We finally departed Tibet, true to previous experience we were 3 hours late in departing. Our original flight was 1315, this was changed to 1615 and then cancelled last night. The next flight we were put on was at 1310, progress a 5-minute gain! This flight too was cancelled and we were put on a 1610 flight after two of our flights were cancelled. I am beginning to develop a healthy disrespect for internal Chinese flights. When we arrived at the airport the flight departure was showing 1610, which is what we were expecting. Shortly after a further delay was announced, the flight had been delayed until 1610 (that was not a typo!!), go figure. Anyway due to other commitments by our driver and guide we finished up spending 5 hours at the airport, it wasn’t too bad as there was plenty of time for people watching. Lunch was a bit of a disaster, it came s a package including a soft drink, coke for Lyn, Sprite for me. No Coke no Sprite! Water for both….. no water! OJ for both, no OJ! Finished up with Hot OJ…. Not good.
Yesterday was our last tour day in Tibet, which was probably good as we were both feeling the effect of altitude. In the morning we went to the Drak Yerpa monastery. The nice thing about this place was its location, about 1 hour north of the city and well into the countryside. We went through a small pass on the way there, and like all good Tibet high spots it was festooned with prayer flags.
All good monasteries are inevitability located on a hill; this one was no exception, further up the hill are a number of caves where early kings and Dalai Lama(s) would go to meditate. The longest meditation was believed to be 3 years 3 months 3 days and 3 hours! However, to get to these caves required walking a distance of 1.5 miles with a vertical component of 1650ft (500m) this walk started out at around the 15000 ft. mark. Despite having just developed a cold it wasn’t too bad but I doubt if I’d volunteer to do it again.
The Last Two Pictures are of the Caves
One disappointing thing was that all the palaces, temples and monasteries contained virtually the same items, statues (all in the same style), wooden blocks from which the scriptures are printed, butter wax candles and fistfuls of money being left as offerings, although it must be said that the most common denomination of these notes was 1/10th of a yen which translates to around 2 cents. However, it was still worth the trip to each one.
On the way back to the city we stopped off at a fairly isolated farmhouse to see how the country folk live, the answer is fairly basically except for the 32” flat screen satellite TV! Other than that they raised their own animal, grain and vegetables, not my preferred lifestyle as the nearest computer store would be over 100km away!
Pantry
Living Room
Kitchen
Eating Area in Kitchen
Stove
House
Crops Drying in Courtyard
Ceiling Decoration
In the picture above we were offered a traditional snack made from barley, butter and cheese. The three ingredients are served in the bowl and you mix them by hand! Our guide told us it was pretty strong stuff and may give us “loose movements”. He had some, we declined. He spent the afternoon looking for washrooms, we didn’t!!
After lunch we had some free time so we looked around the shops and then headed off to our favourite coffee shop.
In the afternoon we headed off to the Sera Monastery to watch the monks debating. For some reason, known only to the monks, cameras were not allowed but you could take pictures on cell phones, my camera may have accidentally self activated a few times. Although we understood not a word of what was being said, the physical actions presented plenty of entertainment!
Back at the hotel I collapsed like a sack of potatoes rice for a couple of hours, then we took a walk around the corner to one of the local restaurants that had an English sign outside. We had a good meal and our last fill of Yak.
We arrived at a rainy Chengdu around 1830 and as we got off the aircraft we experienced the good old Chines tradition of fitting 200 passengers on a bus designed for 100. Not pleasant. We arrived at our hotel about an hour later. Our plan was to lounge around for a bit then go to bed and sleep off Tibet. Because I have a hotel frequent stayer card for this chain they forced me to accept some tickets for free, alcoholic, drinks from the bar! How could I refuse? We got to the room and it was all decked out in a Panda theme.
Sorry there are no photos but I can either spend an hour sorting them out and uploading them or I can try to sleep off the cold and Tibet. You lose, temporarily.
Tomorrow we have a couple of hours on the bullet train(there wasn’t) there maybe WiFi there, then we have 3 or 4 days on the boat, again I am not sure of the WiFi situation(sometimes there is, sometimes there isn’t), so it may be a few days before I get anything posted. I can still write the blogs in Word, but I can’t embed the pictures unless I am online.