Huh, so our blog is blocked in China. No matter, I think we're sneaky devils and can get around that. Thumbs up mum!

Though it was nice to fatten up in Lhasa for a while hitting the road was great. It's hard to explain how comfortable sleeping on a punctured therm-a-rest in a pile of rocks and how delicious our pretty shoddy meals have become. We're currently writing from Lhatse, a pretty sizable town about 500km west of Lhasa. The road here has been wild, westwards from Lhasa the amount of water drops off steeply while the elevation is almost entirely above 4000m. The variation of the East has been replaced by giant brown hills and wide valleys where farmers stubbornly cultivate rocks for the sheep to eat. After the first day of mostly flat we shot up a pass to Yamdrok lake, around the lake through snow and wind, then had some exquisite dumplings at a workers restaurant which doubled as a disco. A middle aged Tibetan lady tried through some pretty hilarious acting to convince us to stay and dance it up, though terrified of what the altitude and yak skull with colored light bulbs for eyes might do to our minds we declined and continued to our campsite just down the road.

I woke up the next morning to an inch of snow and a mild case of altitude sickness. Nothing too bad, just some nausea, a headache, and no appetite. Without a pressing schedule it didn't really matter, we could hang out at our campsite as long as needed, and the snow would melt within minutes. Only problem was, at just shy of 4600m we were at the low point between two passes, with the only way to a lower elevation being over a 5000+m pass...bummer. Around noon after an endlessly curious goat herder had examined everything from our tent pegs to the video camera we decided to go for it. The pass was only 20km off and the first half went great, second half...not so great. For the last 7km or so I had a raging headache, felt like I was going to spew, and was breathing like mad even though we were averaging 5km/h or so. It was miserable, but not as bad as the descent. I had sort of failed to realize that the symptoms would stick around until we got a fair bit lower. With the shallowest descent yet it took another 2 hours, 40km, and a healthy allotment of swearing to reach the next low point which we hoped was low enough at 4270m. Turned out to be good enough, though it was quite a humbling experience. Honestly I had dismissed the possibility of AMS, after all we were in good shape, had been biking at similar altitudes for weeks, and were camping only 200m higher than our next highest campsite. I guess altitude is a strange beast.

We had heard the West was the hard life. So far, this has not proved to be true. Barring the occasional headwind and Ben's bloated belly its been great. With far fewer checkpoints to worry about we have been able to fully enjoy all the benefits of shops and markets in towns and cities that we previously had to pass through under the cover of darkness. Mostly this means good food, so much of it that our Tibetan ramen tally has increased only 27 to 147 since leaving Lhasa. That quantity of Ramen noodles may sound a bit grim, but Chinese ramen isn't your typical American rubbish. With as many as 4 flavor packets each they are somewhat of a treat. We have even ranked our favorites- the elusive gold and purple, green, red, then spicy purple red, not to mention our "breakfast ramen" creation made with milk powder, yum! I'm pretty sure they're no more nutritious than ramen back home but I keep telling myself otherwise.

From here the road splits, south on 318 to Nepal or Northwest on 219 past Mt. Kailash to Kashgar in Xinjiang. I think we're going northwest on 219. Kashgar is about 2500km from here and we'll see how far we make it before we have to resort to hitching in order to make it to some sort of station, whether it be bus, train, or police in an effort to get back to Shanghai for our flight out in about a month, it'll be interesting I think.