Blessings in disguise

i'm supposed to be in Lhasa by now, in fact finishing my tibet portion of the Yunnan-tibet overland trip which began on the 9th Oct. Yet here i am, in an internet cafe in Deqin, waiting without certainty for the tibet permit which already had been delayed for 2 days.
The Yunnan-Tibet overland trip had begun with a freak accident on the second day of the trip -the jeep carrying my travelling partners, all seniors of age 47-57 overturned into the ravine 12m below the road they were travelling on and they were all injured, save for the driver.The accident scene was quite horrifying with the car literally overtuned, all 4 wheels up, almost a third of the car was submerged in the river. The ambulance took ages to appear and by the time the injured arrived at the nearest hospital,(which was in Zhongdian aka Xianggelila} it was 4 hours since the accident. The hospital conditions were worse than the worst guest house i had ever stayed in and they had no blankets available to cover the drenched and shivering injured, nor wheel chairs, nor proper stretchers when they were lifted out of the ambulance. There was no assistant staff and it was the people from the travel agency who had to do the lifting of the injured, help out in the x-ray room which was not closed even while the x-ray was taken. The doctors smoked as they walked in and out of the x-ray room and along the corridors.The hospital does not provide meals , not even hot water and the doctors there only work from 9-5.Getting the insurance to approve the SOS flight to come over was another nightmare and EL spent hours throughout the 2days, night and day pressing the NTUC,AIG and SOS before they finally acted. Her autoroam bill will be another nightmare we have to face.
ELand i had put our trip on hold when the accident happened and so all prior arrangements including the foreigner's permit into tibet were cancelled. After the whole ordeal of the accident, we decided to continue with the original plan 'cos the refund would not have been worth it. However the permit has to be rearranged and there was problem now that there're only two of us. Given the tibetan unrest in March, security had tightened and the permit was more difficult to come by. We ahd given the agency a week to apply for the permit while we wandered off to Daocheng/Yading which was originally planned for the end part of out trip. But the permit was still not ready when we returned to Zhongdian 2 days back. And so here i am, not knowing if i'll make it to tibet afterall for time is running out. We were offered other options including using fake local identity cards but we shall see what goes tomorrow...

Although, it sounded a disastrous trip, in the midst of this all, on hindsight, i see blessings in disguise.The first blessing was the car myself, EL, and the guide were on was safe. The second blessing was the water at that portion of that river where the car overturned was not deep. The third blessing was the injured were pulled out in time by the driver;the fourth blessing was they were all conscious and none of them shed any blood, though they had bones broken at critical parts of the body and clearly in shock. The fifth blessing was, EL n i had our sleeping bags with us and this proved a great help in keeping the injured warm while the were waiting for help by the river, in transporting them from the ravine up to the road as well as subsequently at the hospital where there were no proper stretchers. The sixth blessing was EL , she was very quick in calling the s'pore agency, the insurance companies and the SOS even while we waited for the ambulance and her agressiveness and selflessness in pressing the 3 parties throughout the two days must have resulted in the subsequent approval of the SOS flight almost 36hours after the accident.The seventh blessing in disguise was that that the local passers-by at the scene of accident were themselves selfless in helping the injured instead of just looking on. Some went miles to borrow a ladder to act as a stretcher and to fetch a village doctor, some rushed down to help open a route for the transportation of the injured from the ravine to the road by bashing the bushes, some offered to call the ambulance for us, many went down to carry the injured and it wasn't an easy task. The eight blessing in disguise was our local travel agent,who bore all responsibilities and reacted fast by sending out almost 20 of the staff to the scene and at the hospital, the boss of the agency himself rushed down and throughout the ordeal, we saw the amount of effort and initiatives they took to help the injured including bearing all local
hospitalisation costs and the cost of 3 business class seats for the lady who was not accepted by the SOS flight, they also took turns to take care of the injured throughout the day and night in the hospital and truly there was no fault we could find with them. The ninth blessing was that the directors of the tourism board, the traffic police and other high ranking officials also came to visit and through their 'connections' the sending off of the patients back to Singapore was also more or less hastened........