Choose another map, showing:

• Ganges
• Asia
• Eurasia
• Eurasia, Africa & Pacific
• The World

Other entries in Lhasa

Make that 4 Western-size people

As the train finally chuffed into the beautiful and shiny-new Lhasa station, almost exactly on time two days after we had left Chengdu, crowds of people approached to peer into the windows and examine this historical new mode of transportation. Some Dutch people who had flown in were there to check out the ride and they were quizzing us about what it was like on board. We tried to be polite, but when one has just gotten off a 48-hour train ride and one is standing there weighed down with a big ole pack and one is recovering from a fairly serious fever, one does not feel like chatting. So we moseyed on fairly quickly.

Getting from the train station to central Lhasa was quite a job, though. There were dozens upon dozens of taxi touts vying to take us into the city, none of whom spoke a word of English. We had planned to split a cab into the city with Rhonda, but the touts didn't seem to be our best bet. We could see city buses at the far end of the parking lot, and we were headed for there, but a pint-sized Tibetan huckster of maybe eight years with a limited but adequate English vocabulary nominated himself our translator. "Fifty yuan to go to town centre!" Well, that didn't sound too bad ... until he pointed at each of us and said "Fifty, fifty, fifty" ... as in fifty each! We didn't think so, so we kept walking. We were in the line for the bus, which looked about as full as a bus can get without people hanging out the windows, when the little shyster chased after us again. "Ten yuan! Ten, ten, ten." Well, thirty yuan is less than five bucks, so we left the bus line and followed our tiny guide ... not to a taxi as we'd thought, but to a beat-up, tiny truck. What are you gonna do? We threw our bags into the bed of the truck and piled in. Rhonda headed for the shotgun seat, but nope -- it turned out we were taking the driver, the driver's friend, and our cute little English-speaking scam artist. We all squeezed into the tiny backseat, the truck roared off in a puff of blue smoke and we were off. We hummed along just fine on the highway, until, to avoid paying a toll, the driver just randomly pulled off the road onto a rocky "shortcut." Matt and Cat found this a great adventure, though Rhonda, in true form, mostly complained. When she commented that she couldn't believe the backseat could even accommodate three Western-sized people, we both eyed her ample girth and thought that maybe some people were a bit more Western-sized than others.

Anyway, we spotted a few other people from our train crammed into similar vehicles stuck in a traffic jam along the rough road, which made us feel better, and certainly less like we were being kidnapped to parts unknown. We jounced along back to the highway, though, having successfully avoided the toll, and pulled up to the Yak Hotel dusty but unscathed. The Yak Hotel was full, as apparently was everywhere else in Lhasa, but we'd met a guy in Chengdu who'd promised to make us a reservation (they won't take them until the day of), so thankfully a quick phone call found us a room. God bless Will whatshisname!

Add to del.icio.us Add to reddit

Photos / videos of "Make that 4 Western-size people":