Tibet stories
Finally some stories from Tibet! I’m in Nepal, and have been staying in a village the past two weeks. So I have a lot of stories to catch up on. Guess I’ll start from arriving in Tibet.
I had just arrived on the plane from Chengdu a few days back. Lhasa is 3400m above sea level, and I was feeling pretty uncomfortable with the altitude for 4 days. I checked out the main sites like the Potala and Barkhor square. Despite the fact that it is now surrounded by chinese-built modernity, the Potala is still an impressive building. I also went to a monestary nearby.
I was staying in a cheap hotel, in a 4-person dorm room. My roommates for the first while included a hiker/climber from Poland, a japanese person studying languages, and a swiss girl travelling towards china.
After staying a few days in Lhasa and consulting the guide book I still wasn’t too sure what to do, but then out of nowhere come the japanese dudes I had crossed over the Chinese border with back in Laos! It was nice to see a familiar face, and I wondered what had happened to them. Turns out they disguised themselves as Chinese hitchhikers and hitched all the way to Lhasa. They told me about their stories and hanging around in a place in western Yunnan where the bartenders were rolling joints! We hung out later that night and they told me there was a festival in Ganden monestary. I decided to go, but we didn’t really co-ordinate and I ended up going on my own to the monestary.
I didn’t buy a ticket, but just got up at 5 in the morning, put my backpack on and headed out the door. There were many buses going to the festival, and I just hopped on a random bus. It was still dark outside. I was happy to be with local Tibetans. As we neared the mountain where the monestary was, the sun started to come up. And as we turned off the main road to go up the steep winding road the traffic stopped. The road was saturated with buses. After an hour or so of stop-and go traffic, people just started getting off the bus and walking. I came to estimate that it was about a 500m climb to the top. I had packed a fairly large bag since I planned on staying up there for a few days, so the hike was quite a struggle for me. Probably I would have given up if it weren’t for the men and old ladies hauling their kids up on their backs!
By the time I got to the top I was really tired, cold, and feeling again the effects of the altitude. But I made it and that was the important thing. After some searching I mangaged to find where the accomodations were, although the place was jam packed with people there were still rooms available–I guess most locals don’t stay there. I put my bags down and went to the restaurant/tea house downstairs. It was a really rustic sort of place; there were wooden tables and benches in rows with mostly tibetans sitting and drinking yak-butter tea, bowls of Thugpa (tibetan noodles) and also rice and chinese dishes. There were stacks of dried yak-dung (used for fuel) on the far wall, which was probably the source of the smoky atmosphere in the place. By then some other tourists had come (who were to be my room-mates in the guest house) and we all managed to order some food from the very chaotic serving area. To be authentic we acquired (after no small effort) a thermos of yak-butter tea, which has a taste that cannot really be described. But after having it semi-regularly in Tibet I must say I wouldn’t really miss it if I did not have it again! It is made with some variety of tea, black I think, mixed wth salt. That by itself is somewhat gross, but somehow due to the harsh environment, cold, and altitude it is pleasing to drink. After that it is churned with yak butter in a sort of piston-like contraption, to yeild a sort of milky oily concoction. Sometimes it tastes good, othertimes disgusting. A common staple meal of tibetans is to have a bowl of plain barley flour, to which butter tea is poured on top. It then forms a kind of paste which you eat. That’s called Tsampa.
Anyway, by the time we got the tea down it was time to go off and see what the festival was about. The main event was the hanging of a huge banner depicting an image of a tibetan Diety, I never found out exactly which one it was. But it had already been mostly hung down, and was very large and impressive. Pilgrims were throwing white prayer scarves up at the image, which I think is a gesture of good will and blessing. The mix of tourists and devout pilgrims was pretty interesting. 
There was also a really cool folk singer I made a video of. He was some old albino Tibetan, and I thought of him as a sort of Tibetan Robert Johnson. I listened to my recoding of him many times during slow moments. I will try to upload it!
I ended up staying at the monestary for 3 days, which was a good experience. The monks were pretty friendly but it was hard to interact with them because of the language barrier, and the fact that they don’t generally lounge around and talk to tourists. But for me it was fine. There was this old blind man who hung around the convenience shop out front, at random times he would start singing some song that he probably made up. And anyone who was around would stop and have a listen and a laugh. People gave him pocket money to get by.
I did the standard activities around the monestary, like hiking around the “kora” which is just a pilgramige path that goes around the monestary. I met a nice old lady pilgrim that I walked the path with, and she showed me the place where you squeeze your hand together and look through your fist at some rocks in order to see visions. I tried it but couldn’t manage to see any. But she said that she did see.
I also hiked up some high ridges which had a really good view, and met a yak herder with a pimpin’ yak.
I caught a random bus back to Lhasa, and planned to stay one night and then take off to some other monestaries, as well as do some more day-hiking. I looking forward to getting back to lower ground!
the photos 
hiking near Dali in Can Shan Mountain, Western Yunnan province
visiting JiuzaiGao park in northern Schezhuan province