2nd day on the road to Lhasa
Trip Start
Sep 07, 2011
1
9
88
Trip End
Ongoing
Lhatse, Tibet Autonomous Region, China
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
20min after another stop, we had to get our permission stamped by the Chinese authorities although it was lunch time…2h15 more than in Nepal so it was already after 12am. The lunch break was until 15h30!!! We couldn't believe it how come this was happening. Initially they told us to have lunch and that we will depart in 1 hour, then we were informed that only after 15h30 we could have the permission stamped... Another 3 more hours of waiting. What a tour…this will affect our entire planned Tibet trip! Let’s see how it will end.
After 4 hours we finally got our visas signed. Get into the bus and checked with the guide how our trip will be since we are 1 day late. She doesn’t know! She said we should decide what to do. Go to the 1st schedule stop of out itinerary – Nyalam, only 1 hour from where we were or keep on going until the 2nd goal to catch up our schedule. We had lots of questions. How come could we decide what to do? What was doable? Save? How long it could take? We didn’t get any clear answers. The group decided to catch up the lost day and drive straight to the 2nd day goal – Lhatse. Per the driver it will take us 5 hours (it was already 17h at started to be dark around 20h), per our programme the journey would take us 9 to 11hours…who’s right???
The scenery saved our day.it was just beautiful. We were in the valley crossing it surrounded by mountains. Really a scenic view. We reached 5.200m of altitude. We had a bit of headache and the breathing started to be more difficult but the views exceeded. We drove 4 hours until it got really dark and stopped in a restaurant Shegar (New Thingri) to have dinner. It was very cold. We wore all our warmer clothes and even put 2 pairs of socks. We were offered some jasmine nice warm tea and ate some soup and yak meat. We had 2 more hours ahead until Lhatse (4350m), where was our guest house. Mainly all of us got headache and some stomach ache. We passed through the highest point Gyatchi La Pass (5.220m) but it was so dark and everyone just wanted to get to bed.
Comments
Ahh!... the wonders of travelling in Asia :-)... don't get me wrong, I love it, but u will get used to things not going exactly as planned... give it a few weeks and u won't even be complaining about it anymore :-D