Into Thin Air

In the few days after the last update, Bill and I spent quite a bit of time searching for a few people to join us on a 50-mile trek between Ganden and Samye monasteries. Independent travelers are required to have a government-issued permit in order to leave the Lhasa area, and the only way to obtain a permit is to join a stupid-expensive tour ($100-200 per day). As a result, most backpackers gang up into larger groups to split the costs of a tour among more people. After a few failed attempts at joining existing groups, we posted a note on the message boards at most of Lhasa’s major backpacker hotels.



While we waited for replies to our note, we rented bikes and headed north into the mountains above Lhasa. We biked through the insane city streets, which are absolutely packed full of people, motorcycles, bikes, cars, trucks, tractors, monks, carts, stray animals, and the occasional yak carcass:



We ended up several miles outside of Lhasa speeding through a few small villages as Tibetans smiled and greeted us as we passed. We spied a monastery perched up on a hill, and decided to ride toward it. The ride was rough: we were up around 13,000 feet going straight up a bumpy dirt road on heavy mountain bikes, and it was hard to pedal ten feet without becoming exhausted. We didn't even make it close to the deceivingly far away monastery, so we turned around and sped for miles down the mountain back to Lhasa.

With a couple days of actively searching behind us, we had no luck finding people to go on our trek. Since Ganden Monastery is officially inside the Lhasa area, Bill and I decided that our best option would be to scrap the idea of going on a pricey tour and create our own four-day trip around Ganden Monastery instead. We bought food, rented some trekking equipment, and hopped aboard the 6:00 am pilgrim bus bound for Ganden. We arrived and got a room at the 15,000 foot high monastery in order to acclimatize to the new altitude — not a bad place to stay for $2.50 per night:



We had the whole day to explore the stunning monastery and the surrounding hills. The monestary was mostly destroyed during Mao's Cultural Revolution, and most of what is there today is a reconstruction of the original. Still, the monestary was wonderfully authentic, full of monks quietly chanting and candles using yak butter as fuel. We started at the bottom and ended up above Ganden on a hill covered in prayer flags with a great view overlooking the monastery:



The next day we hit the trail with our guesthouse roommate, a song-singing flute-playing German guy named Tao. The route took us across a yak-covered ridge, where we met a herding family who invited us into their home. The house was made of thick black yak hair, and we were served yak cheese and boiled potatoes along with the seriously disgusting Tibetan specialty, yak butter tea. For those that would like to try some homemade yak butter tea, here is the recipe:

1) Take a few big spoonfuls of butter, put them in a coffee cup.
2) Let it sit in the sun for a day until they get a bit rancid.
3) Pour boiling water over aforementioned rancid butter. Serve.

As we gagged on the bottomless cup of tea, we were able to chat with the family for a few minutes, which was a really fun experience. Ethnic Tibetans are really interesting and beautiful looking people — they have dark skin and almost always have brick-red cheeks. Here is the yak herding mother and daughter outside their family home:



We walked a few minutes to the village of Hepu, where we stopped in a man's home for a traditional Tibetan lunch of tsampa, a mix of sugar, barley grains and — hooray! — yak butter tea. The first day of hiking wasn't horribly difficult, although we got lost a few times trying to follow the sometimes vague trek description from Lonely Planet. At the end of the first day, we camped at Yama Do, along with a few other groups of travelers doing a similar trek, including a super-nice family from Boulder and San Francisco who were accompanied by an army of yak-men, guides, cooks, and a total of seven yaks to carry their stuff.

The next day was slated as the hardest of the trek, and the guidebooks were not wrong. For the first five hours, Bill and I struggled up around 3,000 feet of vertical climb to get to the top of Shug-la, the first of two mountain passes. We got to the top of the crazy-high pass which according to one travelers GPS reading was 17,522 feet, more than 3,000 feet higher than I had ever been in my life. The air was amazingly thin, and we had to take it really slow in order to not get exhausted, or worse: altitude sickness. The rest of the day was pretty easy comparatively, and we set up our tents inside an old rock wall enclosure. We made camp with a group of three guys, Johannes and Marco from Germany and Aiden from England, who cooked dinner over a fire they made using dried yak shit as fuel, as some Tibetans proudly observed and helped get the fire going.



The thought of climbing Shug-la again and heading back to Ganden like we had originally planned seemed crazy, so we decided to gang up with the Germans and Englishman and head all the way to Samye Monastery. The third day, the five of us headed off together up the second and much easier pass, Chitu-la, again over 17,000 feet. The rest of the morning we went crazy-fast down valley after valley, with the sound of thin flat stones crunching like broken plates beneath our feet. We reached Lonely Planet's Day 3 trek description around 2:00 PM, and decided to keep on hauling ass down the valley to see how far we could get. By 5:00 we were making unbelievable time — we were already halfway through Day 4 of the trek description. We jokingly toyed around with the idea of going all the way to Samye Monastery, finishing the 4-5 day trek in just 3 days. By 7:00 our testosterone (or something) kicked in and we all agreed to trek into the night and make it all the way to Samye. The sun went down as we weaved through the valley passing a handful of gorgeous little villages where locals said tashi delek (the tibetan greeting) as we passed by. The tiny towns were full of sheep, yaks, and some of the cutest little Tibetan kids imaginable:



We walked in the dark without flashlights for a few hours, the road lit by a little bit of moonlight and the sky full of more stars than I ever thought existed. At around 10:30 it was pitch black and we turned on our headlamps. The straight road seemed to stretch forever, and I started to seriously doubt that it was never going to end. My whole body was in an incredible amount of pain and I was starting to hallucinate — understandable considering I had hiked more than 32 miles virtually non-stop since 9:30 am without eating anything more than a snack. Finally, the five us hobbled into the monastery a few minutes before midnight looking like the living dead, where we passed out in some cheap beds at the guesthouse.

We spent the next morning examining our blisters and walking around Samye Monastery, which had room after room of chanting monks ringing bells, banging drums, and playing loudly on Indian-style trumpets. The way back to Lhasa is not easy from Samye because independent travelers are not technically allowed in the area. Fines for being outside of Lhasa without a permit are generally $25-100, which is a much lower price to pay than getting a permit legally through a tour, so we took the gamble. Our way back to Lhasa took us on a bumpy four-wheel drive road, a run-down boat across a wide river, and a public bus that we had to flag down from the street. All the while, we nervously kept watch for any police presence, in an attempt to avoid a potential fine. We managed to make it back to Lhasa without getting fined, where we ate a nice meal as a group and then crashed in our hotels after an exhausting couple of days.

Bill is going back to Shanghai tomorrow morning, and my visa expires on the 30th when I'll make my way to Nepal, where I plan to do a little more trekking before heading into northern India.

Thanks for reading,
Ryan!

Photos updated: Lhasa, Ganden to Samye Trek