We went to the bus station and found out all the bus tickets were sold out and on top of it all, we missed the busses to De Ching for the day already. We were approached by taxi drivers. A Tibetan man was the most persistent among the drivers who followed us everywhere. I ended up negotiating the hired car price for the day and the Zhaos settled the deal. All the drivers wanted 200 yuan for the day. But I did the math and insisted that since the day was half over that we would only do 150 yuan and each person would pay 50 yuan. The Zhaos went for 60 yuan per person, in my math that only came down to a 20 yuan discount for half a day gone by. I didn’t think that was a very good settlement.
This driver did not enjoy the Zhaos as Mrs. Zhao had her lips stuck up her nose and insisted on being unhappy and never recovering from her unhappiness. I learned it was a sensitive thing of being in the service industry that the drivers all take it personal when their client was unhappy and they receive it as being looked down on and not properly treated like a human being when clearly it was just the client’s own head trip.
Anyways, we ended up going to Sheep Lake in the afternoon and bought tickets to De Ching for Sunday instead morning. The drive over to Sheep Lake was magnificently beautiful with the wide range of fall colors at its best. This driver had deep soulful eyes and actually had a lot of class. He said I looked like a Tibetan princess. He taught me Tibetan on the drive and many things about the culture. I quite enjoyed his company. He married barely reaching his twenty. Now 16 years later he has a son. He told me that if people don’t marry in the late teens or very early twenties, the chances of getting married later are slim, like trying to sell very old bread. This driver is in the commercial tourist industry but he was deeply rooted in Tibetan philosophy and ways of life that was grounded in ethics and culture. I picked up a bit of Tibetan while in Tibet and he knew the difference. I guess Tibetan from different regions spoke different variations of Tibetan and the insiders can tell.
