So we got to Nepal yesterday which is really cool.
TIbet to Nepal was really one of the funniest and interesting trips of my life. Just getting into Tibet was interesting as we were unable to get the permits we needed, but we took the train anyway and managed in ok.
We went to a monastry that was out of bounds to tourists without the second permit which we were also unable to get, but we went anyway, and the police there gave us a 50yuan fine - that is about 10nz - each.
But the fun started when we were trying to get from Shigatse to Nepal. We found out from the PSB - the Polce guys - that we didn't need a permit if we were going straight to Zhangmu, so we decided to skip Mt. Everest, which we saw from afar but could not get a visa to see up close, and head straight to Nepal along the high way.
So Tuesday morning we got up really early and headed straight to the bus station with confidence as we didn't need a permit. We went to buy a ticket and they wouldn't sell them to us. We tried to pay the driver directly but no one would let us on.
Jason and I decided to go to the PSB to get a little note from the police man to tell people that we were allowed on bus. The PSB wa meant to open at 9:30, come 11:15 there was still no sign of opening so we decided to go back to a large group of Mafia looking men who were willing to take us about half way to where we wanted to go. That trip was very uneventful with a nice brand new smooth road and we went really fast.
We got to our destination which was a stretch of shops lining about 30metres each side of the main road - a really western town where people would ride rotary hoes rather than horses and carts pulled by donkeys would fly past.
Once we arrived at this town I went up to the police guy who was manning the raod block arm and asked him who could take us to Zhangmu, the Tibet-Nepal border town. He left his spot and spent about 5 minutes wondering around asking if any one was going there. The one bus a day there had already left hours before. The travel book we had said that it was about 4 hours and a road that was "a little rough", but we finally found a convience store owner with a mid 80s Jeep who was willing to take us for 1500yuan total - that is about $75nz each or 300nz total. However, he seemed to think it would take about 8 hours - we were a little dubious about this however.
Well after he managed to get his car started - it took about 10 minutes and he could only get it started in first gear for some weird reason - we took off and quickly hit a fairly good gravel road which we followed a it got gradually worse for about 2 hours. We got pictures of Everest and a few other mountains but didn't really stop as we were eager to reacht he edge of the plateau before the sun went down as it was meant to be amazing.
Next is where the fun started. This guys Jeep had a few mechanical problems which he failed to fully disclose to us. We encountered the first of these about 2 hours into the trip. Dad will know that in these old jeeps the steering rack is connected to a steering arm hooking straight to the front right wheel. A much longer arm bolts thorugh this shorter arm and then runs to and steers the left wheel. Well this left sterring arm sheered it's bot off and was left dragging on the ground. This meant the left wheel didn't turn. Well he fixed this by ramming an allen key through the pin whole and wrapping 20metres of no. 8 wire around the area where one arm bolted through the other. We took off at high speed and it seemed to hold well. We assumed that we would go the rest of the way on this system - little did we know what the road turned into.
The driver with more foresight pulled into a village of Tibetan Mudshacks about 15 minutes up the road and found a mechanic - which in Tibetan we now realise man with mysterious high power welding machine. So this old guy Mehanic was summoned from his drunken stupor at the little ale house and came to "fix the Jeep". This fixing process began with a 10 minute search around a junk pile for old metal he could do stuff with - at this point the amazing super welding machine was yet to be unvielded.
Our driver and Tibetan grandad Syd decided on the end of a broken screw driver and showed it to us as we watched is disbelief, uncertain as to how this was meant to help. It was then that the door to the workshop wa opened and a tractor-like engine connected by long cables was started up. The man then pulled funny $1 warehouse sunglasses out from his pocket, crawled under the jeep and proceeded to weld the two steering arms together with the old screw-driver welded into the two arms to ensure they were solid. Had we known the state of the road to come we would have been sceptical of the effectiveness of this fix job which the man charged $2nz or 10 yuan to perform. (Chris will have more about this experience and the people we meet there.)
