Sichuan Trip Photos

Finally some photos from the Sichuan trip, enjoy! Jen is also now a blogger, become her follower at www.jennalaurenslater.blogspot.com!

Middle of Nowhere Qinghai province
Earthquake shelters - Yushu

Serxu Monastery town

Prayer flag pyramid




Wild horses

Tibetan Yak
Hitching with Bo and Marti
Printing Lamasery in Dege

Tro La Pass on the way to Dege
Smiley Tibetan Chap

Gompa in Ganzi
Popeye
Prayer Wheels

Hey All,

This is the description of my Sichuan adventure. I wanted to travel to Sichuan as it used to be part of greater Tibet and was supposed to still be a great place to meet Tibetan people and experience their culture (That and I had to rule out a trip to Tibet because of the expense...).

I left 'Sims' early and shared a taxi with a guy named Bo from Denmark to the bus station and an older Korean tourist. It turned out that Bo and I both intended to do the same route through Western Sichuan to Yushu and then finally to Xining. I managed to loose Bo at the bus station as he had already got his ticket to Kangding and I had yet to purchase mine. The bus journey was relatively comfortable and the Jackie Chan DVDs made it pass quickly. Once in Kangding I checked into a hostel and went for a walk around, I enjoyed some Baozi's (Steamed dumplings stuffed with pork). I managed to run into Bo in a cafe and he was with a Swiss guy named Marti, they were planning their trip through Sichuan and invited me to tag along. Marti had been in Kangding for 3 days and mentioned that there was very little to see and the guide book indicated that it was more a useful transport hub from where to start.

That evening we ate at a bbq restaurant and managed to drink a lot of beers. Marti is just finishing up a finance PHd and Bo was a Mathematician, we had some very loud arguments about probability theory and the misuse of statistics. Bo on one side and Marti on the other. I sat on the fence trying to understand both sides, but ultimately ended more confused than when the conversation had started. We went to bed quite late. I was woken early by a guy in my dorm leaving at 5 and I got up at 8. We had agreed to head to Tagong the night before but there was no sign of Bo and Marti. I wasted the morning eating and seeing what little there was to see in Kangding. When it turned 1.00 I started to worry that I had missed the others and they had headed off without me. I was just about to leave when Bo surfaced from his room, they had both slept in. We took a share minibus to Tagong. Tagong was a nice Tibetan town with lots of Tibetans and a couple of Chinese touches. We walked around the Gompa (Buddhist Temple) and met some of the locals; all of which were very nice. Bo and Marti appeared to me to be professional photographers with their seriously expensive cameras and multiple lenses. Some of their photos were truly amazing. In fact Bo has created a travel inspiration website (Over the last 15 years he's cumulatively spent 7 years travelling.) www.globespots.com. I really recommend that you check it out, either for inspiration on where to go or just for the pictures alone!

There were about 10 other tourists in Tagong due to it's close proximity to Chengdu, we met a seriously strange English guy who spoke so slowly that I had time to go have a piss and return in time to realise the story hadn't progressed in my absence. We enjoyed a nice dinner of yak and tomato stew and then went to a Tibetan Art Cafe that was hosting a party for the Israeli new year. There was a distinct lack of any Israeli's but we met some interesting people. The couple who were actually temporarily running the Tibetan Cafe had actually been travelling continuously for 6 years!

We left the next day for Ganzi (Elev 3394m) and endured a 9 hour minibus ride on a terribly bumpy road. During the journey we passed some beautiful Tibetan villages and even the odd nomadic tribe herding huge numbers of Yaks. Marti had developed a serious penchant for the street BBQ and once in Ganzi we ate and had lots of beers in the street. It was a great place to people watch and many of the locals would great us with the Tibetan "Tashi-Deli" meaning 'good luck'. Some came and sat down with us and even though we couldn't really communicate we mentioned places and they got the idea of where we were going.

The following day we got up and walked around Ganzi, the town was split into two; the modern Chinese buildings ubiquitous to all of China and the Tibetan Old town clustered around the old Gompa. The new part of the town really wasn't anything to write home about, but the old town was fascinating but the Gompa deserted. A new bigger Gompa had been constructed just outside the town, affording some lovely views of the surrounding mountains. On arrival there was a cluster of monks all watching a video on a mobile phone. This irony would become even more apparent the more we traveled in Sichuan. In the presence of Marti and Bo I was influenced to try and take more interesting photos and I think some of mine came out pretty cool. Later that evening whilst enjoying the delights of more BBQ a monk came up to us and tried to sell us some hashish; the contrariety was not lost on us! The following day we got a bus to Dege and passed through a town called Manigango on the way. We intended to return in a couple of days to Manigango but it looked like the Tibetan wild west, with dogs and yaks wondering around and no sign of any Chinese influence. We continued to Dege and went through the amazing Tro La Pass, this was cause for speculation as the Chinese sign stated that it was 5050m, but Bo's GPS (Used to locate places exactly on google maps for his website) begged to differ suggesting the elevation - triangulated with 5 satellites - was closer to 4800m. Either way the scenery was spectacular. We spent the night in Dege and much to Marti's disappointment failed to find a BBQ. We ate at a restaurant where they give you a huge bowl of heated stock and you add your own ingredients. They then made up a bowl of raw chopped garlic, chilli, oyster sauce, salt and oil. You kind of cooked the ingredients in the stock and then dip them into your marinade and eat. We also ate some of this bread that was made very similar to pastry, rolled out onto some oil, folded and rerolled and then fried. It was very nice. There were loads of pool tables around Dege and nearly all of them occupied by monks. The monks weren't keen to be photographed doing something un-monklike...

