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"The Road to Everest"
Page 2
Copyright © Dave Wodchis, 2004.
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October 13th, 2004
Another chilly morning, this time at a completely idyllic campsite. After some bike and bag repairs, the local Tibetan labourer came down for a look to see how I was doing. We didn't say much, just smiled and shared some sentiments about the surrounding landscape. I motioned that I had to change and pack, so we said our goodbyes.
The Tibet Overland guide, which has some excellent graphs, warned me to expect chilly headwinds for most of the climb over Karo La. At about 10:30, I'm ready to go wearing the balaclava that my friend Stephane recommended I bring along when we were together in Paris. Again, I take my time going up, stopping for food and water as much as I feel like - and enjoying the scenery along the way. There are several glaciers within view on each side of the road, and today, there were very few jeeps and trucks again. Another nice break was the lack of villages (and the subsequent lack of beggars) along the way. It can get very tiring having to deal with so many people begging aggressively and running after the bike, so I have been quite happy with the quiet.
Carrying on up to the top of the pass, the winds became a bit harsher. Save for the prayer flags and scarves billowing in the wind, the top of this pass was empty of other people - just the flags, the bike, and me. I relaxed and had a snack before taking on the downhill. The downhill was sweet, ending in a vast valley with yak and sheep herds far off in the distance. I stopped in absolute solitude for lunch around 2:30 - no sound but the wind. Contemplating going all the way to Gyantse Dzong for a nice warm bed and a hot shower, I mounted the bike and headed through various small villages on my way to Simi La.
Canadians Sonia and Pierre tough out a climb
On the way up to the first peak of Simi La, I received word from some American tourists traveling by jeep, that Pierre and Sonia were spending the night indoors in Nangartse. Dale and Fritz (the Americans) invited me for dinner, so I gave them the name of my intended hotel and sped along by a slight tailwind, I reached Gyantse around 7:15. Unfortunately, my intended hotel did not have any running water, so dinner with Dale and Fritz never happened as I checked into the Jiang Zi Jian Zang Hotel just down the street. The room itself was a little cold, but the shower was nice and hot, and it had an added benefit of having a bathtub, plus a TV for 150 Yuan. Settling for some pasta in the hotel restaurant, I met the French-Canadians again, who were leaving the next morning for a trek.
ROAD REPORT - Cycling Day 4
Distance: 88 kms (approx.)
Ride time: 6:15 hours (approx.)
Avg. speed: 13.75 kph
Max kph: unknown kph
Passes: Karo La 4960m and Simi La 4275m (short double pass)
Sleeping place: Jiang Zi Jian Zang Hotel, Gyantse 3985m
Tibet Mileage: 512 km
Worldwide Mileage: 7498 km
Comment: A most amazing and beautiful valley after Karo La. Considering the passes, a relatively fast riding day, followed by a nice hot shower and a bath!
Gyantse Kumbum Monastary
October 14th and 15th, 2004
It snowed here today - just some light flurries, but it did snow here in Gyantse Dzong, located a little more than 250 km from Lhasa. it's a one-horse town with an old fort and a monastery with a Kumbum supposedly containing 100,000 images of Buddha. There's an old Tibetan quarter, and a new Chinese section with big wide empty avenues lined with very non-descript ceramic tile and blue glass buildings. Most of the traffic, if you want to call it that, is the occasional donkey cart loaded up with barley, or a guy riding a horse down the street, but it is a good size town with lots of shops and services, so I decided to get some laundry done, catch up on some writing, and stay a couple of nights hoping that Pierre and Sonia would catch up. Unfortunately, after a couple of days, I was bored out of my mind, so decided to continue on to Shigatse, Tibet's second largest city.
ROAD REPORT - Rest Day 1 & 2
Company on the Kora in Gyantse
October 16th, 2004
There's not much to say about today's ride. It was not too eventful, other than a lunch stop in an unknown village where, while I had some meat momos in a small restaurant for 3 yuan, about 30 local village children on their way home from school, all lined up against the windows peering through the glass, hands around their eyes to shield the light. They stayed there for most of my lunch, until the owner shooed them away, only to be replaced the next group of children. Arriving in Shigatse, I had some trouble finding the hotel I was planning on staying in. Apparently, it doesn't exist anymore, so I checked into the Sandrutze hotel, which is a little up-market with those glass walled showers, but more importantly considering what was to happen, central heating!
Shy in Shigatse
Nice road outside Shigatse
ROAD REPORT - Cycling Day 5
Distance: 100.84 kms
Ride time: 5:25 hours (including 1 hr riding around trying to locate hotel)
Avg. speed: 18.89 kph
Max speed: 30 kph
Passes: none
Sleeping place: Sandrutze Hotel, Shigatse 3825m
Tibet Mileage: 612 km
Worldwide Mileage: 7598 km
Comment: Ultra Flat Road through a scenic valley.
Tibetan window at Teshilunpo Monastery
October 17th to 21st, 2004
I spent my first full day in Shigatse visiting the Tashilunpo Monastery, which has had a lot of restoration work and is also the home of the Panchen Lama, who is second only to the Dalai Lama in the traditional order of Tibetan Buddhism. There are loads of shops in Shigatse and a Tibetan market, so they warranted a look as well. Unfortunately, I think I also ate something bad somewhere, so I wasn't feeling so well that evening.
