street scenes

A random set of impressions from Tibet. We go from Lhasa to the Nepal border-- imagine driving from Calgary to Vancouver on logging roads, with three 18,000 foot passes.

-- In Xigatse, a Tibetan guy is driving a tractor on the main street, towing a trailer full of Tibetan farmer types. This Chinese guy in a suit and no helmet passes the Tibetan and clips his wheel. The Chinese guy drops tyhe bike and rolls across the road. Comes up screaming. Launches himself at the Tibetan, tries to punch him. The Tibetan pulls out a two-foot sword. The Chinese guy backs off.

-- In Lhatse a boy with a thumb growing out of his thumb asks us for money and food.

-- Somewhere between Ritung and Lhasa we play pool OUTDOORS in the sunshine.

-- A monk is wearing white and yellow two-tone loafers, a North Face jacket, white socks, purple robes, and is talking on a cellphone. Why is it that when monks do anything not monkish, they look funny?

-- at Everest Base Camp they bury their vegetables in the mud come fall, and light fires in spring to thaw the mud and get the food out. The landscape is so parched that even yaks get fed hay. There's a village-wide waterfight thing going on-- all the girls are getting chased and soaked by boys.

-- this skinny ripped Brit from Yorkshire and a Norwegian chick show up on bikes. The Norwegian looks tall strong Nordic competent and beautiful. The chick checks into a tent "hotel" while the Yorkshireman builds-- what else-- a stone wall to protect his tent from the wind. The Norwegian chick apparently can ride 200 miles and climb 5.12 but she pussies out as soon as there is any hassle whatever, like a bit of wind or their stove won't light.

-- We're travelling with German Marco and his trashy Ossi girlfriend. East-bloc "style" means tight high-waisted pants, bad skin (something Wessis rarely have), heeled boots and way too much cleavage. Marco has a shit fetish. H is vocally horrified by every toilet he and his woman nee to use.

"CAN YOU PLEASE CLEAN MORE PERFECTLY ZE TOILET?" he barks, despairingly, at the hotel guy in Gyantse, "MY GIRLFRIENT MUST VERY URGENTLY USE ZE TOILET!"

He is fascinated with the yakshit pies the Tibetans put on their roofs for use as winterfuel. And his poor ass can't handle the pounding insane road.

-- Macke and I make it outside to catch sunset on Everest while everybody else is getting wasted off of 1.5 beers at 5000m (16,000 feet). We get ten minutes of full-glory light.

-- We hitch from EBC turnoff. Since we need good karma, I build a cairn and Macke befriends the only guy within 100 miles, a Tibetan with a huge ancient tent who filsl Macke's water bottle with (EWW) yak butter tea. It works. Within one hour, we catch a ride to the border in an empty LC whose drivers argue the whole way.

-- we meet a Jap cyclist whose most recent adventure was Argentina-Alsaka in 19 months.

-- As we drop into Nepal, we get trees, ground cover, waterfalls, and slower heart rates. Macke says "air smells nice, huh?" and the driver promptly fires up a smoke.

-- in The Last Chinese Hotel of my trip, in Zhangmou, there is good news and there's bad news. The good: the toilet exists. The bad: its got a hole and Macke promptly pisses in it and floods the bathroom.

-- Zhangmou at 11 PM is bustling-- cars and trucks move goods, people eat and have their hair done and play video games, and wow, are the girls ever trashy.

-- A Nepali comes up as we cross the Nepal-China bridge and says "Helicopter?" This is Kathmandu joke-talk for "rickshaw" (e.g. "ha, welcome to the third world, Nepal Division, we suck so much that our helicopter is a rickshaw") but the guy is weirdly serious. Yeah, he IS serious. $125 U.S. gets you a chopper to K-town. Fuck, there's a Maoist strike. We have to wait a day before going on. We take the longest busride in the world to Barabhise. The bus has more people on the roof than inside it.

-- K-town. Steak. Coffee. Pizza.