There is a placeholder with links to the itinerary and all the photos from this trip – click here or below:
Rise uncomfortably early (God alone knows why) and dumped at airport circa 6:50, more than an hour before check-in for our flight even opens – Mangal has a bit to answer for here!
Fly to Lhasa…
Searched on arrival and have my copy of Seven Years In Tibet confiscated by an utterly charming but firm official.
Guide Tse-Ten and driver Chum-day rescue us and take us to the so-called four star Lhasa Hotel.
We enjoyed a snack of yak burger and chips in the Hard Yak Café (very good actually) only to find that the Hard Yak is the only one of the hotel’s five restaurants that is open at present.
This, together with no central heating (broke down 2 1/2 years ago) and no hot water (breaks down at regular hours as an economy measure each day) hacks us off.
We get a new room and eventually hot water and tolerate some nasi goreng in the Hard Yak determined to change our dining arrangements for subsequent meals.
We had expected a relatively low quality of hotel, but we had not expected basic ultilities such as heating and hot water to be inadequate. We were especially frustrated by the hot watre issue, as it became very obvious very quickly that thehotel was deliberately shutting down the hot water for several hours a day to save money, but the staff consistently denied this, claiming that there were daily unfortunate breakdowns.
I even offered them money to keep the hot water service going for us, but to no avail because the staff were insistent that the problem was mechanical not economic!
Altitude makes people tetchy when they are unused to it; his additional and seemingly unfair privation certainly added to our tetchiness; especially as Janie and I are both people who also get tetchy when we are cold!