a full plate: Tour group, anyone?

So, here I am in Tibet. I got here yesterday afternoon but it seems like that was ages ago. The flight went well and was shorter than I expected, since nobody ever gave me an itinerary to see the actual times. I was relieved to find that the Tibetan Tourism Bureau had not been laughing behind my back and counting their money after printing fake plane tickets and conjuring up something that looked like an entry permit. After all the horror stories of arranging tours to get here, that was a relief. Yet, while not completely a scam, they weren't exactly on top of their game either. The woman who had been originally dealing with me had gone (funnily enough) to Tibet, followed by the guy to whom she had delegated my paperwork. Eventually a third woman took over, but needless to say everyone was sure that the last person had already given me what I needed and that I must have forgotten. Anyway, they told me that when I got off the plane I was to take the shuttle to the bus station where I would meet my guide, who would help me check in. When I got to the airport, I was suddenly very very happy that I asked them for the name and address of the hostel that they had booked for me (and asked them to write it in English, Chinese, and Tibetan), as there was no shuttle bus to any bus station. Not only was there no shuttle bus to the bus station, but there is no place known as "the" bus station - Lhasa has about 6 of them. Lovely. So I just took the cheap shuttle into town with all the locals and wandered around until I found Snowlands, the dingy hostel where I'm staying.

Unfortunately, on the way I also managed to find a Chinese traveller who then attached himself to me. He was on the same shuttle into town as I was, and was also looking for the tourist hostel district. He was useful for about two seconds as he corrected my pronunciation of my hostel's name in Chinese, but after that I was very unhappy that I'd met him. By the time I found my hostel, he was trying to book a double room for the two of us and asking where I would like to travel with him. Luckily there was no space at the hostel (and even more luckily they actually had a reservation for me), so he had to stay at one down the street. That didn't stop him from asking me to leave my stuff in his room (apparently it would be safer that way because my room was a dorm with 6 other people I hadn't met yet), hunting me down until I agreed to go with him to dinner, and trying to book the both of us onto a tour with another couple who were looking for two more people to share a van. After an awful dinner where I had to bear his chain-smoking (half a pack over dinner), pickiness (none of the food at the restaurant I chose was to his taste), and whining (asking the waitress every two seconds where our food was and then threatening to walk out), I finally managed to give him the slip.

Luckily, the day ended on a much better note than it started; I came back to my hostel to find a woman waiting up by my room and asking if I'd like to join her group on a trip to Everest and some sights in between for 6 days and only a little over a hundred dollars. There's a very interesting system here of message board communication; every hostel has a message board, and travellers post notes trying to find others to share costs on a tour group to books, buy or sell used equipment and travel guides, or swap some good reading material for something new. I had seen a note earlier that a couple were looking for two more to share their trip to Everest, and had talked with the couple about it (the Chinese guy saw the same note and had wanted to sign us up together, as I mentioned before). The couple were more interested in another group of two so that it would be easier to coordinate, but later they'd given my information to a friend who was looking for one more person for her group's trip, and she'd come by my room to see if I was interested.

Turns out this group was 7 people (American, British, and Dutch); they wanted one more to split costs, as there is room for 4 in a jeep and tour agencies charge per jeep rather than per person. I went over to the restaurant where they were eating, and they were all really friendly so I said I'd think about it and get back to them. After talking with my mom and seeing if she thought I'd be able to acclimatize to such an ascent so soon after arriving in Lhasa (we decided it would be OK as long as I kept taking the altitude sickness medicine I was on), I agreed. It was also nice because they'd taken care of all of the details, so all I had to do was give them copies of my documents and pay. I actually also had to give the travel agent my passport for a day - that made me a bit nervous, as the whole system here is kind of wonky and I can never tell when someone legitimately needs my documents or its just a scam.

