Travel highlights

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I think that yesterday was so incredible that I'm not sure anything else on this trip will be able to top it.

I'm in the Tibetan ethnic area if western Sichuan, where it is mountainous, cold, and spectacular. We spent a night I kangding where we ate delicious Tibetan food and avoided the rain, and then two days in tagong, really the wild west of china (people riding horses through town, Tibetan cowboys, and lots of yaks). Also an american who was starting up a cafe and arts collective, whom we happily helped out in exchange for a warm fire to escape the rain, hail, and snow. The second day started off cloudy but we set off on a walk anyway, across the grasslands to what turned out to be a monks' college. On the way back, it cleared up and we had magnificent views of the snow covered mountains.

Then we headed to litang, which was possibly the most harrowing trip I've been on, involving three vehicles and crossing mountain passes over 4600 meters ( litang itself is 4200 m). Our first afternoon there was spent relaxing and adjusting to the altitude, but the next morning ( yesterday) dawned bright and early with our invitation to a sky burial, the Tibetan funeral ritual. Words can't really express it, but the ritual involves the body being sliced into pieces and then exposed on a hill so that vultures come and eat it. All of the remains are then burned. This was outlawed until recently, and foreigners aren't allowed to go in the tar, so we were lucky to be in the right place in the right time.

The amazingness of the day continued in the afternoon when we went to a lamasary and a monk led us into a locked back room where we saw ( and were allowed to photograph) a massive sculpture of a tibbetab Buddhist dirty that is rumoured to have been carried from lahsa by hand.

The day finished with hot springs ( because the guest house didn't have a shower) but those were a let down compares with everything else.

Today I spent most of the day in bed with my first case of Chinese stomach upset, but I managed to rouse myself to catch a bus to daocheng, the stepping off point for my trip into Yunnan. It turns out that there are only buses every other day, but this seems like a really comfortable place to rest and there are some other travelers who I can hang out with since the Israelis who I was with left this morning to go back to Chengdu. There was another city I was thinking of going to, where I might have had more luck getting a bus, but luck when traveling is somewhat subjective-now I'm in a really nice hostel with really nice people.

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