My Electric Postcard

FYI: click on any photo to view it in more detail. Three weeks after leaving Kunming and a few small misadventures, we arrived in Lhasa. I have been reading Peter Hopkirk’s book Tres passers on the Roof of the World and I couldn’t help but put myself in the shoes of many of the western explorers Hopkirk writes about. Almost all of the western travelers in Hopkirk’s book never made it to this enigmatic city. It remained a mystery to the western world until Francis Fitzgerald “invaded” the city on a diplomatic mission involving a british arsenal and several thousand soldiers in 1904. This was all under the guise of establishing free trade with the Tibetans, but it was actually fueled by the paranoia of assumed (falsely it would be revealed) diplomatic ties between Russia and Lhasa and that such a conspiracy would put Russian soldiers perilously close to British India in mysterious lands just to the north. The sad truth however is that the Tibetans were (are) a tragically private pe