We are departing on a 5-day road trip around Lhasa, which will include different lakes and mountain passes, culminating with the Everest Base Camp (EBC from now on) and the view of the Everest herself, or Qumolungma, if you prefer. We are splitting the car with another couple, Eric and Jaela. They are both medical students from Netherlands. Our driver doesn’t speak a word of English, but luckily he speaks “Tibetan-mountain-road-under-Chinese-construction” very well. We also have a guide, who speaks English if he is bothered to.
Our first stop is at a pass overlooking Yamdrok Lake at 5000 meters. The scenery is breathtaking! It makes one want to jump up in the air… as I did… Turned out not to be such a good idea. By the time we got back to the car, I had chills, which I couldn’t shake for the rest of the day, and when we got to the hotel in the evening, my temp registered at 37.5 C (on Jaela’s thermometer, because ours didn’t function anymore, along with the iPod, that gave in a day earlier). That night Jaela and Eric went to see the Monastery, I stayed in with fever and watch the Peoples Liberation Army 80th Anniversary Concert on CCTV 9, and Alek tried to get some “take-out”. He finally came back with a tray full of food in regular ceramic plates, but covered with plastic wrap! He had to deliver all the dishes back to the restaurant the next morning…
Since we missed the Giantse Monastery in the evening, we tried catching it the next morning. A very enthusiastic driver took us along some back alleys and delivered us to a monastery. It was a very peaceful and secluded place, even if it didn’t have the 9-tired chorten (stuppa) described by the LP; by now we had figured out that this was Giantse - even better. We spent some time there and when we decided to leave, we realized that there were dogs stretched across every trail out of the place. At this point it was irrelevant whether you were afraid of dogs or not, these were mean dogs that you should be afraid of. We waited for someone, who would be walking from this obscure place back to town. An elderly woman walked by; we tipped her and tried to explain ourselves. She waived us to follow. Passed all the dogs she let us to safety and back to town (since streets are not always parallel or perpendicular, the way out was not all that obvious).