The night before I leave Lhasa for Everest

It's the night before I leave Lhasa for Everest and I'm in bed when suddenly I feel a pain in my lower leg. It's late and I'm tired and I don't think anything of it because come on, it's just a pain in my lower leg, but then I remember that this is the first sign of Deep Vein Thrombosis and I sit up straight and I start to panic.

It must have been the cramped conditions on the train, I think, after the long haul flight, I think. It's getting worse. I can feel the blood clot moving up my calf and I get up and pace back and forth and try to calculate how long it'll take to get to my heart.

Now I can feel a slight headache start. I go to the mirror and check my nose for blood: altitude sickness. Nothing. I wonder if I should take some aspirin. Why didn't I bring any aspirin? Maybe they have some down at reception. I put on a robe and sneak down the stairs but it's 2am and the lobby is cold and dark, so I take my altitude sickness and my Deep Vein Thrombosis and the three of us creep back up the stairs again and get back into bed again until eventually, thankfully, we all fall asleep together.

When I wake up in the morning I'm all alone. Any pain is gone and it's bright outside and it's time to get going.

Dodging taxis and donkeys and cops

Sonan and I ride back through Lhasa on a rickshaw, dodging taxis and donkeys and cops. I still don't understand any Tibetan but I notice people say something that sounds like "allez" a lot, so I say it, too, in an attempt to fit in. When I get back to Ireland, I think, I'm going to start wearing two long plaits in my hair and when people comment on it I'll just say, oh, what, these old things?

I ask Sonan if he'll be trying to get a passport, and he says yes he'll try but he thinks he blew it by escaping to Nepal when he was 23 and getting caught by the Chinese military. But that's a story for another time, he says.

"You'll have to ask your mother when your birthday is," I say.

"I already did," says Sonan. "It's March 15th."

This sounds familiar. "I think that's Wangden's birthday too," I say, surprised.

Sonan doesn't bat an eyelid. "This day is a special day in the Tibetan calendar," he laughs. "I think every mama in Tibet tells her son that's when his birthday is."

Lhasa, capital of Tibet

Tibetan Sky Burials

"This is where the bodies are fed to the eagles," says Sonan, my guide, above a bright blue river in the mountains outside of Lhasa.

"I don't understand," I say, confused. "Which bodies?"

"The dead bodies, of the people," he says, and goes on to explain sky burials to me.



When a Tibetan dies, the family take the body to the mountainside where a monk breaks it into pieces with a knife and an axe. Eagles start to gather on the cliffs, while the monk's assistants use rocks to pound the flesh and bones to a pulp. Eventually the birds are summoned, and they fly down and take the lumps of flesh back into the sky with them, until there's nothing left.

I'm shocked. The prayer flags on the rocks whip in the wind, and I look up and watch three beautiful eagles gliding overhead.

"But this only happens to the monks and the lamas, right?" I say, eventually. "Not to people like you?"

"Yes, of course this will happen to me," says Sonan. "It happens to nearly all Tibetans when they die."

"In front of your own mother?" I exclaim. I just can't believe it. I can't believe someone would actually be fed to eagles in front of their own mother.

"Yes," he says. "In front of my own mother, if she's still alive." He looks at me curiously. "Why? What happens to you when you die?"

"I'll be put in a nice box and buried, thanks, or I'll be set on fire," I say, shaking my head. "Definitely no birds involved when I die."

Sonan laughs. "Okay," he says. "No birds for the Europeans."

"That's right," I say, looking back up at the eagles circling us in the sky.

Everything Happens for a Reason

The rush of peace I'd felt on the train was quickly replaced by a rush of disorientation when I arrived in Lhasa. I was expecting the city to be something like Reykjavik — small and quiet and serene — but I want to inform the world right now that the city of Lhasa is nothing like the city of Reykjavik. I don't know what I was thinking: Lhasa is hot and noisy and crowded, a blur of market stalls and incense and pilgrims and monks and Chinese and Tibetans all sharing a space together in the middle of the desert.

I'd met an American woman back in Xining who'd been travelling for the past six years. Lucy is almost 60 years old and I'd wondered out loud how the hell anyone could have been travelling alone for so long.

"Don't tell me," I'd said, interrupting her. "Broken hearted, right?"

Lucy had laughed. "I wasn't going to put it quite like that," she'd said. "But yes, I certainly went through a divorce."

On my first night in Lhasa, still completely disorientated, I happened to bump into her again in a cafe down a little back alley.

"You got my message then?"

No, I didn't get any message – I hadn't had any net access for a couple of days. But it turns out she'd emailed me to say that she'd be in this cafe at this time if I wanted to meet for tea – and I just happened to choose that cafe and that time to wander in.

