Advertisement
Before long we were up and over a mountain pass and rolling down into Litang which sits in a flat expansive valley with crazy Tibetan plateauness on all sides. GOSH I love alien landscapes where you can see forever. On the outskirts of Litang was a bit of whatever limited farming they could manage up there. The town itself only had one or two main streets and the buildings maxed out at around 5 stories. With a population of 50,000, Litang is a real TOWN! In China it is mostly (first-world amenities, universities, crowded, noise, pollution, white-collar jobs, migrant workers, middle and upper classes) -> (cities) and (agriculture, peasants, third-world human services, fresh air, space to run around) -> (villages). Sorry this commentary is tainted by the fact that I'm sick of my uncomfortable room and I'm about to go back to America haha. Litang felt nice, like how a small New England town would be if you made everyone Tibetan and put it at 13,000 feet.
We got out of the minivan, a bit disoriented, and made our way to the bus station to get tickets to Kangding. Due to Spring Festival, busses weren't running until "the day after
tomorrow," so we bought tickets for then. We then stumbled around until we came across the Potala Inn (pretty close to the bus station). We got a lovely triple room with private bathroom (shower didn't work) for ~30 rmb/person. We got winded just climbing two flights of stairs to get there. Two sisters run the inn and they had spent their holiday in Chengdu, where their parents now live. It was the first day post-Spring Festival that they had reopened the inn, and only the younger sister was back in town. I forgot her name so I'll just refer to her as meimei because she kept talking about jiejie her older sister.
Our next priority was food. Meimei recommended a Tibetan restaurant kinda between the inn and the bus station. We went there and sat down only to discover that due to the holiday, they weren't serving food... only yak butter tea. So we had some tea. Our hunger somewhat satisfied by drinking liquid butter, we again set off to find the elusive Tibetan cuisine. Finally, on a side street off the main road - success! They only had toasted yak meat pies and steamed yak meat dumplings, so
Wandering Around
Cows also wandering around. that's what we got. Naoki and I had some trouble using standard Mandarin to communicate with people in town, as I suspect either their first language was Tibetan, or they mostly spoke Sichuanese, or they weren't used to foreign accents. Also maybe like 5 times, random people on the street (not professional beggars) asked us for money. They usually said "tashi delek" (a well-wishing Tibetan greeting) and stuck their hands out and sometimes were quite annoying about it. When we were eating, one guy looked in the window, was like "hell yeah two white people!", came in and spent an awkward several minutes just repeating the phrase. We were like you can have some food but we don't want to give you money. Interruption aside, the meat was nicely spiced and very tasty. A good stick-to-your ribs meal to prepare you for a day of herding yaks! After dinner, we did some more wandering. Yaks, cows and pigs roamed the town as well. We found the town stupa and circled around it and spun some prayer wheels.
That night we mostly chilled and also talked with a couple and their daughter who were also staying in the Potala in.
The wife was from Holland and the husband was a Tibetan from Gansu and their daughter was super cute and spoke English, Dutch, Tibetan and Chinese kind of all mixed together. We spent a few hours playing together. First we had races outside but then boys started throwing rocks at us, so we went inside and played a game where she hid an object and I had to find it. Meimei joined in.
The next morning, Naoki and I woke up early to get to the monastery in town. We found the whole town dusted in a fine layer of snow. Jason, the unfortunate Canadian who doesn't like the cold, stayed inside. It was the best monastery of the trip. No entrance ticket, a friendly private tour guide, and there were many buildings to see, including the big monk kitchen! The buildings had an aura of mystery inside and even smelled like ancient secrets. Ancient secrets smell like dust, cold snow, yak fat candles and incense. Many of the locals were making clockwise circles around the whole monastery complex while chanting prayers, spinning hand-held prayer wheels, and counting prayer beads. Just the slight uphill walk to the gate was
an effort for us sea-level dwellers.
Naoki and I wanted to go hiking. Meimei didn't really know of a suitable day hike to direct us towards (just some several-hour trips that involved hiring a car, spending $$$, and maybe not even doing so much hiking?). Therefore, went back and climbed the golden hills behind the monastery. Jason was like "waa it might snow! be careful!" Of course we got caught in a really scary-looking snow cloud : ) Hiking at above 13,000 feet took a lot of effort. It was surprising how far into the nothingness people had set up piles of rocks, incense-burning ovens, and prayer flag monuments. We would get to one landmark and then scout out the next one as our goal. That high up, we were really close to the clouds, so the weather could change quickly. It went from sunny blue skies to "oops we're inside of a scary-looking snow cloud" within like half an hour. The snow cloud was fine (just some small dry flakes)... it only looked like it was going to eat us. We got chilly and headed back.
That afternoon/evening, I met meimei's friend, her friend's boyfriend, and jiejie's
husband. The boyfriend said that he was a singer and he would be singing at a local bar that night! That night, I asked meimei how to get there and she said she would go with me. We walked over together, arms linked and gossiping like new bffs. She talked about how the boyfriend only had one arm, which somehow I didn't notice when he was sitting across from me and we were chatting. She said Litang was a kind of dangerous town. I'm glad she went with me, because it was on the second floor of a building on an unlit street and would have been hard to find on my own. We walked in to discover... a Tibetan disco! They had dancers wearing Tibetan costumes and doing Tibetan dancing to Tibetan music. It was really... shiny... lights, lasers, smoke machines! We "tashi delek"-ed shots of beer. At one point, the pro dancers led us all in doing a dance in a circle and meimei and I participated (but I was always on the wrong foot). Finally the boyfriend did his act. He was quite tall and strong and looked badass in his cowboy boots and wrapped fur shirt.
Finally, it was time to go back and sleep for a few hours before getting up before 6 am to catch the bus to Kangding!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.179s; Tpl: 0.02s; cc: 9; qc: 47; dbt: 0.0615s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb