...tibet? part II

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so, the journey continues......

yesterday was another lovely day in xiahe. i grew to really like that town in the short amount of time we spent there. only about two or three days, but it was great. people were pretty nice (although i've become really paranoid about thieves and so forth as i hear more horror stories. i've gotten really cynical about talking to small children, which is a necessity i hate. they're taught so young to hit you up for money, and they seem to be at an ideal level to slip their little hands into your pockets), and there was so much colour and life. so very different to anything i've seen so far. i think it's safe to say i've enjoyed my experiences with tibetan culture so far.

we got up at a leisurely sort of time, and after some tibetan bread (so much better than chinese bread, cos it has a nice crust on it, but is soft on the inside, and doesn't have sugar in it), kt, isabelle and i headed off to turn some prayer wheels. xiahe has a series of prayer wheels spanning three kilometres that you can walk along in a circuit. it was great watching all the little old ladies go for it - my arm got tired pretty quickly, but they seemed to just be able to keep going and going. i find myself getting out of breath pretty easily at this sort of altitude; on our first day, i was puffing as i climbed the stairs. still, at nearly 3000m above sea level, i'm doing ok, i think. no altitude sickness just yet, just more puffing and panting! so 3ks worth of prayer wheels was going to be no picnic.
actually, though, i got into a groove with it and was so "in the zone" that i managed to leave kt and isabelle far behind, and was sort of unthinkingly following some old men and women. after we reached a white stupa somewhere near the monastery we'd visited the day before, they went off down a gravel track. i couldn't see any more prayer wheels, so i figured i'd follow them. after we went past some of the villagers digging in the rocky ground, and up a very narrow pathway, i figured i was probably going the wrong way. oh well, i thought to myself, might as well just see what happens. i felt a lot safer in xiahe than i have anywhere else, in terms of orientation, anyway, because there's only one main road in the whole town, and it's not too difficult to keep that in sight. after all the old ladies thinned out and went their own way, i realised i was back in the monastery! weird. i'm still not sure how that happened, but i walked back to the start of the prayer wheels and sat down to wait for the girls.

whilst i was waiting, two little girls came and sat with me. and then an old man. and then a young woman. and then lots of people stopped. they were all really interested in my piercings, and it was probably one of the few times i've been sitting still for long enough (except when i'm eating) that they could get a good look at them. the girls were cute. once i was certain that my bag was securely closed and my pockets were inaccessible, i was quite happy to sit there and smile at them. after a while it was a little weird - i showed all my piercings to them and the old man and young woman, and then they just kept staring at me. i wasn't really sure what to do, so i just sat there and waited for them to go away.
they actually didn't go away, but luckily after about 20 minutes, kt and isabelle showed up, so it was ok.

in the afternoon, we headed out to lake tarzang (tarzang hu, which you have to say with lots of phlegm). we caught a bus from the main terminal, after much explaining, which dropped us off on the side of the road next to a long, winding dirt track that lead steeply upwards. more mountain-climbing? luckily, a minivan was passing with a couple of chinese tourists in it, so we hitched a lift with them. when i saw how far we would've had to have climbed, i was bloody glad they were passing.

the lake itself was beautiful, and some of the trees and so forth were festooned with prayer flags. i guess maybe it's a sacred lake? i'm not too sure about that one. there were pine trees and snow-covered mountains nearby, and there was some snow on the ground, too. i was glad i'd heeded the advice of the guy at our hostel and brought both my jackets.
although there was plenty of scenery to look at, i quickly became entraced with the goat wool hanging from the trees. i collected a little bit of it, thinking that maybe i could comb it out and felt it or something - it was exciting to see wool after so long! after a little while, though, i noticed that there seemed to be a pattern to it, and kt suggested maybe it was there on purpose. oops! that was a bit of a faux pas, i suppose. i half-expected some angry monk to come and yell at me, but the place was deserted. i kept the wool i'd collected, thinking maybe i could make something from it and give it to a monk as a present or something.

we decided to walk down, and met some interesting locals on the way, including some lady who kept saying something to us about tickets. after saying wo bu dong (i don't understand) as many times as we could, we just walked away and left her. i'm still not really sure what she wanted, because entrance to the lake is free. the walk down was beautiful, but also cold and steep and rocky. luckily we found a couple of shortcuts and didn't have to do the crazy side-winding the whole way down the mountain.
once we got down, however, it was even colder, somehow, and we were stuck by the side of the road, not really sure when the next bus would be. as it turned out, none of the buses that went past would stop for us. we resorted to sticking our thumb out to any passing car (and quickly pulling it back in again when the police drove past). hitching in china! after about 20 minutes of shivering, a taxi came by and stopped for us. there were already two guys inside, but we piled in anyway. so not exactly hitching, but a dodgy squashy ride home nonetheless.

