Posts From Tibet

We woke this morning at about 7:30 on the train to Lhasa and boy was it an unpleasant experience, headache, shortness of breath, and tingling in the fingers. Then I looked at one of my mapping apps and noted we were at an altitude of 4500 meters. So this is what a sudden dose of high altitude feels like. Trying to look on the bright side we rationalized that Lhasa will be a little bit lower, maybe 3500 meters, yeh right, but before then it will get a little bit higher 5072 meters to be precise. The 5072 point arrived about midday or 14 hours into the trip. There is a bit of a sign marking this point as it represents the highest railway line in the world and the Chinese are pretty proud of this achievement. The train was scheduled to arrive at 17:30 but would not actually arrive until 18:30 so we had a lot of time to kill. So our day was take up looking at the scenery and sleeping. The altitude makes the latter activity very attractive.

Lhasa of course was the capital of Tibet and is now the capital of The Tibet Autonomous Region in China and that change is evident everywhere. Today Lhasa is a Chinese city, from the highrise appartments, the shopping malls, the elevated freeways to the large government office buildings China, not surprisingly, is everywhere. It is only on that second look does one see the Tibetan influence. And today we were off to take a more detailed second look.

Nina and I organized our own car, driver and guide for today as the itinerary for the group was 3 more temples/monestaries. So at 9:30 our guide (Chinese with English name) Susan and driver (also Chinese lady with English name Fay-Fay) arrived at the hotel and we were off. The plan was to see a little of the local country side. On the train journey to Lhasa we had noticed that grain harvesting was under way and we wanted to get a closer look. Similarly with horses. Tibetans are as enthusiastic about horses as Mongolians so if possible we wanted to get closer to some guys and their horses.