The next day we wanted to see Dege's main attraction the largest Tibetan printing lamasery in China. It was a large Gompa which the faithful circulate in a clockwise direction chanting prayers and spinning prayer wheels as they go. Inside the lamasery there where people young and old using tablets, paint and rollers to produce the Tibetan scriptures. Some people worked crazy fast whilst some of the older guys were very sedate. I will upload a video to Youtube that can be found (here) once I am in a place that has the program to work around the Chinese governments dislike for youtube.

We set off early getting a bus to Manigango (3800m) where we would deposit our bags and head to Yihun Lhatso (Yihun Lake). The minibuses that serve as transport in these out of the way places were being quite unreasonable on what they expected for the 13 kms to the lake, so we decided to walk with the pretense of flagging down any Dege bound traffic for a lift. This happened exactly to plan and a huge lorry picked us up and the two drivers seemed really chuffed to have us on board.As we drove towards the lake, we could see tens of vultures swirling around overhead. Bo had been in Litang a few weeks before and had witnessed a Tibetan sky burial. This consists of someone cutting the person up into manageable chunks for the vultures to eat and then grinding the remaining bones with barley flour and baking it to make a bread which is also then fed to the vultures - Nice.The lake itself was simply stunning; turquoise green glacial melt water, with huge boulders littered around with Tibetan carvings and a huge moutain/glacial backdrop. I tried to go for a swim but it was positively freezing. Marti set up his tripod and was taking the same photo 5 times with different types of exposure to fiddle with on his computer later. We walked around the lake to the glacial side (Topless of course - suns out guns out...I got burnt) there was a herd of wild horses just chilling out near the lake, they let me get quite close before bolting - a wonderful sight. We paid for a lift on the back of some Tibetans motorcycles back to the town. Our lack of Chinese and the Tibetans lack of ability to read Chinese characters contributed to us ordering fried, chillied cow stomach and a nice pork dish. The stomach was OK - but it had an acidic pang to it, as can only be expected from a sack that used to contain bile.

Lonely planet got us into a spot of bother the next day. The book says that there are two places commonly known as Serxu: Serxu Xian and Serxu Dzong. So we paid for a minibus to take us to Serxu Dzong (Housing one of the biggest monasteries in China). The minibus stopped in Serxu Xian and we tried to argue that we wanted to go the monastery town. A stalemate was reached as we couldn't communicate with the driver, even though he read the Mandarin characters for 'take us to the monastery' and chuckled and shook his head. A crowd gathered and after a while a English speaker was located. The English speaker was a Tibetan born Italian (Probably the only Tibetan I didn't like.). It turns out that the town was known both as Serxu Xian and Serxu Dzong seems to be the region. The two towns were 30km apart and we argued that because we had shown the driver the address he should take us there for the agreed price. The Tibetan-Italian was trying to give me some shit about being English I can afford to pay, we had just paid 70 pounds for the 130km journey between 3 of us and we refused to pay any more. Eventually we bartered a deal where we paid 50yuan (about 5.50) for the extra 30km. When we arrived the locals referred to what we thought was Serxu Dzong as another name, but then got excited about Serxu Dzong. Either way we never quite worked out what the monastery towns real name was...We'll just refer to it as Serxu Dzong for the rest of this...Incidentally the scenery between Manigango and Serxu was spectacular, we passed through a pass supposed to be 4800m but again Bo's GPS disagreed but only by about 100m this time. There was a huge Tibetan pentagon of flags (Best way to describe it.) and whilst we'd seen a lot of these on the way round, the weather was so good and their were tens of monks throwing Tibetan prayers around that it was a spectacular stop. We also passed the Dzogchen Gompa home of the Dzogchen school of Buddhism, the most popular form of Tibetan Buddhism in the west. The Gompa was at the foot of a gorgeous glacial valley, the gold shimmered in the sun and we got some great photos. There were hundreds of small nomadic villages along the route and thousands of Yaks, many of which darted in front of the minibus on the way for no apparent reason...

