Kham adventure

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Hello. I am about to leave on September 1, for Chengdu, China with Marty Newman for a month in that part of Eastern Tibet which is known as Kham. We traveled to the ethnic minority villages of Yunnan Province two years ago and visited with the Yi, Miao, Dong and Tibetan people.
For this trip we have engaged a guide, driver and jeep.
I have always been inspired by Alexandra David-Neel's adventures in Tibet and the travel journals of Sven Hedin.
Kham is the home of the khampas..fierce warriors who held off the Chinese army..and the site of many Buddhist Monasteries. I want to see how traditional life is lived here and sit in at the monasteries. Part of the fun of this kind of travel is telling stories and doing magic tricks in informal settings. We will take lots of pictures.
We may be challenged by the condition of the roads. I have been following the weather reports for Chengdu and Kangding and it is still raining almost everyday..oh well.
Landslides may be a problem.
We have done our best to have some advanced contacts with local people. Pam Logan is a remarkable woman who has written about Kham and has many projects from sponsoring school children, to restoring monastery paintings, local agriculture projects to organizing volunteers. Through her we have been negotiating with a University to teach about 'spousal abuse' for a day workshop. I have taught family therapy at UCSan Francisco School of Medicine, and Marty, who is a social worker and I have co-taught on various psychotherapy subjects.
We also met a student of Buddhism who studies with a teacher at a monastery who asked us to bring anti-parasite medicine for him. He is suffering with liver fluke disease. There is a little mystification here: the student hasn't told us the name or location of his guru and emailed to say that he was deep into esoteric studies that he wasn't permitted to disclose to us...neither the content of his studies nor the location of his monastery!! Yet...he gave us his cell phone number and we will call him when we get there. I have this fantasy of the hermit's cave..remote, inaccessible...surrounded by silence....then the phone rings...
The compulsion to answer the phone...ubiquitous..

more to follow

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Photos

Naxi Shaman..Baisha, China 2002
From our last trip..near Lijiang. playing the flute