"Everything happens for a reason," said Lucy, smiling and giving me a great big hug.

I don't know about that, but it was really good to see her again.

Yaks in Tibet

The Train to Tibet

I woke up in the night with a hot forehead and a headache and a tight chest. I could feel we were gaining height: the train had slowed down and the coats in the cabin were all hanging diagonally to the right. The digital display said we were at almost 5000 metres above sea level and I thought for a while about dying but then I must have fallen back asleep.

In the morning, the beautiful Chinese children I was sharing the cabin with shared their breakfast with me. They didn't have any English except "hello" and "I love you", but they taught me the names of all the farm animals we passed along the way. We ate oranges and cinnamon cake and hot jasmine tea, and outside the land started to look less like China and more like Tibet. Yaks grazed on plains below snowcapped mountains, and all of a sudden I felt an enormous rush of adventure and gratitude and peace and happiness.

Rubbishman in Xīníng

After a day and a half on the sleeper

After a day and a half on the sleeper I got off at Xining, a town at the very edge of the Tibetan plateau. I'm meeting Wangden here, the guy who's getting my permits for Lhasa. He's suggested I stay a couple of days to acclimatise to the altitude — Xining is already 2200 metres above sea level and there's another day and a half uphill on the train to go.

"I got my own passport this year," Wangden tells me, checking my documents. His parents are nomads: before he started his travel company he spent his life on the grasslands with their yaks. "I had to ask my mother when my birthday is so I could fill in the forms."

They don't celebrate birthdays in Tibet, he says, which reminds me that it's my own birthday next week and so I probably won't be celebrating it either.

"So when is it?" I ask.

"She said it's the 15th of March because she remembers a big moon," he shrugs. "But she's just saying that – she doesn't really know."

"But that would mean you're Piscean like me," I say, pleased for some reason, even though I'm actually a typical Aries and I don't believe in any of that shit.

"What does that mean?"

"It means we both like long walks on rainy beaches," I say, channelling Cosmopolitan. "And we cry easily."

"You cry easily?" asks Wangden, surprised.

"God, no," I say, laughing and flicking my mane. "Of course I don't."

That's the great thing about travelling alone: you can invent a whole new personality for yourself and nobody ever needs to know.

Morning

I woke up with my clothes all stuck to me with sweat and it was light outside again and the train seemed to have emptied out a bit overnight. A man and his baby were sitting on Chan Mei's bed and Chan Mei was gone.

The land we were passing looked empty in the snow and I wondered how far we were from the Mongolian border. I wished that I'd brought some kind of rail map with me just to try and place myself somewhere. But all I knew was that we had left the east and we were heading west and yes this country is bigger than I'd thought and maybe the earth really is flat after all and China just goes on and on and on forever.

Xú Kang & Cui

On the Hard Sleeper from Beijing to Xining

The bunks on the train were more like shelves than beds and every time the man sleeping above me squirmed his shelf would creak and groan and I was glad that I'm many things but that I'm not claustrophobic.

I actually found it strangely cosy. The term 'hard sleeper' is misleading as I had a thin mattress and a blanket. I arranged my water and my oranges and my hand sanitizer next to me, and having them lined up on the table like that made me feel at home.

There were windows either side of the carriage and for the first couple of hours I sat up and watched endless shabby apartment blocks flash by in the smog, waiting for the city to end and the beauty to begin. I had no map and I couldn't tell if this was all Beijing or if one town just became the next. I wanted to remember Beijing as the hutong I'd stayed in, which was full of little homes and market stalls and the man who walked his magnificent goose up and down the tree-lined street every day for all of Dongcheng to see. I decided to ignore the shabby and endless apartment blocks and save the batteries in my camera for the dramatic Chinese countryside instead.

But five hours later it was dark and we were still rolling through urban scrawl. The man on the shelf opposite wanted to chat and I wanted to, too, but all I could manage was ni hao and I'm not sure if his name was Chan Mei or if chan mei means 'my name is', but he gave me a sesame snap and a tangerine anyway. I was thankful: I'd been feeling a bit panicky that I hadn't packed enough snacks.

I dozed off for a while and when I woke up the carriage was dark and Chan Mei was asleep. I fumbled around for the time, hoping that it was nearly morning and I'd be able to see the beauty outside, finally, but it wasn't even midnight. The shelf above me creaked again and I wondered if maybe between now and then I could still end up developing claustrophobia after all.

My last night in Beijing

Will and I begin to lose interest in each other around his fourth beer as I stopped drinking two years ago and he's only just begun. "I'm a lightweight," he explains, his head lolling in the original sense of the word. 

