More of north India: Four day trek in the Spiti Valley

Spiti Valley –If they look like Tibetans, speak Tibetan, they aren’t necessarily Tibetans.

So we were in Manali, at the end of the tourist season, and we couldn’t find more people to share a jeep to Spiti Valley. So we took the 6am local bus and traveled for 10 hours. It was one of those buses that sometimes you see in pictures of India with people hanging from the doors and people seating on the roof… But it was rather empty and since the bus stopped at every town and village, some people even got down at the beginning of the journey. We ended taking 3 seats each and sleeping most of the drive.

Local bus

On the other side of the green mountains around Manali, we found a pretty impressive desert mountain valley right before Tibet. It had Tibetan mud houses inhabited by people who look just like Tibetans, speak a language that sound just like Tibetan, practice Tibetan Buddhism and eat momos and thukpa. But they aren’t Tibetans, they are Spitians. They are indigenous from the region, and they happen to be the guys that ended up living in the Indian side of the border (before there were any borders). The main difference from the Tibetans (at least from the Tibetans that live in China outside the Tibet(an Autonomous Region), that is, the Tibetans that we met) is that they are way more focused on agriculture than livestock and they are somewhat influenced by Indians food and clothes. We had plenty of different experiences with the Tibetan people (check all the Tibetan posts), but it’s not that we are so much into Tibetan culture, or that we are trying to stare at the Tibet from every cardinal point. We didn’t have the best of the experiences in, say, Qinghai province in China, and I even got into a quarrel with a Tibetan monk on our way back from Spiti. But these people happen to live in the highest and most beautiful mountains where the heat of the summer is converted in breeze and bright sun during the day and chilled nights. And we liked that. And I have to say that many of the Spitians made great hosts (and many speak a great English).

So let’s go back to the story, we arrived in Kaza at 3800 m above the see level. It’s a small and dusty place with ugly concrete buildings but it’s the main town and commercial center of the valley. Besides that, it’s tourist friendly and it has many guesthouses and tourist restaurants (not that this is a good thing) and even though there’s no phone signal in most of the valley, there are internet and call centers. We wanted to start a four day trek in a near village, but we were informed in a very helpful travel agency that local transportation only got there twice a week –the day after the following day. Then we went to the headquarters of ecosphere, a great initiative from three NGOs (MUSE, SSS and STAG), that promotes sustainable livelihoods and eco tourism, between other things. They are the guys that trained the people of the really tiny villages to receive foreigner tourists and provide them a “home-stay”. They also put signs explaining either about the villages, or about the solar panels they installed and even how to use a dry-ecological toilet. There we got some more information and recommendations for our trek from Komic to Dankhar going through Demul and Lhalung.

Then we sat at the only bakery. (It was of course a “German bakery”, who knows why they call the Western bakeries that way). We found ourselves surrounded by Israelis and an Iranian Jew who was angry that everyone was speaking Hebrew and he couldn’t understand. In fact, some of the Israelis were complaining –in Hebrew- that they kept finding Israelis and that it didn’t feel like traveling abroad. An Israeli couple got interested in our four day trek and wanted to join us; and two after-army Israelis (which were unlike the ones we met before in Manali –see the previous post) offered us to join them in a one day jeep excursion to the villages of Ki and Kiber the following day.

So at midday of the following day, the two friends, another Israeli couple that they met on the way and we traveled by jeep first to Kibber and on the way back to Ki.

Kiber is a very small village with around 80 houses and an old gompa (Tibetan monastery); it’s only 16 kms far from Kaza but 300 meters above it. We wandered around, saw the monastery and sat in the local restaurant/guesthouse. Ki is an even smaller village with a huge monastery. We were invited in by a very talkative and cheerful monk who explained us a little about the monastery and showed us the room where Dalai Lama once slept. He laughed all the time and from time to time he talked Gibberish-Hebrew. After the small tour and an optional donation, which he really earned, he offered us tea and tsampa (balls of roasted barley flour) and tried to learn his words of the day. He took a brochure from some NGO and asked us about the meaning of indigenous, provide, support and autonomous.

