The Roof of the World - in Tingiri

I could have stayed in Nylam for another day - there was something about the ‘slow’ pace that appealed to me and I’d already been pre-warned that this was the absolute lap of luxury compared to our next stop - Tingiri. Through the clever use of sign language I purchased a pillow stuffed with rice and about 20-years of dust as we boarded a lime-green bus and set out on the beautifully paved road to Tingiri.

The journey was absolutely beautiful as we travelled through the dry, dusty Tibetan plateau, reaching an altitude of 5000m on a pass marked by thousands of prayer flags flapping in the breeze under a clear blue sky. Views on both sides of the bus were stunning and it was difficult to take everything in at once. Farmers, in traditional Tibetan dress, led their cows into the fields, the perimeters of which were marked by rocks and narrow shallow ditches. Women dressed in bright red scarves, long black skirts, adorned with feathers and decorated stones carried their children on their backs in brightly coloured bags as they travelled by foot from one small village to the next.

 The villages we passed were all ‘gated’ by a 5-foot wall, a wooden door and marked by flag-posts which seemed to sprout from each of the buildings, adorned by a red, blue, yellow and white flag. The bus shared the road with small diesel-powered three-wheeled tractors pulling a small wagon filled with children or yak dung which, when heated, is used to heat the homes. It was an amazing bus journey and one that I will not soon forget. As we followed a final series of switchbacks up over the 5000m pass, I felt as though I was now finally, ‘on the roof of the world’.

It was on this bus journey that we were offered the first sight of Everest standing solitary and grand like a beacon above the rest of the Himalayan panorama. Next to it was Cho You, looking equally impressive and ominous with spin-drift swirling from its peak. It was a rather surreal moment and we all clamoured off the bus armed with cameras to take in the views. Everest looked close enough to touch even though it was still 80 kilometers away.