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.