The next morning we had muesli in our hotel room then I walked all around town looking for provisions. I bought a 1.5 liter plastic fuel bottle and filled it at a gas station. Other than that I couldn't find much of use to us except ramen noodles and cookies. I stocked up heavily with both.

Every tourist in Tibet knows the cookies. They're basic, round sugar cookies that taste a little like short bread cookies. Thank God we liked them. We ate large quantities and still liked them too, though we think in quantity they made us sick.

We met the pilots on their way to breakfast at The Chengdu restaurant so we joined them for our second breakfast. The Chinese owners had hung a giant 4-foot by 4-foot colorful poster depicting an ideal western style breakfast: fried eggs, poached eggs, hashbrowns, bacon, juice, coffee, toast w/ jam and honey, etc. They couldn't quite reach this ideal. We ate scrambled eggs with tomatoes, steamed buns, and coffee. Still really good.

We felt no need to rush for once. The top of the hardest pass on the highway, called Gyantsola, was just 31km out of town and that day we didn't plan to ride even that far. Ben's notes said that the descent on the other side of the pass is on very bad road and very shallow. He strongly recommended against riding over in one day from Lhotse and instead suggested camping halfway up and finishing the pass the next day.

Ben's advice came from experience. He and Sarah killed themselves completing the whole climb in one day, with Sarah suffering some altitude sickness near the top. Then they expected a nice long easy descent but instead got a short steep descent down to about 5000 meters followed by a very gradual descent on very very bad roads. To avoid altitude sickness it is important to sleep lower than you ride. They had to work very hard, pushing the bikes half the time, to get down to a safe elevation to camp.

Later several other cyclists said they had similar days of hell trying to do Gyantsola in one day.

So instead of having an awful day, we rode just 20km out of Lhotse in beautiful weather to one of our nicest camp sites in Tibet.

As we started up the narrow canyon at the base of the pass several children held up big clear crystals to sell us. Like the pilots said later, we almost wanted to buy the crystals just because the kids were nice! Of course we weren't about to buy rocks at the base of a pass.

The canyon, as usual, had a few green spots here and there but mostly we just saw gnarly rocks. The side of the canyons went nearly straight up in places.

The pilots beat us to the great campsite at about 4600m (the pass was at 5220m) and were kind enough to invite us to join them. We had a great afternoon, drinking lots of tea and sharing supplies. They dared to bathe in the freezing cold, raging stream nearby. Joan and I were too cowardly. Later (JOAN: as in, more than a week later, on our 15th straight day without a shower), we wished we had.

A couple of times we saw shepherds herding large flocks of sheep on impossibly steep cliff sides. I don't know how those sheep do it. We joked that one slip and we would have mutton for dinner. The shepherds yelled down to us and waved from the heights, sometimes 100 meters or more above.

It felt great to be camping with the Pete and Pat. Not only are they great company, but it was like having a back up system for everything. Their stove started acting up a bit so we heated some water for them. Then our stove acted up and they heated water for us. It seemed like we would make it. The butterflies in my stomach went away for a while.

The next morning while we cooked breakfast and packed up, a group of Tibetan nomads(?) wandered by on the other side of the stream heading downhill. This surprised us greatly because we couldn't see how they got there without coming down the cliff.

We waved and they waved back. They couldn't cross the stream without getting soaked but they made all kinds of wild motions to us, maybe trying to get us to come over, we weren't sure. Of course we couldn't cross the stream either and we were in the middle of eating, so we stayed where we were, waving and smiling for a while then ignoring them.

Then Pat noticed a couple of women tossing rocks across the stream in our general direction. We were much higher than them and fairly far away so the rocks didn't even make it a quarter of the distance to us, but it was strange. We couldn't figure out why they would toss rocks at us. Maybe they just wanted our attention.

The ride up the rest of the pass was hard but didn't wipe us out. We played tag with the pilots all the way up. We didn't get any glaciers views as we had hoped. The land was pretty much bare rock all the way up.

The wind at the top was strong and cold so we didn't linger too long. The descent was exactly as Ben had described: a quick 100-200m drop then a bad, muddy, road and very shallow descent for 20km. Unlike Ben and Sarah though, we weren't exhausted, it wasn't getting dark, and we didn't have any altitude problems so we got through it without extreme hardship. After 20km the road got better and descending more quickly.

We last saw the pilots while we ate lunch at a spot just before the road improved.

At one particularly bad place - very muddy with deep ruts - a truck got stuck in the mud. All the traffic in both directions was stopped while another truck tried to pull the stuck one out of the mud. By the number of vehicles backed up and the number of passengers from the vehicles milling around watching the progress, it looked like the truck had been there for some time. We were able to skirt the problem along a narrow strip at the edge of a cliff.

The valley got wider, greener, and prettier as we descended and approached the town of Shegar. The crystal blue skies and low evening sun made everything look nice.

Around Shegar we reached some pavement, maybe about 10km worth. We stopped briefly at the town but they didn't have many supplies and what they did have had extraordinary price tags. We continued.

Five km past Shegar was the checkpoint and I wanted to get through it that day and have it over with. I was encouraged that we hadn't seen any cyclists going the other way. Hopefully that meant no one was getting turned back. On the other hand, maybe they were all in jail.

When we pulled up to the gate a friendly looking Tibetan man looked at us and shook his head sort of secretively and then nodded his head indicating we should go back. He didn't think we could get through the checkpoint. But we weren't about to turn around at that point.

A uniformed man came out of the guard house and asked for our passports. As I pulled mine out, I dropped my pen. The guard reached down and picked it up for me. I knew then that we would be OK. When I gave him my passport I offered him my travel permit too but he waved it off. He only wanted the passports. He must have written our names and passport numbers in a book and that's about all because he returned just a couple minutes later and waved us along. He never even asked us a question.

The turnoff to Everest Base Camp (EBC) was just 5km past the check point on soft gravel. It was even sign posted! The skies remained clear but a very strong wind developed from the south. At the turnoff it was so powerful we pushed our bikes against it for about one km.

We found an excellent campsite in a wash. We were actually on a flat grassy spot about three feet above the rock- strewn wash. But we were protected from the wind and sight of the road by the wall of the wash. It was a perfect place except the wash was dry so we didn't have a water supply. We had a dry dinner.

Shortly after dark the wind stopped. Then it drizzled all night but not enough to make more than a trickle of water in the wash.

Next: Tenzing our "Sherpa" boy

Tibet Main Page World Trip