Shannan — National Highway 219 — Shigatse
Lhasa sits at 3,300 meters. Shannan, to its south, sits at 4,000. The difference is not just altitude — it is everything that altitude determines: the economy, the roads, the pace of life, the number of people willing to stay.
We left Shannan heading west toward Shigatse. No expressway. National Highway 219, asphalt where it existed, and then, for a stretch of over a hundred kilometers, nothing but dirt.
Driving on dirt roads in the mountains has its own logic.
The vehicle ahead of you kicks up a wall of dust. You have two choices: fall back far enough that the cloud settles before it reaches you, or push forward and overtake. There is no comfortable middle ground. The middle ground means eating dust for an hour.
Ahead of us was a pickup truck. Local plates. The driver moved through the switchbacks and hairpin turns the way people move through familiar rooms — without thinking, without hesitation. I am a plains driver with mountain experience, but this was his road. He had driven it a hundred times.
For twenty minutes, we raced.
Not recklessly — there is a difference between reckless and committed. But committed, yes. Every straight stretch, I looked for the gap. Every bend closed it. The S-curves came one after another, the kind where you cannot see what is coming and overtaking means betting on an empty road around a blind corner.
I waited.
Then, on one bend, the gap opened. I took it.
In the rearview mirror, his truck disappeared instantly into the rolling dust behind us. I don’t know if he had reached his destination, or if he had simply decided that letting a stranger from the interior chase him through the mountains was no longer worth the trouble. Either way, the road ahead was ours.
We reached Shigatse in the evening. Tashilhunpo Monastery.
My third visit.
The tourists were sparse — fewer than I remembered, fewer vendors at the gates. I parked in front of the entrance. The door was ajar. I pushed it open and looked inside.
The monastery was empty. No monks, no visitors, no sound.
I turned one of the prayer wheels. The metal was warm from the day’s sun. I stood there for a moment, then turned back toward the car.
A young monk was standing in front of my vehicle.
My companion had the camera ready, and caught the moment without either of us planning it: me in sunglasses, behind the wheel of an SUV with interior plates, at the gate of one of Tibet’s most sacred monasteries, at dusk. And him — standing there, surprised, looking at me.
We held each other’s gaze for a second.
He pressed his palms together and bowed slightly. A greeting. A blessing, perhaps.
I was turning the steering wheel. I am not a Buddhist. I nodded back — the only response available to me in that moment, hands occupied, faith uncertain.
He stepped aside. I drove on.
My third visit to Tashilhunpo ended in thirty seconds. But I knew, even as I pulled away, that there were more important things ahead.
The guqin was in the back. The monk receded in the mirror. The road to what came next was already beginning.
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