Adventure Consultants Cho Oyu Expedtion
Shigatse
Today began the road trip part of the expedition. We have three days
travelling and an acclimatisation day before we reach the road head,
also known as CBC (Chinese Base Camp). It is 250 km and the road is a
wide strip of tarmac, and parallel to the road are the bridges , columns
and tunnels of the new rail project. We stopped on the edge of town at
a fuel station, and half the team took advantage of the early P stop.
Markus grinned at the inefficiency of it all (he is Swiss you see) 'Ya,
after 5 minutes the tank is empty and the bladder full!'
Once we left Lhasa we began to feel the immense size of Tibet, the
arid air and the sharp shadows, caused perhaps by the lack of filtering
dust in these high altitudes.
They say a good dinner party creates conversation, while a bad one
causes talk. So it is with road trips. So far this is a good road trip.
Neil and Markus exchanged ideas about how to best train for marathons.
Oddly for an athlete, Neil won't eat salad, while Markus can't avoid
chocolate in all forms. Drinking chocolate features often in his
conversation. Starbucks does good hot chocolate, apparently. So does
Springli (where-ever that is) but the best is a shop in Krakow whose
name is un-writable in English, which has 20 different kinds of
chocolate cakes...'I have to go to Poland just to go there!'
In the distance Tibetan villages huddle against the grey-brown
hills. We were in the vast flood plain of the YarlungTsangpo, the great
Asian river that comes from West Tibet and will become the Bramaputra on
it's way to the Bay of Bengal. Here grazing yaks are clusters of tiny
distant dots around the far off villages.
Claudio still hasn’t forgiven Markus for ordering Hawaiian pizza, he
said 'In Rome they won't serve you for the rest of the evening.' and
then thinking about it some more he sighed 'Ah, my poor grand mother! My
poor grand mother!' So when Claudio offered a bar of white chocolate
to Marcus the reply was 'Ha! That is Hawaian pizza for me!'
Meanwhile Iza was explaining what it is to be married to a Russian,
'You know, Russian swearing is quite beautiful, it is like music. They
have so many elegant ways to say bad words.' And still the Tibetan
plains stretched far into the horizon. We did eventually arrive in
Shigatse. Though it was slower than the excellent road would suggest.
Every 60 kilometres were barricades, which were in effect average-speed
controls. The drivers had a certificate stamped in red with the time
of leaving each barricade an arrival time that corresponded to 45 km/hr.
In practice this meant that that a queue of vehicles stopped for ten
minutes just round the corner before each barrier, waiting for their
average speed to come down to the legal limit.
Unlikely as it began to seem, we did eventually arrive in Shigatse,
the 2nd town of Tibe and the ancestral home of the Panchen Lama, with a
correspondingly important monastery, the Tashilhunpo. This is a
magnificent sacred citadel.Within its walls are huge chapels housing
gilded Buddhas, and dedicated to the Panchen lamas past. Felix noted a
monstrous green image, and said 'the scary one, that must come from
Bon.' Dale, strolling past said in a low voice said 'James Bon?'
The day wound up with our first acclimatisation walk above the
monastery, to a Chorten at 4100m and then a long amble down to town and
an excellent dinner in the Lake Manasarover hotel. An excellent day.
Conversation, Gompas, and acclimatisation. What could be better?