The Tibetan Nightclub Story

The afternoon starts out fairly tame - after reaching a fairly dull town of Nyalam and checking into the Kailash hotel for the evening (indoor plumbing!!) Heather & I decide it was well past beer o'clock and search out the nearest thing to a Tibetan pub, a teahouse across the road. It did have a pub-like feel to it so we tucked into 2 Lhasa beers and occupied our afternoon periodically saying to each other

Heather, what'd you do today?

Oh, not much, saw the sunrise at Everest.

(That joke just doesn't get old)

We were thinking of leaving to meet the gents for dinner when 2 Indian gentlemen walk in and ask to join us. We got to talking and it turns out they were recently at Mt Kailash as well, heading back to India via the casinos of Kathmandu. They were basically dragged their by their wives who were far more devout Hindus than these guys, and were on a similar trip to the others we'd seen - a group of 100 people, a few swamis and yogis in the mix, no alcohol/sex/tobacco/etc. One guy was a retired CEO of a company in Delhi and the other was his golfing mate who lived in Mumbai and worked in advertising.

Well! When they found out we had also been out there they absolutely ripped into Western Tibet and the whole spiritual experience. They had us in stitches - every night they told their wives they were heading out for a walk to reflect on the spiritual lessons of the day when really they were looking for the nearest source of alcohol to take the p*iss out of everyone who thought they saw Shiva in the side of Mt Kailash. "They kept saying they saw the face of Shiva, the servants of Shiva, the wife of Shiva. Bullsh*it! It's a mountain!" The former CEO then suggested to his friend that if he too stopped showering and grew his hair long he could become a spiritual guru and make millions out of people looking for some sort of religious awakening. They were also deeply critical of the "sub-human" conditions in which they were expected to exist in western Tibet ("No running water! You have to go to the bathroom in a pit! It's sub-human!"). Sadly they had to leave and we couldn't continue our conversation with them but they left us with tears of laughter streaming down our face.

After dinner and some time at the internet cafe...

Heather & I had been joking about picking up men who had just climbed everest when we went to base camp. Sadly the only people at Everest Base Camp were Chinese tourists acting like they had just climbed Everest (by taking a 25 kuai minibus the 4 kms between the tent camp and base camp). So no hot muscle-y men with 3 weeks worth of stubble and partially frostbitten noses to pick up there...

So after checking e-mails in the fairly uninteresting town of Nyalam, I logged off and headed to bed, heather stayed at the internet cafe to finish an e-mail (mostly a huge rant about Kai, she's as big of a fan as I am). I was all tucked into bed, pj's on, mostly asleep. Heather seemed to be taking forever to finish this e-mail and I was a bit worried about her being locked out of the hotel. All of a sudden she bursts into the room, about an hour after I left her, saying

SARAH! SARAH! Get up get up GET UP!!!!!!

whaaaaaa?

You HAVE to come out NOW I just met lots of hot guys who are about to climb everest and not only that, they've ACTUALLY CLIMBED IT SEVERAL TIMES BEFORE!!! GET UP NOW! We're heading to a nightclub down the road!

whaaaaa? ummmmm what nationality are they?

HOT!! I mean, SPANISH!! GET UP, put some pants on, and let's GO!!!

I should probably mention at this point that 1) Heather has a boyfriend so any references to actually picking up hot mountaineering everest climbers is in jest and 2) I have some sort of chest cold/infection that makes me descend into hacking fits every several minutes and 3) I have not showered in 4 days but *was* wearing clean clothes for the first time in 3 days. Well, after I put my pants on.

So I stumble sleepily after her and we end up in a Tibetan night club with 3 extremely muscle-y stubble-faced Spanish mountaineers ranging from not hot to extremely hot. They had plugged their ipod into the nightclub's sound system (because you can do that here) and were basically playing a mix of AC/DC, Spanish salsa-style music, and the spice girls. This was intermixed with the usual nightclub fare of bad Chinese music, and good to average Nepali/Indian music during which the Tibetans & Chinese did their coordinated dancing (because why do anything out of line with the rest of the country in China!).

We spent the next 4 hours teaching Tibetans & Chinese how to play air guitar and dance in a salsa-style. One Chinese guy was particularly keen on me and tried to get me to drink shots of beer with them (since Chinese generally don't have the gene to process alcohol they drink it out of glasses the size of thimbles) and kept giving me the "OK!" sign.

I had joked to Heather at one point that, since they were starting their climb tomorrow, is this like sending sailors off to sea?? Hahahah. The middle-hot one was keen on Heather but she declined (aforementioned boyfriend). The extremely hot guy had no chat and the not-so-hot guy was keen on me (I'm like, seriously, I haven't showered in FOUR DAYS, you CANNOT be interested).

3 am rolls around and I start to get tired so we head back, with the spanish guys walking with us, to our hotel. Hotel is shut. Not only locked but roller-door shut so we couldn't even ring our guide to wake him up and let us in. The Spanish guys chime in "you can stay at our hotel, there are plenty of empty beds!" So lacking other alternatives (besides the street with the stray dogs) we headed back to their hotel and got into an empty twin room where the beds were already made and the door had been left open.

We woke at 7 am to leave before the owners noticed and remade the beds to look like they hadn't been slept in (sort of, I never was good at bed making). On the way back to our hotel we were chased by a stray dog for a bit, found the hotel still locked, had baozi (steamed meat dumplings) and rice congee for breakfast, and then got into the hotel at 8 am and went back to bed.

I woke up later that morning thinking - did that really happen? Luckily I have both photos & video to prove it...