In Tibetan Buddhism, you are asked to remind yourself daily that you could die. The idea is that you then choose a more sensible option to your choices and in turn help yourself to keep safe.
Leaving Tibet proved quite a difficult experience. We as a family were travelling on one set of papers, however beside our four names was the number six. An unlucky number as it turns out for the Corbetts. This made our paperwork invalid and therefore impossible for us to travel back through Tibet to Nepal.
I had also paid for a private jeep to ensure our quick return to Nepal. However, it appears some Tibetan had decided to pocket that cash for himself, leaving us with no transport either. The only other option was a bus that left too late for us to catch our flight from Kathmandu.
We contacted our friend Kul, in Nepal, he in-turn brought in "the problem solver" called Dobla, aka Winston Wolf (Harvey Keitel from Pulp Fiction) in Tibet, or "The Wolf" as he is now known.
He arrived with a jeep, a driver and was working on our paperwork. 6 hours behind schedule, we left Llasa with everything we needed.
The driver didn't speak much English, all he knew was we needed to get to the boarder by morning. He took a lot of 'vitamins' and drove like a mad man. I couldn't help wondering if he'd prayed and reminded himself that he could die?
He finally slowed down and by about 9pm he even turned on the car headlights so we could see the road in front of us.
After passing through 15 checkpoints and having showed our passports and papers at each one, we finally went through passport control at the Tibet/ China border, however just as we were about 8 steps from no-mans land about to cross onto Nepalese soil, we were stopped and told our papers were missing one stamp. We couldn't travel any further. The stamp we needed had to come from Llasa. Seriously! We were stuck. We couldn't even use the toilet as that was back on Tibet/ China soil.
We thought up various ways to end this story, however, most would have ended in jail or death. Fortunately, "The Wolf" managed to organise a phone call from a high ranking official, and had us making those 8 steps to freedom within the hour.
x Lisa
Lisa, not only are you an awesome family but now you have a good friend in the Wolf. I wish that I could laugh about this but it was not very funny for you. Bureaucratic bullshit is what I would call it. Thanks to those in higher places you managed to get yourselves extricated. It must have been a horrible experience. We look forward to welcoming you home. Love from us all.
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