The tour bus had me, a English printer, a German woman, a young shy French map maker girl, and an older English guy who went to Tibet every year to buy rugs to sell in England. This guy lived in Kathmandu and was married and had kids. He said he made 45 thousand dollars the year before doing that. We started at about six in the morning and drove a little bit to the east and then drove up a dirt road a little bit to a town were we did the boarder formalities.

After crossing the boarder we went up all day long past the jungle and into the Tibetan tundra. Pretty soon we were in a desert landscape where there was no vegetation at all inside a big wide canyon that slithered along until we got to a roadside inn. This part of the world was very desolate, and if it wasn't for the traffic coming through I don't think there would be anybody living there. But I was very interested to see that there seemed to be ruins of an ancient city in one of the empty valleys we drove through. In this valley I saw like fifty very ancient ruins of two story buildings spread out over an area of about a square kilometer. I pointed it out to my tour mates, but they didn't seem very interested though. The entire tour to Lhasa took eleven days, so I don't remember every place we slept at, but I remember after the driving around the desolate river valley, and seeing a couple of exhausted looking bike tourists, we entered a perfectly flat and barren alpine tundra, and looking to the

south and seeing Mount Everest in the distance just shooting straight out of the flatness. Our pit stops were very primitive, the toilets were just holes in the ground, and all the stores sold were crackers and water. After a couple days we climbed up a long shallow graded mountainside up and over a pass that was over 5,000 meters, and down down and down and passing some more ruins and finally low enough for the first trees to reappear at an impressively high 13,000 feet.

For the whole trip the Tibetan people were obviously of a distinct racial group. They had Chinese looking faces, except a little bit chubbier and with darker skin and big thick curly afros. The first town we arrived in was obviously influenced by China because half of the buildings were lined with tiny square blue tiles that I found to be tacky looking.

The next day we drove down a wide river valley towards the east, passing occasional farms. The landscape was desolate except for the trees lining the river. After a day or two we arrived at the second largest city in Tibet called Shingatse. Here we did a tour of a monastery that according to my Lonely Planet book used to be a rival of the Dalai Lamas group in Lhasa.

Tibet has had a pretty rough last 50 years because of the Chinese invasion in the fifties. Since then the Chinese government moved nine million Chinese into Tibet, and now out number the seven million Tibetans left. From these statistics one might think that this would lead to racial tension, but I didn't hear of any, nor did I notice or feel any stress or segregation as I walked the streets.

The next day we drove a couple hours down the road to a famous ancient monastery whose name I can't remember. It had the same layout as the one in Shingatse, with the main temple a large square building with a big room in the middle and a lot of their gods painted on the walls.

Lhasa is in a beautiful setting in a valley surrounded by mountains. It is a little dry for my tastes though. It is about the same size as my hometown of Boulder, which is smaller than I expected it to me.

When we got to Lhasa we stopped and checked out an old statue carved into the roadside cliff. Then we went straight to our hotel, which was a huge monstrosity surely built just for the tourists who go there.

Just as soon as we got there we were greeted by a really up tight and angry Chinese guy who told us he was our hotel guide, which is the weirdest thing. Who needs a hotel guide? We spent the first day doing tours of a couple monasteries around the city. There was one monastery in the foothills that was built up on the hillside and had a lot of buildings connected to each other with walkways. It was in a beautiful setting because there were huge rocks all over the place. The place used to be a lot bigger but had shrunken a lot since the Chinese invasion in 1955. Our guide took us around showing us the artwork and relics and telling us about Tibetan mythology and gods but I hardly understood what he was saying.

The first day I was there I tried to get money out with my Visa card but was surprised to find out that no bank in the whole city accepted Visa. I should have known though seeing that this was Tibet, where the idiot Chinese try to make things difficult for tourist who only come there to see the Buddhist stuff; but that makes the Chinese really upset, whether its because they are paranoid that we will help free Tibet, or they are just embarrassed they invaded and destroyed another country I don't know. When I told my group that I couldn't get any money out I said I was thinking about just riding my bike out to the next big city where I surely could get money out. One guy in my group, an older English guy who went to Tibet every year to buy rugs told me he could get me a Tibetan visa with a lady he knew, but for some stupid reason I didn't take him up on that. I eventually told them I would just sell my stuff off to get a place ticket.

While I was collecting my stuff to sell in my room our guide told me my group wanted to talk to me so I went down to the bus and they all took turns telling me that the paranoid Chinese guide guy told them that if I wasn't on the plane back to Katmandu with them, they couldn't go either because they were on a visa tied to mine. They were really freaked out. I told them not to worry and set out riding my bike around the town. The first place I went to was another, smaller more posh hotel where there were a lot of Singaporean's who bought some of my stuff. I sold my altitude watch and camera and some other stuff to them. I saw a lot of Tibetan street vendors selling stuff in front of the hotel and so I set my stuff up next to them. After a couple minutes they all came up to me and gave me money, and after a couple minutes they had given me about 30 bucks! I felt a little awkward after that so I got my stuff and rode around to some other places and sold stuff to some tourists. Lhasa has a lot of tourists there as you might imagine, being the home of Buddhism. The Chinese tried to destroy it after they invaded by kicking out the monks and destroying the statues, but in the last ten years or so, various groups have been donating money to replace the statues and monasteries and stuff. Probably one of the strangest traveling scenes I have ever experienced was the monks and nuns doing their prostrations around the Pokhara palace like they had been doing for hundreds of years, except now they had to do in in the middle of traffic with cars and buses swerving around them!

The tour up the palace was fascinating because it was absolutely huge. It is built up on a hill that is smack dab in the middle of the city. It housed hundred of monks and nuns back in the day and was full of big meditation rooms. The center of the palace was nice, it had a plaza with a dining room kind of on stilts above it. The second most interesting place we went to in Lhasa, which exists in Katmandu also, is the monastery where the debating monks are. This is were the monks all get together in a big yard in their monastery and debate about the laws of the mind or whatever. The way they did it was unlike anything I have ever seen. They were all in there together making a ton of noise. They were in groups of two usually with one guy practically yelling, though with a smile on his face, and clapping his hands as he made his point, and on when he made his final point he would make a giant clap and let one of his hands sail through the air as if it was over. It was funny seeing all of the monks making the same clapping gesture. We went to another monastery where they were doing a special kind of prayer using incense.

Lhasa was an interesting mix between the Chinese and Tibetan cultures because everything that was Chinese was so different that what was Tibetan. The Tibetan buildings were all white washed and roofed with wood, whereas the Chinese buildings were all covered in tiny blue tiles that made them look really cheap and cheesy to me. The people looked noticeably different also because the Tibetans are browner and have darker, thicker, curlier hair. The Tibetan dress is also different than the Chinese. The Tibetans wore old used robes and the Chinese were just in plain trousers.

While I was in the hotel all by myself once, one of the hotel employees wanted to go to a restaurant and have a bite with me, so we went to a noodle place about a block away. I talked a lot to the guy who could speak a little English. He wasn't very outgoing though and hardly said anything, which was strange and made me thing later that maybe the angry hotel guide guy put him up to it to see if I was a spy or something. Our hotel guide was really strange, he was almost angry with us, and especially me when he found out I couldn't get any money out of the bank. It was as if he was himself telling us that Tibet belonged to his people and there was nothing we could do about it, even though we never implied that it wasn't.

The flight back to Katmandu relieved how much of a dessert of rolling hills Tibet was. I got a glimpse of Mount Everest out of the right side of the plane which was higher than we were, which was cool because we flew right buy it.