Getting There (29-31 May)

Holy yak (no cows, all yaks in Tibet), this travel is insane!  When we booked our onward journey, creative ways to shave time and bucks seemed to make a lot of sense.  In refection, 24 hours of no-frills travel is udder (oh yes, pun intended) madness.  Here's how it went:

Leg One (29 May): Depart Santa Fe shortly after dog manny arrives and drive a rental car to Denver.  six hours

• Thinking when planning: No car at airport, no crazy early morning connection from Albuquerque or Santa Fe to Denver.  
• Thinking in the moment: This pretty much sucks. 

⇨Drop off rental at airport and shuttle back to hotel for overnight before boarding next morning (United) flight to . . .

Leg Two (30 May): . . . Narita, Japan. eleven hours. 
We're less than halfway through this flight and my 58-yo neck is complaining about the weight of my head and my equally aged spine is begging me to find a space to stretch horizontal (but of course cheap me has booked us Economy Plus -- so we're miserably upright for the duration). 

• Thinking when planning: We don't need to pay for those biz-class creature comforts.  
• Thinking in the moment: This pretty much sucks.  

We both doze a bit on the flight (I mostly go for travel distractions: Reading three magazines (cover to cover), watching three movies and starting a new book).  Looking over I notice Cliff is hunched over his tray table (75" of painful contortion).  I  deliberate whether to wake him to save the inevitable cricks or to let him sleep. In the end, I leave it be and deal with my own head-bobbing madness. 

Leg Three (31 May): Fast forward as we've crossed the International Dateline -- Finally, we land in Tokyo and head for the gate of our All Nippon Airlines flight heading for China. five hour flight (plus the two-hour Narita layover) 

It's about 10:00 p.m (8:00 a.m. in the Land of Enchantment -- good morning neighbors!), when we finally land at Chengdu's busy international airport. We're struck first by the humidity, then by the officious, unsmiling Chinese immigration officers who, in addition to our photos, record our full hand prints on a glass-plated scanner. 

• Egads, why do I feel like I'm still moving? 

Having survived twenty-four hours of travel and the security/administrative gyrations of our Chinese hosts, we finally are ejected into a bustling arrival hall just before the calendar turns to June.  Happily, our Wilderness Travel (company supporting our trek) contact seems magically to materialize from the masses (hallelujah), greeting us by name, hustling us to a conveniently parked van and whisking us and our gear off to a downtown hotel. We learn en route from Phu (our contact) that Chengdu has a population of ~20 million people, has grown dramatically over the space of a generation (squeezing out family farms and bamboo huts with an imposing network of glass, steel and concrete), has had the same name for 1800 years, and once included a small-scale version of the Forbidden City palace (built by the king, for his son). How am I even hearing this?  My brain has turned to travel mush.  

Tomorrow, the trip officially begins.  We'll meet our trekking guide, fellow trekkers and get our instructions, tickets and permits for Tibet.