It may seem like ages, but in reality it's barely enough to arrange all the papers, documents, buy the last minute stuff, check on the expiry date of the medicines and eventually go to the doctor and buy new ones... which reminds me: Diamox!
Luckily I have enough for myself but not nearly enough for Steve we have to go to the doctor, I hope we'll find someone who heard of Diamox used to prevent the symptoms of Acute Mountain Sickness.
Not everyone knows this medicine is used this way.
When I tried to buy it in Italy I had to browse 4 or 5 different pharmacies, they just never heard of AMS, they thought I was talking about motion sickness and they gave me travel gum or stuff like that.
We might have to go to a travel doctor and spend a fortune for a consultation, well, we'll see.
Anyway we still have to get the visas for Nepal, my australian visa label on my new passport and the Tibetan Travel Permits, but that will be easy cause it will be our travel agent that will arrange it from Kathmandu.
We have no weight limitations (I mean no different from the usual ones) on the flight to Lhasa, but since we'll be always on the move I prefer to travel light and we will have to use our 2 backpacks and 2 day packs, exactly what we used for our 3 weeks in Argentina and Antarctica.... boy that was difficult! 3 weeks going from hot and humid Buenos Aires to the icy cold ice-camping night in Jougla, Antarctica....
Luckily we are both experienced travellers and have been packing a million times.... I remember my first travels when I was logging around a huge suitcase full of completely useless scarves and skirts and items I most certainly never used...
My best packing was when I travelled from India to Australia with any means possible, plane, boat, train, bus, motorbike, feet etc..., that was a long 2 months with only one medium size backpack and a small trolley, I simply had to wash stuff every day.... and refrain from buying anything... tough since I loved the indian fabrics!
Many times I've been packing old stuff that I was going to chuck and used it once or twice during the trip and then left it behind as soon as I was buying new items, so that the actual space in the backpack was always the same.
But enough about packing! Boring already!
What Steve and I are doing these days, a part from talking about the trip every chance we got, is reading as much as possible about the controversial political situation in Tibet.
We know we will not be allowed any book on this subject when entering Tibet and I have to say it is a problem, since we're used to travel with at least 2 or 3 books about the place we're going to visit, not only the usual Lonely Planet guide, but also books about the culture etc... We won't be able to do that and that's the first time... We are so interested in hearing both sides of the story, you know the chinese side and the tibetan side. I try not to jump to conclusions without knowing as much as I can and I pride myself on doing a thorough research about any place I'm going to visit.
Before going to South East Asia I read everything I could find on the Khmer Rouges and Pol Pot and the was in Vietnam, I read the testimonials of many survivors of the killing fields and I had to order books from obscure bookstores online in order to get some rare or out of print books.
I watched movies about it, and believe me, it wasn't easy in 2007 to find a copy of "The Killing Fields" the movie with Sam Waterstone, I had to order a copy from Korea (!!!!!), it took 4 weeks to arrive in Holland.
Well, to cut a long story short we bought a few books on Tibetan Buddhism, the Dalai Lama, Historical studies of Tibet, the account of courageous travellers in the early 20th century, and the book by a chinese film maker Sun Shuyun, "A year in Tibet".
Yes, we want to hear about her experience in Tibet, since she grew up during the Cultural Revolution and she had been taught to look at Buddhism and the Tibetan people as if they were superstitious and primitive.
I finished the book yesterday and I have to say that I enjoyed it very much. Yes, Sun's practical and analytical approach to life is always clashing with the Tibetan beliefs and traditions, and yes, her atheism is sometimes limiting her possibilities to delve even more deeply into a magic world of shamans, monks, remedial practices, and so on, but it's also true that she is always up for the challenge, she points out the incongruities of some practices but she understands the reason behind some arrangements.
She disapproves of the constant drinking but she understands why sharing a wife between 2 or 3 brothers is responding to some very practical necessities in a land where the family household needs more than one man to survive.
I have to say that I was so excited about our trip after I finished reading that book, that I bought the doco produced by the BBC, of which the book is a complementary story.
There's a few videos taken from this doco in youtube and it's really interesting to watch them.
Here's the link to one of them, if you're interested: A Year in Tibet
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