A bit of finishing and bits

ok so if you read Mike and Jason's account you can get a pretty good idea of the "road from hell" or "ride of a lifetime" or "i think I could possible die tonight". Now it would all be fine but the biggest thing we can't give up is that NO WHERE did we read in any of the guidebooks that we would even be venturing into anything remotely dangerous (seriously mom and dad, I had no idea) and then with the car's steering being hand welded back together, Holy mother, was it something else. Also, from what we saw in the moonlight it seemed to be one of the most incredible feats of construction and engineering to build a road up the Tibetan plateau so why haven't we seen some Discovery Doco on this project??? or why is there no record of this road??? or are we just softies??? NO WAY!!!! It nearly brought Lucy to tears, uh that's right people, Lucy. But we have all agreed that it was amazing and as it was a full moon night, and we could see the light relfecting across the sheer canyon ledges and in the raging river beneath, there really is nothing to compare and we did live so all is well. But boy, was it a ride. Also I would also like to mention the incredible feeling of being on top of the world, literally at eye level with the tallest mountains in the world. This was before we hit the road of death of course and we were climbing up to 20,000 ft. and were literally seeing just the perfectly white peaks of the mountains as the sunset but when you are that high the sky is blue and fades into pink at the horizon...and amazing dusty pink i have never seen before and felt soft. Our driver told us to hold on and as we passed through the prayer flagged arch to the top of the pass, we beheld an incredible sight; the sunsetting over the cloud shrouded Himalaya mountains. Yum Yum. We jumped out for a few pix and boy was it COLD... a real frigid dry cold...and at that moment we were very very glad that we hadn't gone to base camp with our feable equipment. Back in the jeep and the descent began. In the next 4 hours we would descend over 11,000 ft down off the plateau...we just kept going down down down. Oh wait a night! What a feeling! Of course within those 4 hours the radiator hose broke, the boys ran down into the canyon to get river water, we stopped by a mining town at midnight for some fried rice and to seek out a new hose, and then we winded our way down absolute sheer cliff edges on what was really like the worst logging road ever, stalling and us having to push start the car 4 or 5 times ( i stopped counting), and finding ourselved head on with huge trucks coming up the road that was only big enough for one of us and a cliff on the other side. Of course, once I found out that our MDSH had done this drive 3 times that month, I realized why his car was falling apart and also felt much more confidence in us arriving to Zhangmu, which we did about 2 AM or so. Oh what a night! Besides the fact that Zhangmu is like a super seedy brothel town built literally on the cliffside, life was good and we found a relatively clean room (we just didn't look too hard) and got a few hours of sleep before making our way down to the border crossing and into Nepal.