There was no need to consult my smart-watch to know that we had climbed to an altitude of more than 4,500 meters.1discomfort serves as a warning system on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.
After a four-hour journey, our coach 2 a parking lot in Madoi county, a sprawling herding district in the northwestern province of Qinghai. I got off and took a walk, but it felt like hard work. What seemed like a slightly dazed feeling at lower place—such as when I visited Lhasa, capital of the Tibet autonomous region, in 2019 at about 3,000 meters above sea level—had 3 into a severe headache because of the thin air.
As the air pressure 4 rapidly, my sunscreen bottle swelled and its 5 spilled out. Trees were a rare 6. The soil was frozen. Rice tasted half-cooked.
I 7 a small hotel, where about 35 doctors and journalists would stay for the next few days as part of a volunteer medical program. I was assigned a roommate, a photojournalist in his 50s. We climbed 8 of stairs carrying suitcases packed with winter clothes and other necessities to 9 the sunburn-producing ultraviolet. The climb clearly worsened our symptoms. We were both breathless when we reached our room.
Cracks could be seen meandering across the walls of the room, a warning sign of the quake's destruction and a 10 that the danger had not gone away.
It certainly hadn't. At about midnight, a magnitude 4.8 quake 11 the county and made my roommate and I—both 12 because of the discomfort we were feeling—jump out of our beds.
We scrambled for our clothes and shoes and argued about whether we had enough time to run outside. Before we had reached agreement, the shaking had stopped. The street our room overlooked was quickly 13 with people, and my sixth sense for survival told me to join those life-cherishing people downstairs, but the 14 told me to stay put.
The older man and I stared at each other and then decided to creep back to our beds, but we kept our pants on, just 15.
