But while I don’t envy your experience with the facilities, I am jealous of your overland treks and visit to Base Camp. During the planning stages of our trip, I was hoping we’d get the chance to see Qomolangma, if only from a distance. But as it turned out, the furthest we could manage to get out of Lhasa was a day trip to a nearby mountain lake.

The ban on photos of the Dalai Lama was one of the sadder things we encountered in Tibet. During a visit to one monastery (the one on the highway between Lhasa and the airport), a pilgrim walked up to us and asked “Picture? Picture?”–apparently one of the few English words she knew. We weren’t making the connection of what she wanted until our guide said that she was hoping we had pictures of the Dalai Lama. It was sad trying to explain that we didn’t have one. And even if we did, it wouldn’t have been safe for us or her to give it to her, given the significant number of government spies rumored to be spread throughout the society–even in the monasteries themselves. Still, it made me wish that I could have smuggled in a whole stack of Dalai Lama photos and left them in a dark corner of some obscure monastery, to be discovered, some time later, as a “miraculous manifestation.”

Don’t know if you saw it, but the Discovery Channel aired an interesting documentary a few months ago about the life of the first emperor and his burial complex. You probably heard, while you were there, the legends that the actual tomb chamber was laid out like a map of the emperor’s conquered lands–with rivers of flowing mercury. An interesting fact from the documentary was that recent soil core samples taken from the tomb area actually produced mercury readings high enough to support the reality of that legend.

Very well described.

We specifically picked our range because it outputs 16K BTU for each of its burners. Not one of the those sissy Viking stoves as you say. Although, whenever you do settle down, I can recommend some 30K BTU wok stoves for you. Double flash… yum…