Photos and videos at the end.
Onto Everest Base Camp (EBC).
The courtyard between the accommodation block of our hotel and the breakfast area was very busy with tourists on the move. A small group of young soldiers in uniform marched sternly among the buses.
We set off out of Shigatse along the Friendship Highway (also known as the China-Nepal Highway), an 800-kilometre scenic route connecting Lhasa, with the Chinese / Nepalese border.
We travelled along a wide valley with low juniper bushes spreading over to rounded hills and mountains behind, which gave way to yellow fields of wheat and villages with a backdrop of reddish brown mountains, rich in minerals.
The abundance of minerals in Tibet is one of the reasons it attracted colonial interest. The brutal British invasion in 1904 was to counter a perceived threat from a growing Russian influence.
At the head of the valley, we passed through the town of Gêding with it’s large cement factory. Manufacturing facilities such as this are not common in Tibet. Tourism is the main source of income.
After Gêding, the valley narrowed quite a bit. The colours since Shigatse have been various shades of brown and red in the hills, softened by dark greens and yellows in the valleys.
The two lane highway was busy with trucks and cars. We turned south and were joined by a braided river as we made our way up to a marker noting that we were 5,000km from Shanghai. Again the small terraces of barley by the river among gravel and rock.
In the early afternoon, we reached Gyatsola Pass (5280m). There was much excitement in the bus, as this was where we caught our first glimpse of Mount Everest. We waited in some brief snow flurries for the clouds over the distant Mount Everest to clear. At the pass, villagers from the valley below live in simple shelters for the tourist season.
We dropped down again into an isolated valley and then more passport and security checks. The Chinese are insanely paranoid, but you get used to it. We transferred to an EV bus for the final 20km or so up to Everest Base Camp (EBC).
The camp itself is a tourist construct, not an actual climbing base camp. We were about 20km from the glaciers at the base of Everest but the view was still spectacular, at least when the cloud lifted. The camp is a kind of tent city, orderly rows of multi-room plywood structures with a canvas outer shell, housing hundreds of tourists.
Sanitation was appalling as usual. For all their big construction and future focus, the Chinese don’t do basic mass sanitation very well.
A lot of Chinese tourists went down on a convoy of buses to lower altitudes after sunset. So many people were walking around with oxygen. Either with small canisters or bottles of oxygen with nasal tubes. Night was cloudy so we missed the chance to see stars against Everest.
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