Since we've been so hard at work traveling and blogging, we decided to get away last weekend... We took a bus 4 hours north to the Nam-tso lake and spent the night in the tent village on the shores of the lake. The bus trip had a lot of stops at many bathrooms (some dumping right into the river behind it) and many photo opportunities where the locals were trying to charge the tourists for taking pictures of their yaks and baby goats (we still haven't seen a baby yak, maybe they are just not very cute...) The bus trip was made more entertaining by the annoying Canadian guy (we were very surpised to find out he was Canadian, we thought they were always super nice) that just wouldn't shut up. Well, right before we got off the bus, he got shut up by the bus driver. Anyways, it turned out that his yapping would be the least of the reasons we got headaches that day... We had already been wheezing in Lhasa (especially climbing the steps of the magnificent Potala Palace) and this lake was located 1100m above Lhasa!
By the time we arrived at the lake, it was already crawling with day-trippers. We waited for all of them to leave (buses left at about 2pm) and took a nap in our tent. The tent had very comfortable beds, 3 thick blankets per person and not one light bulb powered by the solar panel outside the tent!
We walked around slowly that day. It turned out that the altitude hit Ayse on the first day and Pete on the second day. I guess it really didn't help that we both had colds! I (Ayse) could not even make it out of the tent to see the sunset, but Pete was out there, fighting for a good spot with the tripod-wielding Chinese tourists with their $5000 cameras. The Chinese (men) really seem to be very serious about photography. They walk around with their tripods, Nikon vests, super long telephotos lenses and then they pose with all this gear for photos taken by their wives' cellphone cameras.
Both of us had a miserable night up at Nam-tso lake... It was cold (used all 3 blankets) and loud (when the generators stopped (11p) the dogs started barking (until 4a), and then the wind picked up and we listened to our tent and the prayer flags up on the hill behind us flap for another few hours). It really was almost like sleeping on a sailboat...
In the morning we took some pictures, but as soon as the bus arrived at 11am, we all piled into the bus for a windproof shelter and napped in there until we left at about 2pm. All in all, it was miserable while we were there, but now that we are back in the "lowlands" of Lhasa (only 3700m here) we are feeling AWESOME! We can even climb the stairs to second floor restaurants without stopping! The trip to Nam-tso was also a good dry-run for the 7-day trip we are going to take to the Nepalese border via Everest Base Camp (5200m).
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment