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Driving to Xiangcheng
No guardrails, but at least there are prayer flags! (Long time no blog. Still continuing the Spring Festival tale from where it left off.)
I took a cab to the sub station well before the sun came up and to my surprise found three other foreigners also waiting. It appears that the Yunnan and Sichuan highlands are quite popular travel destinations for foreigners. Especially since the 2008 change in requirements for foreigners entering Tibet, maybe more and more people are traveling to Deqin County in Yunnan and the Garze Tibetan Autonomous region in Sichuan. There was a crunchy granola French couple and a long-term traveler Canadian guy. I tried to chat with the French couple, but they weren't that friendly, their English wasn't that good, and they seemed to be pretty into criticizing the Chinese government and tourism industry. For example, they referred to Xinjiang as East Turkmenistan and Shangrila as its old name Zhongdian. No doubt the Uyghurs and Tibetans have in many ways got a tough lot, but I didn't want to join their smug moral superiority party.
The Canadian guy named Jason was really cool and also we discovered another foreigner, a Japanese exchange student named Naoki. Though he has taken English classes for many
years and his vocabulary is quite good, Naoki is not used to using it to communicate, so Chinese was the best common language for us.
From what I read, I expected the ride to Xiangcheng to be totally miserable - long, bumpy, windy, vomit and spit running down the aisles, cigarette smoke in my face. Well the road was actually paved much of the way, people spit and puked out the windows, and not that many people smoked. Expect the worst and you will be pleasantly surprised : ) It was nice to drive through the Chinese wilderness, with huge mountains forever and Tibetan villages in the valleys. The architectural style of the Tibetan houses was lovely. They were made of brick with plaster and white paint over them and had a slight taper as they rose to a partially open top floor. Since they often didn't have very defined roofs, it seemed that people could just add another layer if they wanted another floor. The window frames had detailed woodwork and were brightly painted. Most houses had prayer flags on a pole sticking out of the top.
We got off the bus in Xiangcheng, we ran away
from a lady who tried to get us to stay at her hotel, the French couple disappeared, and our Canadian/Japanese/American team set off for the bus station to buy tickets. However, Spring Festival struck again!! No public transportation to Litang for at least several days! We went back to the lady we ran away from. (She was very good to us. I'm just in the habit of running away from people who want my mon-ay.) Her hotel seemed pretty empty and we got a triple room with electric blankets and hot shower access for something like 30 kuai/person. She helped us arrange the kind-of-confusing transportation to Litang. It was going to be something like 600 rmb for a minivan. But maybe a cheaper magical taxi would come in at around 11 pm. In that case, the magical taxi driver would knock on our door. She advised us to keep our door locked at night because there were dangerous people around. It seems that she had an ongoing feud with the Tibetan hotel owners across the street. She said that their hotel was a bit cheaper (maybe 20 kuai/bed) but it was dirty and they were less helpful over there. She
showed us a huge welt on her leg and said this Tibetan guy had apparently hit her in the face and bit her in the leg. She herself was from the Sichuan lowlands and was not Tibetan and had moved to the area to find work.
Jason, Naoki and I wandered around trying to find other travelers who we could split the minivan with. To our surprise, we found two other foreigners, but they were heading in the opposite direction. We walked way down the one main street of the city until we reached the Bsampeling monastery which sits on a hill at the edge of town. It was empty except for us and a few monks. A monk gave us a tour in Chinese which would have been much more interesting if Naoki or I had known any religion/Buddhism vocabulary. The tall ceilings, dim candle-lit halls, detailed symbolism and indecipherable chanting made for a mysterious supernatural experience. Jason related to us what he had learned of Buddhism and Hinduism and declared that studying Buddhism made him a better Christian. I recalled my previous traveling companion Mary's comment that religious study is valuable because it "opens up a part
of our brains." I think she was referring to that part of us that can imagine things greater than ourselves, that can conceive of things that are beyond reason. No matter what you believe, the practice of believing is inherently valuable.
After the monastery, we searched in vain for a Tibetan restaurant, then settled on a very mediocre Sichuan place. It seems to me that a lot of "Tibetan food" is what people have to eat when they are poor and the local conditions can only support some grains and yaks. So maybe people are quite happy with the new fruits, vegetables, and flavors that have come with recent economic development and better transportation links with the more fertile areas of Sichuan. Also maybe Tibetan food isn't something people go to a restaurant for. Not sure, but I was still on a mission to find some! Finally we went to bed. No 11 pm knock from a magical taxi man.
The next day we considered the minivan price. They were willing to lower it to 500 kuai and we went for it. We drove up and up and finally reached the Tibetan Plateau. SO COOL! There were golden hills that went forever and occasionally one could see some SERIOUS snow mountains in the distance. The highest pass we went over was about 4700 meters or 15,400 feet. I was all like "woohoo! personal altitude record!" Jason was all like "I have a heart condition and am worried about pulmonary edema." We picked up some quiet, good-natured, tough-as-nails nomadic folks from some the middle of nowhere location on our way to Litang.
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