10 January 2009
We were ready for 9am breakfast, but no-one else was so we made plenty of noise dragging our luggage downstairs and plonked ourselves where we sat yesterday even with the sleeping person and about 0919 Lapsang appeared and we had breakfast. SB had Tsampa a Tibetan breakfast of roasted barley flour, tea and butter if you wanted, you mix it up to slurry.
We left the lodge at 0930 and started a very long and windy drive up to a view point for Everest and surrounding mountains. We continued climbing up and through another pass to Gyatso La (5100m) before finally starting to descend. We continued the drive stopping at Lhatse at a fairly westernish Chinese restaurant, although the town was quite large we got a lot of stares and waves and hellos. The town is a mix of the old and new and we left down overtaking horse/carts and tractors/trailers, all packed to the brim with people and goods and highly decorated with flags etc.
We continued the drive to Narthang Monastery (12th century) and was able to go into the hall to hear the monks chanting and playing musical instruments. This monastery is famous as it held the printing blocks of the scriptures, although only about 8000 remain, some are still hidden and the remainder destroyed during the cultural revolution. About 130 monks sill reside at the monastery and there is also a nunnery beside.
On arriving into the outskirts of Shigatse a car in the centre of the road decided to turn right straight into us, and even weirder, into my passenger door; weird because today I swapped sides with SB. There were suddenly lots of people mulling around, but we were okay and only superficial damage to the car, so the other guy paid some cash and we continued our journey to our hotel (Yak Hotel) in the Tibetan side of the town. It was flash on the outside, but the room could do with a clean and a vacuum and the 24 hour hot water really only meant slightly warm. Still I had a shower and washed my very grotty hair.
We wandered into the town and the entrance of the monastery before heading back through some very persistent beggars who try to get into your pockets, we physically had to push them off.
We had dinner at Gongkar Tibetan Restaruant and called it an early night. On returning to the hotel, SB managed to get a piping hot shower – so not fair.