Kangding, China

Hi from China,
After the incredible experiences in Litang, we headed back to civilization. We took the early (and only) bus to Kangding, a city that is considered to be the unofficial border of Tibet, even though it is formally in Sichuan province of China.
The ride, like many before, was very long, very hard, and very beautiful. The snowy mountains, the high passes, and the terrible roads were all there.
Just south of Kangding there is the highest mountain in China out of Tibet, called Gonga Shan. It's 7756 m high, only 1300 lower from the Everest! The bus went very close to it, and it was a very impressive site.
The city itself is not that interesting, so I used the time to communicate. I had Internet access for the first time in a long while, but all the Internet places didn't allow connecting my camera and downloading pictures. It was a hard job finding a nice person who wants to help, and he took apart a computer and connected a CD to it and also allowed a USB connection - so I was back in business.
Kangding itself is locates in a valley between some hills with a river flowing through it (sounds familiar???). One of the hills is called Paoma Shan, and it is famous in China (and the Chinese say that it's famous all over the world) because of a Chinese folk song telling about the beauty of that mountain.
We climbed it the following day, saw the monasteries that were built on it, and saw many school kids having a day trip on top of it.
Later we went with another American couple we met to some local travel agency to ask about a glacier park near Gonga Shan. The tour guy said that the weather will not be that good the following day and the visit won't be fun because of the poor visibility.
Since the tour guy wanted to practice his English - he took us to a nice local restaurant and sat with us while we were eating.
Sichuan province is known for it's spicy dishes, and they even have a special kind of pepper called Sichuanese pepper. This pepper is not just spicy or hot, it is so hot that it causes your mouth to feel numb. In Chinese they have a different name for it's flavor - it's not the regular "spicy" or "hot". So when you eat in this province you must remember to ask for "not spicy", which will either make it reasonable hot for people like me, or it will make it tasteless.
After the first round of dishes we were still a little hungry, so we asked the local guy for recommendations. He ordered for us two more dishes that burnt our tongues. He was just sitting there laughing at us!
We had some guys sitting in a table next to us who really enjoyed the fact that foreigners were eating with them in the restaurant. They started to drink with us, local beer in small glasses like the Chinese like it. They kept buying us beer and had some drinking contests with us, until we all felt happy.
After that the tour guy and the group took the four of us to a local pub. The pub had some singers and dancers performing Tibetan music in a disco fashion, which was very funny. They kept buying us beer, and we were all very happy.
There is a tradition there that if you like the singer you buy a white scarf and put it around the singer's neck. Our new friends kept buying these scarfs and gave them to us to put on the performers.
Between the performances there was a short time for dancing to Chinese and Tibetan music. We became the stars of the dance floor.
I tried connecting my ipod to the DJ's stereo so I can let them dance to some decent music - like Rage Against the Machine of something like that, but he didn't have the needed cables. That could have made the evening even funnier.
The following day we woke up late, just to see that the sun is shining and the weather was great for a trip to the glacier park, but it was too late for that.
We took a bus to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province.
R.

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