The Roof of the World

The Roof of the World

22 July 2009

 

And so to Mt Everest (or Qomolangma in Tibetan, which sounds something like Chumbawumba...Tubthumping has been stuck in my head for 3 days). Two days drive from Lhasa along the 725K Friendship Highway, via the thriving metropoli of Lhatse, New Tingri, and Shigatse, through several rather high passes, all 5000+ meters, and a lot of Diamox. One turns off the Friendship Highway at Pang-la Pass, where one can be swarmed by Tibetans selling fossils and offering photos with their yaks, and can pee in a hole in the floor of the 'toilet'. Thence down the spaghetti road, which apparently has 160 switch-backs (lost count at like 9), and appears to be made of corrugated clay. Bouncy bouncy.

Arrived at the hotel complex (I am being slightly facetious), consisting of about 25 yak-felt tents each with a yak-poo stove in the centre. We took over five of these, five guests to a “hotel”. Our personal one was the Yak Hotel, but the more creative Tibetans have named theirs things ranging from “Steel Firm Hotel” to “Qomolangma Grand Hotel,” which seems a slight overstatement, but give them credit for trying. Couple of guys made us dinner, gave us all the plain hot water you could ask for, and handed out thick duvets to ward off the -15 celsius temperatures at night. All surprisingly cozy, really. Abby and Elaine and Paul got tucked in by their Tibetans, we are clearly less charming and did not.

The more ambitious of us trekked the hour up to Base Camp One (I took the minibus, is there anyone on earth who will be surprised by that?). David is ambitious, went on up wearing only a hoodie with Amy, Rich, Debbie, Denis, Lindsay, and Steve. For $3, worth the bus. Base Camp sounds somewhat cooler than it is...actually a tent full of Chinese soldiers, all aged about 15, who declined to let us past the barrier as our guide's name is spelled wrong on the permit. Whatever—the barrier bars only a scree hillock, and there's another (better!) one just outside it anyhow, which we scrambled up and took photos from. Everest is in fact more photogenic from the Yak Tents, and really, how often does a girl get turned away from a mountain by five-foot tall Communist bouncers? I like to think that I would totally have climbed the entire 8800+metre thing myself in flip-flops, if not for that pesky barrier. Sigh.

Clouds can obscure the whole thing, which is, I'm told, what happened to the Dragoman truck recently, but come dusk, all blew clear and the mountain loomed over us, pristine and fierce. An intrepid posse got up at 5am to see sunrise from base camp—I did not—but when I did finally rouse myself from my yak tent at 7:30, it was absolutely gorgeous. It's stark and white and very strange in the surrounding tan sandstone and shale hills. I think I expected a more Alpine experience, but not a yodeler in sight. The Himalaya are not the Alps. Shocking.

As we've driven through Tibet, the little villages and towns are so strange. They're uniformly white, with little frills of cotton at every window on the outside—I have noted the textiles, Frost—and with Buddhist eternity symbols hung at every door, appliquéd on white cotton, and the same blue and red and yellow painted window sills and trim. I do sort of wonder—what if someone wanted a pink house?

 

Drove all day yesterday to bush camp in a sort of quarry, up early today. Today is the solar eclipse, which we all got to see via Jenny's little glasses at about 9am. Into Shigatse to leave Steve, who is going off for a Kora or ceremonial pilgrimage, around a mountain on a yak for the next 9 days. Six of us had hash browns with cheese for late breakfast in a cafe called the Third Eye Restaurant, and now we're back up to Tibet for a night before five days of bush camp as we cross all of Tibet on  the way to Yunnan, and thence to Laos.