Friday, May 12, 2006

Accomodations & Toilets

Throughout this overland, we've had the pleasure of being blessed with a variety of accomodations and toilets with different sceneries and scents.

A couple of the nights weren't as bad as we were staying at hotels with shared washrooms which we were quite accustomed to by now. Lucky me though, a monk tries to get into the washroom as I was using it! There is one washroom in this hotel that has a door on it and it is 'locked' with a long toothpick. Usually, if the door is closed, it means someone is using it. Guess this monk isn't familiar with this concept because he pushes the door and breaks the toothpick! All the while, he just stands there while I struggle to keep the door closed with one hand. Nice.

More interesting accomodations were found at Rongphu Monestary near EBC. As mentioned before, 8 of us who arrived late and the guesthouse was full. They took us up to the monestary where they showed us this big room with about 4 beds/couches. They kind of looked like day beds, Tibetan style (not necessarily a good thing. too bad I forgot to take a photo). We got to sleep in lovely fragrant beds in the cold with a 40 watt lightbulb we couldn't control. Needless to say, it was a sleepless night as we would wake up gasping for air everytime we fell asleep due to the elevation we were at (almost 5000m). We would be awake in the middle of the night hearing one of the other tourist gasping for air. This one guy even brought a huge oxygen pillow with him! We were quite happy when daylight broke.

The 'washrooms' at this place were the best we've seen so far! The one for the monestary was right out in the open with a wall that goes up about 4 feet high. You go where you can find a spot. Oh yeah, and we're just talking toilets here, showers do not exist. Not that you would want to anyways since it's freezing!

Lucky for us, there is a large Tibetan dog (all known to be quite vicious) guarding the washroom. I tried to go when I first got there but this dog was on top of the wall barking his head off. I put off my need out of the fear of this dog attacking me while I was going (what a story that would have been).

I thought perhaps the washroom for the guesthouse would be better. Jokes on me! You go where you can find a spot in this one too and here, you're not sure where the hole actually is so you've got to be careful where you step! At least I didn't have to worry about the dog here.

Luckily, accomodations at Namtso were actually quite nice! We stayed in yurts with 4 real beds in them. Very cosy.

This place didn't even have washrooms. When we asked, they said you go where you want to. Nice! :D. We did find something resembling a washroom further down but we might as well have gone anywhere.

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