zhangmu: nearing nepal.

From through the broken window of the internet cafe, in this charming mountain hamlet overlooking the Nepalese border, I'm watching (smelling) a man cauterize the bloody stump of a yak head with a small flame thrower.


Nepal's a funny country, geographically (and geologically) speaking. The northern half incorporates the better part of the Himalayas, making it the most mountainous country in the world. The southern portion slopes towards India, and its eastern neighbor is the enigmatic Bhutan. To reach the border meant rappelling, by dilapidated van, down through the Tibetan Plateau. We rested in Zhangmu, a bustling (really!) border town laid out vertically along the slope of a misted mountain.

Here, Han, Tibetan and Nepalese folks sold batteries, knock-off Northface coats, Pringles chips, turquoise jewelry, Tiger Balm. It was the first city we'd seen since Lhasa, and we were ecstatic to drink beer, eat fruit, take showers, use the internet. Five or six different languages were being exchanged out in the streets; it was a relief to be able to communicate in Mandarin again, and, for my companions, in English.
At night, we clinked Lhasa beers (full, foody) to wish two of our group safe travels through Nepal and India.

EBC.

By the time we made it to Rongbuk Monastery - four bedraggled days later - we were a little dispirited - by the long, lonely roads, the tiny, impoverished villages, the lack of sustenance. (Tibet, for all its blue skies and beauty, is terribly inhospitable in nearly all other respects. Nothing grows; food is imported from China proper, and, as such, is costly and generally non-perishable. The trip's diet consisted mostly of plain chapatis and soda crackers.)But then, almost suddenly, there we were, at the world's highest monastery, looking, on an unusually clear, cloudless day, at the world's highest mountain.


We settled into one of about fifteen tents nestled in the rocky valley running perpendicularly toward Everest.


"The Yak and Yeti" was indistinguishable from its neighbors; a stove, which also served as a furnace, was wrapped around a support pole in the center of the tent. One continuous bench marked the periphery, where we'd sleep head-to-toe. Two flaps cut into the tent's slopes let in frosty sunlight.

The trek to the Base Camp - 5km from the Yak and Yeti - felt like walking across the imagined terrain of a strange moon. The roads was full of clefts and dips, framed by igneous boulders and small valleys of purple and green pebbles. The sky was very blue; it was frigid and windy and the air up here - 5,200m high - was noticeably thin. In the far-off distance, Everest loomed like castle. Progress was therefore slow; we paused more than once for water and to rub some circulation into our raw ears and noses.

Finally arriving at the Base Camp - frantic prayer flag streams and a small cluster of Chinese foot soldier tents - felt like a mighty achievement. We were lucky, we were told; the weather had been particularly forgiving, and afforded us a brilliant view of the mountain.

We returned to the Yak and Yeti, and picked at oily noodles and played cards until the sun set (Everest blushed soft pink), after which I skipped outside to stare at the brightest sky of stars yet. The next morning, we would continue on the trickiest bit of the trip - the drive to the Nepalese border.

gyanste to tingre.

Leaving delusionally pretty Nam-Tso and Lhasa behind, we forged onward to the south and to the west, where we'd eventually hit the Nepalese border. First, however, there was the matter of a few more monastaries, the most notable one being the Tashilumpo in Shigatse, a city-shrine to the scholar-politico, and lama Tibet's second-in-command, the Panchen Lama. Here, symbolic offerings of pens and pencils, alongside the usual flutter of paper money were squished into walls, taped to pillars, buried in the vats of yak butter that served as candles.
The food in Shigatse was a welcome reprieve from stale, oily yak meat noodles on account of Shigatse's being Tibet's second largest city after Lhasa, as well as a strong Han presence.
We took a night in the significantly more provincial Gyantse as well, where traffic was a function of local goat-herding timetables.

Next was Sagya, the first in a line of smaller and increasingly rural townships along the so-called Friendship Highway (where the boulders havebeen shoved aside to make room for goatcarts or suvs or our dusty, banged-up Chinese van).

The ride was peppered with dry, dismal patches of shelter where no roads or running water, or electricity visit. Squalid, which means that the occupation of every single villager living in these remote, beautiful huddles of huts is beggar. The children - all smiling, dirty, friendly - tried to sell us pebbles and gum. A pair of urchins in yak-less, dismal, garbage-infested Tingre - one, still in the crotchless onesie of pre-potty-trained Chinese kiddies, offered us cigarettes for 3RMB. His friend, no more than 5 or 6, swung a makeshift switch of broken bungee cord and rocks and sticks maliciously toward anyone who refused.

the empty road.

Most of Tibet looks just like that - beautiful and boring as hell. Turqoise lake, gaping gorge, snowy, cloud-laced mountains. . . for hundreds of miles. It gets a little grueling, particularly if one lacks even a rudimentary working knowledge of geology (by day). By night, distant galaxies become pronounced. For city-dwelling I, it was all fascinating; I stood outside for as long as I could bear the cold each night, neck craning, eyes wide.


Glacier-gazing:

A photogenic bathroom (a loose term) break near Shigatse-

Mountain villages en route to Kathmandu-

nam-tso

Nam-Tso is one of four 'holy' lakes in Tibet (still don't understand quite what that means, except 'holy shit, it's beautiful!'), and, at 4,700 meters above sea level, holds the obscure superlative of world's highest saltwater lake. 'Lake', however, seemed to me an off-putting description of a body of water beginning under a startlingly near snow-capped range and extending to distant horizons, where the light and its reflection on the emerald waters became altogether indistinguishable.





Prayer flags in Tibet are everywhere. At Nam-Tso, they formed rippling, rainbow hypotenuses from high, craggy rock cliffs down to the water's foaming edge. I read that the colors symbolize the ancient elements, which was a particularly fitting correlation here, where white light cast by a crimson sun illuminated the skies, the seas and the earth.



After sundown, we watched the stars - of the entire, shimmering Milky Way and beyond. From this (numerically insignificant but visually soul-changing) vantage point, we counted about a hundred shooting stars, before bundling up and falling asleep to the persistent howl of mastiff mongrels.

the bends.

"The symptoms of altitude sickness," wrote my worried father, "are brought on entirely because of the elevation and thin oxygen content in the air. As a result, the brain tells the body to hyperventilate (unconsciously) to bring in more oxygen. Don't push yourself. If you don't feel well, find the quickest way to descend."
Tibet lies somewhere in the ballpark of 4,000m above sea level. I had virtually no context for regarding altitude prior to this trip, only a mounting sense of paranoia towards a condition I assumed (like just about everything else) could be shrugged off with a hot shower and a long nap. The fear was chiefly brought on by the assiduous preparations being taken by a couple members of my young, fit, globe-trotting group. They ate, beginning three days prior to arrival, exclusively fruit and bread. They took their daily Diamox; they drank water perfunctorily and obsessively. And, perhaps as a result of too much preemptive mental stress, which can increase the heart rate, which at high altitudes can induce additional oxygen depletion, they got sick.
The rest of us escaped with mild headaches, which evaporated after the third day.