Days 11-12
We spent a day and a half in Tibet, where our home-stay was actually in a large lodge-like building instead of the villagers' homes. It was freezing up in the mountains at night, so they gave us layers upon layers of heavy blankets to sleep with at night, and I managed to stay warm by burrowing under them as far as I could without suffocating myself! During the day they fed us some interesting dishes, such as a hotpot full of basically just animal fat, and the village specialty - yak butter tea, which is pretty much the equivalent of drinking liquid butter. (This was right about the time when I broke out the stash of emergency poptarts).The village boys challenged our guys to a basketball match, and we cheered them on while they exerted themselves in the high altitude; we had height on our side, however, and managed to come out victorious. In the evening, we huddled around hot stoves in a beautiful upstairs room of the lodge, eating oranges and chatting. The villagers showed us some of their dances and encouraged us to grab hands and join in, and we clumsily attempted to mimic their stomping and spinning until we were all dizzy. The movement kept us warm though!
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| A mountain view |
We got up early the next morning, ready to leave, only to find that, thanks to the cold, the buses wouldn't start! Our bus drivers came up with the ingenious solution to thaw the buses by lighting fires underneath them, so we all stood by for a good half hour watching this odd bonfire perplexedly, until, miraculously, the engines started again!
We drove a short way to the foot of a mountain where we participated in an invigorating early morning hike (and by invigorating, I mean exhausting) up to the top where we visited a Tibetan monastery. The monastery was really fascinating; the Tibetans hang prayer flags, colorful cloth squares decorated with images and prayers, all along the hills in order to 'blow their prayers heavenward.' They also burn evergreen branches and incense in special stoves at the top. I watched several Tibetans make the hike all the way up to the monastery with bundles of branches on their backs for this purpose. Among the checkerboard of colorful prayer flags and with the fantastic mountains in the distance, the monastery was very beautiful.
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| Inside the temple |
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| Prayer flags |
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| Burning incense |
More bus riding brought us to a small town in the region of Shangri-la. The town we were in was basically all closed down for the New Year, and my friend and I wandered for a good hour and a half before we even found a small place where we could get food. Picture us aimlessly wandering around what seems to be an absolutely deserted town, with all the shops and stores closed up, tired, hungry, and frustratedly demanding to know, "Why are we even here?!"
That was a low point of the trip, but once we got our fried rice, we were much better. And it turned out we were in that specific town in order to visit a friend of our trip leader's who ran a Tibetan orphanage nearby. We got to spend the evening visiting and making friends with the kids there. They even performed special songs and dances for us. I played a funny game with two little girls that, from what I gathered, consisted of spinning around in a circle and yelling out names of fruits in Chinese.
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| Apple or banana? |
We headed out the next morning for our last village stay.
