Mt Qomolangma (ཇོ་མོ་གླང་མ) (9/25)

"Seeing is believing!" -- this is what I telling people this afternoon. It was truly a unbelievable experience today.

I woke up at 8am in the morning. Looked outside the window, it was raining!!! "Geez, why I had such bad luck", I told myself.

After breakfast (today's breakfast is Changba (糌巴), the 1st changba I ate in this trip), we left Shegar around 9am. At the Lulu Checkpoint, I asked the solider who examined my passport and permit about the likelihood of seeing Mt Qomolangma ("Qomolangma" is the Tibetan name (means "mother goddess of the world") of Mt Everest. It is also the name for the mount used in China . Since here it is Tibet, so I will use the Tibetan name, and forgot about silly nonsense name of "Everest") today. He replied "No way"!!! He also told me that the mount has been covered by clouds and mist for 3 days already. "Today", he said, "we have rain here, so it must be snowing right now in the mountain."

The rocks on the hills alongside the highway are very colorful -- brown, red and blue. And the rocks are heavily twisted, a strong evidence that tells why the Himalaya Range has so many top mountains.

After the checkpoint, it is a long winding drive up to Pang-la (加乌拉 -- 中英文差太远了!) pass. Not surprising, it was snowing here in mountain, even though is far away from the Mt Qomulangma! The road was a series of switchbacks going up the mountains. In the past two days, I found Mr. Danzeng was not a speeding driver, and sometimes I wished he could drive faster (Several days later, I found out the his Land Cruiser is not genuine Toyota 4500, I believed it was a re-make from a Toyota 62. Maybe that explains why it is slow). However, today, under this severe weather condition, he showed off his skill -- passed all other 4x4 we met on the switchbacks! Exciting, but scary.

Finally we reached the Pang-la pass. The altitude reading on my GPS was 5,180m. At Pang-la pass, on a fine day, one supposedly can see four 8000+m mounts of the Himalaya range: Makalu (玛卡鲁峰, 8,463m), Lhotse (洛子峰, 8,516m), Everest (珠峰, 8,848m) and Cho Oyu (卓奥友, 8,201m). However, this beautiful vista was ruined by the snow today. All I could see was a curtain in white!

We continued driving in snow for about two more hours, and arrived at Rongphu (绒布, 5,000m) around noon. I found a room in the guesthouse of Rongphu Monastery. People here don't know how to do math, I guess :P -- 40-yuan/bed for a 3-bed bedroom, but 20-yuan/bed for 4-bed, both rooms are of the same size! I took the 4-bed room, a no brainer.

The restaurant of the guesthouse was packed with travelers from all over the world. They all looked gloomy because of the weather. Of course, how many time one will have an opportunity to come to here visit the tallest mount in the world? And at that moment, it really looked like we all would lose this opportunity today.

Rongphu Monastery is claimed the highest monastery in the world (as least that is what my tour book says), but I doubt that -- at least the Dirapuk Monastery in Mt Kailash tops it, by 5,100m vs 5,020m, based on my GPS's reading.

Here is a photo of Rongphu Monastery taken at 1:45pm. You can see from the picture that the snow was indeed heavy			Another photo, taken inside the Rongphu Monastery at 2pm. A Tibetan woman was shoveling snow in courtyard.

After a short visit to the monastery, I went back to the guesthouse to take some rest, also to make plan for what I should do tomorrow -- stay here for another day hoping weather will turn around, or "stay the course", move on to the next destination. Around 4pm, I suddenly felt my room became brighter, then I looked out the window, wait, what is that -- oh my god, sunlight! Snow stopped, and there was sunshine (albeit weak) from the sky! I rushed out the door, celebrated this magic moment with other visitors.

Here is a photo to show how misty it was after the snow stopped.

I grabbed my camera bags and tripod, went up to the small hill next to the Rongphu monastery. Found a good spot, setup the tripod and the camera, then waited for the miracle to happen. Some locals here said even though the snow stopped, and sun came out, the chance to see Qomulangma is still slim, because the area was still very misty, and windless (w/o wind, no chance to blow away the mist). However, I just did not believe that -- somehow I felt the force was with me, and I would get whatever I hope today!

Rongphu Monastery. At 5:38pm, Mt. Qomolangma was still hiding behind the mist. But as you can see in the photo, there were more and more blue in the sky, clearly a good sign.	This is me, with the setup of my photo gears. The tripod is a Gitzo 1325, equipped with a Bogen leveling base 3502, and a Markins Ballhead. Hasselblad XPAN is the camera in this photo.	Everyone was waiting for the miracle...

We all wanted to save this precious moment forever

And the miracle did happen! About 5:45, Qomalangma finally took off the mask, showed her beautiful face to us lucky people. We exclaimed our excitement. This is simply unbelievable -- just 4 hours ago it still snowed like hell at here!

The air quality was particularly good after snow. This was the dream moment for any photographers. Click, click, click, kept on going, until the sun was set...