Serxu Dzong (4200m) was an awesome Tibetan town, the monastery was huge and built on a hill surrounded by smaller white mud houses. The restaurants served a combination of Sichuanese food and traditional Tibetan fare. We met a Dutch guy who had been there for two weeks just chilling out and he showed us some nice places to eat and explained why there were hundreds of tents everywhere. There was to be a prayer festival starting on the Friday and in the last two weeks the monastery had been completely repainted and hundreds of these tents put up. The population of monks was 1500 that lived in the monastery but during the prayer festival this was expected to increase to 6000. The Dutch guy definitely enjoyed our company after not seeing anyone for weeks and we had a nice meal and some beers. He also explained that the monasteries in China are heavily subsidised by the government which would explain why in places of apparent poverty the monks seemed so well off: motor bikes, video phones, laptops, money to burn in restaurants...On our way home there seemed to be a hundred stray dogs that were either barking at us or fighting each other, but the clear night sky was immense. As there was near to no light pollution we saw shooting stars and the milky way looked as if was on top of us. I had never seen the sky look so bright at night. The next day we went round the town and monastery speaking to the monks and just generally absorbing the chilled out atmosphere. Again we observed an un-monklike action; three young monks were painting the roof of one of the houses and found it funny to drop a large rock onto a sleeping dog below. The dog flipped out and didn't know what was going on...

We were due to catch a bus to earthquake ravaged Yushu at 3. Whilst waiting two guys in a old stud mobile VW pulled up and asked if we wanted a lift in return for a small amount of cashish. We agreed but this meant pretty much sitting on each others laps as the bags had to go on the back seats and hundreds of small polyester blankets were rammed into the boot. The guys were very nice offering us drinks, cigarettes and stopping every time there was a nice view to let us out to photograph the scenery and them and their car. We got out of them that they were from Shanghai, we didnt work out why they were in Sichuan with hundreds of crappy polyester blankets...Either way when we reached Yushu they were very helpful and we tried to buy onward bus tickets to Xining but the sleeper was full that evening. So we found a hotel, went round the destroyed town. Hundreds of blue aid tents had been erected and used as makeshift shops the people really seemed to be getting on with things. We ate a dinner of roast duck and beer and again stumbled into bed pretty late, the shop owner seemed pretty impressed by all the beer we had drunk. We got up at 6.30 to try and get a ticket for the first bus to Xining, unfortunately all the tickets that day were booked. We had to cram into a shared minivan (14 people and 10 seats). The 14 hour, 874km journey across the grass planes of Qinghai was exhausting, Bo likened the scenery to the northern part of the Gobi. We passed two tiny towns on the way and we felt very sorry for all that lived there. I got the feeling that if the Chinese wanted to irrigate this land and use it for farm land they would be more than capable...We got into Xining and had our first hot shower in 7 days was amazing!!! I have a 24 hr train journey in hard seat to Beijing tomz that I am not looking forward to... But it was cheap. Will arrive on the 19th and will be ready for Jens arrival on the 21st!! My friend has uploaded some shots to this flickr account http://www.flickr.com/photos/54104333@N05/, I will be adding some more when I get the opportunity. I will soon upload photos from the Sichuan trip tonight, the photos below are the promised ones from Laos

Love to All

Chinese Side of Borer



Lao Lao Whisky

The one on the right got handsy, the chief is in the middle
A giant

Boys on a time out, the huge bongs are used to smoke cigarettes and opium
Th Feast accompanied with some Laos Laos

