We went mountain biking in Lhasa...wooohoo!!!!! And here are the photos to show you all how totally awesome it was! We were such happy bunnies at the end of the day we could hardly stand ourselves :)

We headed to Sera Monastery on the street - it's just 5kms north of town. The monastery was very busy and we were feeling good on the bikes so we gave the monastery a miss. We will go back, they have debates every afternoon except on Sundays :) We took a path along the south wall of the monastery and headed for dirt...and we found it! Here is A (tiny on the left side) riding the singletrack in view of the Potala :)


And here I am riding some of the same singletrack :)


It was a scenic ride, this rock chorten was next to the trail...


After playing around in the dirt for a half hour or so we headed back to the east...on the way we spotted these solar powered kettles :)



Continuing on, we found our way through a small village...



...stopping once for directions and then ended up getting a puncture on the way (this is A's THIRD!!! puncture....which is how many I had on the moto in India :). It was not surprising, the trails were covered with thorns.


While I was fixing the flat A got into the peanuts and also snapped these birds on the wire...looks like a woodpecker to me :)


Once we fixed the flat and moved on we were heading up towards the Pabonka Monastery and a Sky Burial site. The trails were amazing!!!! This is looking ahead and back the way we came.



I also spotted these tiny purple flowers growing by the trail....


We were getting into more and more farmland and we started to follow an aquaduct around the valley on it's accompanying tractor trail. We stopped for a photo op on this stream crossing :)




We decided it was time to move on and we again hit the street and bombed back to the valley floor and then picked up another dirt road through another village to get around the mountain to another monastery (just a general destination - we heard it was an off-road ride from Sera to Deprung :). Then we rode along the canal for a little ways, houses lined the other side of the canal...


As we continued on we came to the nature reserve where there were lots of cows grazing and some good views of the Potala :)


Then it was more dirt road and more villages...




...some Buddhist carvings...



...some friendly guys waving hello...


...and a lot of great scenery and rock :)






Just after we nearly got choked by a truck passing us in the dust, we came upon a nunnery on the side of the trail...we stopped to chat, we took some photos and handed over a small amount of cash for some new shoes :)





Maybe I didn't give enough cash to the nun or maybe A just needed the time to walk up the hill to get some pics of the prayer flags spanning the gully - we had been riding to these flags for a half an hour - but not a minute after we left the nunnery I noticed that I had a puncture. I not only got the second puncture of the day but the 3rd and 4th, too - I had three thorns in my tire and three holes in the tube! I patched A's tube from earlier in the day as I only had three patches left in the patch kit - we wouldn't want to have a tube with a hole in it *and* no patches left, that's just asking for trouble :)



A's view from the hill as I fixed my puncture under the tree (you can see it in the center there, the tree on the left :)


The dirt road petered out and we were surrounded by Chinese military and other administrative type buildings, and it was getting to be dinner time :), so we headed back into town...grinning like idiots who have had a wonderful day playing in the dirt and seeing places that no other tourists ever go....