Shigatse and Mt. Everest, Tibet, China  གཞིས་ཀ་རྩེ་གྲོང

As if 3600m Lhasa wasn’t enough to leave me breathless, why not head to the highest place in the world? (This, in a year where I headed somewhere close to the opposite already!)

It may be the most touristy thing to do in Tibet, but it’s worth it. (It’s also much easier and cheaper as a Chinese national; access to Tibet is restricted to guided tours only if otherwise.) I joined a four-day tour to the Chinese base camp of Mount Everest — known as Qomolangma in Tibetan (ཇོ་མོ་གླང་མ) and Chinese (珠穆朗玛峰), or just Zhufeng 珠峰 for short. (Being the demarcation of the Nepalese border, it’s known as Sagarmatha there.) We crossed some of the highest roads in the world, passing by countless stretches of stunning scenery: fields of wildflowers, Tibetan villages, impossibly blue lakes (oxygen-deprived, due to the altitude) like Yamdrok-tso, monasteries, and even the Kharola glacier above 7000m with the viewpoint leaving me heaving at 5560m! I’ll let the pictures do the talking.
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