Cyclist's Dinner Party
The next day, I arranged my Tibetan Alien travel permit with the PSB or Public Security Bureau at a cost of 300 yuan or approx. $60 Cdn. It took about ten minutes and seemed relatively painless, much like my dealings with the Chinese embassy in The Hague where I received my visa. I looked around the town a little bit more, and later in the day, Pierre and Sonia from Canada knocked on the door inviting me to dinner with some other cyclists they had met. Chu from Singapore, had convinced a guy from South Korea to join him, and another guy from Japan was staying at the Tenzin hotel with them. We ended up going for a nice Chinese meal at a local/tourist restaurant. I say tourist, because they did have an English menu that had prices just marginally higher than the Chinese menu, saying it's because they serve a leaner quality of meat to the foreigners. We're not sure if they also serve leaner vegetables, as those prices are apparently also a little higher.
Singaporean Cyclist Chu in Lhaste
Anyway, after dinner I went back to the hotel and now whatever kind of poisoning I had kicked in big time. The next thirty-six hours were spent in gut wrenching agony, with excruciating stomach pains as well as the accompanying dysentery. It was a day or so later that Pierre and Sonia came by and convinced me to take some Imodium and start a course of Ciproflaxin antibiotics. They?e both doctors, so I went along with their advice, even though I hadn't had it for more than three days - my usual marker for starting treatment other than rehydration salts, rest, and water. I did start to feel better the next day, and still better the next day, but not well enough to start cycling again, so Pierre, Sonya, Chu, the Korean and the Japanese guy all started off from Shigatse a day ahead of me. During those days, I managed to pick up some more altitude medicine, and while doing so, had the opportunity to visit a couple of hospitals in Shigatse. These weren't the first ones I had visited in Tibet, as my hunt for altitude medicine had also taken me to the main hospital in Lhasa. If you are seriously sick in Tibet, here's my prayer "GOD HELP YOU!" - and here's my advice: "GET THE HELL OUT!!!" - Get to Nepal, India, Beijing, or Bangkok, because you won't get any help in Tibet. The pharmacists can't even do simple math, the doctors can barely understand how to use a stethoscope, there's no heat, and that brings me back to my earlier point about my hotel. Being sick, I was far better off to be in my nice three-star hotel with central heating, even if it was right next to a construction site that stopped work between the hours of 2:30 a.m. and 5:00 a.m., than I would have been to have been lying in a freezing cold hospital bed with completely incompetent staff that would probably have ignored me and absolutely filthy toilets.
I also had the chance to visit Shigatse's first department store in my search to stock up on some more peanut butter, and it reminded me that sometimes I forget my modern world. I forget that I am a modern child, raised with elevators, automatic ticket readers, supermarket scanners, bar codes, anti-theft clothing tags, metal detectors, and x-ray machines. In the modern world where I've lived for so many years, I take it for granted that everyone is in a hurry and has a busy life, and I believe that everything is or should be possible.
Cycling Nomads
Sometimes on purpose, and sometimes not, I forget like I did today, that some things are just not possible, and that there are still some far flung places where people at the age of an adult, are discovering, and afraid of getting on something like an escalator. When I saw this happening today, I thought I should have taken a picture because it was funny to see, forgetting that my parents held me by the hand as a young child my first time getting on and probably many more times. It was probably kind of funny to see as well, but I don't think anyone took a picture.
In the department store, it's obvious that in the town of Shigatse, word has gone out about the escalator, so locals and visiting Tibetans from the surrounding villages have come to try out this remarkable invention. Crowds of them arrive and head straight for the escalator, milling around the bottom. After I had done my shopping upstairs, I was coming down the escalator and I saw a woman at the top afraid to grab the handle or step boldly forward. I thought I should run back up the escalator going down, reach out my hand and help her out, but it was too late. I had already passed her by. I thought I should at least stop and watch this phenomenon for it's (hopefully) successful conclusion, but it was too late. I had already satisfied my consumer desire for peanut butter to go with my road-snack crackers, so I bustled away out the door, past the SUV's in the parking lot, past the bicycle rickshaw drivers on the street, and past the farmers bringing their potatoes to market on foot. I don't wonder if I should have taken a picture, but I still wonder if that woman made it on to the escalator successfully. I hope so. I really do.
Earlier in the day, I had visited the post office here to send a parcel home. it's a big post office offering banking services, parcel wrapping, philatelic collector sales, and the usual array of post office services - or so it would seem. My parcel contained some CD's of trip photos, a mini-DV tape of trip video and a couple of souvenirs from Tibet. Translated from the Chinese, the encounter as I walked up to the counter went something like this:
The clerk took one look at me and said:
"No."
"Excuse me."
"No. Go to Lhasa."
"Excuse me. I just want to send this parcel to Canada."
"No. Go to Lhasa."
"Lhasa is seven hours away, and seven hours to come back."
"Go to Lhasa."
"Really? Go to Lhasa?"
"Go to Lhasa"
"Is there a manager?"
"Go to the third floor."
I go to the third floor and it's the same story. They call someone on the phone and hand it to me. The person on the other end speaks English.
"What is your problem?"
"I want to send a parcel to Canada."
"You have to go to Lhasa."
"Lhasa is seven hours away, which means I will have to take one day to go there, one day to stay there and send the parcel, and one day to come back."
"You have to go to Lhasa."
"But don't you have trucks that go to Lhasa with mail from here?"
"Yes."
"So, why can't I send my parcel from here? This is a main post office and a major town that has traffic lights and even local buses."
"What do you want to send?"
"Some CD-ROMs, some souvenirs, and a mini-DV of my trip video."
"You have to go to Lhasa?"
"Why?"
"It's Tibet."
End of story. So much for the modern world.
ROAD REPORT - Rest and Recovery Days 3 - 7
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