and Sichuan cooking, and so is very much always the same menu, which is a little limited, especially on the veggie front! Their main dishes are Mapo Tofu, Aubergine, green beans and fried tomato and egg. Really tasty, but when you eat them twice a day…..

The next day we were supposed to get our visa extended and get our Tibetan Tourist Permit, a mystical permit which a foreigner can’t travel in Tibet without, and which can only be obtained when booking a tour through a travel agent. A simple way of ensuring that independent travel is almost impossible!! We were told by our guide that we may not be able to get this done today as it was Sunday. This made us really mad, because it would mean having to stay here for another day, and have less time at Everest base camp. If we’d known we would have booked the tour a day later, but we were told in Lhasa that it would be no problem. So we both

got on the guide’s case and had a good moan, at which point he gave in an said he’d see what he could do. We visited another temple, again from the outside only, and then went off for a cheap breakfast in the afore mentioned Greasy Joes!!

After hanging around at the hotel for a while, the driver turned up and said that we had to go and get our visas and permits. Wa-hay we though!! Wrong! We got to the police station only to be told that we couldn’t get our stuff because the officer who needed to do it was on patrol, and there was no way to contact them!!!! At this point the rep for our travel agent in Shigatse turned up and we gave her a big sob story and generally moaned loads, and she told us to go and wait back at the hotel and she‘d call us if she could do anything … about half an hour later, she turned up and said that she could sort it out, and we were to give her money, and have