Langmusi, July 21-23

Seems I have to eat my own words... small villages with muddy roads and open sewage can indeed be charming. I can't explain what's so much nicer about Langmusi that I actually enjoy staying here - I guess to a large extend it's the people. They do get quite a few tourists here, because it's on the road from Xiahe to Songpan, two rather famous places, and they also have two monasteries and a mosque that are worth a visit. Still, people seem rather unspoiled and natural. for some reason, they marvel at digital cameras and always want to have their picture taken - I am not sure what the great appeal is of seeing yourself on the display of the camera. It's not that they want a picture with us or of us (although that happened too), most of the time they ask us to photograph them.


Langmusi sits directly at the border of two provinces, a small stream divides the village into Gansu and Sichuan side. It's surrounded by what looks like rolling hills but are actually 3,600m high mountains. We are at over 3,000m in the village itself. No altitude sickness so far although physical activity is more streneous than usual. We opted out of the suggestion of a 2-day hike to the highest mountain and did a one-day horse trek instead, which seemed the more relaxing thing to do. Well, I enjoyed it a lot, but I think B. would have preferred to walk :) His horse seemed to be a donkey in disguise, never went where it was supposed to. We had lunch at a nomad family tent,
but it wasn't quite as romantic as it sounds - they just left the food there for us and went outside, we ate together with our guide, who wasn't really so much of a guide. Because of us being foreigners, he restricted his commands to "hello!" (meaning we were going in the wrong direction) and "ok, ok!" All my attempts at engaging him in a Chinese conversation didn't make things much better, although we did understand each other fairly well.

The village is surrounded by grasslands with myriads of flowers, it's indescribably beautiful. We rode to the spring of the Tiger River, the stream that supplies Langmusi with water. And while the water is clear and fresh up at the spring and probably drinkable quality, the further down you get to the village the more garbage it contains. And scarily, people wash their clothes and food right in the center of the village where the water is the dirtiest. Some guide books actually seem to find that romantic. Any leftover food is also simply thrown in the ditch. We could witness some "green energy" use, however - solar powered water kettles :)

Right now is festival time for the Tibetan monks, so they get to go out from their monastery and sit around on the grasslands, having picnics, relaxing in tents. We walked by a Tibetan nomad couple who were just hanging out in the grass and motioned us to come over and sit with them. The woman (hung with jewelery and dressed in traditional Tibetan skirt, which is wrapped around the waist, sits very high, and is held by a huge silver-decorated belt) didn't speak any Mandarin at all, the man about as much as I :) We still figured out they wanted pictures taken, even with us, and they actually want us to send them to them, which is rather non-trivial, as they don't seem to have an address. A youth on his colorful motorbike (clearly a horse-surrogate, the men here like to drape colorful blankets over their motorbikes as if they were saddles) came by and offered his address. I can't really read his handwriting, but once back in Nanjing I'll figure out a way to mail the pictures.

The only annoying thing (apart from the power outage in our guesthouse, but at least cell phone reception was great, because I had my first phone interview for my internship here) are the Sichuan monks who are real lay-ways. They claim the path one needs to take to get to the Tiger gorge goes through their monastery, so they charge an entrance fee, even if you only want to go hiking. The gorge is gorgeous (hah!), it was a bit crowded when we went on a sunny day, maybe due to the festival. It also looks a bit like full of garbage but those are shawls, usually in white and yellow, presented as an offering to the Buddha (or tiger?) There are also huge piles of wooden spears. We were told it's because this festival commemorates the arrival of Buddhism - some monk told the fighting nomads of the grasslands to give up their weapons, so they piled them all on a mountain and burned them ("gave them back to God").

