Tibet, here we come!
5.15am, wake up!!! We print our tickets, we have
breakfast e we head to the check in gate. After dropping our luggage, the
security guards stop Andrea and start talking to him in Chinese… The come to
me, and tell me that he needs to go to the desk to check something… and
fortunately they let me go with him to serve as interpreter. They make him open
his bag, and guess what the problem is! An
hard disk and a flashlight! …without any comment, we go back to Marchetto and
we get ready for boarding, perfectly on time.
Air
China serves us breakfast… Yay… I love Chinese food, but I really can’t stand
Chinese breakfast! I don’t even open my sticky rice soup… the sole idea makes
me sick! I try to get some sleep, to compensate for the previous nights, ma
after about one hour we start to fly over the Tibetan mountains and the sight
literally keeps my eyes glued to the window. The earth is so close as I had
never seen it before from a still high-flying airplane.
On
the way to our hotel, even before entering the city, I see it: the Potala
palace, the fortress of Tibetan Buddhism. Impressive, solitary, towering Lhasa
with its white, red and gold. An oasis in the desert. I am enchanted.
Before
long we arrive at the hotel and our guide’s brother advise us to take a rest e
let our body some time to acclimatize. A 3-star hotel after 9 days in the
cheapest hostels of China sounds just like a dream. The space is not that
large, since they put an extra bed in a double room (a mattress on the floor),
but it’s really cozy.
We
start feeling the lack of oxygen, especially walking up and down the stairs. Two
flights are enough to let us short of breath and with palpitations.
A
short nap, and we decide to go out to get some lunch. We eat in a quite
touristic place, but it is not bad anyway. After eating our first plate of yak
meat, we go have a luck at the Potala palace. I can’t say whether is more
impressive from close up or from a distance..
To enter the square in fron of the palace we must go
through a metal detector check-in and I immediately recall our temporary guide
first words: “if you don’t want to get in trouble, do not take pictures of the
military!”. Mission: impossible. They’re everywhere! The city is literally
plastered with uniforms; platoons and checkpoints alternate endlessly. One more
detail: it is not allowed to bring lighters in certain zones. The fear that
someone may protest against the Chinese government by setting themselves on
fire is huge. What impresses me the most is the composition of the platoons:
some soldiers carry a gun, others a truncheon… and others a FIRE EXTINGUISHER. In
front of such view, you are not able to speak a world.
While I walk through the streets of Lhasa, I start
accusing the first symptoms of altitude
sickness: nausea and headache are slowly increasing. I resist for a while, but
eventually I decide to go back to the hotel. The nausea get worse and worse and
I end up vomiting. I take a painkiller and I go to bed, literally destroyed. I
don’t even go out for dinner, because every time I try to stand up, nausea and
dizziness return. At least, ibuprofen seems to work quite well on my headache.
They say it’s a good sign.
I fall asleep, confused and aching.
P.s.: our guide advised us not to take a shower on our
first day in Lhasa, because hot water would increase AMS (acute mountain sickness)
symptoms. This means 3 days since last shower. We are starting dreaming hot
water and cleanliness.
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