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27 May 2007

to Tibet - Day Nine: Banana Lhasa

It is recommended that your first day in these high altitudes be taken easy. Thin air makes for tough breathing and you can get headaches, nausea and barfing. I think. Which is why the morning trip to the Drepung monastery was cancelled and replaced with a garden and museum. Which is why half way through this announcement i exchanged glances with Jas and we jettisoned off of the bus.

It was also recommended that i stay out of the sun after getting a pretty good burn on the Great Wall. So the first thing we did was rent a couple of bikes and cruise around town under a cloudless sky. The guy at the hotel didn't want to rent them at first citing they were all broken. On a second more insistent appeal he caved in quickly and we were off.

These bikes were brilliant. Solid Chinese steel juggernauts. What they lacked in braking capabilities they made up in spades with wobbly pedals, bent rims and hands down unbeatable catastrophic weight. Once you got these puppies rolling there was no stopping them and your only recourse in the event of an emergency is to try your luck at manoeuvering or ghost ride it like a cannon ball that would surely kill anything that it struck.

We dropped by a tool store and picked up some crescent wrenches and at a bike shop to get a new bolt for the seat post because i was tired of knocking my teeth out with every pedal pump. With brakes tuned up we covered a very good portion of the city in lawless winding traffic. The pinnacle was a half hour climb behind the Sera monastery to look at the city from above. Lhasa fits snug into a valley with compartmentalised neighbourhoods that read much like circuit boards from a distance. It seemed like the Chinese had rebuilt much of the city aside from the 7th century Potala palace in the centre. In one area, new stone houses were sprouting up on what looked like the rubble of wood splinters and clay. Two kids came out to race us on bikes. The one guy behind me tried rubbing tires and bailed. Funny nutters. Still too innocent to make any concern of our out of town appearance, they seemed just genuinely stoked to have some other kids to play with.

We had breathed in about as much diesel fumes and sun rays as we could for the morning . It was an easy afternoon back at the hotel after being sastisfactorly acquainted with the city. Found the "Music Kitchen Cafe" to eat pizza and spaghetti. Not too bad. The place was made up to looke like a western style pub complete with rock portraits of Queen, Prince, BB King and all that royalty. Bob Marley himslef was being played back through the house system when we walked in. There was brief moment of alarm when we heard a cat meowing from the kitchen. Then relief when we saw the ladies trying to coax it down from the ceiling onto a stool they were holding up. A healthy well looked after cat.

Back at the hotel i was offered another elevator massage. I chuckled myself to sleep about that to the faint moaning and grunting sounds coming through the vents.

joel

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