So we carried off again and motored quickly, we thought perhaps far to quickly considering the potential for the steering to come undone at any moment. But off we went over the most beautiful alpine area in the world. We kept wanting to stop for pictures but the driver was insistent that the views we wanted were only a little way ahead. And they were. We climbed to the top of a 5200m pass and that was the edge of the plateau. The mountain peaks we could see before turned into huge mountains which we could see from base to peak - we were at the Himilayas. We stopped and took photos, but as you can imagine 5200m at 8:00pm in a northern hemisphere late October, wa a tad chilly so our photo taking lasted about 5 minutes - lukcily the ast few minutes of sunlights.
The road from here went from bad to terrible. We dropped from 5200m to 2500m in only about 100km. That drive took 7 hours and this is where all the real fun began. We took off from the top and the road descened quickly into massive gorges where the road was only just hanging onto the side. It was like someone had built a road around a fiord in Milford sound. It was just hacked out of the rock. We follwed this road uneventfully for about 2 hours and then the "brand new" hose connecting the raditor to the engine burst. Luckily we were a good 1000+ metres below the pass and it was only just warm enough to get out of the car and try to fix it.
The process began with Jason, Mr. Driver and I scrambling down a steep sloop to a river to fill our empty water bottles. Then began a 1 hour process of fixing the radiator hose. The one on the Jeep was screwed so he grabbed his old one, the one he had just replaced, and attached that. However, he had replaced that one as it had a huge split in it. We wrapped sellotape around the hose to stop it from leaking in a process that took ages and ages. (More about the details of this later). We then jumped back into the car and with only a minimal amount of leakage drove "around the corner", literally no more than 1km, to a village. Here we jumped out and ate food, the first meal of the day at 11:00pm. Our driver rushed off to find a new hose.
Interestingly, this worker miner camp shanty town had great food and at 11:00 at night our driver was able to get a local to fabricate exacly the right hose for him out of top quality pipe used in their road working rigs, and the hose and installation only cost $10nz, including the late night hassle me from bed fee. Our meal was the same price and really really yummy. It was however freezing so we waited in a small internet cafe occupied by chinese kids playing a dancing game. Really funny.
Our driver promptly returned and despite it being midnight insisted that we go back down the last 33 km of road to Zhangmu. This road is under heavy construction, much needed as it is currently the most dangerous road in the world. The huge cliffs feel hundres of metres, perhaps over a thousand at there highest point, to a river below. The road continued to wind along the cliffes as the descent from the Plateau continued. This portion of the drive was filled with terror and fatigue as the road seemed to descend from one bottomless canyon to another, each time the road becoming steeper and more difficult than before. Everytime the road widened enough to feel comforable workman camps of heavy canvas tents emerged at the road edge and heavy equipment was parked in ways to take our vechile to the cliff edge. Moreover, this road is the main shipping highway between Nepal and Tibet. So, at some point we came accross huge trucks lumbering up the hill towards us.
Somehow during our first truck encounter the Jeep stalled and would not start. We all a\had to jump out and push the truck to the very edge of a huge precipice and wait for a convoy of massive vehicles to roll on past, one coming to with n only a cm of smashing out little jeep with its rear tail. Well needless to say the drive down was insane and we can not tell if the dark augmented or reduced the fear we should have felt. It did mean however we did not get any photos.
So around 2:30 we rolled into Zhangmu, with a huge sigh of relief. We found a place to stay for a few hours until we walked accross the border, 10nz for all for of us. It was a brothel I am sure and the red halkway lights were creepy. But there was little choice. We paid our driver another 800yuan between us - about $60nz just because we felt guily that we had forced anyone to ride that road - and then we went to our room and didn't sleep for aleast an hour after that despite absolute fatigue.
Then the next day we got to nepal.
This is the short version - I will write this adventure in more detail later.
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