My Little Tibet

A few things I forgot to mention in the last entry:

• The trip to Chengdu was the first trip that allowed me to see China through the window - before it wasn't that possible because I took several night trains.  Chengdu is in the province of Sichuan and the countryside is beautiful, with fields and mountains but every now and then the beauty is ruined by numerous factories that breathe out smoke and with the dwellings of the factory workers and the occasional farm with geese running freely.  All this added to an omnipresent fog gave everything a slightly depressing grey tone.  This fog seems to be all over China and I don't know if it's smog, dust, mist or a mixture of all of them, but it's rare to see the sun without this invisiple cover which hides its power.

 

• As soon as I got to my hostel in Chengdu, a girl said to me, hey, I recognise you, we saw each other in Mongolia!!!  I was astonished because I didn't remember her.  Then she gave me more clues and I remembered who she was.  I think we spoke for 5 minutes while we tried to look for a tour through the Gobi.  Strangely she said to me that she remembered me because I was South American.  This made me think a bit and it's true.  Apart from 2 Peruvian girls that I met in Russia and 3 Argentinians in Beijing I haven't met any other Latin American.  But they do leave their mark, particularly in hostels where you can do graffiti on the walls.

 

• When I came back from seeing the giant Buddha, I took a bus that left me God knows where in Chengdu.  From there I took another bus that I thought would take me to the centre.  There was no sign in English to tell me the direction of the bus.  Suddenly I heard the following: 'ladies and gentlemen, please do not take explosives onto the bus, thank you'.  The first time this was funny but then it became annoying because the message was repeated at each bus stop.  

 

• A couple of entries ago I said that my grandmother had to be begged to be taken to the park.  I thought about this a bit and should correct it; on the contrary, she is the one who is most enthusiastic and the first one to get ready.  Other members of the family, however, need to be dragged from the house, but my grandmother is the one who beats everyone when it comes to having energy.  

One of the objectives of this trip around the world was to see Tibet and Everest base camp, but as the Chinese specialise in ruining things and Tibet is no exception, I started to think about whether to go or not.  Travelling there is very restricted now.  You need to go there as part of a tour and the tours are very expensive.  In addition, you can't just wander around freely (as you could do a couple of years ago).  The solution is to find a group of backpackers who want to do the same tour as you and for the same amount of time and agree on the price and paperwork.  I saw so many people running around like crazy, waiting for an email, trying to get a group and getting stressed more and more each time, and I was put of the idea of going through the same process.  Even more, the Chinese constructed a railway that goes across the Tibetan plain until Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, with the aim of promoting the migration of Han Chinese (the biggest ethnic group in China) and thereby crushing the Tibetan culture.  They have employed this tactic in different parts that they have reconquered and it has worked well for them.  This means that Tibet has already lost much of its authenticity.  The last thing that motivated me not to go to Tibet was when, speaking to a traveller (who strangely had a tattoo of the Colombian flag on his backside; just to be clear, I didn't see it), he told me that you can see 'sky burials', something that's very difficult to see in Tibet and it's something that has interested me for several years.  At the end I decided to go to the region near the Tibetan border in the province of Sichuan (which apparently is more Tibetan than Tibet).

The place I chose to start my exploration of the mini Tibet was a city called Litang.  To get there you have to go through another city called Kanding where I spent a night.  There I got to know Adam, a Chinese guy I had a few beers with.  At one moment Adam started singing because a romantic Chinese song was inspired by a mountain in Kanding, although I think that his voice was not the most romantic.  The following day I took a bus that took me to Litang on a journey that started at 5am and that was full of bumps from the bad road.  When I arrived in Litang I met up with the same English guy who spoke to me about the sky burial (yes, the one with the tattoo on his arse).  He told me that he still hadn't seen a funeral because the regional lama was sick and the bodies hadn't been blessed.

A sky burial is a religious ceremony that was created because the ground in the Tibetan region is very hard and difficult to dig, so it's to give the dead eternal rest.  The Tibetan lamas bless the body and designate a cutter whose job it is to cut up the body so that the vultures eat it.  The whole body has to be devoured by the birds, a process that becomes more complicated when the animals tear up the body and leave just the skeleton.  Then the cutter patiently takes each bone individually and hits it with an axe until they become a mixture that the vultures swallow up easily.  Only at that point is the funeral considered sacred and complete.  This process can last several hours.  The longest part is the bone preparation.  The funeral that I was able to witness took almost 4 hours due to the size of the dead body.  At the beginning the Tibetans seemed a bit reluctant at our presence but then they relaxed and became very friendly, trying to tell us stories in Tibetan and playing with our cameras.  I ended up helping to scare vultures as they became very impatient when the mortar of bones was almost ready and they had to be kept away from the reach of the cutter.  After this they offered us some tea that tasted really strange and a type of salty pastry cooked on the ashes.  I took a lot of photos and videos, but to avoid repulsion and out of respect for the deceased I am not putting them on this blog.

