(Sunday)
It's an early night because the guest house we're staying it at the border town of Kodari wants lights-out in the dining area at 10 p.m.... which is rather 'earlyish' especially since I had a bit pof unplanned siesta this afternoon.
We're metres away from the 'Friendship Bridge' that is the entry point to Tibet. We left Kathmandu early this morning at around 6 a.m. with the plan being that we'd be in Tibet earlier this afternoon/evening. However, this was not possible so we're staying put on the Nepali side tonight and planning to go through tomorrow morning.
The six to seven hour overland trip from Kathmandu to the Tibetan border was eventful to say the least. The roads are in an extremely bad condition (yes, even worse than the Maltese roads); the monsoon has wrecked havoc on the mountain roads, just as it does every year. There were at least three instances where we had to get off our vehicles, carry our luggage across the impassable road and put them on board another vehicle on the other side of the landslide.
On one occasion the roadblock was not due to nature's forces but because a dead person's body was lying on the road. Appartently, a man was run over by a lorry yesterday afternoon and according to tradition, the body is not touched until all the relatives arrive for the funeral. So the road was blocked on both sides where the body was lying; the body was covered with a sheet and a community of elders were sitting under a tent put up in the middle of the road discussing funeral arrangements. We had to uncermonously walk along the dead body with our luggage to get to the other side of the road to continue our trip towards Tibet and Cho Oyu. Let's hope the relatives arrive soon as the body has been lying there for more than 24 hours in 30 degrees Celcius plus temperatures - in the sun !
Further along the road we actually had to help out with the repair of the road so that our bus could go along. We managed to patch up the road as best we can (by placing boulders and stones in places where the water had swept the road) so that the bus could make its way across. It did :)
The other most significant event of the day was meeting our expedition's sirdar (or chief sherpa), Padawa Sherpa. Padawa is to Himalayan mountaineering what ronaldo is to football. The guy's been on the summit of Everest 11 times (I repeat, 11 times) and on Cho Oyu's summit six times, apart from making most of the summits of the 12 other 8,000m peaks.
Apparences are deceiving. The guy's gota slim build, not particularly muscular and one wouldn't have a clue that he's a top mountaineer.
The fact that we have such world-class individuals as Padawa and our guide Victor Saunders in our team fills us with confidence in reaching our intended destination, the majestic summit of Cho Oyu in a month's time.