out that he only has one locking hub, so is in fact limited to 3 wheel drive!!!

Then we came across a lorry trapped on a muddy bit which bridged across this dry stream - it had a puncture! Traffic was beginning to pile up on both sides - there must have been about 10 vehicles! Total gridlock man!! Now the Tibetans are not known for patience whilst driving, so along comes a JCB from the nearby roadworks, and Hey presto - it builds a new bit of road for the traffic to cross on the spot!!!! You don’t see that kind of efficiency back in England!!

We stopped in Shekar to get our entrance tickets for the Qomolangma National Park, and went for yet another Chinese lunch, then headed for the park! We turned off the Friendship highway (The Lhasa to Nepal Road) at a sign which simply had a

mountain on it!! We had one more high pass to cross, the mountain range which was in between us and Everest!! Now we thought that the hairpin climbs we’d previously done were high, but this one was enormous!!!! It started off with hairpins snaking up what was obviously the remains of an enormous glacier, and took about an hour and a half to get to the top!!! That’s hard going in an old jeep!!! After all of that, at the top was the view point with a fantastic panorama of the great Himalaya range, with Everest in the middle, flanked by almost as massive mountains as far as the eye can see. They even have a little plaque showing you which is which. So, we were just a little peeved to find that we could see …….. a big line of clouds!!! Gutted!!

The journey down the other side seemed even longer, but an interesting diversion was when we heard a loud clanking noise coming from underneath the