East is Relative

Arriving in Lhasa

That night, I still hadn’t received my ticket to Lhasa, and I was supposed to leave at 8:45am the next day, so I sort of panicked. I called the travel agent and she told me that they thought they had bought the tickets, but were wrong, and I’d either have to go a day late or take a train at 4am and transfer trains at a different city – they told me this at about 11pm. I was freaking out, pretty much, because the schedule until I leave China is pretty tight, and if I went a day late to Lhasa, everything would have been really screwed up, and I didn’t think 4 hours was enough time for me to decide to take this other train and have to make a middle-of-the-night train transfer. As I was weeping on the phone with the travel agent, though, she told me someone had bought me a ticket last minute. They bought me a soft sleeper instead of a hard sleeper, and the company covered the extra costs since it wasn’t my fault that there was a problem in the first place. What a relief. But I had to get to the train station earlier than I planned, because the train left at 6:51am, not 8:45am.

I slept really fitfully, because the food I’d had right before I went to bed was really spicy and didn’t agree with me, and I’d had a few beers, and the room was really overheated again. I was pretty much sick all night, but I made it out of the hostel in time to get to the train station with only a few minutes to wait to get on the train. I’m really not sure what I ate, because I was sharing a dish with my friend Rob, the bartender at the hostel, but it was home-cooked something. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but boy was it not. Once I was on the train, I was sick a few times in the bathroom, but I managed to get to sleep around 8am. I slept for most of the day and through the night, to wake up this morning feeling much better.

This particular train ride from Xi’an to Lhasa is about 34 hours, and we haven’t stopped very often. It was nice to just be able to sleep. I also started drinking a lot of water to try to help stave off altitude sickness, which is common for people traveling to Tibet, because the elevation is so high. Altitude sickness is essentially what happens when you don’t have enough oxygen to breathe. If you don’t take medicine to help relieve the symptoms of altitude sickness (which I didn’t because I didn’t have any medicine to take), you’re supposed to drink a lot of water to help your system process as much oxygen as possible. There are some oxygen tanks on the train (I saw one person using it earlier this morning), but I’m trying to avoid that – a lot of the things I’ve read say that if you use oxygen you’re just making it worse, so you should only do it in an emergency. Anyway, I’ve only had a few moments where I was short-of-breath, and I’ve had more water in the past 24 hours than I’ve had in the last 3 days. Other than that and some very mild nausea (but not actually getting sick), I’ve been alright. A few deep breaths also seems to help.

I arrived in Lhasa this afternoon around 4:30pm and met up with Donovan, Taylor and Sarah for a few days of exploring Tibet. Sarah’s been sick from the altitude, but Donovan and Taylor are fine. We’ll see how it works out, wish me luck. Touring starts tomorrow!