This bright, chill Zhongdian

We both found the area bewitching. The town is almost unearthly quiet, as though the winds sweep away the noise of cars and people into the hills. The silence is hypnotic and spirit-soothing, it felt a privilege just to be walking about here. The sun is fierce and burning but its absence is crueller: each morning sheet ice forms on the shallow pool in our hostel's courtyard.

The local public toilets stink even worse than usual Chinese public toilets. Water often fails in our hostel. Tim once broke the ice covering a water pail to wash himself; his harrowing description of the ensuing sensations decides me against copying. Tough brown faced men walk the town streets, hands thrust in shabby suits to protect them from the freeze. Stringy meat skewers are grilled speedily under large red umbrellas along the main town road. Shops sell bright coloured Tibetan dress and rather fetching fur lined waist coats - but I resist temptation. Maroon robed Buddhist monks chat on mobile phones and queue for buses. Two beautiful golden skinned Tibetan girls served us lovely and necessary coffees in the Camel Cafe, getting our orders confused every time. Over and over, the sense of remoteness. Yaks graze blithely on the main road's only round-about. People stop eating or working and stare at us, usually happily, but sometimes they are too shocked to smile. The Tibetan people here love to sing lungfully, they sing while walking, while tending fields and while driving buses. They sing what sounds like deep folk songs, a change from Han Chinese pop music, which is often a lot of sappy girl and boy bands. It is a delight to break from the Chinese love affair with "Hotel California" and that awful Carpenters' "Yesterday Once More" (the one that goes "every shal-la-la-la, every wo-wo-o"). The life in the town seems fairly closed to us, rarely a sense of welcome from people, but in the remoter areas and hamlets, people's faces light up to see these two legendary foreigners.

Climbing a hill

In the first morning, we had hired ponies and had been walked around the Napa plain to see the seasonal Napa lake. Unfortunately, this was not the right season, so the lake was more of a small bog - I've seen football matches played on worse. But the brown and yellow grassy plain, with horses, black pigs and sombre faced yaks milling around was a beautiful sight. All around us hills with snow covered ebony forests burst straight from the edges of the flat fields - where the Zhongdian sun doesn't reach thick snow forms.

With the day only half done, Tim suggested we walk to the Tibetan monastery, which we had seen on our bus ride to the lake. He claimed (correctly as it turned out) to have a good sense of its orientation, and so we set off, prompting amazed stares from every group of villagers we passed. Some years ago, handing out fliers on the streets of Waikiki, I discovered that if I act insanely cheerful and happy, people can't help but smile back. So we waved at everybody and shouted, "Hello! Ni Hao!" and they shouted "Hello!" back and laughed happily among themselves. At a crossroads we encountered two old women and a little girl. The women were wearing the dazzling bright pink and blue turban-like headress of the area, which sometimes hangs a pink scarf down past the ears to obscure the mouth area. The girl was dressed in the same grubby most rural kids seem to wear. Their rough brown faces and black eyes looked at us confusedly as I mimed that we were looking for the buddhist monastery. One woman saw the light and beckoned us to follow them through the village. We walked through village mud streets, past yaks standing moronically and dozens of black piglets suckling frantically at their resigned mothers. Past the simple houses, we came to women washing clothes, some wearing their turbans and aprons over faded jeans. They giggled and then pointed at one of the hills behind their village - we were to surmount that to reach the monastery. We started scaling one path up the hill, but on looking back saw the distant Tibetans beneath us were waving for us to go in another direction. We started our ascent again, trying to breathe in the thin high altitude oxygen. We lost and found the path, slipped in wet mud, crunched over patches of ice and then came to the hill's peak. We now stood at the hill wall dividing two valley floors - the villages and horses of Napa behind us, the majestic monastery complex resting some distance from us, its golden roofs shining in the afternoon sun. Beyond it, endless white mountains. We continued on into the valley and reached the monastery a little time later. We were full of arrogant happiness. We had come to an area where there were almost no other Western travellers, we had chosen our own route through remote hills and had only found our route by interacting with many friendly villagers. We felt utterly vindicated in coming here rather than "do" the set hiking trails of the much more popular Tiger Leaping Gorge near Li Jiang.

