Day 1 on the Friendship Highway

We left Lhasa on the 19th after having spent four nights there. It was quite enough time there, I think. As I may have mentioned before, we met two American guys our age to share the cost of a jeep + driver/guide across the Friendship Highway to the Nepal border: trip duration, 5 days and 6 nights. Our driver and guide were nice Tibetan men, and the jeep was just big enough to hold all six of us. One person had to sit in a fold out seat in the very back, with the luggage, but it wasn't so bad because you could just lie down (albeit rather awkwardly).

The first day we travelled to a monastery about two hours away from Lhasa called Samye. We had to take a very rickety Tibetan boat-thing for an hour to get there. Once there, we saw the monastery, which is the oldest monastery in Tibet. I think it's 1400 years old or something like that. It was really impressive, and we got to hear those crazy Tibetan horns that are enormously long and produce a deep, resonate bellow.

We hiked some pretty hills and I took a short video of some a field of grass blowing in the high wind--it was a very pretty place. We had dinner with our companions and later that night we circumambulated the temple and made friends with some Tibetans in the process. Two women called out "hello!" and we met them and took some pictures of us with them--they were very impressed with how their pictures showed up immediately on the camera for them to see.

Later that night I played some pool--there are lots of pool tables in Tibet. I won one game and lost another, but both were really fun. Of course, I drew quite a crowd of onlookers. Maybe they all assumed I was a pool pro because I'm Western or something. Anyhow, these rural Tibetans were quite nice and seemed eager to laugh and smile.