Nam Tso Lake, Tibet
September 29, 2004 - September 30, 2004
Nam Tso Lake is North of Lhasa, and is comparable to Everest Base Camp in temperature. This was the first day in the Land Cruiser for the 4 of us, and we got up early to leave Lhasa at 7 in the morning. I had a particularly rough time of it as the new hostel I was in was actually so new, it hadn't finished the showers yet. But at least I was wide awake after that 6am cold shower! We were pretty lucky with our driver because he was safe and cautious. Other Land Cruiser drivers have a death wish, and I've heard horror stories of guys who thought they were Mario Andretti in the Himalayas! We saw a couple horrible crashes on the way to the lake, and it only got worse as days wore on. Once we got to the lake we realized quickly what a dessert environment can be like. If we were in the sun it was too hot, and we had to strip down to shorts and a t-shirt, but even under the shade of a cliff the temperature plummeted and I needed every piece of clothing I brought. I stocked up on cold weather cloths and 2 winter coats for this Tibet trip but I still found myself running to the lodge for liters of "sweet tea" to warm up on. We only stayed the night, and the next morning Andries and I made the foolhardy decision to climb what looked like a hill to see sunrise. We had met some other travelers, Ian and Danielle, who came with us. Well at bitterly cold temperatures, and above 5000 meters, climbing the ever-steeper "hill" turned into a mountain of a challenge and we reached the top only to find an even bigger hill was blocking our view of the sunrise. Awe well, the exorcise might have done us some good (or something). |
Typical family home
Guard dog with village in background (and thousands of yak)
Village dentist!!
Hahaha. No, not really... I HOPE not anyway!
(Josephine's pic)
Don't know why I posed here...
Andries and Eran
This is almost 18,000 feet up!
Eran (Israel), me, Josephine (Holland), and Andries (Holland)
Nam Tso Lake
(I had camera problems from this moment on, so Andries took these pictures...)
That's me... on a yak... with a towel on my head....... it was cold.
(Danielle took these ones...)
Andries and I walking back down from our early morning climb
(Josephine took these ones...)
Our home for the night. Kind of a little different from Hotels back home, eh?
This was the single coolest thing I found in Tibet. A
solar stove - that works! You can't even put your hand in the hot
spot. It's
amazingly hot! These things are everywhere in Tibet because they have no
electricity or wood. Only other option is dried yak shit.