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Saturday 2005-10-01 - Yan Shi Pin, Tibet (China)
Lunch break in the midst of poverty
We make a stop in a village along the Qinghai-Tibet Highway to allow our two drivers to eat lunch. The tiny restaurant is not really for tourists but the drivers invite some of us to share their Chinese hot pot (“don’t take meat, only the vegetables,” Marie Josee warns).
Together with Willemien I walk around a bit: some small buildings on both sides of the road — that’s all. The mostly Muslim inhabitants of this small village are very poor but amid the dirt (apart from the road there is no pavement at all) they’re still doing their best to keep things clean; we watch a woman sweeping her yard — she doesn’t even have glass in her windows, only a sheet of not-so-clear plastic with holes in it. Yet it must be bitterly cold here in winter: it’s very high at an elevation of 4558m (according to my GPS), located at N 33.58876, E 092.06429. One of our bus drivers writes down the name of the village for me: Yan Shi Pin.
Apart from the tiny restaurant, a beer house, two small shops and what must be a garage, it’s not clear what the inhabitants of this bleak village live on. At least there is a small clinic. What is noticeable is the power station though: a combination of some small windmills and a group of solar panels.
Saturday 2005-10-01 - Amdo, Tibet (China)
Finally, sleep
Once it gets dark, it gets a lot harder to stay awake. We’d been promised an hour or so of sleep once we’d get below 4000m but that never happens: we stay well above that altitude, passing two more high passes.
At 23:55 we come to a larger town, Amdo where the last checkpost before Lhasa is located. But it’s the national holiday in China: all three checkposts on the Qinghai-Tibet Highway are open and unmanned, we just sail straight through.
Now, we can finally go to sleep, we’ve passed all the high passes and it’s another seven hours to Lhasa. I snuggle in with two duvets (one along the drafty window) and soon fall asleep: no problem for me with my short legs!
