Last of Lhasa
We reached the Airway Hotel around 1630 and were allocated a different room. This time it also offered a view of the Potala but from a slightly different angle.
We took a cab, along with Denise, to Barkhor for some shopping. We bought a door knocker, a horn (musical instrument) and a pencil case. They were all bronze items. We were wary of buying things that were overtly Chinese or Nepali as our souvenir of Tibet.
We had dinner at Snowlands Restaurant. It was an Indian/Nepali style meal that we all enjoyed. It was a nice last meal in Lhasa and Tibet.
Pleased to be leaving
Back at the hotel, I felt quite pleased that our time in Tibet has come to an end. I was sick of the sleepless nights due to altitude. And the was also the constant aches, especially in the neck and head. Plus breathlessness. The extreme dryness was also making me thirsty and my nose was very dry.
Kim was having a heat reaction of some sort and developed lumps on his forehead. He also felt the onset of a cold.
Ramblings about Tibet
I feel we visited Tibet at the right time of year. The colours of autumn were gorgeous. The temperatures were cool in the shade but scorching in the sun. The sub-zero nights are irrelevant to us as we’re in bed by 7 or 8 pm! We never got a chance to use our cold-weather gear!
The Tibetans are extremely devoted to their form of Buddhism. We’ve never seen such devotion to a faith anywhere else, and it takes up a disproportionate chunk of their lives. Some people do seven pilgrimages from the wild west to Lhasa each year, each trip taking one week in each direction! And the guide described it as “not very often”.
Most Tibetans (esp women) wear their traditional dress, and the nomadic people do not bathe. Our guide sighed as he saw some Tibetans in “Chinese clothing” (what we call western clothing), and was proud to proclaim that monks at the Tashulinpo Monastery wear Tibetan shoes rather than “Chinese shoes” (ie normal western shoes) unlike their counterparts elsewhere. Seems to be some resistance to modernisation, and vilifying such trends as “Chinese”.
To be fair, he doesn’t vilify everything Chinese. He was quite quick to admit that many temples were destroyed in China during the Cultural Revolution, and this wasn’t targetted at Tibet. In fact, many more temples were probably destroyed in China compared to Tibet.
Our guide’s English wasn’t very good and was hard to understand at times. I do pretty well understanding him as my ears are quite forgiving towards accents and mistakes. “Sky-burial”, the ancient Tibetan custom of chopping up corpses to feed the vultures was referred to by our guide as “Sky-bury”. Denise thought for a long time that he was talking about sky-berry, some kind of fruit!