Day 63 Sat 4 November, Tingri to Zhangmu/Dramu, Tibet

Wake up shivering at first light (8am) and crawl into the ‘restaurant’ in the main building thru a room where the owners family are sleeping. They reluctantly arouse and eventually get the stove going using first some yak dung and then sheep pellets which they scoop from a basket. Water from a bucket is ladled into kettles, generally they try to use a different scoop from that used for the fuel. The stove is quite efficient and yak and sheep dung obviously of very high calorific value as quite soon the room is warm and the yak butter tea is beginning to boil. We make coffee using our Kathmandu (Sydney shop) coffee plunger and coffee brought from Darwin. Watching the town rouse itself is quite interesting, firstly packs of feral looking dogs go on a scrounging round, to see if there’s anything edible which has been thrown into the street, fighting over scraps of cardboard and the odd instant noodle container, then a few dzo wander past to see if the dogs have missed anything. By 8.30 most of the male population seems to have stumbled out of their shacks to pee in the street (the women are more decorous as they wear long skirts) before a few market stall holders set up their wares, mostly vegetables and various dead animal carcasses. They are joined by a few soulful looking western backpackers hoping for lifts to Everest base camp or perhaps finding a Macdonalds.

After a slow breakfast we say farewell with no regrets and drive on south. There are splendid views to the west towards Xixabangma/Shisha pangma (8012m) which shines white in the morning sun against a vivid blue sky, but to the south and east its overcast and we are unable to see the full extent of the Himalayas. We climb over two barren passes, where nothing seems to grow, the hills here appear to be covered by lichen and moss rather than grass and it seems very arid although there are quite large flocks of sheep and goats. At the 5124m summit of Thong-la, the highest and final pass there is a great collection of prayer flags and three Tibetan girls appear from nowhere. What they are doing there or where they come from is a mystery. Its cold and bleak, -5.5C so we pause only briefly for a few pix and to tie our scarves from Shigatse to the pile.

We then start a descent which gets increasingly steep after Nyalam which is covered in snow and where we have lunch whilst Pu Chung visits the police station to get the final permits. We follow an amazing river, the Po Chu (which becomes the great white water rafting Botekoshi in Nepal) which cuts right through the high Himalayas between 8000m peaks, it’s like dropping off the edge of world, as we descend from +5000m to 2300m in about 20kms. The road deteriorates and gets a bit scary as it follows the valley down to Zhangmu/Dramu, the border town on the Tibetan side. 5km before the town we run into a solid line of trucks, parked nose to tail all the way down. These are Chinese and Nepali trucks which exchange cargos (mostly going from China to Nepal) The town itself is perched on a series of hairpin bends on the mountain side and we find an overpriced hotel but at least it has hot water.

Weather: Cloudy, -1.5C
Distance today 184km
Distance from start 13,931km
Road condition index: a bit scary from Nyalam downwards