The monastery itself was a fantastic sight, if just a little more alien than I would ideally have liked. Cream steps led up to mighty gold and white fortress keeps. There were dozens of green suited soldiers lounging around the top of the distant steps - suddenly, as I watched, one did a perfect splits, sinking down to the cobbles and smoothly up again. It was like a slap that said, "you're a long way from home Danny boy". As we started walking up the many, many stairs, at some unseen signal, all the soldiers started running down towards us at full pace. One monk made his way down the steps at walking speed, his red jostled by all that rushing green. The soldiers ran past us and marched out of the complex, and in a second silence returned to our climb.
Standing in the courtyard of the main temple areas of the complex, the wind sang with seried yet unseen wind chimes. It was cold, the afternoon sun glinted off the monastery's holy peaks. There were few monks around - it was more museum than functional. Tibetan monks are such a cultural icon of our era, it felt an electric shock each time I saw one walking around in their spiritual home territory. After years of Hollywood and "Free Tibet", now I find I have to fight the urge to hug each one I see and shout, "We're with you brothers"! But these monks were not really for hugging, the odd ones we saw ran around talking on mobile phones, carrying keys or water buckets. The inside of the monastery itself was a dazzling and terrifying array of demons and demi gods. Buddha was relatively rarely depicted, instead were endless depictions of a three headed, twelve eyeed nasty man, a blue demon about to feast on a red lipped supine woman, people being crushed and cut open, a goddess with a thousand hands. Frankly, I didn't find all this very impressive. Where was the meditation, rising above base urges and seeking of enlightenment, or whatever it is Buddhism is meant to be about? I wanted to see Tibetans glowing with the happy peace of Nirvana's waiting room, not see them rushing to unlock some hard to open door (and not even a metaphorical door!). It was all very geniune, but, perhaps ironically, as a result rather inaccessable to the traveller. No one in the monastery spoke English, nothing was set up for us tourists to do other to oggle at the fantastic artwork. It was of course my fault for arriving so ignorant, but it would have been nice to have found some way to get even a short talk on how the root of suffering is desire and related topics. I left still curious about Tibetan Buddhism, but with the sinking suspicion I would end up learning about it in some backpacker "meditation workshop" taught by a California called Brad.

The winter road to the north

Just made one of the most difficult decisions of this trip. From Zhongdian in the tip of Yunnan province, Tim and I were planning to travel by remote bus routes to the Tibetan mountain town Litang in the west of Sichuan province. Litang sounded fantastic - wild, vibrant, men with yak fur hats and long engraven knives. We met in Zhongdian's main street two other travellers who wanted to do the same route and the four of us sat down to compare plans. They told us the bus to Litang was cancelled during the winter - their proposal was to hire a jeep and driver and go there independently. Tim and I weighed up the benefits of going to Litang against the list of potential problems. It would be two full days of driving on mountainous and probably badly maintained roads just to get to Litang, then two more days of rough bus journeys onwards to get to the city of Chengdu. We were travelling during winter, so parts of the roads would most likely be slivered with snow and ice. Frankly, I had already been rather scared by the journey to Zhongdian, on narrow roads above towering gorges, frequently with no barriers to stop the bus meeting the river cackling far beneath us. To do worse roads while they were iced over sounded... And the realisation was dawning on Tim and I of just how high Litang is. The Lonely Planet put Litang's altitude at 4620m above sea level. Other sources suggested this might be an error, and the real altitude was around 4200-4300 metres, but either way, this was staggeringly high. Lhasa, famed for its cases of altitude sickness, seemed almost Belgian at only 3700 metres - in Zhongdian we were already at 3300. The air here feels more spread out, it takes longer to breathe in before the lungs feel full. We began to seriously wonder what the oxygen level and winter temperature might be like in our ozonelayer-scraping destination. Deciding I didn't need to sleep on this, I said to Tim, "Please, you head on with them if you want, but this is not the kind of travelling I want to be doing". This was going to be physically challenging, potentially quite dangerous and it seemed a huge effort to get to a town that we might not be able to enjoy properly either due to the weather or the altitude. It struck me then that I am not an explorer, not someone who revels in remote and uncertain paths to physically secluded destinations. I felt like one needed a level of gear and expertise to enjoy such travelling, and I am not (yet?) a person who has those things.

I think that Tim was more inclined to try it than I was, but we didn't want to break up our travelling duet just yet. Together we decided not to go. Now the prospect of turning around and heading back to Lijiang beckons unwelcomely.

It was, however, a strangely powerful experience for me to meet the older of the two other travellers, an Englishman named Richard. In his forties, he asked me with a quiet smile why I had wanted to leave England. I explained to him my reasons, wondering if he would argue some of them with me. He didn't - he said, "Your situation sounds eerily similar to how mine was". He had thrown in a well paying job and left the country, he was now living in western Australia. Much later that night, after the decisions had all been made about who was travelling where, he said how he had changed his life a lot when he realised he wasn't happy in England, but... He paused, clearly this was something that was difficult to say. "I wish I had followed my instincts more. Looking back, my intuition about what I wanted was very good, I should have let it guide me more". As we said goodbye, he wished me well with my travels and life, with a tad more seriousness than the typical traveller goodbye. It made me conscious how right now, I have little idea how I plan to finish all this travelling, made me wonder about how opportunities maybe don't come around very often in life.

Daniel, 24 Feb, LuGu Hu

Postscript: In retrospect, we would never have had time to have made the Litang journey and for Tim to make his flight home, so it is perhaps lucky we wimped out. Richard, who was already feeling a little poorly when we met him, emailed me later: he woke up the next morning coughing and suffering headaches and decided to head to lower altitudes immediately. So all in I think we made the right decision back in Zhongdian.