather is hot and humid, just how I like it. The food actually tastes like a chef has been somewhere near it when it was cooking and the people smile and speak English. Compared to China it's heaven (you can't tell the Nepalese that though - they just end up here again in the next life).

Pictures from Lhasa: http://www.flickr.com/photos/robinsouthgate/sets/72157600203741342/

Pictures from the journey: http://www.flickr.com/photos/robinsouthgate/sets/72157600226919371/