Lhasa, Tibet

Paul:

this is my first blog entry. Jess has been hassling me to do some and I've even had suggestions from friends that I put finger to keyboard so here goes....

Well, we have been in Tibet for four days now. It is a very different place to China. The scenery is spectacular with snow capped mountains and wonderful old Buddhist monestaries. Lhasa is a town which is kind of divided with a Chinese half and a Tibetan half with the Potala Palace, which is the palace of the Dalai Lama, in the middle of the two. We have spent our time in the Tibetan part of town.

The altitude makes a big difference to how you are. It makes me a bit more lazy than normal (if that is possible). It definately affected us both for the first day or so. We arrived from the airport by bus which dropped us in the middle of town. As we got off I was trying to work out where our hotel was using the little map in the lonely planet. I reckoned it was about 2km away. All the time I had a couple of rickshaw drivers 'helping' me over my shoulder and making sure I was aware that they were very capable of taking us to where we needed to go. I was feeling a little tired and hassled and kept saying no, no, no, NO! So they left us alone and picked on someone else. I regretted this action soon afterwards as we ended up hiking the 2km to the hotel with our full backpacks (Jess was less than impressed, with good cause, but soon got over it). We did find the hotel in the end after about an hour of exhausting yomping and struggling to breathe.

Lhasa is an interesting place. There are hundreds of little shops and stalls keen to sell you Tibetan 'antiques', tshirts etc. 'Hello, looky looky' is a constant sound you hear as you walk the streets. The stall holders are, however, very polite and friendly and shopping here is actually quite an interesting and pleasant pasttime (I don't believe I just said that).

On the first full day, we went to a Buddhist temple in the centre of Lhasa. It was very interesting and full of different gold buddhist statues. There is a constant line of locals queuing up to visit each chapel in the temple. A massive line of hundreds of people. The whole place was charged with emotion and feeling. It was an amazing experience to be amongst this. Outside the temple there are hundreds of locals prostrating themselves in front of the temple. This involves kneeling then sliding their hands along the ground untill they are lying flat on the floor with their hands in a prayer position above their heads, then standing and repeating the whole process. They can go on for hours! Half of them are 60 plus. It looks knackering to me. There is a walk around the outside of the temple (called a Kora) which is about 2km long. We've seen a dude doing this prostrating thing around the Kora all day!

The lonely planet is an invaluable help on our travels but obviously it can never be completely up to date. It told us that to get tickets to visit the Potala Palace (the dalai Lama's palace), you need to queue up at 5pm on the day before you want to visit. After we eventually found the ticket office which was at the far end of the palace, we found the ticket office closed. Fortunately, there was someone there who spoke English and Tibetan who told us that tickets go on sale at 9:30am and queues start at 7:30am for tickets for the following day. Damn! An early start for us the next day. We got to the ticket queue at 8am and the queue was already all the way down the side and looping back on itself. I held our place in line whilst Jess went off to find brekky (coffee and jammy biscuits...Yummy!). The shop near the ticket office was playing a nice Tibetan pop song. Quite catchy I thought. However, after about 10 minutes I realised they has the same song on a constant loop. We were in the queue for 2 1/2 hours! That song is now indelibly etched onto my brain (I'm singing it to myself whilst typing this. ooh yahy yay ooh yay yay...Ahhhh). Still, we got the tickets and the palace was interesting and definately worth the visit if not quite as spectacular as we expected. They are very strict on not allowing photos in the palace. Jess did sneak one, as she was lining it up, I reminded her to turn the flash off. Too late. FLASH. The flash went off and we legged it to the next room feeling a bit sheepish. Later on in another chapel, the guards went on red alert shouting and running. The target was a guy who they'd caught taking piccies. They held him there whilst they watched him delete every single picture he'd taken which seemed to be a lot as he was there for about 10 minutes.

The food in Tibet is, how can I put this, interesting. They say that being at high altitude means that you have less of an appetite. Maybe, but I reckon it's more to do with the local food. Everything seems to have Yak in it. Yak steaks, yak stirfry, yak curry, yak milk, yak butter, yak yogurt (yakgurt?), yak yak yak. There are lots of little shops by the side of the road selling yak meat. They get massive carcasses delivered at night, which they lay out on the pavement (bearing in mind that the Chinese and Tibetans spend all day it seems hacking their lungs up and spitting it onto the pavement!), then drag them into the shops and start attacking them with massive axes and cleavers until they have huge chunks of yak meat which they hang out for the next day. The smell is also 'interesting'. They season the meat with rosemary and burn incense in the shops but you definately know when you are approaching a yak meat shop. Time to close the nose off and breath through the mouth! near our hotel there is a row of about 6 or 7 yak meat shops in a row. It takes a minute or so to mentally prepare yourself for the closed nose dash past them. In the middle of this row of shops is a little bakery which appears to sell some nice cakes and stuff, but there is no chance that i'd be able to stop and buy anything from there. (the cake probably has yak in it anyway???)

We have not had a great deal of luck with restaurants here. There is a different attitude to service here. It is common for one or two dishes you order to not turn up until you go and ask for them again. Some of the stuff that does arrive is, err, not quite what you expected. Still, it is all part of the experience of new places and we do have a bit of a giggle about the whole thing.

When we arrived in Lhasa, we did not have a flight organised back out and weren't even sure how long we were staying. Once we had decided we were going to fly to Chengdu (our next destination) on 26th, we went to ask about flights. 'no flights untill 29th' we were told. Eeek. An extra 3 days in Yak paradise. I hurried straight to a computer and desperately seached for flights earlier. We had to book 1st class tickets (oooh hoighty toighty I hear you say) which cost us an extra au$100 per ticket (about 40 pounds). Oh well, another travel lesson learnt. Always make sure you can get away from somewhere when you need to.

Anyway, we've got another day in Lhasa before we head off to Chengdu and more edible food?