As my final bus ride on the seeminly endless route to Xiahe wheezed it's way over the last hill up to Xiahe, I noticed a billboard in (bad) English that pronounced Xiahe the "little Tibet of China."

I have expected, after 10 months, not to be too excited about the actual cities and towns I travel to in China -- it is never the town or city itself that draws travelers to these places, but something else -- the people, a famous landmark or surrounding natural beauty. And usually the place your bus stops is the absolute pit of the destination. In this regard, Xiahe was true to form.

But what we actually found inside the town -- the Labrang monastery, home to hundreds of Tibetan buddhist monks -- lived up to the marketing hype of that billboard.

I got to Xiahe the day before Rick, and spent the evening walking around town. One side of the town is the Chinese and Hui Muslim side. It's the one side of town with most of the restaurants and hotels and souveneir stands -- along with paved roads and relatively new looking buildings

The other side is the Tibetan side -- no pavement, mud brick houses and plenty of garbage -- but more interesting and visually stimulating than the former. The most striking thing about the town, though, is that every third person is a monk in long maroon robes -- monks at teahouses, monks on motorcycles, monks on cell phones, monks shopping for new robes, monks hanging out on the side of the road talking with their monk friends.

Rick arrived early the next day, and we promptly signed up for a tour of the monastery with an English-speaking monk. There were only four of us on the tour, which made it much easier for Rick and I to kick into journalist mode and ask a bunch of questions.

The first question our monk asked us as we walked to our first stop, the School of Medicine: "Is this your first time in Tibet?"

The question didn't go unnoticed by us. We politely said no. Although it first seemed to echo the billboard I passed on the way up to Xiahe, I realized the monk was making a point: Tibet reaches beyond the geopolitical boundaries set by China, and though we were, according to maps, in Gansu province, we were in Tibet, his turf.

Our monk spoke great English, and led us through the School of Medicine, the temple of the founder of the Yellow-hat sect of buddhism and a hall of yak-butter sculptures.

"Before the Cultural Revolution," our monk started one of many sentences, "there were many of these sculptures."

"How many?" I asked.

"Many," he said emphatically, implying there were many more than the ten or so we were looking at.

I wasn't sure what to expect when I realized yak-butter sculptures were on the tour, but they were actually quite beautiful and look like they require great skill to accomplish such intricate sculptures of buddhas and lotus flowers.

We walked outside toward the largest building in the massive monastery complex -- the School of Philosophy. As we waited for another tour to finish their walk-through, a nearby group of monks chanted, the only noise in one of the most peaceful locations in China.

We entered the large red doors with brass handles and walked for a while in complete darkness. Finally someone turned on low-level lights that allowed us to see the brightly colored wall-paintings and shrines. Most of the room, though, was only lit by outside light, adding a certain mysterious quality I expected from a monastery.

As the tour came to an end, we parted ways and Rick and I wandered toward the Tibetan side of town, where our tour guide said there was a nunnary. (I had in fact met a nun while wandering around the monastery complex and was beckoned by a Tibetan to join him in the pilgrims route, spinning prayer wheels clockwise around the complex). We climbed a steep hill to get a look at Xiahe from above, with it's golden stupas and evergreen hills.

The monastery itself is a sprawling mass of mud, brick and wood structures, most of which house the 800 or so monks. The main buildings stand out from the rest with their gold roofs and orange walls. It was easily the size of a small town by itself.

Having seen the main attraction of Xiahe, the next day Rick and I rode bikes (his brought from the states, mine, a blue, rickety piece of aluminum from our guesthouse) to the Ganjia grasslands. It was only about an hour ride away. When we got to what we thought was the grassland, we took a few quick tours of the campgrounds -- complete with yurts, disco music, small restaurants, and, in the case of the one we ended up staying at, a stage with kareoke and a dance performance. Not quite the wild grassland we expected, but the surroundings were incredible.

At one point a wrinkled, tanned Tibetan horseman with a cowboy hat wandered into our yurt offering horseback rides. We later took him up on his offer, made a deal for a one hour ride and mounted our (mini) horses. We thought it might be a tour through the grasslands, following a Tibetan nomadic herder, wind through our hair as we gallop through the sunset tinted land.

Unfortunately it was nothing like that.

Two Tibetan teenagers wearing North Face grabbed the reigns of our horses, walked straight past their horses and just kept on walking. I could have crawled faster. After twenty minutes of laughing, Rick and I decided to get off and let the Tibetans ride the horses back while we walked back to our yurt. (Here is the sunset we saw walking back.)

Later that evening, we made our way back to the guesthouse where we ran into Christina Harvey, a girl I interned with at the Nevada Appeal about five years ago. The world really is a small place.

(Next up: Dunhuang).