After our usual breakfast of hot Muesli and then breaking camp, it was about 9:45am. This may sound late but the sun didn't rise until 8:00am or so. Tibet is on China standard time. All of China is on Beijing time. In far off Tibet, that's about two hours from true time. So relative to the sun we left around 7:45am.

It turned out to be a pretty easy day. The sky was super clear again but cool. We had a pass to do but it turned out to be the lowest of all the passes on the Friendship Highway. Also on the long approach to the pass we had 25km of paved asphalt road. Not only did this make for smooth riding, but it meant we didn't get powdered with dust every time a jeep or truck passed.

The road gradually ascended a spectacular valley, although none of the views had much if any green. It reminded us both of the southwest - a deep rocky gorge with a raging river in the middle.

The river washed out the road, even the paved part, in many places. Some large bridges had also been washed out. We passed a few friendly road crews. They waved and smiled as we ride by, happy to have an excuse to take a break from their picks and shovels. Every country we've cycled in has had friendly road workers, even the ones on Caterpillars.

One thing about the road crews. They always seemed to be making very minor repairs to fairly good sections of road while just a half kilometer away there would be a bridge laying in the river perpendicular to the highway and all the traffic would be driving over undulating mounds of large rocks to get around where the bridge had been.

We saw one truck size boulder sitting on the left (river) side of the road. We imagined what it would have been like to have seen that thing crash onto the road.

We had one bit of really bad news. At one of the bridges that wasn't out (a bridge in as we started saying) we stopped to filter some water. Joan spent an aggravating 30 minutes trying to fill just two water bottles. The water purifier was broken for all intents and purposes. We could still count on the stove to boil water but we would miss the speed of the filter and especially miss being able to get a cold drink out of the fresh streams.

Even though the pass wasn't as high (4650m) as the other two we had done, I didn't exactly fly right over it. I still had to stop and catch my breath several times. But we never stopped for long. Before we knew it we were at the top and screaming down the other side.

We planned to camp before the next town, Lhotse, but no good camp sites showed up. We had to cook a small meal in nondescript, barren rocky area. If you wanted to find a place for nuclear waste, this would do. We wandered about 40 meters off the road on the upwind side to avoid the dust from passing vehicles. Nothing within a mile of the road offered shade or a place to sit.

We passed lots of people on the last 30km to Lhotse but had no particular problems with them. This vast valley is at the confluence of two wide, rocky rivers. From the air the rivers must look like tiny trickles in the bottom of the several km wide river beds. The floor of the valley is amazingly flat probably cut by a glacier. The rivers meander around the valley at will, eroding whatever gets in the way.

The highway through much of the valley is paved and raised on a causeway of sorts about five meters above the valley floor. This helped keep the children from bothering us. They would see us and immediately come running up the rock strewn side of the causeway. By the time they made the climb we had passed.

The causeway ended abruptly and the road continued unpaved on the valley floor for the last 16km into town. We hoped to find camping but there were too many people. Also the only water nearby (the river flowed down the valley a km or so north of the road) was in mud puddles dug for the livestock to drink from.

Strangely, in that wide open, treeless valley, we could not see Lhotse until we were just one km away. It was just around a slight bend to the south and around a small hill. There was no wind whatsoever so even when we got one km away we couldn't see because a truck passed us and the dust was so thick it was like riding in a blanket of fog for a couple minutes.

We stayed at an over-priced dump in Lhotse, just like all the other tourists. The London Pilots had arrived well before us and got "dormitory" accommodation for 35 Yuan each. Their dorm room had just 3 beds. We also asked for a dorm but the room they assigned us to had 12 beds crammed into a small space. Several large, gnarly looking Chinese and Tibetan drivers already occupied half the beds. We might have missed an authentic experience but we went back to the hotel and payed the outrageous fee of $12 for a double room. The 12 bed dorm would have been $3 each.

(A few days later at the same place, Team Swiss talked them way down in the room price. When they asked 100 Yuan, Yvonne said, "This is Lhotse, not New York City!")

A glimpse of hotel check-in in Lhasa, Tibet: The whole process took about an hour. We were tired, hungry, dusty, and most of all irritable so this hour seemed like an eternity. The town's generator comes on at 8:15 everyday, but on that day it was dark by 8. So for 15 minutes while we were trying to move into our room, we had almost no light. At the top of the stairs the carpet is loose. I nearly tripped on it with every load I carried up. When I got to the room I found a locked door. The woman at the front desk said the service people would open the door. But the Room Attendant was out and didn't show up for 10 minutes. I walked around the second floor in the dark looking for the Room Attendant. Meanwhile Joan was downstairs trying to get them to turn on the lights. They kept saying, "just a moment..." We didn't know about the generator at that point and they didn't bother to explain. Joan was baffled as to why they didn't just flip a switch somewhere. Eventually she found a switch and threw it at exactly 8:15 and the lights came on. The place had no shower whatsoever and the toilets were smelly, doorless places containing a hole and nothing else. That describes most Tibetan toilets but these were worse than most.

We had a great but way too expensive dinner with the London Pilots at a friendly Chinese restaurant, The Chengdu. The French Fries were more like fat, greasy potato chips but tasted great. We ate lots and had a great time talking and laughing with Pete and Pat.

Next: The big pass

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