Xiahe & Langmusi
There are lots of tourists in Xiahe, and most stay near the monastery on the edge of the Chinese part. I stayed at the Tara Guesthouse. The name does make me cringe after the health problems I suffered on account of the Tara Hotel in Tashkent, but the places are unrelated. It is centered around a courtyard and is a backpacker favourite. I got a bed in the greenhouse room – lots of windows so a highly variable temperature. At 2900m, those nighttime temps aren’t exactly warm.
The Tibetans are immediately noticeable. Many are monks and nuns, and they wander around town in crimson robes. Others are sunburnt, with wild, windblown hair. The women have very long braids that are then tied together at the end (lower back). Many wear traditional hats that look like a cross between a cowboy hat and a fedora.
My first order of business was food. Of course, this was Tibetan. Tibetans are not blessed with good farmland, and consequently the food is limited in terms of ingredients. It’s a cold place, so the food is filling. If the flavour is too bland, though, there is chile paste at every table to liven things up. I had thentug, a soup with thick, square noodles, cucumber, tomato and meat. I opted for “Muslim tea”, which is seasoned with spices and dried fruits. To finish off, I had what was billed as an entree but which I would term a dessert – toma trae tse. This is rice, topped with toma (a tiny, slighlty nutty tuber), then drizzled with yak butter and sprinkled with sugar.
I headed to the Tibetan quarter. It was a world removed from the white tile and neon of the Chinese part of town. Adobe houses and two-floored buildings crowded around chortens. From the outside, it was uneventful but through short archways you find courtyards with two-storey houses packed together facing the centre of the yard.
Further along, a cluster of houses clings to the hillside. I decided to investigate these to see how they were structured, and to get an overview of the Tibetan quarter and western part of the valley. It was not long before a group of nuns invited me in for dinner.
Nuns and Monks
Behind the adobe wall, the houses have two floors. A shed sits by the door. The first floor contains a sunlit sitting room and then beds in another room behind. The upper level contains the kitchen and dining area, with another bedroom/living room behind it. The nuns’ house was surprisingly modern inside. Dinner was being prepared on a gas stove. The bedroom, lined with photos of the Dalai Lama, Panchen Lama and bodhisattvas, was of very modern engraved wood. The only old thing there was my stool. Dinner started with a loaf of bread that had been dusted with curry powder. Tea came, followed by rice. Conversation was conducted via the nuns’ English textbooks.
The main course was a salty, stirfried mixture of yak, cucumber, cabbage and potato. It actually didn’t taste that bad. They insisted I have seconds, which was a little rough considering lunch was only two hours previous. In what has become a standard comedy routine for me, I returned their amusement at my chopstick technique by attempting to teach them the proper “Josh” way of using chopsticks. Dessert was fresh yoghurt, not unlike Uzbek kaimak in flavour. I was made to literally lick my bowl clean. A photo session followed and I headed back down the hill to the hotel, as the setting sun and corresponding plummet in temperatures necessitated a change of clothing.
After that experience, to see the Everest Cafe jammed with white people eating steak, burgers and lamb chops was quite sad. Mass tourism is an ugly beast, there is no doubt about it. The next morning at the Labrang Monastery was further evidence of that. Hordes of Chinese tourists were getting in the way of the pilgrims in order that they could have their photos taken in front of prayer wheels and ornate buildings. It is the most vain, most cheesy, most intellectually deficient photograph you can take, the “look at me in front of something famous!” shot, yet so many tourists think it’s pure genius. It was recommended that I take the monastery tour, as I would get to see places otherwise off-limits. Somehow the sanctity and atmosphere of these holy places seemed like it would be hard to capture with thirty other Westerners and a megaphone-toting guide.
The best thing to do is just wander around the grounds yourself. It was muddy after the night’s rains, but teeming with crimson-clad monks and weather-beaten pilgrims. Around the outside are over one thousand prayer wheels, stretching the 3km circumference. Many of the doorways feature carved wooden murals depicting forests of deer, lions and dragons.
Labrang Monastery
At the south end, a golden temple sits by the river. A large black cloth with circular white symbols drapes down the front. Murals are painted on every inch of the frontage. Walking down this side, you see most of the prayer wheels. Pilgrims will circle the entire monastery, always clockwise. Others can be seen prostrating themselves. Tibetans of all ages, from adolescents in Adidas track suits to gnarled grandmothers hunched over their canes, do this circuit. The river flows past this side, and on the south bank rises the hills, cloaked in turning leaves and higher up thick blankets of fir.
The middle part of the monastery contains the living quarters for over a thousand monks. There were many more than that prior to the Cultural Revolution. The north end of the monastery is where the bulk of the action is. There are squares of peaceful park where monks receive lessons. Golden-roofed temples sit high above, with steep hillsides rising even higher behind them. Deep, gutteral throat-singing emerges front behind closed doors and the distinctive Tibetan trumpets and alphorns call from unknown corners. Pilgrims swarm the gleaming white chortens and holy shrines.
There are places where flocks of tourists do their best to miss out on the holy atmosphere of this most beautiful of the world’s corners. But it is a large monastery, and there are many places to quietly stroll and take it all in with due reverance. You can spend hours there, admiring the murals and shrines. For those of us unable to make it to Tibet itself, Xiahe is a special treat.
