Tibet Part 3... almost to Everest

So after 3 days in Lhasa, the guide, the driver, Jenn and me piled into the Toyota Land Cruiser and headed out. If you want to go find these places on a map, we went to Gyantse, Shigatse and then Shegar.

If you want to see where we were, the easiest way would be to click on the slideshow below and go to the Picasa Album. Jenn thought this was a stupid toy, but I bought a geo-tagger for a camera - basically it records the latitude, longitude and altitude of our pictures. So when you go to Picasa, there should be map to the right side (Photo Locations). Click on that and it will show where each picture was taken.

It does not unfortunately show you the altitude. Generally speaking though, we were between 4,000 and 5,000 meters (12,000 to 15,000 feet) the entire time. Most of the passes we went over were around 5,000 meters.

Since we hadn't seen enough Buddhist monasteries in Lhasa, we hit a few more on the way to Everest. It was a bit like Thailand... they all start to run together after a while. But to be frank, there is not much else out there. The scenery is stunning, but barren and desolate. We could not figure out how people live out there. Most of the villages have electricity (so the Chinese could give them TVs and spread propaganda most likely), but people were still relying on wells for water.

But all in all an amazing few days in the car. And since I'm sure people are wondering, the hotels got worse the further we got from Lhasa - beds got harder, water got colder, rooms got colder. The night before Everest, the place was unheated and we at least got the last space heater in the hotel. And we were staying in the "nice" places. Food was generally good (go with the yak over the chicken if you go) and the people were always nice.