Rongphu is widely considered the best place to shoot the north face of Mt Qomolangma, because you can use this beautiful chorten as a foreground element.	Sun was starting to set
Probably it wasn't the right season yet, the sunset was not as spectacular as I hoped for. I did some research after I got home, it looks like colours in May to June are much better.	This was taken after the sun has completely set. The scene was illuminated by twilight in nightfall.
Compares to its sunset, the sunrise in Mt Qomolangma was even less attractive. Colours were weak (maybe a different season (early spring) will be better), but the real killer is the light -- nothing will look good if it is in shadow!	Mount Qomolangma in morning After taking this photo, we said farewell to the mother goddess, continue to our next destination -- (Old) Tingri.

To see more photos of Mt Qomolangma, visit the online photo gallery on my website fototi.com (will be launched by the end of November).

Oh, I can't let go an nasty issue, that is the restroom in Rongphu! Man, that was the ugliest, dirtiest and least comfortable toilet I ever seen (actually, days after I found another one that tops it). I don't wanna go into the detail on how the toilet look like, one word, ugly. I just felt amazing why such a beautiful place could have such a unfit thing here. I did not remember I saw such unmatched things in Nepal. Later I met a Tibetan tour guide in the kora road of Mt Kailash. I complained this matter to him, but he laid blame to Chinese government, claiming that the government did not allow locals to do renovation to the guesthouse, in the fear of making local rich. I took that as a grain of salt. I think the real problem is the mindset of the people here.

At last, that was something sad happened on me in here -- I lost my GPS (Garmin Geko 301) that I used on my Nikon D2X to record GPS data into pictures. I don't know where and when I lost it. I found out the GPS was not attached to the camera when I was taking the sunrise pictures in the morning. It is very sad -- now I wouldn't be able to geo-encode my photos when I do the Mt Kailash kora! :(



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Sakya Monastery and Shegar (New Tingri) (9/24)

Shortly after leave Shigatse, the scene outside the window changed quite a lot -- fewer and fewer green you could find, the colours were mostly dominated by yellow, brown and blue (sky). This reminded me that I am on the way to the "real Tibet", or the Tibet in my imagination. It was Sunday today, however, there were groups of little kids walking along the Sino-Nepal Friendship Highway, with school bags on their back. The driver told me they were going to their schools in Sakya town, on foot! (geez, that is a long ways to walk! The distance could be easily over 20km). Usually students stay in school for a week -- go home on Friday, and come back to schools on Sunday. When those kids saw our jeep, they waved their hands, hoping to get a lift. Mr. Danzeng never stopped to pick them up, and I really felt guilty about that. However, what can we do -- our jeep simply can't hold that many people.

Around noon we arrived Sakya (萨迦) town (altitude: 4336m), where the famous Sakya monastery locates. Sakyapa is one of the four main buddhism schools within Tibet (the other three are: Nyingma, Kagyu & Gelug). each with its own incomparable lineage of teachers and emphasis on particular practices. Sakya monastery is consisted of two monasteries: northern and southern monastery, on either side of the Trum-chu river. The northern monastery has been mostly destroyed, you can see its ruin sprawled across the hills. The newer (built about 200 years after the northern monastery) southern monastery is what people usually visit in these days.

The Main Assembly Hall of the Southern Monastery
The southern monastery was built like a fortress -- it has thick walls, with watchtowers on each of the corners. This should not come as a surprise -- during 1268 to 1354, Sakya was the capital of Tibet, and this monastery was the central power that ruled the entire Tibet! This was the first religious government with a lama as head of state. It set an important precedence for Tibetan government.		This is why Sakyapa is also called "Flower Sect(花教)" -- buildings are painted in ash gray with white and red vertical stripes. The colouring is widely thought to symbolise the 3 important bodhisattvas (菩萨) -- red for Jampelyang(文殊), white for Chenresig(观音), and grey for Chanadorje(金刚手). This colour pattern becomes a symbol for the Skaya authority. Whenever you see houses with this colours, you know the owner is a practicer of Sakyapa order.

Sakya monastery is a pleasant place to visit. The monks over there are extremely friendly. Unlike other monasteries in Tibet, monks here LIKE being photographed! There are a group of young monks, when they saw me, with my (impressive) camera hanging on my neck, they rushed to me ask for taking photos of them. Here is the youngest one among them, putting his dinning bowl on his head. Well, I think this manner is sort of blasphemous for a religious man!

We left Sakya around 3:30pm, continue the way to the next destination: Shegar (协格尔，新定日). The weather wasn't looking good after Lhatse(拉孜) -- in Sakya, I could still manage to find some sunshine and blue sky, but here the sky turned gray and overcast. I am very concerned about the weather in Mt Everest tomorrow!

Due to some road-work, our jeep (and many others) had to stop and waited for about two hours near Katso-la (加错拉) pass, at altitude of 5000+m. Not fun!
We arrived Shegar after 7pm. This is a small town with nothing really interesting.

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