Mt. Everest (Qomolangma in Tibetan)

Wow.

Sakye

Sakye contains a monastery of the red hat Buddhist sect that was once in power. The monastery was in pretty rough shape, enduring 600 years of neglect and ransacking by the Chinese during the Cultural Revolution. Great hiking around the ruins, though! City itself smelled. Of interesting note was the presence of stuffed dead animals in the protector regions.

Shigatse and Beyond

Shigatse is Tibet's 2nd largest city and home to a nice monastery of the yellow hat sect. Did some excellent hiking there and had a nasty few run-ins with Tibetan mountain plants. And no, I did not jump off a cliff.

Gyantse

This was the first city stop outside of Lhasa - some nice monasteries with the largest stupa in Tibet. Hotel was decent but the altitude was rough - especially when hiking.

Road to Gyantse

This was quite a spectacular journey filled with mountain scenery, a very high altitude pass (5200 m), a stop in a large section of sand dunes and a tough river crossing! No that is not me doing the jump kick off the sand dune - that is Tristan, our group leader.. I just took most of the photos.

Lhasa and Surroundings

A much overdo post - Lhasa is the largest city in Tibet and home to both the largest monastery and most important temple of Tibetan Buddhism. It's a city that is a mix of old and new - Tibetan old and Han Chinese new. I mentioned that China has put in an enormous amount of money into infrastructure but the pictures I show below are of old Tibet as Chinese cities tend to look alike in comparison. It is such a devoutly spiritual land but I am afraid I can't take the religion of Buddhism as seriously as I should when compared to the philosophy of Buddhism (which does not feature the absorption of local idolatry).

Still alive

Hi Everyone - still alive. I am currently in Kathmandu, Nepal. Internet here basically sucks. It's either a pitifully slow connection (making picture uploading impossible), or ancient/locked down computers with no USB ports (making picture uploading impossible). Tibet was amazing, the scenery and the people made for a wonderful experience. Touched Everest... One thing that was so sad was the level of poverty - wasn't prepared for that. Got some very interesting perspectives on the whole China/Tibet issue. On one hand there's been a terrible amount of damage and suffering caused - on the other hand, China is now pouring an irrational amount of money into developing Tibet. We weren't exactly sure why but we had some theories.

Nepal was really a taste of India... with less people and cleaner (75% Hindu population - making it more Hindu than India). I took far too many pictures (over 600) recently. I think I've taken maybe 2500 pictures so far.... but I have also been travelling for roughly 75 days. I'm back on my own again and in a way it's quite liberating. While group travel lets you do some things you can't on your own, I think I prefer solo travel by far. I will try to post some of these pictures from Bangkok (net permitting).