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March - October 2005

Intrepid Season 2005 - China, Tibet, & Nepal (part III)

Brett Voegele
2005-11-19 14:41:04

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previous years caused problems when they reported what they’d witnessed. Or how about the fear, such that you throw a celebration, but impose an 11PM curfew – maintained by police in full riot gear walking the streets at night, scowling at any who were still out and about (at least they only scowled at me – not sure what they did to others).

As I said, an interesting time to be in Tibet. We were fortunate enough to leave Lhasa a day before the full celebration – making it out before 9 AM when many of the roads were to be closed. Yes, it would have been interesting to stick around to witness everything, but the rumor going around at the time was that there was going to be a 24-hour curfew, though I don’t believe that actually happened. I do know that many of the shops were forced to close, so I think it was best that we went on our way.

Anyway, that’s getting WAY ahead of the itinerary, so let’s backtrack to the start of the trip. We met in Beijing on August 15th – we being myself and a group of 9 passengers. It was another great group; aided by the fact that 7 nationalities were represented among the 9 passengers, which I find always helps out with the group dynamics.

We did our standard stuff in/around Beijing – or at least tried to. After driving 3 hours out to the Great Wall at Simatai, and walking to the wall in the driving rain, we discovered that we could only go between roughly 3 towers. It was probably a good thing, as the wall was pretty slippery and not overly safe, but the authorities seemed to be overly cautious. I found out later why – it seems that 2 days earlier a foreigner had been struck and killed by lightening. Doh! A performance that night (kung fu, opera, or acrobats), followed by the Forbidden City the next day, and the next thing you know we’re on the overnight train to Xian.

Again, the standard routine in Xian – wandering around ...