

The snow stopped and it remained overcast for the morning. Finn woke up feeling the effects of the altitude, finding it difficult to focus his sight properly. The man in the shop opposite which we camped sold him a sheaf of tablets that seemed to cure the problem and so we got underway.
We had camped before a pass so a decent chunk of the morning was spent getting over that. As we approached the top so,e bad weather blew in bringing with it snow and hail, reminding us that we were cycling now at 4800m at the top.
The weather cleared up the following day so we said goodbye to Tashi. His grandmother gave us a thangka, a thin white scarf given in Tibet as a good luck for travellers before we left.
The weather closed in again as we made the climb out of the valley in which Zhidoi sat. It started to hail then snow. The limited visibility was a stark contrast to the wide open vistas we had had the luxury of riding through before. The weather cleared up by the time we reached the top though, it seems to be a law of nature that as soon as you bother to put on the extra gear for bad weather it clears up.
We spent most of the day climbing so by evening the temperature dropped significantly. A cold wind blew in and the snow started up again. We pulled into a small shop on the outskirts of a tiny hamlet and decided there was no point in continuing on and making ourselves miserable. We set up our tents in a field opposite the shop and crawled out of the wind and snow.
Tashi’s town of Zhidoi was very near a monastery, and a large once, that we were eager to see. Tashi taught some of the monks up there, including the young boy who was reincarnated Lama of this particular Buhdist sect and arranged for us all to go up there and have a look around. In return he wanted us to cook him his favourite western dish from his time abroad: mashed potatoes.
Mashed potatoes made with yak butter is an unusual but tasty alternative, and Tashi seemed quite pleased with the meal. After lunch we borrowed his uncles car and drove out to the monastery.
The Gongsa Monastery is huge, though not the biggest by a long shot. Tashis monk friend met us at the entrance and showed us around. Unfortunately we couldn’t get any photos inside the buildings. We saw first the prayer hall, lit by yak butter lamps the pungent smell of which you quickly learn to associate with Buddhist monasteries. Ere were a dozen or so monks in there chanting their sutras, and along one wall a shelf with that held all the monastery’s texts.
Afterwards our monk guide had to go off and teach, so we thanked him and said goodbye. The young novices of the monastery were playing in field at the bottom of a hill and Tashi suggested we go over and say hello to them, most of them hadn’t seen a westerner before and were very excited to see us.
with the young novices of the monastery, It acts like a boarding school mostly, the majoirty lf these kids will leave when they get older rather than become monks
We planned to leave Zhidoi the next day but a snowstorm blew in overnight and continued throughout the morning and then all day the next day, so we stayed an extra day taking shelter in Tashi’s place. We helped Tashi write application letters for scholarships to London Film School, where he had been accepted but couldn’t afford the tuition. Hopefully he gets the funding.
We woke up to a sunny day. We had breakfast (scrambled eggs and bread. Eating oats every day can get stale) and then hit the road. The old road that is, the new road ran almost in parallel to the old except 80m above along the face of the hill, rather than next to the river itself.
One of our coldest mornings out on the plateau this morning, not least because we had decided to camp so high up. A biting wind was blowing down and being thrown around in many different directions, funnelled by the multitude of valleys and bouncing off the mountain faces. It was overcast and a light snow had fallen yesterday, hard to believe it’s almost June but it makes sense now why the plateau is referred to by some as the third pole.
We pedalled up and down many hills through quiet, empty landscape punctuated by prayer flags and yaks. We climbed a short pass and then down into the neighbouring valley where we began to climb a bigger pass with long switch-backs that would stretch for almost a kilometre before turning. Up here above 4000m the internal combustion engine powering the heavy trucks and machinery don’t work effectively, on account of the oxygen deprived air. As a result the road can’t be too steep or else a heavily laden truck won’t be able to get over it.
We got up the pass eventually, it’s the highest pass of this leg so that was a nice relief. From the top we could see a pretty big town down in the distance, and where there is a big town there’s the promise of a hot lunch. We took in the view from the pass for a while, waving at the Tibetans who would pass by on their motorcycles or watching the colourful paper flutter in the wind, thrown out of a car as it reaches the highest point on the road. We flew down the other side, propelled not only by gravity but also by the strong, stiff wind which seems to have finally decided which direction it wants to blow.
Last night it snowed but in the morning the sky was clear and the sun shining. We started the morning off climbing up to the top of the pass. The descent down the other side was long and exhilarating in the cold morning air of the plateau. Minivans full of Tibetans honked and waved and some even stuck their phones out to get photos of the crazy foreigners who had decided to cycle up here.
Last nights snow washed out all the colour of the landscape this morning, leaving only the shape of the rolling hills and flat plateau between. The layer of snow was thin though and had started to melt by the time we were eating breakfast.
Near the top three western-looking cyclists going the other way sped past on the downhill. It was a bit disappointing that they wouldn’t stop for a chat, I can’t imagine they’d seen many cyclists up here. For us, at least, the last westerners we’d seen had been in Urumqi. At the top of the climb however a fourth member of their group had remained to take some pictures and I got talking to him. His name was John and he was from Ireland. Running into an Irishman up here was a very unlikely coincidence but it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. John and his group were cycling from Chengdu, a city about 1000km away in the province of Sichuan to Lahsa, Tibet. They had a guide and all the papers in order and were travelling a lot lighter than we were. In order to get into Tibet you need to be travelling in a party of four of your countrymen, so I assume the other three were Irish too.
John informed us that a town lay at the bottom of this descent and that somewhere there served food. We said goodbye and sped off downhill, pictures of hot bowls of noodles in mind as a brief squall of wind and hail blew up the valley.
To change things up a bit today we decided to cycle each on our own before lunch. The landscape was so flat and open and there were so few turn-offs (none really) that there wasn’t much of a chance of someone getting separated.
I was trying to get a photo of the wildlife but the iPad camera can onky really capture landscapes. Im sure Finn or Andres photos will have some good shots of the animals