In the morning thick frost covered our tent fly. We had camped in the shadow of a big hill so the sun didn't reach us until just before we left, around 10am.

After our muesli breakfast, Joan carried the tent about 100 yards west to catch the first of the sun. She hung the fly on a guide wire for a telephone pole. By the time she walked back to our camp, the sun was just behind her. A few minutes later, our whole camp was in the sun. It looked pretty silly having our fly drying 100 yards away.

The fly was like a flag: bright blue on against a brown hill. I think that's why we had company that morning. Four guys driving up the road parked below us and walked all the way up the steep hill to our camp. They stared as we packed. They even tried to help, which was unusual. They picked up and handled all our stuff. They played with my horn for awhile. At first it irritated me, but they treated it carefully. I couldn't play for them because my lips were painfully chapped. They left when we finished packing.

Our mission that day was to ride over Karola Pass. The Everest Cyclist's notes had described the pass as an "OK climb." (We later figured out he meant it was a relatively easy climb). I would say it was an AWESOME climb! The road followed a river most of the way and the climb the whole way and never got very steep. Also the road was in good shape with few if any washouts. Most impressive were the views!

At around km marker 175 we passed in front of a beautiful glacier coming down a nicely scooped out valley. We stopped for 30 minutes, had a Snickers bar, and took way too many pictures. A short distance further we passed another glacier perched between some windblown, snowcapped mountains. Below the snow, shepherds herded sheep in wide green valleys. This was the kind of stuff we expected to see in the Himalayas!

We were lucky to have excellent weather. The bright sun made everything brilliant.

As we enjoyed the view (laying on our backs soaking up the hot sun), two other cycle tourists approached. They were pushing hard and almost didn't stop. They rode crappie Chinese copies of mountain bikes, loaded with Chinese, camouflage-patterned backpacks and big, happy black baskets on their handlebars. Since they hailed from Bavaria (southern Germany) we called them Team Bavaria. (Matthias and Cornelius, a.k.a Nely). They looked really strong, but they had also had a tough time on Kambala.

They had some good news. The Gyantse checkpoint, 28km before Gyantse, had been worrying us for days. We didn't have a permit for Gyantse and we worried we might get turned back. But the Bavarians told us that someone else had cycled through a week before, going the opposite way, and wasn't even asked for a permit (though they had gotten one in Shigatse). Team Bavaria didn't seem worried. So we worried less.

We agreed to meet at the summit, just a km or two up the road, and then cook a meal together. It would have been a great place to rendezvous. It was about 5,000m high, and like all Tibetan summits, covered with prayer flags and cairns. But when we arrived, it was crowded with tourist jeeps and begging Tibetans, including one kid who walked out of the mountains wearing just a sweater, simple pants, and nothing on his feet. Then a strong cold wind blew up. It was amazing how fast the weather changed. Clouds converged. So we and Team Bavaria decided to descend a bit, and then meet.

A bit later, we passed another outrageous glacier. But more beggars and jeeps dissuaded us from stopping. We never did end up having lunch together.

Team Bavaria was having bike problems. Everything kept coming loose. The bolt that held Matthias's pedal kept coming out. Matthias had a Chinese imitation of a Leatherman tool but it wouldn't fit into the recessed area where the bolt head was, so he couldn't tighten the bolt. My American imitation of a Leatherman, a Gerber tool, fit, but we could only tighten it a little.

The road got pretty rocky on parts of the descent. We went pretty fast, though. We went so fast that Joan almost plowed right into a yak attack. Yaks are huge animals, but they're generally not aggressive. As we were flying through one pretty valley, we saw a yak on the side of the road. On the other side of the road, some shepherds were having trouble getting the yak to go somewhere. They were about to lob a huge rock across the road to give it some inspiration. It looked like Joan was going to ride through just in time to get hit by the rock. I screamed for her to slow down. She did, and the rock passed in front of her and hit the yak.

The yak went nuts, running around in circles and snorting. A horse staked nearby went into a panic, too. It started running around at the end of its rope, whinnying. Joan raced through, afraid to look back. Team Bavaria and I stopped and waited for the yak to calm down.

Then I got a flat. Unlike the first one, on Kambala, this flat got to me. The first one could have been a fluke. But another one so soon. Because of the rocky downhill, I was sure the flat was the result of a pinched tire. The wind was blowing strongly and uncomfortably so I didn't have time to check. If I had, I could have spared us some disaster to come. Instead, I just put a new tube in and we continued.

Pumping up the tire was hard. Although we had lots of spare tubes and patch kits, our pump was on the fritz. We had a double-shot Cannondale pump, one that pumps air in when you push, and when you pull back for the next stroke. A one-way valve on the pump had broken, so for the past few months, the pump only worked on the pull stroke. With half a pump, it took a long time to fill tires, and I never could get very high pressure.

Now I was scared. Was Tibet going to be British Columbia (12 flats in 3 weeks) all over again? We still had a hell of a long way to go. We hadn't even gotten to Ben's Notes' Day 1 (Ben's the guy who sent us road notes on the Friendship Highway, but his riding started in Shigatse, which was still a day-and-a-half ahead of us). It was the first of many times on the Tibet trip that my stomach churned and I felt we couldn't make it. It felt bad.

Team Bavaria rode on while we fixed our flat. That was OK with us. It's hard trying to match your pace to anyone else's.

After the steepness ran out of the descent, the skies cleared and we were in a pretty river canyon with lots of villages. They seemed to have terraced every piece of land possible for barley farming. I was constantly amazed at the places where they grew stuff. The soil had so many rocks and so little life. But there the crops were.

As usual, some kids tried to stone us, and others chased us along the road. We started seeing lots of villages, so we couldn't camp. We wanted to make it all the way to Gyantse but it was too far: after a sweet 20km descent, we had a steep , 100 meter climb up a hill near a big dam project. That's when we saw Team Bavaria again, but not as we expected: their bikes were on the back of a Chinese truck that passed us near the dam.

Our road got narrow and looked really bad-like a temporary detour around the dam project. At the top of one hill, we went down some switchbacks that gave a good view of a town below. But it looked like our road dead-ended at a construction project. We didn't want to go all the way down and then have to ride back up. We had already ridden at least half a km down the hill when our doubts grew. I kept hoping to see a jeep or a big blue truck come up the road, so we'd know it went through to the town. But there was no traffic.

So I turned around and climbed back up the hill to ask directions. It turned out we were on the right rode. That little side trip cost us 25 minutes. It was just before sunset.

But maybe the delay was good. Soon after that, we rode through a not-so-small town. Just before town there was a gate across the road. So here was the checkpoint we had worried about. We had talked about trying to cross the checkpoint in the dark, but we were in plain sight, and we were too tired for late night border jumping. So we rode right up to the dilapidated wooden shack that we guess was the guard's office. As we approached, the kids went crazy, yelling and running around as usual. But instead of throwing rocks, several of them climbed on top of the counter-balance, making the gate rise for us. We didn't stop. We rolled right through, quickly but casually, hoping not to hear HALT! or anything like that.

We didn't. No one was on duty. It was 7:30 p.m. We didn't know if they were off-duty, or if they just didn't care about a couple of bikes.

Next: Sand-covered nightmares, and oh no, another flat.

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