Seeing Kangchendzonga is also a milestone for Thomas and me. This means we have seen 8 of the top ten highest mountains in the world. The remaining two mountains, K2 and Nanga Parbat, are both located in northwest Pakistan, and we obviously won’t be heading there right now.

To celebrate the eight, we have put together our own pictorial list of the world’s ten highest mountains, respectfully leaving blank spaces for K2 and Nanga Parbat. We’ll get to Pakistan some day!

French Thomas just left a comment on our blog that monks from Dargye Gompa have been arrested while protesting for their freedom, and he left a link with photos from an online source.

This is terrible news, and we hope the Chinese government will end this nonsense and release our friends.

I’ve always said the San Diego -Tijuana border crossing is the most abrupt, most dramatic border transition I’ve ever experienced. It turns out, there is another…

Driving along the desert roads of the Tibetan plateau, the road peaked just before Nyalam to reveal a spectacular Himalayan panorama and a road heading down, down , down. After what seemed like an unending series of switchbacks, the open moonscape we were moving through gave way to tight canyons that slid their way through the snow-capped mountains. Stone villages and terraced fields clung to the steep cliffs, herds of yaks and goats wandered along the road.

Pema, our driver, carefully navigated the hairpin turns and steep drop-offs as suicidal Chinese drivers blasted past us inches from death. As each passed, Pema would sigh and indicate that they were self-important Chinese officials. I raged at their idiocy and their lack of respect for our lives as well as their own. The dumb stunts the Chinese drivers pulled were infuriating.

Dodging the onslaught of idiot drivers, we eventually wound our way down to Nyalam where we stopped to wait for the caravan to the Nepali border. All cars are required to travel in a caravan in one direction from Nyalam to the border town of Zhangmu along an insanely narrow road carved out of the sheer canyon walls. This road was easily the most spectacular 45 minute stretch of road I have ever experienced (or probably ever will.)

In less than an hour, you drop from desert to pine forest to deciduous forest ending in tropical jungle filled with buzzing, dinging insects! You start surrounded by the Himalayas and end in plummeting gorges filled with ribbon-like waterfalls not unlike the steep gorges in Kauai. At points, the road (which is one solid, permanent construction site) actually passes through waterfalls – the drivers all stopped their cars under the falls to wash the desert dust off the cars. The trip down ends at the border city of Zhangmu, an unbelievable construction clinging to the steep canyon slopes.

After a night in Zhangmu, we rushed down to the border crossing to fight our way through the Chinese bureaucracy to exit the country. The Chinese border station is a shockingly chaotic and embarrassingly confused place with meaningless forms and bored bureaucrats who, after arriving more than an hour late to work, seemed completely uninterested in everything they made us do. (After requiring everyone to fill out declarations that we didn’t have any bird-flu symptoms, there was nobody to collect the forms, so we ended up just stuffing them in our pockets.)

Once we were through the paper obstacle course, we hired a minivan driven by a young woman to drive us across the very long no-man’s land between the borders. As I was contemplating how impressively progressive it was that our driver was a young woman, she hit the gas and our van went flying down the dirt road shooting around hairpin turns dodging pack animals and Tibetan and Nepali traders walking along the terribly neglected road. On several occasions, she came within inches of the roads precipitous edge (much to Thomas’ aggressively voiced distress).

Suddenly, the woman slammed on the brakes and informed us that she could drive no further due to the backup of vehicles waiting to cross the border. Thomas, Irina, Dimitri, and I piled out of the van and walked the remainder of the way down the muddy switchbacks through honking trucks and Chinese buses to the Friendship Bridge, which connects the two countries over a steep river gorge.

The other side of the bridge was a world away. Blocky, functional, Chinese cement boxes gave way to colorful wooden Nepali architecture. Nepali foods and spices permeated the air. Everyone suddenly spoke fantastic English and casually greeted us, welcoming us to Nepal. Smiling, happy faces. All of us felt like we had been transported to the other side of the world. In a drive that would normally last less than an hour, we had gone from desert to jungle, from sand storms to waterfalls, from nomads to the hustle and bustle of the subcontinent.

As in many third world countries, trash management in China, and even more so in Tibet, is a huge problem particularly outside the tourist areas where there don’t seem to be any centralized places for disposing of trash. The more organized municipalities have random piles of trash distributed throughout the town while less organized places are evenly littered with garbage – it is just like living on a dump.

The most shocking examples of trash mismanagement, we encountered in Tibet. Many small settlement do not have any toilets so people relieve themselves by walking a few meters to squat between a herd of sheep and a pack of stray dogs.

But the worse practice of all is to use the rivers as dump. All the plastic bottles and packaging materials, of which there are an abundance, go straight into the river and get deposited downstream along the riverbeds. This is a major problem and since China is so concerned about making money with occupied Tibet, they had better cause environmental awareness quickly in Tibetans and Chinese alike.

Two days of driving to the Nepalese border and most of it was backtracking via the same route by which we had come. Our 17-day trip was almost over and I knew, we would hit the same spine-crumbling potholes again.

I didn’t expect a lot of excitement going back. Going through familiar terrain, though, provides a chance to relax and let your mind wander. I believe all of us were thinking about the last 15 days as we sat in the car silently driving by herds of Eastern Kiang and watching Lake Manasarovar disappear in the distance.

Tony and I had just talked how lucky we were to have found Dimitri and Irina and how the trip had worked out perfectly, when we got a flat tire. The first one on the whole trip! Luckily, it was right next to a herd of Tibetan gazelle.

Within twenty minutes, Pema and Losang fixed the flat and we continued our trip slowly rumbling along toward the Nepali border stopping once in a while to watch endangered black-necked cranes or to admire the Himalayas peaking out behind the barren Tibetan mountains.