In the morning, we twisted Tensing’s arm and he gave us an extra hour to visit the ruins of the Rongbuk (Rongpu or Rongbu) Monastery shortly before the barrier stopping tourists from going any further. One of the buildings is still habitable and incredibly, given the very cold temperature, a nun is still living there. The stupas where the ashes of cremated monks were stored had not been damaged when the monastery was wrecked and we saw the open space where sky burials of non-monks took place. The ruins of this monastery against the backdrop of Everest towering almost overhead were awe-inspiring. As we left Base Camp, we saw a herd of wild antelope; its impossible to imagine what they find to eat in the Rongbuk Valley which had formally been a glacier and consists entirely of broken grey rocks.
Driving back over the pass, we returned to the iconic G318 and continued westwards. We left it when it turned south towards Nepal and continued westwards along a valley of a tributary of the Indus. The valley was increasingly of semi-desert type and enclosed by bare brown hills with snow-capped peaks in the distance – eventually Shishapangma of over 8,000 metres hove into view and we could see a large part of the entire Himalayan Wall from east to west. Our new road had been built specially to carry tourists from China to Nepal and a junction which, for some strange reason was unmarked, took us westwards through increasingly arid landscape until we came to the huge Lake Poku. We saw a famous wild donkey which likes to race cars but it was moving too fast to take a picture.
The road is still being built and all the bridges are still under construction. This required some hair-raising detours on mud roads with incredibly steep gradients and crossed by large streams. The van behaved magnificently and, after crossing a very high pass, we descended into a valley containing the River Indus on its way to Pakistan. Crossing a bridge we entered the town of Saga and found a cheap hotel. The room was unheated and terribly cold, so we slept in the van.
