Repkong

After leaving Drakar Tredzong we got on another bus to Xilang. This is about a 7 hour ride I think. We decided to skip going to Tso Ngon, or Qinghai Lake as it is known. There is an island in the center of the lake where Shabkar once stayed for many years, there are also many rare and exotic birds there, as well as masses of Chinese tourists. I figured going to Repkong would be enough for me. Aku was pleased because he didn't want to go on the boat to the island in the middle of the lake.

After staying in Xilang for one or two days we got on a bus to Labrang. This bus ride was about 9 hours long I think. On the way, I remember my first encounter with livestock blocking the road. One section of road took us about 45 minutes to pass through because we kept encountering herds of yaks, sheep, and goats.


We also passed by a large field where many tanks and other military equipment sat. There was a small complex nearby of young soldiers, maybe this was a training ground, or just a display of power, I'm not sure.


You can't really tell from the picture above, but in the distance are the tanks in the field. Some of them are covered in white cloth so that from the corner of your eye, they almost look like the tents of Tibetan nomads.

I enjoyed the drive to Labrang. When you first enter Repkong you can see displays of painting on the sides of the road. Repkong is famous for it's art. There are particular styles of Tibetan art from Repkong that have become famous throughout Tibet, China, and other parts of the world. One of these styles is the tangka paintings that are made from ut-out pieces of cloth. The colors are very bright and brilliant, and the overall effect is beautiful.

Finally we reached Labrang, one of the most famous monasteries in all of Tibet. I dont' really know too much abou the history of Labrang unfortunately. Here are some photos:

"Golden Chorten"



"Meditation Huts"

Nehkor (Pilgrimage)

After the teaching gig fell through, Aku and I went on pilgrimage to some important places in Amdo. There were many places I had read about that I wanted to see, and after going to the first one, I realized that my ambitions were pretty high and to go to all those places would be quite exhausting, though we did accomplish almost all I had set out to do.

The first stop was Drakar Tredzong (White Rock Monkey Fortress). I had read about this mountain in Shabkar's autobiography. Shabkar is a Tibetan saint from the 18th century who is famous in Tibet. His life story is almost as popular as that of Milarepa. One of the main things I remember from Shabkar's autobiography was that he was extremely compassionate and generous. There is a story that someone gave him a horse, and then he met a beggar on the road, and decided to give him his horse, without any second thought. He was also extremely realized and spent many years meditating in caves throughout Tibet, there is hardly any sacred place in Tibet that he didn't set foot on. His name "Shabkar" means "White Foot", the color white being associated with purity.

The bus trip to Drakar Tredzong wasn't so bad. It was about a 4 hour scenic drive for the first leg of the journey. Then we got to a crossroad in the middle of nowhere, the road to the right went to the town called Chabcha, and the road to the left...well I wasn't sure yet. And I wasn't expecting to get off the bus there either, but that's just what we did. Then we waited...and waited...



The road was long and straight, and we could see the cars coming from a mile a way. The cars would appear in the distance, then you could stand and watch them approach for about 5 minutes, pondering whether or not they were going to stop. We were actually waiting for a bus, but not many buses came by. Many tractors did drive by. Tractors are a common form of transportation for Tibetans. We also saw many motorcycles, driven by Tibetan men wearing their big oversized chubas, or Tibetan clothing that resembles are large thick bathrobe. Finally, after about 3 hours, a bus stopped. It was full of people, but we managed to fit inside. I should have taken a picture of this crowded little bus, full of interesting characters, but I guess you'll just have to use your imagination.

Drakar Tredzong

Finally we arrived in the town of Xinghai, which is the closest town near Drakar Tredzong. I had read good things about this town, but my first impression of it wasn't that impressive. As I stepped off the bus I was immediately greeted by a strange man wearing a long green Chinese army jacket. Not in the army, but sporting the fashion that some Tibetan men fancy, he grabbed my shirt and started tugging on it. Smiling, he revealed his brown, decaying teeth, and glossy eyes. "Muh Muh....Maaaaa....Uhhhhh" he said to me. I realized that he was either mute, dumb, retarted, or crazy...or all of the above. He tugged pretty hard on my shirt and Aku tried to pull him off of me. He was harmless, but his presence rattled my mind for a moment, as I had just stepped off the bus.