Langmusi
The next stop on the Tibetan Trail is Langmusi. The small monastery town is hard to get to, even harder to get from.
The town straddles the border between Gansu and Sichuan, with the White Dragon River marking the borderline. This puts most of the town on the Sichuan side.
There are two monasteries, one on each side of the river. The Lang Mu monastery (“si”, in Chinese) is the better of the two, with a wealth of spectacular buildings running all the way up the hillside. Chanting and horns waft through the air like the ubiquitous incense. While smaller than Labrang in Xiahe, it is also much less-touristed, and thus retains a consistently rich atmosphere.
The Kerti Monastery on the other side of town seems more “under construction”. The adjacent mosque is perhaps nicer. There is a mountain steam flowing into town here and this provided me an opportunity for quiet reflection.
At night I dined at an expat joint, in great hypocrisy given my previous statements regarding my Xiahe experience. I devoured a gigantic yak burrito and hung out with members of a tour group. They were doing Beijing-Kathmandu via Lhasa, a pretty cool itinerary. They were great people and proved that individually, tour group members are not inherently bad, no matter how strongly I feel mass tourism ruins beautiful places.
I took a wander in the hills surrounding Langmusi. The hiking is relatively easy-going and there were numerous paths. I traversed a series of ridges, and came across something unique.
Two squares of tattered prayer flags, one quite large (20′ x 20′) and the other much smaller (8′ x 8′) marked the site. The corpses told the story. A couple were but skeletons, one still with baked flesh on the bones. But there was also a fresh body, chopped to pieces. This was a sky burial site.
Tibetan Buddhism was formed by mixing the traditional Buddhism that crossed the Himalayas from Nepal with the traditional Tibetan animist religion of Bon. In these remote parts of Sichuan and Gansu, sky burials are a surviving remnant of ancient tradition.
The body in Buddhism is merely a vessel, carrying the soul. The soul moves on at death, typically to rebirth. Thus, the body is a useless shell of no significance. In sky burial, the corpse is chopped to pieces high in the hills as an offering to the vultures, a last gift to the living world. The goodness of the person in life is determined by the speed of the vultures’ work. This particular old lady apparently did not meet the vultures’ favour. The site is sacred so I did not take pictures, save for a corpse-free long distance shot of the flags.
Langmusi to Songpan
The roads get much worse when you get to Sichuan. From Langmusi to Songpan is 219km. Precisely 21km of this is paved. We left at 7am and arrived at 8pm. Need I say more?
OK, I will. Because the crappy road starts at the Sichuan border, only the four km road leading from Langmusi to the main “highway” is paved. From there, things get muddy. Really muddy. I’m surprised we didn’t get stuck. The other passengers at this point were mainly monks, en route from the monastery to their homes in the various surrounding villages. The villages are very poor, and the people have to work hard to eke out a living.
The route was fairly dull but during one stretch of wide open grassland there was a spectacular scene. Hundreds of nomadic yak-herders named Goloks (a Tibetan race) had gathered to fete some luminary. They lined the highway on horseback carrying flags and throwing prayer papers to the wind (think confetti, only holy). At times I got the impression of a medieval army readying for battle. Seeing hundreds of horsemen gathered in the middle of nowhere was quite surreal.
After this plateau, which took a couple of hours to cross as we weren’t moving all that swiftly, we got stuck in the mud at a pass. Traffic had come to a halt here because of big trucks stuck in each direction. A great many vehicles crossed the pass on a high ridge to the right of the road. The beat up bus, however, wasn’t going to pull that one off. Eventually the other vehicles and ourselves became unstuck and we were able to continue to Zoige, the halfway point.
The town of Zoige didn’t look like much and so the five of us backpackers decided to attempt onward travel. After all, we couldn’t have had more than 100 km to Songpan. There were no more buses but we were able to find a driver with a minivan. Most drivers protested about the late hour, and I’m sure we paid a premium that would allow the driver to overnight in Songpan. He decided that he needed lunch before we could proceed. In a fit of stupidity, we decided to put our backpacks in the minivan before heading for lunch. When I came to my senses, I went back to hang out at the van. I had some food with me – moon cakes, peanuts, water – so I wasn’t too worried about lunch.
Sure enough, the driver returned to the van early. When I jumped in the van with him, he freaked out. Now, the guy’s English wasn’t any great shakes so communication was a little rough but he was set to go somewhere with that van and our bags. If he was honest, he wouldn’t have cared about me joining him I don’t think. Something was definitely amiss.
But with me on board, his plans were pretty much scuttled and he parked on the street out front of the bus station and sulked until the rest of my group tracked us down. In fact, he continued sulking for the duration of the trip. Poor baby. The journey was mostly potholes and switchbacks as we began our long decent from the 3500m plateau. I was in the corner of the van and got jostled quite severely, including a couple of giant bumps that sent my head smashing into the ceiling. That was splendid.
Dusk embraced us with driving rains. At a town 17 km from Songpan, the road became paved once again. We pulled into town. Forced to divert around the car-free walled town, we embarked on a search for a guesthouse. The town was alive, though, despite the pouring rain. It was Moon Festival, the reason for all those moon cakes. The streets were packed with people. The throngs, combined with the glowing lights, the beautiful traditional buildings and pouring rain created a rich atmosphere that entranced us.
I decided to stay and check out Songpan in the daylight.
Tags: China, Travel, Xiahe
Administrator