Something that made me feel a bit disappointed was seeing how this religious ritual is turning into a tourist attraction.  It's more about going to the place, taking photos, buying the tshirt and moving onto the next destination.  It bothers me a bit maybe because for me it has been something fascinating, something that has interested me for some time and not something else to add to a list of things I've seen on my trip.  I suppose that each one sees whatever he wants with whatever binoculars he wants.  Litang is at 4014 metres so the nights were quite cold and it was very easy to burn.  The air was also very thin and it made it difficult to walk.

The afternoon after the funeral, I started having altitude sickness: headache, generally feeling unwell, and then it turned into what felt like a type of cold.  Altitude sickness is something that can happen to anyone no matter how healthy or how many mountains you have scaled, and the fact that I grew up at 2600 does not count either.  There are people who scale 5000 metre mountains and then get altitude sickness at 3000.  It's a really horrible feeling and you can bleed internally if you don't get it treated appropriately.  I did what I could to avoid it and became enthusiastic about walking through Litang, where people were much nicer than in China proper, unfortunately you see a lot more poverty and beggars though.

I spent another day with these symptoms and on the third day I decided to go to a lower altitude.  That night I met Julien and Claire, French, who live on the island Reunion, and I also met the Min family from Korea - a father and son that were very nice.  On the next day I took the first mini van to a town called Daocheng that is at 3650 metres.

There in Daocheng I felt better, with even fewer travellers and the place seemed more remote.  There were several mountains I walked across on the two adys that I was there but I still felt weak because of the altitude and I decided to listen to my body and took another bus (a painful and uncomfortable journey of 11 hours) that took me to a city called Shangri-la.  On the bus I met the French couple and other travellers and we ended up on the same hostel.  I was a bit sad to leave Daocheng.  It had a special charm and that was that there was nothing special there.  There were no tourists and no important attraction, only Tibetans living their everyday lives.  Something I noticed there and in the whole TIbetan zone was that Tibetans are more focused on maintaining their identities, their customs and religion, whereas the Han Chinese  with their good business aptitudes are those that have the restaurants, shops and the rest.  Maybe that's why you see more beggars in this area. 

In Shangri-la which is situated at 3000m above sea level, I felt a bit better, but still with a type of flu, I decided to hire a bike and explore the area.  I particularly wanted to go to a temple called Sumtselling Gumpa which is the most important temple in Southeast china and as a rule in China you have to pay an exaggerated amount to enter.  Two years ago the entry fee was 10 yuean, last year it was 55 and this year it's 85!!!  It's not fair at all.  I decided to leave the monastery for later and started to go around the mountain that was in front of the monastery.  After a bit more than an hour of walking I arrived at a village where the monastery was.  Two smiley Tibetan villagers showed me the way.  That's how I saved myself from paying the entry and that made me enjoy the place more.  But what I didn't pay in the ticket price I certainly paid in memories.  I loved the place, with monks everywhere, walking around, welcoming, without pretensions, with the freedom of walking erratically along the lanes of the monastery and at times even getting involved in the life of the monks themselves.  This was the Tibet that I had imagined in my mind and I was not disappointed with my choice.  The Buddhist temples are full of colours and life, with murals where red, yellow, blue and gold were abundant - very different from the sombre Catholic churches.

The sunset in the monastery at Shangri-la is phenomenol.  The wind makes the bells that adorn the roofs of the temple ring, the constant sound of the wind with very low tones and the unison voice of the monks that repeat prayers.  Suddenly you see a monk that hurries to the temple as he is late to the celebration.  What a wonderful place.  The city of Shangri-la was really beautitul, with its stones streets and a type of square where at night you they did typical dances and all are invited to participate.  The following day my flu got worse and I spent it in a bookshop of a Tibetan cooperative (where I also bought my souvenirs).

On my last day at Shangri-la I went to the post office to send a packet to my sisters.  As in Colombia the postal service is almost inexistent, every time I sent post I feel that it's something special.  I feel a bit worried that it's going to get lost in the post.  But I also imagine the route it might take, how many hands it might pass through... I can visualise the postman with his uniform walking down the streets where my family leaves, leaving the packet at the front door.  I feel the emotion, the joy, my sisters' beating hearts at the seemingly inexorable moment of opening the packet to discover its contents.  

