Tenzing arrives, making a grand entrance--he bursts into the office, a radiant smile on his face. He proudly tells our traveler that he has succeeded. In his hand he has permits to go to Mt. Everest, permits which will pave the road to our traveler's dreams. The actual permits look pretty unassuming. Just little bits of paper with the all important red stamp (a thing which lets you know you have really gotten official in China). Tenzing explains that everything is set, only there is one slight catch: our traveler must take along a guide. It had originally been our traveler's plan to avoid this pesky annoyance--guide's being the sort of people who make you go do things you do not want to do, talk to you when you want no one to talk to you, and point out all those stupid little cliche things which everyone sees when traveling. But, sacrifices must be made. So for the sake of Mount Everest, our traveler reluctantly agrees to drag along this guide person.
You might imagine that a guide being brought along under these circumstances might prove to be the source of many awkward situations. Our traveler resolved to ignore him, shove him in the back seat, and leave him in the hotel at every stop along the way out to Everest. Yes, this may be a heartless attitude, but such a person is our traveler that he finds this whole idea of a "guide" bugging him to no end. Our traveler had images of himself crawling around Everest discovering all the mysterious wonders of this place on his way--now these images were shattered by the picture of some touristy guide popping out from behind rocks to point out that this was the place where such and such a climber fell to his death and that tourists could now order small dolls to toss off the cliff in remembrance of the climber.
Arrangements were made that the traveler should return at 8 in the morning on the following day (Monday) to begin the great journey out to Everest. But before our traveler leaves to go about his business for the night, Tenzing suggest that he meet with his guide. Our traveler agrees to get this bit of unpleasantness over with and so he meets Samdim. Samdim (his name is pronounced like you might pronounce Gandhi's) is a Tibetan who lives in Lhasa, he speaks fair English, but his Chinese is, in his words, 100% and of course he speaks Tibetan. Samdim is a young guy, our traveler eventually learns that he is the same age as this guide.
Over the course of the coming days, our traveler learns that Samdim is not so bad as he thought he would be. Indeed, Samdim seems incredibly happy with the idea of just relaxing on his own at every stop, letting the traveler go around to explore on his own. As a person, Samdim is actually quite interesting. He is infatuated with hip-hop music, although he has problems with some of the artists since in his words, "They use too many bad words." Of course, his favorite artist, a fine strapping young African American fellow by the name of "Nellie," has some of the most profanity laced songs our traveler has ever heard. Samdim finds great pleasure in playing these songs, (mostly concerned with such topics as killing policemen and doing other scandalous things...) and he has a peculiar way of bobbing his head to the beat which makes him look like he has a strange disease. Much of this might have been the rough roads too, though.
Samdim, in his capacity as a guide, was quite good, although in his own words very inexperienced. He would bring the traveler various gifts at every stop along the way: brownies, little trinkets from the local population. Our traveler and his companions, while they knew that these expenses were covered by the original fee, still found themselves being won over to Samdim by them.
Above is a picture of our traveler's fearless group of adventurers. The fellow in the bright yellow coat is Samdim, the short Mexican guy on the left is the driver, whose name is completely impossible to render in English. The dirty hippy next to him is our fearless traveler, and the giant in the middle is the original mastermind of the adventure. The two girls on the left are classmates who came along for the ride. In the back, you can just see the Land Cruiser in which our traveler has much faith.After having chatted aimlessly with Samdim, our traveler left to pack up his things at the hotel and purchase some food stuffs for the journey. Traveling along these roads, stops for lunch are not always guaranteed, so travelers after bring along a large supply of edibles. So it is that our traveler goes to bed that night with completely revolutionized hopes in his trip to Mount Everest. No more does he worry about hitchhiking (lame, I know), no more does he concern himself with bringing down the local government that he might escape through the confusion. He is at peace.
