As I step out of Lhasa's airport, a man in a 10-gallon hat shuffles me onto a bus to town. I am the last passenger, and there is no room for me and my own 10-gallon backpack, so I take the foldable chair adjacent to the driver's seat, sans safety belt. In the event of an accident, I will be the first to be ejected through the windscreen.
At one point on the hour-long journey, our bus goes neck to neck with a truck trying to overtake us. A wing mirror is smashed. Arguments break out. The passenger behind me snores. So far, there is nothing to suggest Tibet is anything other than a part of China.
But, as the Potala Palace comes into view, shades of China fade away. Trademark Chinese roads, complete with tacky lampposts and propaganda banners, give way to narrow alleyways bustling with circumambulating pilgrims and filled the ubiquitous smell of yak butter. Monks with cleanly shaven heads and deep maroon robes rub shoulders with German-speaking backpackers on the ring road surrounding the Jokhang, Tibet's holiest temple. Apart from Chinese tourists haggling over trinkets in the background, China feels a world away.
Climbing the three flights of stairs to my hotel room gives me a throbbing headache and I begin to worry about how altitude sickness will affect our planned road trip to Nepal via Everest base camp, which is more than 1km higher than the 3,600-metre mark at which Lhasa lies. I heed the advice of many a travel guide and decide to spend a few days in Lhasa acclimatising before setting out for Kathmandu in a four-wheel-drive Jeep.
To miss Lhasa's Potala Palace would be to go to the Vatican and not see inside St Peter's Basilica. In fact, the parallels to St Peter's go beyond that. Built just decades apart - St Peter's was completed in 1626, the Potala in the 1640s - both serve as centres of spiritual longing and seats of religious empires. And just as you can weave through the tombs of popes past in St Peter's, so can you meander through the Potala and glimpse the final resting places of the Dalai Lama's previous incarnations (the current, exiled Dalai Lama is the 14th). But then I step onto one of the palaces terraces, surrounded by snow-capped mountains, and all comparisons with Italy abruptly end.
We finally roll out of Lhasa after several nights of scouring guestroom bulletin boards for other travellers who may want to share a ride to Nepal. An early-morning start gets us to Shigatse, Tibet's second largest city, by sundown; along the way we pass curved lakes and ancient stupas, each attraction carrying its own spiritual weight. We know this because pilgrims of modest means and monks bearing digital cameras are always nearby, always chanting, always circumambulating.
