Advertisement
Headed off on a 5 day horsetrekking tour up in the north western Chinese mountains, close to Tibet. We finally reached our starting point, Songpan, after a gruelling 8.5 hour bus journey in what can, at best, be described as those old yellow "Bus Scoile" buses from the Middle Ages and driving as if the four horsemen of the apocolypse were chasing us along a winding hairpin road carved into the side of the sheer mountain face. That was enough to make us saddlesore before we even SAW a horse! In addition, he insisted on leaning on the bus horn, which was at a criminally high decible level, for no apparant reason, especially when travelling through towns and there was no vehicle nor person in front of him.
First day on the horses was grand, with plenty of blankets and bedding to shield us from the hard saddle, however when Day 2 was pretty much a plank of wood between you and the horse, the rear began to crack under the strain... literally! By day 3, we were so numb we couldn't feel anything below the waist so wasn't so bad.
Add to that the lack of sleep due
Candy Floss
The lad in the flat cap on the right is actually 86.. to sleeping at minus temperatures in a flimsy sleeping bag, on a mattress of 1inch-deep branches of fir trees, under a tent full of holes and the bottom of it about a foot off the ground, so that a nice fresh draught gave you frostbite on your face every morning!
Food, as you can imagine, was .. rustic at best. 5 young lads as our porters providing the following standard fare:
Breakfast: deep fried bread-thing, and some sort of potato and noodle mixture, and tea
Lunch: Sliced cucumbers in spicy Sichuan dressing, and bread, and tea
Dinner: Rice, potatoes onion and leek, and tea
Very healthy (food was healthy, but cooked and served in pots that you wouldn't be surprised to see as chamberpots!....but by the end of it, we were gagging for a good aul Yak Burger, in which we did indulge when we finished the trek!
Still it was a great experience, with fantastic scenery, vying with Norway for the award for "Landscape most like Legends of the Fall". The final destination, Ice Mountain, was worth the pain of the horses, and the sights on the way included rivers, waterfalls, grasslands and permanently icy mountains.
Howdy
Hey we were heading off horseriding - cowboy hat was compulsory! We also had great fun at night over the roaring campfire, with some pie jiu (beer - the bottles which were opened by a local with his teeth!) and bai jiu (rice wine), and singing at the tops of our voices to the tunes of Tibetan folk songs, Chinese pop, and myself and Thomas trying to keep the Irish end up with Fields of Athenry, Oro Se do Bheatha Bhaile and Trasna na dTonnta! The porters were ably supported by a Chinese girl called Vicky, but not so much by her Chinese boyfriend called Everett - not quite the traditional names we were expecting in China!
We had crazy porters, who insisted on cracking the horses with stones, and punching them in the face on regular occasions, in between throwing each other off the sides of the mountains through gorse and other prickly hedges!
There were a few hairy incidents on the horses, partly because my horse was so competitive, he insisted on biting the face and ass of any other horse that had pretensions of hitting the front of the group! In addition, Thomas' horse, in addition to falling a couple of times uphill, insisted on stopping
for water at every available opportunity which left him holding up the rear on many an occasion.
The town of Songpan itself is very small, but the people here are very friendly. When we arrived back from the trek, they were in the middle of May holiday celebrations (but, as luck would have it, we forgot the camera for all the colourful dancing) so the place was full of Chinese tourists and the prices of everything had jumped overnight.
Facing into the horrible bus journey back to Chengdu, we were stuck on a more comfortable bus, but an imbecile of a driver, who insisted on driving slowly on any dual carriageways, but at breakneck speed on the hairpin highways, which were full of tour buses (we must've passed at least 500 buses in the space of 3 hours) also tearing around the roads. We passed many accidents scenes with cars and trucks on their sides, in addition to being involved in one, when a tour bus coming towards us at 50mph on the wrong side of the road clipped and broke off the rearview mirrors so we had to stop for an hour to argue of the accident
(I'm sure the mirror only costs about 3euro to replace) and even the police who were caught up in the ensuing traffic jam didn't seem interested in breaking up the melee!
Arriving back in Chengdu to 34degree heat after days of cold wrapped up in fleeces was a shock to the system, but a refreshing shower and laundry (everything smells of horse and is covered in horse hair) and we are looking forward to our 4day tour on the Yangtze River starting tomorrow!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.469s; Tpl: 0.014s; cc: 29; qc: 133; dbt: 0.3608s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.3mb
Maeve
non-member comment
That hat!
I don't know what's behind you in the photo, but you look like one of the 3 musketeers ! Even when roughing it, you've got style !!!