Return to Lhasa

Return to Lhasa

We drove out of Gyantse into the mountins. We soon left the broad flat bottomed valley and took a tributary valley. It had a powerful river  but the sides were steep and the road was soon climbing a steadt gradient. 

We passed a massive transformer station so I knew that an HEP station and dam were nearby. We climbed steadily on a series of hairin bends. I was constantly on the lookout for a dam but stared in vain. It was only after we crested a ridge and dipped back towards the main river that I caught a glimpse of the upstream face of the dam.

We followed the road along the lake formed by the dam. At one point, there is a castle on a pinnacle of rock. Iy used to control trade along the valley.

The castle now sits on is own island, only connected to the valley side by a modern causeway.

We reched the head of the reservoir and the delta that the river has formed where it flows into the lake. 

Above the delta, the river is so choked with debris that there is a lot of braiding as the river changes course. A lot of farmers were displaced by the building of the dam. and the Manla reservoir. Now as the silt builds up, I see a lot of opportunity for land reclaimation and for some of those farmers to return.

We continued up th river, passing more communities cultivating what fields they could between the raging river and the steep valley sides. The scenery had changed. The valley widened out and there were rolling grasslands surrounded by towering peaks. 

We turned away from the main valley up a side valley and a pass. The distant views that we had had across the grasslands changed to a narrow and steep valley. The road left the bottom of the valley to climb up the side via numerous hairpin bends to reach another pass.

We were promised views of the glacier that fed the river. The valley narrowed and we were dwarfed by towering cliffs. Somewhere above us was a glacier but there was low cloud cover. There were glimpses of snow in the breaks of the clouds but you had to be lucky to be looking in the right direction at te right time. 

There was a tourist turn off point for visitors to catch a glipse of the glacier. It cost 50 yuan, would involve a hilly walk across scree to reach a point a few hunderd metres above where we had been ten minutes before. It was still cloudy so it would have been a waste of 50 yuan so we didn't stop.

We had crested the pass and had started our descent. The tops of the mountains were still cloaked with cloud, but the valleys were clear.

We came to a marker denoting the height of a local pass at 4,890 metres.

A view of the river as it cascaded downstream. There was a large car park and a two storey traditional building, a hotel with a restaurnt and cafe. It obviously wasn't open as when we approached, a security guard rushed out and shooed us away. 

We got back on teh bus and set off down the valley. As we left, the clouds parted and we had a great view of the building nd behind it, the nose of a glacier as it pushed its way down the valley. 

At the bottom of the valley, we returned to a highland, rolling grassy plain. There were a series of lakes that are widely visited by tourists. There are also several stop off points to view the lakes and an opportunity for local vendors to sell coffee, sausages and souvenirs. There were also ample opportunities to pose with Tibetian mastifs, massive dogs the size of a pony or to side astride a yak. 

These dogs were just puppies as they grow larger than St Bernards or Newfoundlands.

A view up the lake from one of the viewpoints high above the waterline. 

The road that we were following climbed further up the valley side to cross a pass. There were several hairpin bends until we crested the pass. Therw was thick cloud on the other side of the pass. It was only as we descended that we emerged from the cloud and could see down the valley.

There was a settlement a long way down the valley in the distance.

The road would take for ever to descend the slope at a reasonable and manageable gradient.

Bends...

...and more bends. 

When we reached the settlement at the bottom of this descent, we entered a major broad valley that would take us pass the airport. We stopped here to drop off John and Kim who would be flying to our next detination. The rest of the group would say goodbye to our Tibetan guide and board the train in Lhasa for the 36 hour train journey to Chengdu.