From the Archive: One lap of Everest by Toyota Land Cruiser:
My beige Land Cruiser cost $1580 to rent. This sounded exorbitant until I learned: The trip would take five days, maybe more; the lone road to Kathmandu, unpaved and often not so much a road as a yak path, would beat the Toyota's bushings into metallic granola; and the Land Cruiser came equipped with a real, live Tibetan. In this case, 27-year-old Passang."Passang Passang," he replied.
ChapStick would at least taste better. Tibetan food is reviled by even the Tibetans. It consists of slices of meat from yaks that are slaughtered only after they've died of old age. Plus yak-butter tea ,Chang is the local beer. One liter costs about 26 cents. Pour month-old milk into a bottle of flat 7-Up and you will have roughly the same product. Chang's alcohol content is low, thus imbuing it with no redeeming features whatsoever.
In the preceding week, I had perhaps asked Passang 25 times, "What about getting fuel?" He was resolutely silent. But refueling in Tibet's barren outback was, indeed, unfathomable, principally because anything remotely resembling a gas station refused to present itself—another reason a carry-on Tibetan guide is mandatory.. A disembodied hand slipped between dark-blue drapes and proffered a black garden hose."Don't know.
Tom and I climbed out of the truck and acted as human pylons, marking the spot where the road evaporated. Passang drove off into the west, soon resembling a brown ant kicking up a dusty, minuscule rooster tail. Kelly happily clicked photos. Then he handed me a chunk of—dried yak cheese, one of a dozen globs or so on a string that he had been wearing as a necklace. "It's food, but it also wards off insects," he explained, although at this altitude there weren't any.
Whatever its name, Everest, at 29,028 feet, positively resonates with peril, death, and personal disaster. I couldn't wait to get away from it. At its base was another monastery. The monks there live at the highest permanently inhabited outpost on the planet. They do not move real fast.
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