We wandered to the main street, first looking for a restaurant. Aku asked an old man where the restaurants were, and we walked to a nearby alley, Aku with his small bag, and me with my large backpack....I always feel like a target when I'm carrying my huge backpack through an unknown town. The first restaurant we stepped into didn't look that great, then Aku looked over his shoulder towards the old man who showed us where the restaurants were...the old man shook his head in dissaproval, and we moved on. Aku explained that the restaurant we stepped into was a Muslim restaurant. Tibetans and Chinese muslims often don't get along in Tibetan towns, and the disputes can often be violent. So we walked to another restaurant down the road. This restaurant had some kind of Chinese action movie playing inside, dubbed over in Amdo-Tibetan. So we decided to eat there. We both ordered Tentuk (or Tibetan Noodle Soup).

I needed to use the bathroom, the lady at the restaurant told me it was in the back. So I walked to the back and found the bathroom in a courtyard of some kind of apartment complex. I stepped inside and realized that this bathroom was the dirtiest one I had visited yet. I'll spare you the details, but lets just say on the walk back to the restaurant I wiped my feet many times on the concrete.

After eating we hired a jeep, filled with two old Tibetan men, that were both going to Drakar Tredzong as well. The journey took about an hour, and the road was bumpy and windy. But it was well worth it. Drakar Tredzong is a beautiful place.



After visiting many monasteries and temples, I was impressed by Drakar Tredzong, seeing it as a natural monastery, a natural temple, where many great beings had lived. These great beings all lived inside of the mountain itself, in it's caves, for many years. It is full of caverns, valleys, caves, hidden places, wild animals, meditators, and who knows what else.

That night we stayed in one of the worst hotels I've ever stayed at. It shouldn't really be called a hotel, more like a bunker, a concrete box. My bed was sloping to the left, so it felt like I was sleeping on the edge of a hill. It was cold, and it was dirty. The "town" at the base of Drakar Tredzong consists of a large monastery and one street with small shops and a few restaurants and "hotels". In one restaurant we went to, many young nomads smoked cigarretes and drank beer, telling stories, as their long knifes occasionaly were revealed hanging from their belts on their sides. At breakfast one morning, a man sat by the wood stove (which they burn dried yak poop in), already drunk at about 8am, talking about how he had just witnessed his brother or cousin kill a man the other day over some dispute.

We decided to circle the mountain that day and visit many of the sites on the mountain. The entire circumambulation took about 8 full hours, and at the end we were exhausted. Here are some photos from the walk:

"Mani Wall"


"Nomads in the Valley"


"Resting"

"View"

"Guru Rinpoche Cave"

Self-Arisen 'Ah' Syllable"

"Prayers"

Guinan

The next stop was Guinan, about 7 hours southwest of Xilang. This is where Aku lives. It's a small town, with one or two monasteries, populated by many nomads who live in the surrounding grasslands.


My original goal was to teach English here at a small school mostly attended by young nomad children. However, things didn't work out, and unfortunately I had to pass up teaching at the school. I did however, get to spend time with Aku and other monks of the monastery, as well as Aku's family.

"Aku's Cousin"

Aku's family are nomads. Many nomads seem to have a small house, which serves as a kind of base. Many times the elderly people in the family will stay in the home while the younger ones will venture out for days to the grasslands and tend the yaks and sheep. The countryside in Tibet is extremely beautiful. The rolling hills feel as if they are covered in a soft green carpet. Really, it is very soft ground, and the grass is very firm, you can walk around with no shoes on and your feet will never get dirty (unless you step in a pile of yak shit).

Amdo

After a brief stay in Xilang (pronounced "Zilang"), we stayed at Kumbum which is one of the most famous monasteries in Tibet. This monastery is built over the spot where Je Tsongkhapa is said to have been born. Je Tsongkhapa is the founder of the Geluk school of Tibetan Buddhism, and is widely revered throughout Tibet as a manifestation of Manjushri, who is depicted in Tibetan paintings as an orange diety wielding the sword of wisdom above his head, cutting through ignorance. It is said that one of the temples in Kumbum is built at the site of a tree that marks the spot of Tsongkhapa's birth. This tree had leaves that had naturally arisen images of Tsongkhapa's body on them, thus the name "Kumbum", which literally means "Body" (Ku), 100,000(Bum). At least, that's how I remember the story as it was told to me by my monk friend, who I will refer to as "Aku", which just means "uncle" and is how everybody refers to monks in Amdo. Unfortunately, Kumbum feels like a tourist attraction and less like a vibrant monastery. Every day you can see bus loads of Chinese tourists dressing up in Tibetan clothes and taking pictures in front of ancient stupas at the monastery. Maybe that's not a bad thing, I'm still undecided.

I was still ill at this time and unable to eat very much. 2 days went by and I had no appetite. I was taking Tibetan medicine known as "Druptop Rilkar" which seemed to be helping, it at least put a dam up to block the "southern floods". After about 2 days I started to feel better and got some color back in my face, and a little bit of an appetite. We were able to do a full "kora" or circumambulation around the monastery, which takes about 1 hour.

Xining, or Xilang in Tibetan

I arrived in Xining, which I will refer to as "Xilang" since that is the way I referred to it to my Tibetan friends during my journey. It was about 11pm. I looked outside my train window for a maroon-clad monk, my friend's brother, who was supposed to be waiting for me there. I saw him standing next to the station building. I got off the train with my large backpack strapped to my back and walked towards him. He gave me a katag (white scarve that Tibetans greet eachother with), and we exchanged greetings. I asked him "Khyo manga ab-guk?" (Did you wait long?), and he said no that he just arrived.

Then we walked to our hotel just up the street and settled in, took a shower, and tried to talk to eachother. I quickly realized that some of the phrases I had practiced earlier were going to have to be modified slightly, and adapt to real life situations.

The next day, we moved from our fairly nice hotel to a hotel around the corner that was a little cheaper. This was in the Tibetan section of town, I guess you could call it "Tibet Alley", it is a loud alley full of little shops, pool tables, Chinese shoe-shiners, monks, fake-monks begging for money, theives, prostitutes, travelers, and traders. It's a nice place to stay.

"Tibetan Alley"

Leaving Chengdu

The next leg of my journey would take me from Chengdu to Xining, about a 25 hour train ride, quite a distance. My train was a night train, scheduled to leave the North Chengdu Train Station at around 10pm. I was feeling really tired that night, a strange kind of tired, not your normal tiredness. I had an eerie feeling that the big Sichuan hot pot I had shared earlier that day with some fellow travelers from the hostel might have something to do with it.

Hot Pot
Hot Pot is a Sichuanese specialty that kind be found nearly on every street in Chengdu. You sit down at a table that has a hole in the middle of the table where a large metal bowl is placed. A flame is lit underneath the bowl and when the broth starts boiling you start adding ingredients that you selected from the menu.

It's an adventure to eat Hot Pot when your Chinese is bad or non-existent like mine. You end up with all kinds of strange ingredients sitting on your table, and as you stare at them, they almost seem to stare back at you. My favorite ingredient is the pigs brain, nice and raw with the texture of undercooked scrambled eggs.

The previous day I actually enjoyed the hot pot. The color of the broth was brown and it was full of spices, particularly the mouth-numbing one that I love so much. I shared that hot pot with a group of friends from the hostel with a bottle of the watery Chinese beer called "Snow".

The hot pot the next day was a different story, and it is this hot pot that I think made me sick. Even if it wasn't the actual cause of my demise, it still made me sick, just thinking about it. Let me describe it briefly: The broth was clear, and reminded me of dish-water from the sink in the kitchen of the restaurant. The broth, while it was just water, wasn't clear, but looked as if it had soap in it, kind of a creamy white color. There were no spices in the hot pot, just water, and the ingredients we were to add. One of the ingredients was a popular meat in China, which looks like spam, and makes me SICK! It's pink and fake and I hate it. There was also pigs brain and the other strange ingredient that I still haven't identified, though I think it might be pigs ear. It's tough like leather and is almost furry feeling, but it's not hair.

I believe that is what made me sick on my 27 hour train ride from Chengdu to Xining.

The Train Ride

My seat was in the middle bunk of the compartment, with one bed above me and one bed below me. It was hot. And I was starting to realize that something was brewing inside of me, a storm. I could hear distant thunder bellowing inside my stomach, coming closer with each gurgle. I could feel the moisture seeping out from the pores on my forehead, and temples. I could tell that I wasn't hungry, and that I wouldn't be hungry for a while. The workers inside my body that are usually steadfast and hardworking received a notice that it was time to go home and lock their doors, and to return to work in a few days. There was a curfew in my body until the flood had died down, everyone was advised to let the flood run its course and to return back to normal afterwards.

I woke up feeling hot, partly because I was sick, and partly because the train was hot with no air-conditioning. I decided to make a trip to the bathroom while the train had stopped and realized that in China you aren't allowed to use the bathroom when the train stops in a town, only while it is moving. So I waited for the train to move again and went to the bathroom. That is when the first wave hit me. The flood had been gaining momentum and was ready to make it's first exit. One section of the flood was making it's way up Main Street headed north, and the other part of the flood forked in downtown and made it's way down Main Street headed south. The flood headed south exited the city first, and with great rapidity and no resistance, as the workers had made sure to leave the city streets open and unblocked. The second flood movement exited from the north side of town, with a little more resistance. The north side of mainstreet runs uphill, and this made the flood a little slower in it's exit.

I returned to the bathroom many times that day and night, reenacting the same story every time. I told the people near me on the train that I was sick, pointing to my little Chinese-English dictionary to the words "sick", "vomit", and "diahrea", then pointing to myself and nodding my head. One man gave me some herbal tea which felt good, and a little boy tried to be my friend and get me food. I told him all I could eat was bread, and he nodded his head in assurance, and walked to another car on the train to get me some bread. He returned ten minutes later, not with bread, but with something very similar...greasy fried chicken's feet. Well, maybe not that similar to bread. I told him "Thank you very much, but..." and I shook my head and pointed to my stomach.

The scenery outside wasn't very interesting. And the train seemed to move slow, making many stops. I was counting the hours until the ride was over. It lasted 27 hours. I have a recommendation for you: If you are ever thinking about going to Xining...take a plane.

Leshan

Leshan is where the worlds largest Buddha statue is located. It's about a 2 hour drive from Chengdu. It was a popular place for Chinese tourists and pilgrims to flock to. The Buddha statue is impressive and is carved into a mountainside. I would probably say that I was about the size of one of it's fingernails.

Chengdu - Lots of Bicycles and Guys With No Shirts

The first thing I noticed as I entered Chengdu at night on the airport shuttle was that lots of guys were riding their bikes around at midnight, wearing no shirt or with their shirt hiked up half way because of the heat.

I arrived at my hostel, called the Mix Hostel, located at Xing Hui Xi Liu road. My room was simple and agreeable. And I went to bed.

The next day I woke up and went for a little walk, finding a nearby tiny restaurant that served steamed dumplings with rice porridge for breakfast. It was a tasty breakfast and I returned their a few more times during my stay in Chengdu.

Later that day I met some guy from England who was gathering a group of people to go to Leshan where the worlds largest Buddha statue is. I joined the group and started hanging out with the guy from England. We took a bus to another part of Chengdu to explore the city, then we walked back from their to our hostel. I didn't see anything particularly interesting in Chengdu during my walk, though on my return to Chengdu at the end of my trip I did find some more interesting things.

To Chengdu

When my flight left from SFO I had that strange feeling of entering into the unknown. "Am I really on an airplane right now flying over the Pacific Ocean on my way to a country I've never been to before?" I thought to myself. Yes, it was true...and there was no turning back.

Arriving in Beijing, I had almost no time to meet my connecting flight to Chengdu. To make matters worse my luggage took forever to show up at baggage claim. Unfortunately your baggage cannot be checked all the way to Chengdu, you have to pick it up at the port of entry into China and go through the process again. So I waited as the conveyer belt went round and round, finally getting my large backpack and heading out to navigate through the airport and check in for my Chengdu flight. I found the airport in Beijing to be very un-"user friendly". It felt like I was in a large supermarket trying to find the peanut butter. After asking around I finally found the domestic departures area, with about 10 mintues before my flight left.

As I flew over mainland China at sunset, I looked out of my small oval window to the land below. I could see mountains, and puddles of lights collected in small valleys below. As the mountains grew dark, the lights got fewer and fewer, as we were probably flying over sparsely populated areas. Occasionally I would see a single light, shining in the middle of nowhere, and I would wonder who or what that light belonged to.

Finally, we landed in Chengdu. As I headed out of the airplane and got my first whiff of Chengdu Air, I had that familiar feeling of realizing that I was extremeley overdressed, and that soon I would have to shed my leather hiking boots, and warm jacket for something more appropriate to the hot humid weather there.

I also had the great fortune of waiting at baggage claim for a long time waiting for my backpack to emerge and plop down on the conveyer belt like candy from a vending machine...but it never did. My luggage was left in Beijing because I checked in too late for my connecting flight. I had to wait at the Chengdu airport for a couple of hours for the next flight to bring my luggage from Beijing...ah yes, let the travel experiences begin.

My First Post - The Trip is Over

Most people start writing journal entries at the beginning of their travels. Oh well, guess I'm a little late on that one. I think the main reason I didn't make any journal entries during my trip was due to the atmosphere of the internet bars in China and Tibet. Usually they were dark and smoky. And in Tibet I always had some kids or teenagers staring at my computer screen as I typed. So it was a little distracting.

I have decided to write up a summary of my travels in Tibet, which lasted 3 months, as a way to tell my friends and anyone else interested about my travels there.

So lets begin....