I start looking around for newer, more sober company and I meet a man whose car once broke down in Naas, and a young farmer who landed in Beijing two days ago to study Mandarin at the University. "Back home I work in a field," he says, wide Italian eyes looking up at me. "And now I have to find somewhere here to live." He takes a sip of his tea and leans in, admitting: "I only know the word for 'house'." I try to reassure him with my tale of turning up to live in Iceland without a word of Icelandic but we both know it's not really the same thing.

Eventually I decide to leave the bar early and go and get packed up for the train.

"One last word of advice before you go," says Will, giving me a bear-hug. "Don't take the lower bunk."

But I do have the lower bunk! It's the only ticket left that Qing could book for me – the train is full.

"Oh well, that's alright, don't worry," he says, backtracking quickly. "You'll be well looked after in that case. You're going to be sharing that seat with every Chinese mammy on the train."

No Offence

There's a new guy asleep in the bunk above mine when I go back into the hostel this morning. I try to get my things quietly so as not to wake him, but he sits bolt upright in bed and says WHAT TIME IS IT? nearly hitting his head off the ceiling.

"Almost noon," I say. "Are you jet lagged?"

"No," he says, rubbing his eyes. "Just lazy."

He reaches out a hand to introduce himself and I take the opportunity to interview him. He's from Quebec, he tells me, his name is Will, and he lives with Buddhist monks in a monastery a couple of hours outside of Beijing. He's been up there in the mountains all winter, but today is the day of their road trip so he decided to get a lift. He wanted a warm room and a hot shower for a couple of days. And now here he is.

"Monks go on road trips?" I ask, dubious.

"Yeah," he says, laughing off my cynicism. "Road trips to the book market. You want to go for some lamb stew?"

I do want to go for some lamb stew, but I don't entirely trust him. He looks about 25. Why the hell would he leave his home in Quebec to live with monks in a monastery outside of Beijing?

"Alright," I shrug, putting on my coat and deciding to keep my belongings firmly on me at all times.

* * *

It's totally acceptable to eat lamb stew in China by holding the bowl up to your face and using your chopsticks to shovel the noodles into your mouth as fast as you can. In fact, says Will, if you don't eat like that they might think you don't like it. He calls out to a waitress and orders something else, entirely in Mandarin.

I'm still curious as to how he ended up here, so I continue to quiz him. It doesn't take long to come out: he'd had his heart broken once, of course, by a Chinese girl he met in Montreal. She'd taken Canada in the divorce and now here he is, trapped for all eternity in Beijing. It wasn't until he learnt to meditate that he began to get over it, he says. The monks helped him.

"This your first time in China?" he asks.

"It's my first time in Asia," I admit, less defensive now that I know he's a broken-hearted human being. "I haven't travelled all that much."

"No offence," says Will, offending me. "But I can tell."

"I've been to Memphis," I say, indignant. "Rolled up around midnight all by myself!"

"Alright," he laughs, draining the last dregs from his stew. "Don't worry, it's not your demeanour. It's just that you already told me you'd hired a guide for Beijing."

Hello

I got burnt out on the Great Wall. The sun was high but as it was cold and I'm celtic I didn't think to use sunblock. I stood at the highest point taking pictures of the mountains until I heard whispering behind me, and I turned around to see a small group of Chinese people giggling at me.

"Ni hao," I said, flashing them a smile. Perhaps they'd invite me back to their home for some lunch, I thought.

One woman shrieked. "She said ni hao," she said, delighted.

I stood still for a while so they could photograph me. Then they turned around and walked off.

In Beijing with Ye Qing

Qing is my guide for the day in Beijing and she says I'm crazy to take the train all the way to Tibet. Do I even know how big China is? The plane is cheaper and that hard sleeper could take four days!

I know, it's a long time to be on a train, but I need to dedicate time to my favourite hobby: staring out of the window. Qing says okay then and books me the ticket. "But it's just a bunk in a corridor," she says.

Earlier we'd been to the markets to buy a camera case, where she said she could haggle for me if I liked. Ah no, I'd said, I'm sure I'll manage fine. "Alright," she said. "Just start at 50 yuan and don't pay anything over 100 or it's a rip-off." The first seller we met offered me a fake Sony case for 250 yuan. Thank you very much, I'd said, immediately handing over the money as Qing laughed and shook her head.

We ended the day at a restaurant with her husband, Wong Chan, sharing three bowls of dumplings which I dipped in soya and vinegar.

"You know Chinese girls won't eat soy sauce?" Qing said, looking at my plate. "They worry it makes their skin darker."

"Oh really," I said, pouring another good bit into my dish. The grass is always greener, I thought.

The Forbidden Cat