Lhasa - Food and Weather
Lhasa is a city of contrasts - the spiritual center of Tibetan Buddhism and administrative center for the communist Chinese. It is home to the ancient Potala Palace - the greatest monumental structure in all of Tibet tracing a lineage to A.D. 637. A stone’s throw from the Potala sits the Jokhang Temple - the holiest site in Tibetan Buddhism. Remove the Potala and the Jokhang temple and you are left with a sprawling concrete city jammed with soulless bunker-like concrete buildings.

Mao-era architecture aside, Lhasa is a vibrant city of a half-million exhuberant citizens. From Lhasa, the team travels by truck and foot to Sepu Kangri - 150 miles to the northeast.

"I'm wasted. Tired out from the sun's intensity and the altitude here in Lhasa. The city is unbelievably changed from 19 years ago. It's a thriving, pulsing, energetic place- like Russia, compared to 20 years ago!"
- Carlos Buhler, 8 September 2002

"We have been in Lhasa for two and a half days, but it feels like a week. Not that I’m over it, but it just feels familiar. The world is the world is the world. No matter where you go, things are pretty much the same. Let it be Lhasa, Chengdu, Montreal, Albertville or Oslo. It might look different from the outside, but underneath it’s similar. People go to work, they shop, they love, they fight, they believe."
- Carina Ostberg, 8 September 2002

"Today has been an anxious day for me. Not fun. I was anxious all night long. Then the shopping day was riddled with anxiety because Mark and I don't know each other well enough. I read Bonington's description of their 2nd attempt and suddenly realized how big Sepu is and how inexperienced our team is. Avalanche prone seracs lay above our route. The glacier is heavily crevassed. And it’s truly a long, long way around the back to the west ridge. I know I was irritating Mark with my feeling that he wasn’t taking the peak seriously enough. He expressed to me that this was really bothering him. So I explained that I was only thinking out loud."
- Carlos Buhler, 8 September 2002

"It turns out Dawa’s older brother is actually the real cook, and Dawa is his helper. Carlos freaked again when he heard that. I guess having a good cook and copious amounts of good food is just about more important than anything else for Carlos. We bought 100kg(!) of potatoes, 100kg(!) of rice (that’s 10kg/person), 25kg(!) of flour, huge bottles of vegetable oil, all kinds of nasty-looking meats and Chinese salamis, a bunch of spice and chili powder, 400 eggs(!), 40kg sugar, even some sort of boil-in-a-bag chicken. Then Carlos insisted on getting 15 large cans of Nido full-fat powdered milk (set us back $110), 10 jars of honey, 15 jars of jam, 100 packets of cookies, baking powder, black tea, God knows what else. And in another market we bought 90 packets of Ramen noodles (all the same flavor), 15kg Chinese style noodles..."
- Mark Newcomb, 8 September 2002

"Mark pointed out what great strong athletes the members were. Why does he think this matters? We had athletes on Gasherbrum 1 and we didn’t come close! It’s going to feel terrible at the end of the trip not having climbed the peak too. And god knows, I hope I have to eat these words with a fork and spoon because we made the first ascent of Sepu Kangri. But that seems a pretty distant possibility now."
- Carlos Buhler, 8 September 2002