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Thursday 5th October - After packing up on cakes / bread and any snack items we could find, we are leaving the chinese border to make our way to Nyalam - weather is splendid and that will stay like this during the whole 5 weeks! pretty incredible when you think thats the autumn here!
i have just turned 35 and i couldnt be in a better place to celebrate it than Tibet, except with family and friends - i had everybody on board singing me happy birthday to the surprise of the local people that didnt understand what was going on! LOL
our journey was only few hours to Nyalam and that allowed us to enjoy a resting day in order to acclimate to the altitude - from that moment on we would spend the next 2 weeks at over 4500m constantly!
Nyalam is a small place - within 10 min you had seen the whole place... our hotel was pretty basic but typical of Tibet, with no heating so at night you really had to cover yourself, no hot water, and very basics toilets - toilets were the story of our travel! a whole in the ground most of the time! you needed a gas mask to go there...lol
As we walked through Nyalam, we went to the local school to find that the kids were so well behaved - never saw kids of 5 - 6 running sweeping the floor or their school and being so happy about it! and there was no teachers around to tell them what to do or supervise them! that was a sight!
the next day we left early as we had a long journey that would take us to an unknown place where we had our first rough camp by a river - that was a great experience - the night sky was awesome as it was so clear! and the landscape was just amazing too. during that day, we crossed few tibetan villages which really made us feel humble - people are living in some extreme conditions here and they still have a smile on their face - it s a big reality check for everyone that comes here.
next morning, we headed to Tingri, via the Lahlung leg pass at 5050m - it was a wonderful view of the tibetan landscape and thats also were we really experience some altitude sickness symptoms- short of breath after few steps/ light headed / some people got sick... it will be like this for the next 10 days - but there was nothing to do apart from drinking up to 6 litres of water a day and being slow in everything we were doing. we had to acclimatise to it.
We arrived at Tingri in the afternoon and stayed at the local hotel that has the worst toilet we would witnessed - we even saw a Yak coming and feeding itself on our boom-boom (John's term:-) ) - that was pretty disgusting and that night no-one had yak meat for diner...LOL In fact, looking at the restaurant we went to, there wasnt really anything that gave use reassurance on the hygien of the food served! the unusual thing was that we got served by a soldier in uniform that was helping for service! that was funny!
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