I don't think I've talked about this before, but Tibet is essentially a police state. In order to even get in (by plane or bus), you have to pay an exorbitant fee to a "licensed travel agent" who will get you your Tibetan Tourism Bureau (TTB) permit, buy your plane tickets, and sign you up for a "tour group." It's all just a bunch of bureaucratic crap, as my tour "group" ended up consisting of me, myself, and I. I also had to sign up for a three-day tour (their cheapest option) in which my first three nights of lodging would already be booked and some tour guide was supposed to cart me around to see the sights of Lhasa. All of the permits, tour group costs, lodging, and the plane ticket from Beijing cost me about $550 US. If I could have just booked the plane tickets to Beijing myself, they would have been around $300, and lodging at the place I'm staying now is about $5 US a day. But I can say that I was lucky, though, as I actually got a copy of my TTB permit; most tour companies don't actually give it to the traveller (it's assumed that if you have a plane ticket, you must have had a TTB permit at some point). This then causes trouble down the line, because if you want to get a permit to go anywhere else outside Lhasa, you have to show your TTB permit, which most people don't have.

Then, once you're here, it's more of the same bureaucratic crap. To go most places outside of Lhasa, you need a Public Security Bureau (PSB) permit, which the PSB will not give to you, only to (big suprise) "licensed travel agents." So it pretty much forces you to go with a tour group no matter where you're going. Usually this tour group consists of renting a 4-passenger van and a driver for however long you'll be travelling. This is why people always want to be in groups with a multiple of 4 (and why the group of 7 wanted me as their 8th). It's really a pain in the ass after having travelled places like Guatemala where you can just stand on the side of the road and pay 2 dollars for someone to take you to the other side of the country. On the other hand, it also forces people to make connections with other travellers; besides hanging out at restaurants and meeting people in the hostels, every day there are new postings on message boards from people looking to join/be joined by other travellers on their tour. The message board system really does work quite well - I posted a couple of notes on different message boards saying I'd buy somebody's used Lonely Planet Tibet (my China guidebook only had a couple of pages on Tibet), and I found someone to sell me theirs in less than a day.

Anyway, so I guess my first day was pretty successful overall - I managed to lose my guide but find my hostel, pick up and then ditch a Chinese stalker, and book myself onto a travel group to Mount Everest in one afternoon and night.

Today was a bit less hectic. I went on my "tour" that came with my package into Tibet - there were about 8 other people who were also on this "tour" with me (most of them had booked themselves into Lhasa independently and then joined on with this guide to see the sights). I say "tour" because it consisted of the guide showing up half an hour late, putting us in taxis to Sera Monastery in the suburbs of town, asking us to pay our own entry fee, and then pointing us in the right direction for different buildings in the monastery. He was definitely sketchy; in addition to the not-showing-up he did the previous day, he also asked for my travel permit when the tour started. I just gave him a copy and said that my original had been in a bag that had been stolen. Nothing I can do about that, right? I suppose he was useful for the approximately 5 minutes he spent actually talking and explaining things, but since half the group spoke Chinese and the other half English it didn't really work out well.

The monastery was cool, though. I tried out the 3 phrases of Tibetan I know on the pilgrims and got my introduction to the burning candles and incense that I think I'll soon be quite used to. In the bigger assembly hall of a temple, we watched as one monk performed some kind of story in front of a huge assembly of all the other monks. I'm not quite sure what it was about, but from his gestures and acting I'm pretty sure it involved monkeys. Later, I wandered off to a dark back rooms and had an elderly monk hold my hand and guide me around the entire back complex of the temple after I repeatedly stumbled, proving myself incapable of finding my way with no light. I found the side building where one of the monks was totalling up the offerings they'd received that day, and where the young monks ran to fill up the water (or tea?) jugs to offer to the older monks during the monkey ceremony. I also walked a bit away from the temple and came to a place where some of the other monks were sitting in a circle and debating. All in all, it was really great - I couldn't really say anything to any of the monks or the pilgrims because they mostly only speak Tibetan, but as long as I smiled and nodded my head to them I almost always got a warm response.

When we got back to Lhasa I ditched the rest of the tour group and went wandering around Barkhor, the colorful area full of stalls and shops around the Jokhang temple in the center of town. I didn't really want to buy anything, but it was fun looking around anyway and seeing what they had. In the afternoon I looked around for some of the things I needed to go to Everest and took care of the rest of the payment and paperwork with the travel agency and the other 7 people. By the time I finished all of that stuff, got dinner, and did a little food shopping (we have a lot of room in the back of the Jeeps, so some snacks can never hurt), it was too late to do much else. So here I am, writing this very long blog post. Here's hoping some of you made it to the bottom of this, and I'll write more later on in my trip to
let you know how Everest was and whether I've managed to make it back without Acute Mountain Sickness.