after this little adventure we were pretty hungry, so we headed to a local restaurant, gesar's (good, cheap food, with western, chinese and tibetan dishes, and plenty of vego stuff, as well as some english-speaking staff) and tucked in to vegetable fried noodles and vegetable momo (tibetan dumplings - read "stodge"), as well as some tea. kt tried the nomad tea, which looks like a cup full of mulch with some sugar on top. i acually think it might be lapsang souchong tea, which is a smoky-flavoured black tea i used to drink back home (lipton's does a bag version). anyway, it tasted pretty good with sugar. i had muslim tea, which is green tea, dried fruit and sugar. very sweet, as they put about ten lumps of sugar in it (and they're actually lumps!), which slowly dissolve as you drink a cup and then add more hot water.
we ended up feeling quite full and happy and decided to have an impromptu concert for the locals who were eating there (mostly monks at this point). of course, "girlfriend" came out, which everyone loved, and then we played a bit of the "naughty washerwoman" for them as well, complete with wind instruments this time as we'd brought them with us to play at the lake (but it was too cold to sit still for long enough). one little girl loved kt and decorated her face with stickers. we also met a local musician, whose cd had been playing in the cafe earlier (kt and i had been listening and talking about how great the music was). he played a little on kt's uke and then brought out his mandolin, which had the standard number of strings and all but seemed to be tuned really strangely, so neither of us could play it. he sang and played one of his songs for us, using a traditional singing technique, (i think), which sounded really great.

eventually we'd drunk so much tea and played so many songs that our heads were spinning (wind instruments at high altitude, especially when you haven't played in a while, is kinda difficult), so we headed back to the ranch where, to our delight, we managed to have piping hot showers, and then headed off to bed.

waking up at 6:30 this morning wasn't exactly my idea of fun, but we'd decided to catch the 7:30 bus to langmusi, along with our aussie friends damien and helen. after saying goodbye to isabelle, and exchanging details so that we could maybe meet up in yunnan somewhere, we headed downstairs and out into the frosty morning.
one not-too-long bus ride later, we were in langmusi, another tibetan town on the border of sichuan and gansu. apparently the elevation here is 11000 feet above sea level. i'm not really sure what that translates to in metres, but it's higher than xiahe, i think. more puffing and panting! we checked into our very basic hostel and then headed out for some food. the town here isn't as pretty as in xiahe - there's less colour and the architecture and so forth seems to be more chinese - but the landscape certainly makes up for it. we went to the monastery here and had a little wander around (couldn't seem to find a tour or anything, though), and found ourselves walking up a grassy hill. on one side of us was rolling green hills and pasture, dotted with houses and with snow-capped mountains in the distance. on the other side was red-brown rocky cliffs and pine forest, descending into a valley. the trees along the mountain were all dotted with snow, and we've seen a bit of it on the ground, as well as melting off the rooftops. lovely.

on the advice of an english-speaking guy at the ticket counter for the monastery (yes, more tickets - cheap this time at 15 yuan for two days' entry), we headed up the road nearly a k to the "lamu caves". lamu is the tibetan name for langmusi, and apparently this means "faery caves". whilst we didn't see any faeries, it was certainly a lovely valley. after some local kids tried to get some cash out of us (kt gave them some hong kong coins, which satisfied the younger two, but the older one wasn't impressed), we had the valley pretty much to ourselves, and were soon hopping rocks over the river and scrambling up the rocky sides. we bumped into helen and damien again on the way, who had just been in one of the caves (they said it wasn't that great in there, so we chose not to scramble up the rocky mountainside to go in that one), and walked a little more, then decided to go back into the town centre. after all the walking we've been doing lately, we're both getting pretty sore legs, with knees and calves cramping up a bit. actually, i think the combo of walking and climbing lots, and then sitting on buses and trains is really what's doing us in. lots of fun, though, so i can't complain too much.

we got some more food and drink, then looked at shiny things for a while, and wandered aimlessly through town. that's pretty much been our day. we were planning to leave tomorrow morning, but after checking out the scenery, we've decided we want to stay another day and enjoy ourselves. we're thinking of climbing up the cliffs tomorrow and playing some music up there with a little picnic lunch. apparently if we go to the monastery at about 6:30am, we can also catch the monks doing their morning chanting and rituals, which should be great too, as we haven't really had much of a look at the monastery yet. after that, it's off to songpan - probably we'll be getting a minivan with the other aussies, which is slightly more expensive, maybe, than a bus and stop-over in zoighe and then another bus to songpan, but it's much more efficient, and we've got to be in songpan soon to extend our visas.
so. another day of lovely mountain scenery, and then more bus-ing! hopefully it shouldn't take more than five or six hours in the minivan.

i'll post some photos from xiahe and langmusi as soon as i can! in rural areas like this, it's hard to get a decent net connection, and a fast enough computer for kt to upload them, but we're working on it. there's lots of stunning scenery i'd love to share!

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