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:
Changtang with Kunlun Range on
the back
A 5220m (17,000ft) Pass on a Early August
Morning
