We should have gotten a clue when we saw the toilets at the bus station! It was just a room with a platform with holes over a big pile of human refuse! Wonderful! Those were probably among the best we saw until we got to our hotel in Lhasa! Me and my friend, Krista, had a game of pool (making up our own rules!) We kept the locals entertained anyway! A couple of white girls playing pool badly in their neck of the woods!
Soon enough, we were on a 30-hour sleeper bus ride to Lhasa, Tibet. We were all up the back of the bus, and we found out pretty soon that this bus didn't have good shock absorbers! So began the longest journey I've ever undertook!
On board the bus were 6 young soldiers. One of them (obviously a higher-up guy than the rest) sat up the back with me. It was very cosy, especially with the orange oxygen balloon (for the thin air up there) in there too! My friend, Julie, was sitting in front of me. During my sleeplessness, I sat up listening to my walkman. We went over this huge bump, and simultaneously, I hit my head on the platform above as Julie broke her seat back on top of my legs! Pretty soon, it was Mr Soldier guy with his orange oxygen bag, me, and Julie all snuggled up in the back!
We started to notice a bit of dizziness when we got out for a pit stop! The toilets got worse and worse until it was a matter of finding a nice piece of ground, getting your friends to keep watch, and squatting! Made you just want to hold on!
I remember us stopping once very early in the morning in the middle of nowhere, and thinking "This is a long toilet break!" It wasn't! There had been an accident up ahead on the icy road, so we were stopped for 6 hours there! We discovered that we were suffering from mild altitude sickness, and the stop actually helped us aclimatize. One of our ladies was really sick, she could barely walk. Later when we were on the road again, we picked up a tall Tibetan guy who looked after her - tucking her in and everything!
We got there at 2:00 in the morning after a bit of a hair-raising ride around the mountains. CITS had arranged for someone to meet us and take us to a hotel. We finally got to sleep a couple of hours later, and boy did we sleep!
Lhasa.
