This was going to be a long day and all of it was going to be on the bus! The day before we’d stopped in Zhangmu on the Tibet-Nepal border, instead of travelling for another couple of hours up the road to Nyalam. This meant two things, firstly we had an extra two hours of driving on what was already an all day drive. Secondly, is the rapid altitude gain. The most important rule of altitude is that once above 2,800m you must not sleep more than 300-500m higher than the night before. Ascending rapidly can cause altitude sickness, mild altitude sickness can take the form of a headache, nausea, sickness and in moderate/severe cases your lungs filling with liquid, bad altitude sickness can lead to HAPE which is fatal if untreated immediately. Nyalam is situated at 3,700m above sea level and although that would have been a dangerous altitude gain on the first day (900m) it wouldn’t be as dangerous as going from Zhanhmu (2,300m) to Lhatse (4,100m) in a single day. We would be gaining 1,300m above the threshold in a day, an extremely dangerous plan! And we had people on the tour who hadn’t trekked and hadn’t acclimatised to any altitude. (As a side note we will be complaining to the tour organiser about this reckless disregard to altitude). We left Zhangmu at 9am. For two hours the bus drove along a road literally hanging off the side of vertical cliffs. The valley was long and deep and we were constantly climbing for all of the 2 hours. At one point we saw a huge mass of prayer flags and asked to get out and take a look. The flags were over a side valley and the road was on a bridge to cross this valley. I looked over the edge of the bridge and couldn’t believe how high we were, it must have been 300m+. My legs went weak with the height! After a couple of hours driving the scenery had changed from the green of the valley to a yellowish, dry landscape with only a little plant life. Just a dry, stoney, desert like landscape. We had reached Nyalam and already gained a lot of altitude! Just after Nyalam the traffic was stopped. The road had disintegrated in a landslide and a bulldozer was blocking the road while another vehicle pulled loose stones from the hillside before unblocking the road of boulders. The landslide must have been very recent. We were stopped there for about 90 minutes, putting us even further behind schedule. From here we drove for hours through the desert landscape. It...
Read MoreWe were told that the minivan would pick us up at 6:30am. We had asked the night before if 6am was too early for breakfast. The manager had assured us that was fine, just come down at 6:15am. After a pause he repeated this, but added, “maybe 6am”. On a usual day, at around 9-9:30am breakfast takes 45 minutes to be cooked and eaten, so we weren’t entirely convinced. I decided 5:50am I’d go down and get the process rolling. We woke at 5:45am after a bad nights sleep and put the last few things in the bags. We went downstairs at 5:55am and found the manager was awake and sat in the lobby. It took until 6:20am before the scrambled egg and toast was brought through. 25 minutes to make scrambled egg, toast and coffee! He then brought our cornflakes and milk. That must’ve taken about 30 seconds, why not do that first? Just as we were finishing at about 6:30am a guy came in looking for us. He said the rest of the group were eating breakfast at a nearby cafe (we hadn’t been told about breakfast) and that as we’d already eaten we’ll be picked up from the hotel once everyone had eaten. That would be at about 7am. Dammit, we could’ve slept a bit longer and not rushed our breakfast. We finished eating, got our bags and sat in the lobby reading the newspaper. At 7am two men arrived on motorbikes. They had come to collect us and take us to the cafe where the rest of the group was. We had a huge rucksack each (we bought a lot extra equipment in Nepal which we wanted for Tibet and we had souvenirs weighing quite a bit), plus a day sack to be kept with us containing money, passports, books, phones, etc. Then we had a canvas bag with bottles of water in (it was 37°c outside, sitting in a minivan all day would be hot). We were told to get on the back of the bikes with all these bags. We argued, can’t we walk? The guy responded it was a 10 minute walk, or 2 minutes on the bike. They pressured us until we agreed. Annemarie got on one bike with her rucksack and the guy rode off. I had the rucksack on my back, the day sack on my front and I wrapped the canvas straps around my hand as best I could and held on to the handle. This was the first time I’ve ever been a passenger on a motorbike (except a couple of minutes letting Annemarie ride slowly on...
Read MorePosted from Rikaze, Xizang (Tibet), China.
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