Traveling in Tibet

These past few weeks with my family have been very busy and very fun. We just returned from a week long trip in Tibet. We left on the train on the 16^th in the evening and after a beautiful, but long train ride arrived safely in Tibet. None of us had altitude sickness really, although I did faint once on the train for a second. The thing you notice most about Tibet is the vastness and remoteness. It’s like Montana but bigger and more mountainous. Our tour guide Kashi picked us up at the train station and took us to our hotel. Originally, I had had reservations about booking a tour guide because I usually don’t like tours, I like exploring by myself, but I was really happy to have done it here. We would have never been able to see so many cool places if it hadn’t been prearranged and our tour guide was really nice. We got to sleep in until about 9am every day because the sun doesn’t rise in Tibet until 9 or so and nothing is open before then. The first day we went to the Potala, which was built by the 5^th Dalai Lama. Because it was Tibetan New Year and Chinese New Year on the same day (Feb 18^th) all the temples we went to were very crowded with Tibetan pilgrims coming to pray for good things in the new year. The Potala was very big and empty and had an amazing amount of rooms. It also had the tombs of many of the Dalai Lamas who have died. The tombs were very big and gold. Then we went to the Summer Palace, which is where the Dalai Lama lived in the summer. It had a beautiful garden outside and the rooms seemed much more homey and lived in. They had a radio that was a present from the Pakistanis. We also went to the second biggest town in Tibet, after Lhasa, called Shigatse. There we toured another monastery that is the largest functioning monastery in Tibet and has 800 monks who live there. Mom and I also walked the kora around this monastery, which is a path all around the outside of the monastery that pilgrims walk in a clockwise fashion. It had prayer wheels and prayer flags all the way around and a magnificent view of the monastery, town, and surrounding mountains. Shigatse was more of a trading town than an actual city and seemed much smaller than Lhasa, which itself seems much smaller than most Chinese cities. When we were at the hotel in Shigatse we also ran into an Irish guy who is teaching in China who we met on the train. It was quite a coincidence. He had found a group of 3 other Western people and 2 Koreans who were all traveling to Mount Everest. However, none of them spoke Chinese so I helped them book rooms at the hotel. When we got back to Lhasa we went to see the Johkang, which is the oldest monastery in Tibet and, I think, also the coolest. It has a ton of statues of different kinds of Buddhas inside representing the 4 different Buddhist sects that are in Tibet. You can also walk around on the roof where you have a beautiful view of the square in front of the monastery where the pilgrims gather and Potala with the mountains in the background. It was an amazing trip and like nowhere I have ever been before. The thing I thought was most amazing, besides the incredible scenery, was the degree to which the Buddhist faith was integrated into the Tibetan culture; it was like they were one and the same. I am amazed by the strength of the Tibetan people, both physically and spiritually. On the way back the plane ride was bumpy, but also beautiful. You could see the entire Himalayan Mountain range outside the plane window; Dad thinks you could even see Everest in the distance.