To fulfill my long-time dream of facing Mt. Everest, recently a friend and I made an 11-day, 2500-mile Jeep trip in Western China including Chinese Provinces of Qinghai, Gansu and Tibet, stretching from the Gobi desert that is less than 150 miles from Mongolia to the foot of the Himalayas where you can see into Nepal.  For 7 days we were spending our 24-hours at between 12000 and 17200 feet with air pressure as low as half of what we breath here in Boston.

 

I have been preparing for the trip for a while.  The only surprise I had during the trip is that everything is so pure and beautiful that one almost have to be spiritual to apprehend.  Very often I would lost my breath in the beauty in stead of altitude sickness.  Sun is extremely bright in the pollution-free thin air that the sky is impossibly blue, the cloud is impossibly white and the grass hills are impossibly green.  Your eyes can be very easily saturated by every color in the spectrum (don't even think about your Kodachrome).  Tibetans we met are very friendly.  Their religious believes are pure and total.  Shining in the highest plateau in the world, their temples are sure the closest places to their god.

 

- A preface I wrote for a picture show I did at work about my 2000 trip to Tibet

 

 

I took about 700 slides and my friend Liu Jie took another about 300 pictures my digital camera on this trip (plus two hours of video if you are interested).  There are quite a few good shoots.  To give you a preview of these pictures, here are a few:

 

Mt. Everest in the afternoon

 

Mt. Everest in the morning

 

Changtang with Kunlun Range on the back

 

Northern Tibet

 

Deers and Wheel

 

Red Walls

 

A 5220m (17,000ft) Pass on a Early August Morning