Bzzz, Bzzz. Tourist Police. Open Up!

The room buzzer sounded at 7pm. John jumped up. "Great, maybe the CITS found us a jeep tour to Everest." He opened the door. Two plain-clothed men stood in our hotel room doorway. One of them showed John his badge. In perfect English he read what it said, "Tibet Tourism Security Bureau. I want to see your permit."

"Uh, I'll get it," John said and he shut the door leaving the two men in the hall.

"Damn," John said to me. "Now we have the tourist police after us. The PSB must have tipped them off. I bet they'll watch our every move now. One mess up and we get slapped with a fine."

"Don't give them the permit," I insisted. "We might need it later."

John fished in my pack pouch for the soon-to-expire document. He went back to the door, opened it, and handed it to the man there.

"We'll take this," the man said. His partner stood next to him saying nothing. Perhaps he was there for intimidation purposes, strength in numbers.

"Uh... you can't have it," John said. "I, uh... need it for my records." (That was really smooth John.)

"Then I make a copy of it and bring it back here," the man replied.

"Uh uh," John said quickly. "WE make a copy of it."

They left together for the hotel business center and I was left alone to wonder what would become of us.

"They wanted to know where we were going tomorrow," John told me later. "They asked, are you going to Shalu? One hundred to one they'll have a policeman posted there in the morning."

Of course there was no way we were going to Shalu now. We were staying in Shigatse. But was staying in Shigatse a good idea?

"I told them that it was my understanding that we didn't need a permit to stay in Shigatse," John said. "The Tourist guy said, no, but you need a permit to go anywhere else."

John sat on the bed next to me. "As I see it, these are our options. One, we try to hitch a ride toward Everest and Nepal early tomorrow morning." (If we were caught feigning ignorance was going to be tricky. Would the PSB believe we were that stupid?) "Two, catch a bus back to Lhasa, and Three, try to arrange a jeep trip to Nepal."

We opted for number three. We first called the CITS contact back. There were no spaces on any jeep trips leaving in the morning. Then we caught a pedicab to different hotels in the area, and in a mixture of English, pantomime, and phrase book communication asked around for jeeps that had space to take two more. (Mind you this was all taking place at nine o'clock at night.)

We did eventually find a tourist agent (purely by mistake by walking into a restaurant thinking it was a hotel). He could get us a jeep and a driver for $300. At least that was what we gathered from the poor translation of a student who was standing nearby. We needed an interpretor, someone who spoke English. The tour agent made a phone call. "Sit, sit." He motioned us to two chairs and poured us hot water. We waited. Eventually a man showed up on a bicycle.

"That interpretor looks awfully familiar," I said to John. "Isn't he the receptionist at our hotel?" The entire town was somehow connected it seemed.

The hotel receptionist explained the trip to us. The agent could get us our permit. It would be a three day trip. It would cost 2500 yuan, more if we wanted to see Everest. The tour agent needed our passport numbers, our names, a 500 yuan deposit. He turned a document to us to sign (it was entirely in Chinese).

We lied that we didn't have our passports or money on us. (At this point everything seemed shady to me and I didn't want to hand anything over.) "They are back at the hotel," I said. So we agreed to meet at nine in the morning, to sign the document and go together to the PSB to get our permit.

We took another pedicab back to our hotel and locked the door. I was exhausted. We still feared that at midnight we'd get another buzz from the tourist police, this time issuing a fine.

We briefly considered switching hotels; but you have to register your passports at any hotel you check into and they could track us down. In the end we opted to disconnect the hotel buzzer to our room. If they did come by, at least we could say that we never heard their call. Maybe they would think that we had already left town.