And best of all - in Langmusi there's good food, Tibetan as well as Sichuan, so we finally got some veggies, but also the Tsampa (Barley stuff) here tastes good. And there's wireless internet in two places! It's a nice place to just hang out and relax. It's a bit cold for my taste, never really above 20 degrees, I miss the desert :) As I type this I'm sitting in a little cafe run by a couple of Tibetan sisters (recognizable by their jewelery, straight noses and language, of course). One is sitting next to me and we chat a little with our limited Mandarin. She's also leaning over trying to see what I type but admits she doesn't recognize anything. Tibetan script looks kinda cool, but I can't make out a single word. That might be how she feels about English. And as you can see, our laptop attracts a lot of attention :)

Xiahe, July 18-20

The bus ride from Lanzhou was really interesting, because the first couple of hours we drove through mostly Muslim areas - I have never seen so many mosques in my life, every village seemed to have at least two. Often they are a mixture of Chinese and oriental architecture - for example a six-corner pagoda, made from wood beams with typical chinese patterns, topped by a large golden dome with the half-moon. The further south we got, the more we saw Tibetan Buddhist temples (recognizable by their prayer flags).

Xiahe, a tiny town consisting of only one muddy street inhabited by Han at the eastern end, Tibetans at the western end and Muslim Hui in the middle, is home to the Labrang monastery - one of the six major monasteries of the Yellow Hat sect (only two are outside Tibet). It was founded in 1709 and housed 4,000 monks during its prime time. During the cultural Revolution they suffered some setbacks, but were able to preserve a lot of their temples. Today, they teach Buddhist Philosophy, Medicine and other fields at six colleges. Right now they have about 1,200 monks living there. Pilgrims walk the "kora" - the pilgrim's path around the monastery - from dawn till dusk and keep turning prayer wheels. One can visit the inside, but only with a guided tour and no pictures allowed - except for the Yak butter sculpture museum -

and yes, that's just as weird as it sounds. Yak butter is also used as fuel for lamps throughout all the temples, which makes for a rather interesting smell, and as a condiment for tea, bread and pretty much anything else it seems (my theory is that it also serves as body lotion, which would explain the smell of people).

The town has a very strange vibe to it. The - without exception - crappy looking hotels are all booked out, the main street is bustling with monks in red robes and Tibetans (starring cowboy hats and large knives), a lot of them pilgrims. I don't feel any of the friendly "vibe" the Lonely Planet talks about. The men are extremely rude in staring, as far as just sitting next to me in a tea house and trying to read what I am writing on a postcard or typing on the laptop. Everyone - Han, Hui or Tibetan - is trying to rip us of, trying to sell us water for 5RMB (normal price 2RMB) or not giving me any change at the bus station in the hope I wouldn't be able to read the bus ticket (I even suspect the man in the post office!) Maybe I'm failing to grasp the Tibetan Romanticism that seems to have struck all the other western tourists here, who walk around with glowing faces and buy cheap silver jewelery. This place could be really nice, it's nestled between mountains (we're at 3,000m here) and today there is a beautiful clear sky and crisp air (quite cold after Dunhuang). But all the garbage piles on the side of the street and the fact that there is construction going on everywhere - the last two items seem to describe almost ever town in China - spoils it quite a bit. Right now the main street is torn open left and right, possibly to lay sewage pipes (the rest of the village obviously does not have a sewage system, there's only a ditch on the side of the road and everyone - man, woman, pig - just pees on the street). I can already see how this place will become another Disneyland type Eldorado in a few years. But frankly, I fail to see the charme in small towns that have never undergone any "beautification" - at least in China. I hate myself for saying that, but the average Chinese village seems to be an unattractive heap of dirt and garbage (piled on the side of the street and set on fire from time to time). Maybe I'm just conditioned to Europe's "small town romanticism" - I failed to find Newfoundland pretty just as well - but I can be charmed by small Italian or French villages that have nothing special to offer apart from a pretty setting. But China fails to charm me... I guess I'm having quite a downer after two weeks on the road. Maybe I need a break.

Special food - everything made of yak, from yak meat over yak milk and yoghurt to yak butter (which is also put in tea and tastes slightly salty). Tsampa - a porridge of roasted barley. Rice with sugar in yak milk (tastes kinda buttery). A "cake" made from yak butter and wheat flour with red beans(?), which is more like cookie dough, didn't seem baked at all. Supposedly there's momo - boiled dumplings, but what we had was rather steamed, and most certainly not fresh. The Tibetan diet seems almost veggie-free, I'm dying for somehting green and leafy. It's all very dry and starchy, mixed with milk or yoghurt (which is really good, I admit).