P O S T C A R D F R O M T I B E T

This bus, with no shocks, drafts and dust everywhere was the snugest place to be. It was like a box seat at an atrocious theater where epic landscape scrolled by. I should stay on board like the other passengers, and continue the three more days to Lhasa, common sense said. Then these discomforts would be of finite, scheduled duration. Sleepy after a restless night, I considered it.
Instead, my partner Bill and I would get off at a place called Tingri West to begin a 10-day walk to Everest Basecamp at the foot of the Rongbuk glacier and then out to Xegar, a village about 150 kilometers farther down this road. We didn't know where Tingri was exactly. The maps were impressionistic at best. "The driver will know and let us off," we thought. After all, we'd paid fare only for that distance, and he certainly wouldn't take us an inch farther than we'd paid for, especially after how much we'd argued with the driver about the fare in the first place. He'd agreed on one price (we wrote numbers on our hands to communicate), then once we'd hoisted our luggage on top of the bus, he demanded more. As his final ploy he closed the pneumonic door of the bus in our faces, ending our haggling.

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