Ah! I wrote about the nice weather and cursed it! DOH! :)

Yesterday morning we woke up to rain, so our early departure for Yamdrok Tso was delayed (it's over 100kms to get there, with 1100 meters of climbing, so we need ideal weather). So we made good use of our day and decided to decide about our departure from this fair city.

It is such hard work! Nothing about our departure will be easy and the only way it will be cheap is if it is fast. There are so many options and we don't know when we will be back this way again (I have lots of other places I want to explore :) it makes it so hard to choose. One thing we definitely want to do is incorporate riding the bicycles - we see so much more than the average tourist does from the window of the vehicle they are riding in. Please be patient for commentary around that topic to be expounded upon by us - we are not going to say too much until we cross the Nepal border :)

At all the foreigner accomodation places (be it our youth hostel or one of the big hotels that is recommended in LP and RG) there are big bulletin boards where people post the trips they are trying to arrange and find more travellers to fill the seats (interestingly, there are way more Chinese messages than English messages...which matches a theory I have, I will explain more about when we hit Nepal :). We spotted a great looking trip to Kailash that hit all the places we wanted to go, including Everest Base Camp and the Nepal border....but it is very expensive and we haven't heard back from the guy yet when we asked about taking our bicycles. We are also looking into doing our own thing with one of the local bicycle trip companies so that the jeep has a proper bike rack. It's no more expensive than any of the regular jeeps trips - it's a racket here, they know how much everyone else charges and the quotes are all about 1000 Yuan per day plus the costs of permits and a guide. We have been told that the guide is 260 Yuan a day with apparently 160 going to the guide agency (the official Chinese guide agency) and the guide seeing the other 100.

The guide and permit situation is driving us batty! It seems that it depends on who you ask (travel agents)...which is a bit scary. At one point yesterday we have the travel agent tell us that they don't care about bicyclists, the police don't speak English and we would have no problems riding the Friendship Highway without a guide(then what the heck have we been doing cooling our heels in Lhasa for all this time??? We could have been in Kathmandu by now!!!!!) but I told her about the problems and then she phoned a friend and got the right information...hmmm, it seems you need a guide. Ah, it has been frustrating!

We are looking to make a day trip to Samye Monastery - it's a monastery built in the form of a mandala...which is the shape of Buddha's house (roughly :). We also want to ride to Ganden on a 1 or 2 night trip - it will be a lot of climbing anyway you look at it (Ganden is at 4500 meters, Lhasa is 3680), but if we go offroad off the backside trekking route we have an offroad pass of 5200 meters to cross :). Then it will be time to get on the road to Nepal...but how fast and what do we stop to see?

Here are the things we discovered yesterday:

-> The southern leg of the Friendship Highway, the bit that goes to Gyantse, is under construction and closed to jeeps...they drive along the top and then hook back to Gyantse from Shigatse. Bicycles are allowed while it's under construction, but you have to have a guide with you and the guide rides in the jeep....hmmm.

-> The permit costs for us and a guide to get to Everest Base Camp in a jeep will top 1000 Yuan (400 for the jeep and 180 per person) just for the permits! That is 65GBPs or about US$130 to get up close and personal with Everest.

-> We paid for a permit to get into Tibet - that was 500 Yuan each in Xi'an (and we hunted around and it was the cheapest we found). That is a bit of money spinner - to get a new one while we are here is only 60 Yuan and all the permits come from Lhasa (ours came from one of the local hotel travel agencies). OUCH! We found this out when we discovered that we need to get a new one - our original one expired May 1st! When we applied in Xi'an they did not ask us how long we wanted it to last and we didn't ask - the guidebooks indicated that the Tibet permit wasn't the key for how long you can stay, it was the Chinese Visa that is the important document. To add insult to injury, on our permit it says I am a housewife and A is a beautician - the only Chinese name on our permit had accountant next to it and the other American woman was also a housewife! Ah, can you believe it!?!?!?! My reputation is in tatters! :)

We *are* formulating a plan and it will involve riding the bikes...we will see Everest for sure (you can see it from the highway) and we will probably shell out for the permits, as it is once in a lifetime. We have to get out of China by the 19th of June (when our visas expire) and, if I get my plan the way I want it, it will take us 10-12 days to get to the border - we need to be moving out of Lhasa by the first of June. More news as it happens....