Shanghai'd

Most of the 11 person group has now arrived in Kathmandu and we are only missing one bike. The goup dynamic seem pretty good so far - much more on that later, I am sure. It would be nice to have some more fewer Y chromosomes, but I guess cycling across the worlds highest plateau doesn't appeal to your average hockey mom.

The crisis of the moment is the Chinese visa situation. Things are tense these days at the Chinese embassy in Kathmandu. As there are lots of ethnic Tibetan refugees in Nepal, there have been daily protests about freeing the people of a certain western Chinese automomous region. What was once a slam dunk 1-day visa application process has now turned into a 5-day guessing game of Chinese diplomacy. On top of that, the embassy is rumored to shut for several days starting tomorrow in celebration of the Chinese national day holiday. Today is our window to try to miraculously pull off a rush visa for the group and make our scheduled Tuesday morning flight. Miss this opportunity, and it will be days (if not weeks) before we have another chance (if at all). I haven't been sleeping well.

I can't even describe the anxiety/frustration/anger at seeing literally months of prepartion, hours of training and thousands of dollars slipping out of my control and into the hands of a Chinese paper-pushing bureaucrat. We should know one way or the other later today ...