China - The Friendship Highway - Part I

Wow, this has been another incredibly beautiful journey. We left Lhasa early in the morning on the first day.

Looking back toward the Lhasa valley from the first pass:

We first visited a really cool lake Yamdrok Tso (4488 m).
Here are a couple of the locals hanging around for some pictures:

Michelle was keen on seeing and Shivani spotted the rare and endangered Black Neck Cranes:

Way Cool:

Near the end of the day, we were waylaid by some road paving. We were forced off the road and required to wait a couple hours while the black-top cooled. Here are a few shots of the hard laboring road guys:

We eventually gave up waiting and started off-roading it through the river basin along with a caravan of other SUV’s. One poor group of people got majorly stuck, but they were too far away for us to help. We ended up crossing the main channel 4 times. Yes that is the river right out the window.

Eventually we were able to sneak back onto the road and it was smooth sailing on fresh black-top. We passed several large peaks with large glaciers coming down to near the road. Then came to another large lake, although this one was not natural.

There was a really cool “island” with an old fortress looking structure on it:

We eventually came to the town of Gyantse. Here there is a pretty cool monastery and also an even cooler abandoned fort way up on a hill:

We spent the night here and visited the monastery the next morning.

The crew eating dinner:

The monastery was quite scenic, the coolest thing was that it contained the largest Stupa in Tibet, which is 5 stories high plus the dome on top and has 108 rooms all containing some Buddha dude or another.




Michelle and Shivani winding their way up the oversized Stupa.


Looking up a prayer flag pole:


Another view of Gyantse:


We then moved on to the next town of Shigatse - a short drive away. Being all monasteried-out, we decided to visit a local carpet factory and take in some other sights.

The carpet factory was pretty interesting, here's a lady spinning wool into thread:


A few shots of some locals:






Finally we did some more shopping.
We decided this would be a good place to buy some stuff:


But we all agreed to avoid doing business with these guys: