Tibet, once the home of the Dalai Lama, a place of great spirituality, a magical Shangri-La but that wasn’t what attracted to me to this land, no,instead it was the chance to bask in the sight of the Mother Goddess of the World, the towering Chomolungma, sometimes known as Mt Everest….
While there are roads all the way to Everest Base Camp in Tibet, it’s not so easy to get there. In Tibet it’s all about permits, to get in as a foreign tourist you need a permit, to get to a lot of the places outside Lhasa you need a permit or two. On top of that you need to hire a landcruiser and driver (and for some places a guide too) to take you there.Naturally this costs money so you need to find some friends and so the dating game begins….
All over Lhasa in the hotels where travellers are found, there are noticeboards where people advertise themselves as available, or groups looking for the perfect person to join them ready to experience the next great adventure. Searching through the noticeboards each day becomes second nature and part of daily routine, sometimes you’ve only just missed out on the trip, other times they’re not going quite where you want them to go and other times you just don’t like the people going….After a few missed opportunities I found my group, none of these pesky annoying men, just three women, me and the driver…..
The trip was a six-day trip to the base camp stopping off at towns and monasteries along the way. Of course for some of the girls the monasteries were the focus of the trip and the base camp was just an added extra, I can’t understand some people’s priorities at all! All these monasteries were beginning to blur into one for me, though that said the monastery in Gyantse did have a multi-tier stupa which was the only one in Tibet and looked more Nepalese than Tibetan. On every level on the stupa were rooms filled with art and statues of Buddha.
Another highlight of the road trip was Lamdok-tso, another beautiful turquiose blue lake nestled in the mountains, so many of the lakes in Tibet seem to have this unreal colour, it’s amazing to see.
After three days we got to Rongpuk Monastery the main stopping off point for trips to the base camp and here unfortuntately we stayed for the night. By the time we arrived there were no more rooms at the inn and so we nearly had nowhere to stay, no even a stable but fortunately we ended up staying in a room in the monastery, not quite palacial but one small step up from the stable.
The next day we got up early and started our short 8km hike from Rongpuk at 5000m to Everest Base Camp at 5200m, all along the route we had clear views of the mountain, we were very lucky to have clear skies and good weather, I didn’t even need half the warm clothes I’d brought. The scenery was all very bare and rocky and nothing grew there, though there were still the ever present yaks to be seen here and there.
The base camp itself is a tent village and has an definite charm about it,there are tent hotels where you can stop and have tea or just stay the night with the mountain behind you. There’s even a hotel called Hotel California….
That said there’s isn’t much you can do there but look at the mountain, going further requires guides and expensive permits but it felt good to be there, so we stayed a few hours before heading back down to our car. Instead of walking back we took a more relaxing route….All the way up we were passed by fellow tourists going up and down by horse and cart so a couple of us decided to see what it was like and it was good, the driver sang to his horse all the way and we just sat back and let the scenery flow by……
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