The village
Laos Jungle

Traditional Dress

Phongsaly and the journey to Chengdu

Hey All,

I left Luang Prabang and got a very pleasant (not) 19 hour local bus to Phongsali town in Phongsali province, the northern most province of Laos. I really take other people's ability to speak english for granted; it was impossible to communicate anything with the locals. The food was interesting though. I found the 'Regional tourism office' and organised a guide for the next day to take me on a 2 day trek to stay with a tribe in the jungle. I got up at 5.30 and walked the 3km to the bus stop to get the local bus to Buen Neou where i was met by my guide. He zipped me off to his house to drop off my large bag. We set off walking through the rice paddies and into the hilly jungle. The views of the paddies where spectacular and it was seriously hot...The trek itself was not as arduous I had expected/wanted, we reached our lunchtime destination at 10.30. It was a small tribe about 10km into the jungle, they had power from a generator that ran off a stream and some of the shacks even had satellite dishes. There were animals everywhere: dogs, chickens, pigs, goats, cows all living in and around the houses. We ate a lunch of sticky rice, fried eggs and sauteed bamboo prepared by the wife of the head of the village. We set off again for the tribe where we were going to spend the night. We got there at about 1.30, and it was similar to the previous tribe, if not slightly more rural and spread out. I was starting to think that this tour was not as i had anticipated...After a shower under the village tap (I shared this with two young boys who were hacking a pigs head in half and removing the edible bits.) we went and had a second lunch with the head of the village who we were staying with. he then invited us to a wedding party. The wedding party was actually all the men in the town getting shozzled for a week prior to the wedding. We went into this big hut that had a table in the middle with 6 men sitting around it and a load sitting along the wall, all looking very sorry for themselves. My guide had studied English at university but we had yet to manage to communicate more than basic questions and answers, his english really wasn't great. We were invited to join the table, where we were toasted with a shot of Laos Laos whiskey. I was not sure how things were going to proceed...About every 5 minutes someone would make another toast, everyone would touch glasses and down the shot. This went on for an hour or so, i found out the guys sitting by the wall were having a tactical 'time out' as they were too drunk. The people at the table came and went but the head of the village never moved, he got more and more vocal. Me and my guide were somehow having conversations now, the way that only two drunk foreigners can understand one another. After a couple of hours the women (who weren't participating in the festivities) brought a table and plates and plates of different and obscure food was brought to us. It was truly a feast. We resumed our previous positions and continued to get shozzled, my guide was translating for me. All the men were fascinated by my leg hair, my height (LOL) and other parts of my body...They got quite handsy to be honest and I had to be stern with one pint sized chap. Someone produced a drum and everyone was howling at the top of their voices. I was invited to sing an english song, not knowing the whole of an english song, I sang the start of an Enrique Englaisias into a westlife finished off with 'Who is Silvia?' (IC rugby song); it was terrible, but well received. I was given the drum to keep beat for a short period, but this was soon removed from me as I was incapable of keeping the correct beat (Laugh away Joe, Coggy and Toby). After some dancing and more snacks, we headed back to the chiefs for another enormous meal. The chief tierd from 3 days on the trot retired to bed. It was about 10p.m by this time and both my guide and I were drunk. We went back to the gathering but it was loosing momentum as there was very little space on the 'Time out' wall and only 3 guys at the table. We continued for another hour drinking the Laos Laos poured out of a medicine bottle (I watched it being re-filled from a petrol can...) and then went back to the chiefs and to bed. The guide woke me up at 6.00! I had a splitting headache, but he seemed bright as day. We set off at 7 and were back in Buen Neou within 3 hours. So it really wasn't two days trekking more like 1, but the experience of getting drunk with the locals was priceless. Good food and alcohol transcends all barriers!

I spent the rest of that in bed feeling sorry for myself and having to visit the toilet frequently. I got a bus to Orumsay at 7 the next morning. I spent the night in Orumsay and got a bus to Mengla in China at 8.00 the following morning. I was so shocked by the border, on the Laos side it was shanty towns and dirt roads and on the Chinese huge western style architecture. It had taken 4 hours to travel 80km on the Laos side and it took 30 minutes to do 40km on the CHina side...In Mengla i bought an onward ticket to Kunming on a sleeper bus. I spent the afternoon eating and going round the food market trying random fruits and nuts that i had never seen before. Lonely planet describes Mengla as a dust bowl, but it was anything but, infact it was nicer than the majority of British towns. The sleeper bus was awesome, I actually had a bed and got a good nights sleep!

I arrived in Kunming at 7 a.m after fannying around trying to walk to the train station (went the wrong way), I somehow got a bus there. Booked a hard seat 20hr overnight train to Chengdu. I spent the day exploring Kunming, it was a nice city. Green lake park was an excellent place to people watch. Lots of people of all ages practising Taichi. I got my train that evening to Chengdu. I had heard horror stories about the hard seat experience on Chinese trains, but it was OK. I couldnt sleep because the seat was so upright but i was able at least to dose. I managed a few hours when people got off and i could lie across the seats. Chengdu is enormous, as we approached the city i thought we must be nearly there but we continued to go through the same urban landscape for another 30 mins. I was starving at the trin station so bought some delicous stuffed dumplings for the equivalent of 30p. Rejuvinated I got a cab to "Sim's cozy hostel'. The place is phenominal, I could holiday here, it has bar, games room, dvd room, resaurant, gym, and hundreds of other touches that make it an awesome place to stay!

I don't know what i'm doing next as i want to head to north west Sichuan, but it is expected to rain alot in the coming weeks and this can cause landslides to block the roads. There is no option to fly out so if i get stuck, Jen will kill me if im not in Beijing by the 21st. What I think I will do is go halfway and then either come back a bit and get a train to Xi'an or if the weather is good continue. We shall see.

The Chinese incidentally block facebook and even this blog, the hostel I am at has a programme that routes the internet through South Korea and then sends it back encrypted so the Chinese can't block it. If the blog goes quite you now know why...Unfortunately pictures aren't uploading at the moment, so i'll try again soon and put the Laos-Chengdu photos up.

Love to All