Please, no more temples!

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There are only two reasons to come to Tibet: to trek and to see all the temples and monasteries. If you've read our previous blogs you should know that trekking is not our forte and so we were stuck with option two.

Today we headed off to see the Deprung Monastery - one of the older monasteries in Tibet, and the Jokhang Temple - in the city centre and one of the major pilgram destinations.

Deprung Monastery is on the outskirts of Lhasa near the mountainside. Before the
'Cultural Revolution', over 10,000 monks used to live there. Now it houses 700. To our untrained eyes, this monastery looked a lot like Sera Monastery (that we saw yesterday) so we were kind of bored after the first 50 Buddha statues. We did however, get some really nice views of the mountains and pilgrims walking up steep slopes to the top.

Our very knowledgable guide took it upon himself to tell us everything he knew about Buddhism all over again. We suspect he has some kind of memory problem. For example, every room has volumes of Buddhist scriptures and therefore in every room he felt compelled to explain the significance of these scriptures to us. It was still quite interesting though, since we too have memory problems and had already forgotten most of the stuff he had told us the day before.

We wasted most of the afternoon wandering through Lhasa and eating jelly - you can buy little jelly cup things by the kilo here at ridiculously cheap prices. So far we've eaten 1.5kg of jelly for only AUD $2.00

That night we met up with our guide Tin Tin at the Jokhang Temple. It must have been peak hour because the place was swarming with pilgrams prostrating themselves everywhere. Kitty even stepped on some poor little girl's hand. We got to see the 60 resident monks chanting in the assembly hall which was kind of creepy. Some of the monks weren't even chanting so later we got to see the head monk scolding them all (probably the best part of our visit there).

Probably the most moving part of all was seeing the extreme devotion of all the pilgrims. Some take years to travel from the remote Tibetan countryside prostrating every couple of steps. Others spend months just prostrating outside Jokhang Temple - even in the freezing cold winter months.

The other highlight of the day was convincing myself I had mountain sickness. I don't think I had it, or at least much of it, but it was sure fun whining all day about it.

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Photos

Deprung Monastery
One of the major monasteries in Tibet. Lots of monks all wearing expensive shoes.

Colour everywhere
They love their colour over there. Every inch of the walls and ceilings is covered in bright vibrant colours and paintings.

Dalai Lama lived here
For awhile aparently anyway. Not the current Dalai Lama, but past ones.

Scary statues
Just scary and unfriendly. And millions of them.

Even scarier statue
This is one of the protector statues. I guess even the evil spirits find him too ugly.

Prayer wheels
People walk past an spin these things as they walk by. There are mantras carved all along the outside of the wheels.

Yak butter lamps
Lots of stuff is made from yaks in tibet. This is a yak butter lamp which pilgrims light as offerings to the idols.

Clever way to boil water
Its solar power. Takes 30 minutes to boil a whole kettle. Its odd because the monks have all the other luxuries like mobile phones and sports shoes, but they don't have an electric kettle. Or maybe they are just extremely environmentally aware.