Words Fail Me

Debbie and I kept crossing paths with a small group of travelers from an Australian tour company.  We met up with them — in the freezing cold — to watch the sun set on Everest from the Tibetan-side Everest Base Camp.
No climbers this time of year.  Just the mountain, the rocks, the wind, and the cold.    Sunset gave way to a violet dusk with only Venus visible in the sky.
We hurried back to the monastery in the dwindling light before the rocky path down got too dark to navigate.

We stayed at the guest rooms of a Nyingma (a “red hat” school) monastery called Rongbuk, highest monastery in the world, just 8km away from Everest Base Camp.


The monastery was cold and relatively desolate.  Saw about as many sheep as monks.  Ascetic accommodations with no running water…
…but it was hard to argue with the view.

Our first glimpse of the Himalayas from one of the high passes.
That large peak just left of center is Mount Everest at 8848m (29,000 ft.) above sea level, highest mountain in the world.

Also visible are Lhotse (4th highest), Makalu (5th highest), Cho Oyu (6th highest) and Nuptse (the underachiever whose topographic prominence and lack of a particularly independent peak keep if off the list of the world’s highest mountains.)
  

The entrance to Qomolangma National Park, gateway to Everest and the Himalayas, stands at 5248m (17,200 ft.)
The wind tore at the prayer flags.

We overnighted in Pelbar aka Shelkar aka New Tingri.
Accommodations (as the criminally misleading “Snowland Hotel”) were what I would consider “unloved motel”-caliber……but with water disconnected from the sink, shower, and toilet to prevent freezing.

The Shigatse Dzong (seen here in another of my famously shitty photographs) echoes the architectural design of the Potala Palace.

In Shigatse, I loved the particular shade of blue on the stone sign out front of the Tashi Lhunpo Monastery.The monastery is supposed to be the home of the Panchen Lama, the highest ranking lama after the Dalia Lama in the dominant Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism.  The “Gelugpa” practitioners are sometimes called the “yellow hats” in distinction from the Kagyu, Sakya, Jonang, and Nyingma schools whose practitioners are called the “red hats”.  All, however, are part of the Vajrayāna (meaning “diamond vehicle” or “thunderbolt vehicle”) branch of tantric Buddhism.

The Panchem and Dalai Lamas are supposed to recognize — and thereby affirm — each other, but here’s where things get tricky.  In exile, the 14th Dalai Lama recognized one person as the 11th Panchen Lama while the Chinese government recognized another.  I leave it as an exercise for the reader to guess which officiates at religious events recognized by the People Republic of China’s and which has been detained in a series of unknown locations.

Photographs inside this building were forbidden, but one of the highlights of my entire trip to Tibet was seeing the 35 foot tall statue of Maitreya (the Future Buddha), the biggest gilded statue in the world.
  
In a (rare) stroke of luck, we happened to attend on a festival day when the monks were debating just as they do every day at the Sera Monastery! 
 

Our “three star” hotel in Shigatse was so ornate, so over the top, so Chinese that it looked almost Korean. 

A glacier at 5020m (16,500 ft.)
  
  

Yamdrok Lake, one of the sacred lakes of Tibet.
The color of the water was almost mesmerizing. 

At 4900m (16,000 ft.), this was the first of the high passes we navigated.  It looked like the shittiest parts of California to me.  One of the recurring disappointments of Tibet was that most of it was brown & dry instead of snow-capped.  My conception of Tibet as some sort of paradisaical Shangri-La was wildly out of sync with reality.

Somewhere between Lhasa and Shigatse, we made a pit stop.  The facilities were…rudimentary.
This cow was the town plumber, as far as I could tell.

The air in Tibet was frigid, but as arid as any desert.  The thin atmosphere meant the sun beat down brutally.  It was common for my skin to burn in the sunlight and my body to shiver in the shade.
One of Debbie’s ongoing frustrations with the entire trip was how the sharp contrast between light and shadow made good photography practically impossible.