All the way down Karola my rear tire felt way too soft. I tried putting air in but our pump wasn't working right. Then the tire went completely flat. Even after I put in a new tube, the pump still couldn't get the tire up to a good pressure.

So all day I was aware my rear tire was too soft. It gnawed at me. Every bump, every rock, I worried I'd get a flat. This is one of the ways Tibet can get to you. I couldn't get spare tires or tubes in Lhasa because my touring bike has a 700c wheel (you can get 26-inch tires and tubes all over Asia, but 700c are very hard to find). Also, the pumps in Tibet didn't fit our valves. We bought some adapters so we could use a local pump if we had to, but it seemed iffy at best. I didn't want our trip ended early because of tire problems.

About one kilometer past the checkpoint, I finally got a flat. It was almost sunset and we had 27km to Gyantse, the next town. This flat tire had me mad. I was hungry and tired and ready to camp. Instead I was fixing the second flat of the day with a malfunctioning pump.

I decided to put on the spare tire. Joan started taking it off her bike, but on inspection, we realized the bead of tire had torn away from the sidewall. We had carried that spare for thousands of miles and it was worthless. So much for Plan B. Probably the sun had deteriorated the rubber.

As she had during my Kambala flat, Joan rode ahead looking for camping. But the valley had a lot of people. She couldn't find a private place.

Meanwhile, I removed the tire and started carefully inspecting it. It turned out a steel splinter, less than a quarter of an inch-long, was stuck through the tire. I was happy to find the cause of my flats. But I still don't know what caused the other ones. It seemed impossible that any tube could have survived more than a few minutes with that sliver in there.

We rode on into the sunset, looking for any possible camping spot. Lots of people walked the rode, or drove by on horse-drawn carts. The horses all wore lots of bells that sounded like sleigh bells. It was really cheery to hear them coming. But we couldn't get away from people. And we couldn't find any water to filter. The road was generally following a river, but it was about one kilometer to our left.

We rode for about an hour past dark, using the headlights we had carried all around the world, but almost never used. They didn't work very well. It was slow going. The road was covered with sand, and we almost wiped out several times. We saw some lights ahead and hoped it was Gyantse. But the lights turned out to be a small village.

Somewhere around 9:30 p.m. we flagged down a large jeep, but the driver, who spoke almost no English, wouldn't take us and the bikes because his car was filled with seats and it would be a pain to squish us in. By tracing a circle and a half on my watch's face, I think he told us that Gyantse was 90 minutes away by bike.

After that, we decided to just camp at the next flat spot. I found a barely passable place up the hill from the road. It took a monumental effort to get the bikes up there, clear away the rocks, and pitch the tent. Fortunately it was a clear night with no wind. No moon either, so no one could see us. The stars were fantastic.

Since we didn't have water, we skipped dinner, woke up at dawn, and skipped breakfast too. We managed to pack up before anyone spotted us. Then we rode the remaining 14.6km to Gyantse, arriving before 9 a.m.

After checking out several hotels, we chose the "Hostel of Gyantse Factory for Furniture." Our room (not much, but adequate) overlooked the town square. It had a good view of a fort up on a hill, even from the outdoor toilets. (The toilets were the way-down kind-just a rectangular hole in the floor, with a three-story drop to the bottom).

We wanted a shower but the only place in town with showers cost 10 times more than our hostel. So this was Day 5 without washing. By later standards we were rather clean.

We spent the day napping and eating at a pretty good restaurant called Tashi (the name Tashi is to a Tibet restaurant what The 19th Hole is to country club clubhouses) and working on the bikes. I put brand new brake pads on the front and rear of my bike. I also fixed three of my tubes and found that the hole in each one was in the same place relative to the valve. That meant the last three flats probably all came from that steel splinter, which I probably got while climbing Kambala, four days before. How any of those tubes survived an hour, let alone a minute, with that sliver is a mystery to me. I was relieved but embarrassed. I should have looked harder for the cause earlier.

We spent a lot of time watching the town square from our window. Horse- and mule-drawn carts filled the streets. Sometimes we saw caravans of five or more carts. Some of the caravans carried hay. Some carried firewood. Others had sacks covered with tarps. The horse were all nicely decorated and almost always wore 'sleigh' bells.

I walked around looking of provisions-simple things like macaroni noodles. I went to about 10 different little shops, including one that called itself a “supermarket.” I found very little. Most of the shops looked like how I think of a “dry goods” store would have looked in Dodge city, circa 1871, except darker. They were very dark. Everything was stacked in a haphazard manner on shelves along the walls.

All the shops carried just about the same things, or rather lack of things. I don't know how they distinguished themselves. They had lots of ramen. Macaroni was hard to find. Candy bars, instant soup and canned tuna were out of the question.

Like a lot towns in Asia, Gyantse had a town disk jockey. Some business appoints itself to the position. They place speakers in their windows and play TV or movies at full volume, loud enough so the distortion overwhelms the voices, but makes the machine guns sound really cool, all day long. I'm not kidding. from morning until night.

Eventually karaoke clubs took over the town volume requirements. That lasted until midnight or so. Then the dogs started barking and howling at each other.

What really kept us up, though, was the rat that scrambled around our room. First we would hear it scurrying around the ceiling. Then somehow it got down onto the floor and ran around. It kept bumping my horn. Several times during the night one or other of us would sit bolt upright in bed, sure the rat had just climbed over us.

Next: trouble with brats

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