Man Man Zou

This is our fourth and final night in Xiahe, which I raved about in my last journal post after walking around town for an hour.

Xiahe is home to Labrang Monastery, the next most important site after Lhasa, Tibet. There are so many Tibetans here. Many of them are here on pilgrimages from other villages, towns, or provinces, which explains the family that was surprised to see our foreign faces in town.

The Tibetans dress in massive warm layers, and mostly dark colors. I said before that their look reminds me a little of a cowboy, but the layers are definitely unique to them. They have regular clothing underneath, but over that, the women wear long fur-lined skirts, along with a long fur-lined jacket with sleeves that are so long they almost drag on the ground. They have a big belt to hold it all together. When it gets a little warm out, they take their jackets off their shoulders and let it hang over the belt. The men are pretty much the same, without skirts. Their clothing getup looks like it would be a pain to wear, which is why I wasn’t surprised to see a few Tibetans wearing fake North Face jackets.

We spent the first day walking around town and getting a feel for it. The monastery has a 3km pilgrim’s route around it, which consists of hundreds of prayer wheels that the pilgrims spin as they walk past. We walked the circuit alongside monks, families, pilgrims, old people hunched over their canes, etc… Near sunset, a bunch of yellow-hat monks gathered in a courtyard for a meeting, so we gawked like typical tourists would.

The next day we went for a real tour of the monastery, since that was the only way to be able to see inside the temples. Labrang monastery was pretty active when we were there, but, thanks to the brutal government, not as active as it was in the past (it went from 5000 monks down to 700 after the Cultural Revolution). Still, when we walked through the insides of the temples, there were many monks gathered together chanting in various places. The most interesting thing I saw was a large group of monks praying on the mats on the floor, and up on an altar was a very young monk looking down upon them. He was a newly reincarnated lama, in his young teens.

We hung out by the prayer wheels a lot just to watch everyone go by, spinning the wheels. My eyebrow piercing came in handy because lots of Tibetans and monks stopped to take a big look. We also had a branch of berries that a monk gave us, and we gave those out to the pilgrims walking by. That was pretty much the only way for us to make contact with them, since Xiahe and the Labrang Monastery see tourists come through everyday.

One unfortunate result of tourism in Xiahe was a ton of beggars. Annoying beggars. I suppose it sounds bad to say that, but it really was frustrating so I don’t care what it sounds like. One time we were walking down the street, and an old lady who was browsing in a little shop saw us coming and booted it outside just in time to stand in our way and beg for money. Hmm, shopping and begging… Tibetans would be minding their own business, or talking with a friend, then see us and run on over to beg for money. Some of the ladies would walk alongside me for a whole block begging. Though sometimes begging is a part of the culture, seeing how they come running to foreigners tells me that tourism is not exactly a good thing for this town.

On one of the nights in Xiahe, we talked with a local high school student, Mary, who invited us to her house the next evening. I was worried about how to pass the time with someone who just wanted us around to practice her English with (something I’m sick of and can barely put up with anymore), but when we showed up the next day, things went a lot better than I had expected. There was a big dinner waiting for us, along with a special Tibetan dessert that we got to make by ourselves. Mary wanted to show us the best Tibetan things she could think of.

The dessert is called zang ba. It’s made by first melting yak butter in hot water. Then we added sugar and barley and mixed it with our fingers until it was quite thick. It tasted really good, but since Mark secretly passed a lot of his over to my plate, I ate too much of it and I don’t think I’ll be able to eat it again for another year. We’re a team in that way though- I usually pass stuff over to him to take care of (such as meat, alcohol, etc…) and he finishes it off for me without anyone noticing.

Mary’s English was surprisingly good, and she was pretty good at keeping up the conversation. Her father teaches Chinese to the monks at the monastery. He proudly showed us a DVD of his trip to Tibet for his students’ graduation. We stayed there for two hours and left before we all ran out of things to talk about.

I’m really glad I met Mary, but it’s always a risk with the many English-practicers I meet in Asia. Sometimes I get approached by people (usually female) who just talk at me for a period of time until they run out of fancy words and pre-planned things to say. That’s definitely one of the low points of living in Asia.

We also hung out with a tour group of retired Australians. We went on the monastery tour with them and ate dinner with them that night. I forgot how much I like middle-aged Australians. They brought back good memories of my trip to Europe with my mom a few years ago, since our tour group was mostly old (but young at heart) Aussies who liked to party more than most people my age. They had a big laugh when I called one Aussie guy’s hat a cowboy hat. Apparently it is absolutely not a cowboy hat, though to me it looks just like one- what the heck is it?

On our last full day in Xiahe, we went to see the grasslands. There are several popular grasslands areas around Xiahe, so I thought I’d be cool and choose the most remote place. We found a motorcycle taxi driver to take us the 30+km to the Ganjia Grasslands. We hopped in the little trailer behind the motorcycle and I thought nothing of the trip ahead of us, except that I’d have a nice view of things in the open air… Then he turned off the main road, onto a little gravel road and I knew I was wrong. 30km, 2.5 hours, and 2500 potholes later, we finally arrived at Ganjia. I couldn’t walk or see straight when I got off the trailer, so I was stumbling around. Did I mention that during our time on the motor-taxi it was midday at 3000m elevation and there wasn’t a single cloud in the sky, and we didn’t bring any water?

I still haven’t recovered from that trip, but what I saw along the way made it worth it. There were sheepherders with their sheep so far up in the mountains that I could barely see them. And along the road sometimes we’d have to stop to wait for dozens of sheep to get out of the way. We also saw herders with their yaks, and farmers with their donkeys and cartloads of hay. And all along the way was a backdrop that looked like the surreal green hills on Windows XP desktops.