Arrived in Kathmandu yesterday in a jampacked public bus (cost only 160 rupees!!) from the Tibetan border after a 10 day trip to Tibet. The way to travel in this land was by landcruiser because there are serious scary parts on the way to Lhasa. We stopped in 3 cities before arriving in Lhasa on the 5th day. Many of the towns had huge monasteries (Shigatse and Gyantse)
which were partially destroyed during the Cultural Revolution and now are controlled by the Chinese government. In one monastery, there used to be 6000 monks, now there are only 1500 monks and these are picked by the government. It really is sad. At the Potala Palace in Lhasa
, it is a silent monastery, no life really, just lots of old relics that people cannot worship anymore because of the government. The city of Lhasa has exploded into a Chinese metropolis. If you read Pico Iyer's account of his travels in the 80's, you can really get a good sense of the huge change that this city has undergone. Most of the shops are run by the Chinese, you can basically get by with Mandarin and eat only Chinese food (which is all good, but in Tibet, it's more sad).We stayed in luxury hotels during the tour but had to returen to the ghetto life after the tour ended and stayed in a fairly good dorm hotel, Tashi Targyel near the Jokhang temple
- the holiest temple in Tibet. This temple was by far my favourite because of the sheer amount of pilgrims coming to this place in the morning and evening. I felt like a horrible tourist when we bypassed the line of hundreds waiting to get in when this place had no real significance to me. It's really uplifting to see the hundreds of people prostrating themselves at this temple even after so many attempts to stifle their culture and way of life.Lhasa also provided many Western comforts, hot showers, movie theatres (saw Die Hard 4.0 finally) and ate fast food. Had a bet whether there was a McDonald's and lost, but there is the equivalent called Dico's - good chicken burgers, shitty chicken nuggets, and gross hot Fanta.
On our way back from Lhasa, we had a grueling 14 hour drive in a cold LandCruiser, really happy to get out of a car at the end.
Highly recommend going to Tibet before it turns into an indistinguishable Chinese city.