From there I left for the "tiger leaping gorge" which is a 2-day walk.  When I got to the entrance I bumped into Julien and Clare who were going to stay in Jane's Guesthouse.  Jane is a really special person.  Some guidebooks describe her as her but actually it's him.  For some reason I insisted on the French couple having a private room, leaving me in my private room :S  The walk is not difficult, nor is it particularly spectacular, but it's still worth it and has plenty of places to eat and sleep and is not a particular challenge.  Well, there is some challenge and that's when you want to go to the riverside.  A large number of families have discovered that it's good business to rip off tourists by claiming that they had built individual parts of the journey and therefore you have to give them money and of course the ticket that you have bought at the entrance is not valid.  When Den Xiaoping told the Chinese that it was time to get rich, they took him very seriously.  In spite of these disappointments and irritations, this was a very beautiful part of the trip, seeing the rapids, the forceo f the water and the eternal noise it makes while it follows its bed.  The legend says that a tiger jumped from one side to another side of the river where it is very narrow but we didn't see the stone because another family 'constructed' a bridge of 1m width and you had to give an obligatory 'contribution'.  Along the way we bumped into the Min family, with whom we ended up going to Lijiang, another small city in Disneyland style, full of souvenir shops, places to sleep and eat and many tourist traps.

 

In Lijang I met up with the Min family who were really funny and full of energy, although a bit enigmatic.  Another positive point of going around with the Min family is that their son, Stefano (his name in English that he doesn't like) spoke Chinese, which meant that we tried more varied food and with more taste than what we had been eating.  We ate quite good dishes of fish, pork, shrimps, vegetables, soups, intestines, tofu etc, and I can confirm that Chinese food doesn't make my taste buds jump out of my mouth. Alll these dishes were eaten in different meals, lunches, dinners, brunches, that I shared with the Min and ocassionally Julien and Claire.

 

Two of my nights in Lijiang I spent in some discomfort because of a cockerel that had the habit of crowing incessantly between 2 and 7am.  I was the only one who heard it.  What happened to those times where I could sleep through a party?  Lijiang is in the province of Yunnan, famous for being a province with great ethnic variety.  You can appreciate this clearly.  Every city seems to have a distinct group with different clothing.  In Lijiang for example there are many Naxi who are a matriarcal society and have a language of hieroglyphics which is still used today.  One afternoon I went by bike to a Naxi village called Baisha.  There I saw some beautiful art of creating paintings with threads.  Very impressive - many of them looked like paintings, with different levels and colour tones, but when you get closer you can see that they are made completely out of thread.  Some of them took several years to be finished.

There's a city in the south of Lijiang called Dali.  I didn't think of going there but was thinking of going directly from Lijiang to Kunming, but I ended up with the Min family after another delicious lunch, on a train to Dali.  The train had a delay of several hours so I finished Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky.  I think that my punishment was having to share the carriage with a child that was really noisy, a phenomenon that is easy to predict in China with the 1 child policy: 2 parents + 4 grandparents = 1 chinese brat

In Dali we met up again with Julien and Claire and an Israeli couple we'd met in Shangri-la as well as Daniel, another French guy.  Now I'm in Dali where I've had some great times playing amnesia, chess and just having a laugh.  One day we tried to go to a mountain from where in theory there's a good view but it was closed because it was very windy and the funicular wasn't working and no, you couldn't walk up.

On another day I decided to cycle to a village and from there take a boat back across a lak that was opposite Dali.  To my great surprise and sadness, the language barrier and bad information made me spend a long time on the bike along paths that were under construction, full of rocks.  I arrived at several vilalges but couldn't find the boat that would take me to the other side of the lake.  It was getting dark and the worry and tiredness were starting to play with my mind. Suddenly I saw a bus that took me to the new Dali that was 14km from where I was staying.  I finished the day with 11 hours of cycling, pain in many parts of my body but only a pathetic 90km covered.  I think that if the path had been better I would have managed to take the ferry and wouldn't have spent so long getting back.  Fortunately on my return Julien waited for me with a really cold beer.

Today the Min family left for the south, but before that they invited me to a that they had been invited to wedding (the advantage of speaking the language) and I was glad to accept and there we ate, laughed and waited to see the couple that went through many local customs before committing to each other.  This was a marriage from the Bai ethnic group, which I don't know much about :S

Tomorrow I'm going to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan and from there I plan to go to Guilin, another really touristy place that has the famous Chinese mountains.  Till next time.