This was an extraordinary day: interesting, religiously inspiring, beautiful, ridiculous, sublime.
The pics show the glacier which we passed on 11th October, but which didnt upload for some reason. Tensing had told us that if we wanted to see Tashilumpo monastery we would have to get up early and go ourselves. It is the seat of the Panchen Lama and Tensing is a Dalai Lama man, so perhaps he didnt want to go. So, after we had walked for 20 mins and seen it from afar, we returned to the van and Tensing turned up with hot water for our coffee and a boiled egg each, and told us that he had arranged the permit to go to Tashilumpo. We drove there, and after parking the car, had Jennifer’s fortune told by a fortune-teller. We also saw a man making moulds from clay and crushed up bone from dead people to fill the hole that good people get given in the skull to let evil spirits out after they have died.
We then walked round the northern wall of the monastery which was extremely interesting with a steady line of people twirling prayer wheels, ferral dogs, each with a bowl into which pilgrims put food and water, goats with huge horns, and monks begging for money. There were prayer wheels along the entire route. Some had the ashes and remaining bone fragments of cremated monks below them.
Tensing then drove us through the western suburbs of Shigatse to the Na Thanga monastery which is where the first Dalai Lama of the Gelukpa sect of Buddhism was born. We were the only visitors and a young monk showed us round. We saw a footprint made by the first Dalai Lama in 16th century and some extremely old statues of the Buddha as well as his protectors who had originally been demons.
The road from Shigatse to the west was beautiful, following a small river upstream in a valley enclosed by brown bare hills with farmers gathering the stooks of barley. Eventually we came to a sign advertising thermal springs which is where we spent the night in the spa-cum-hotel. It is hard to imagine that the room could be any worse: the ceiling was falling in, the bed clothes were filthy, the towels were wet and it seemed someone had just used them, the floor was swept, but all the filth was deposited in a corner, the tap of the basin didnt work, there was no toilet, and about one quarter of the room consisted of a huge hole covered by a piece of plywood. There was an unpleasant small emanating from the hole and, lifting a corner of the plywood, I saw a mass of tissues with brown markings on them. We fled. Tensing got the woman owner to give us a marginally better room, and we reluctantly stayed in it after bringing our own bedclothes from the van.
In complete contrast, the thermal spring was divine. It was basically a swimming pool with a constant flow of piped hot water. The chemical content of the water meant that it was extremely boyant and it was hard to stay upright, especially as the floor was slimy from the chemical, but it was thoroughly enjoyable. I couldnt help noticing that the other people in the pool were much darker-skinned than Tensing, and he said that they were basically farmers from the nearby villages relaxing after a day of hard toil in the fields.