Ki Gompa

On the way back to Kaza, the four guys asked us about our four day trek and decided also to join us.

So the following day we were supposed to be us and other six people starting the trek. We ran into the first couple (from the bakery) on the (only) street and they said some lame excuse about why they’re not coming. That left us six people. The second couple came to the bus stop to say that they aren’t feeling well; the girl developed altitude sickness during the night and hardly slept. That left us four people: us, and Adam and Omer -the two post-army friends

From Komic to Dankhar

So we took the local bus around 2 pm and we arrived in our first stop, Komic (4500 m), one hour and a half later and around 800 meters higher! We were received by Kunga and his great family in their mud house and gave us a room in the upper floor with an amazing view. After seeing the stuffed tiger on the entrance of the local temple and its interior (well, not all of us, Iohi couldn’t enter because the entrance is forbidden for women – I suspect this is because the image of guy biting the ass of other guy), we went back to our home-stay. Kunga prepared Indian food: dal, vegetable curry, rice, pickles and chapattis and answer all our questions about Spitians and Spiti Valley. We learned that the workers that were building more mud houses outside were actually Nepalese immigrant workers! Who could imagine that farmers living in mud houses had workers doing their hard work! During the night Adam and Omer hardly slept and started to go one by one all the symptoms of altitude sickness. We were supposed to walk up to 200 meters higher before going down to Demul at 4300 m above the sea level, so they decided to quit and return to Kaza by jeep. That left us: the two of us trekking alone.

So after having breakfast and having Kunga’s wife put a lot of rice in our lunch box, we started to follow up a jeepable road under the bright sun of 4000+ altitude. We were alone most of the time walking up on a moon-like landscape and we only saw far away some shepherds. At that height walking with our bags, water and food was a pretty hard task, but eventually we found some Spitians on motorbikes that point us that the trail to Demul went up from the jeep path across the mountain. Then every step was an excruciating task, we had headaches on and off and even breathing was tough. After 4 hours we were thrilled to see the Tibetan prayer flags that marked the highest point of the trail: 4700 m above sea level.

From there it was a nice and relieving walk down. After one hour or less we started to sea the terraces with plantations of barley, potatoes and wheat, and the people working the land with yaks. Soon we arrived at Demul (~4300m), mud houses on a steeped slope and everyone, men and women, was singing and working. We still don’t understand what they did; they were moving, splitting and all sort of stuff with dried straws.

Demul

  We were led to a home stay by guy in his forties or maybe fifties, it was hard to tell. The situation was a little ambivalent, they were by far the most apathetic family of the trek, but the same night they held some kind of party there so we had the chance to glance at a tipical Spitian celebration and to taste the goodies: some kind of barley spirit which tasted between vodka and whisky, steamed sheep blood sausages that were exquisite, and very tasty recently made mutton meat momos.

Inside the homestay

On the following morning, we headed to what supposed to be the shorter trekking day –4 or 5 hours. So we started an extremely stepped walk down the valley; in less than 2 hours we descended around 1000 meters! First we went down a river until we reached a village of five mud houses called Sanglung. We had there some nice trees to have our lunch (box) and then we peeked in a house until we were invited to have some chai with the local family. We asked regarding our next destination, Lhalung, and the guy from the family did a single hand-movement that pointed down towards the river bank and then west. We were a little puzzled, our printed instructions (from 2008) indicated that the path goes east and then down the river to cross a bridge and then up again to reach Lhalung.

So we went down till almost the river and asked again to a group of workers who pointed east (like our printed instructions). Since we didn’t want to walk up again to the trail, we went off the path and walked over the river bank towards the east. We supposed that we’ll eventually find the bridge right there over the water…

So we walked and walked off the path over the stones and mud on the northern shore of the river for hours. Suddenly we had Lhalung up the hill in front of us, and on the other side of the river. But the thing was, there was no bridge…

We considered many times to cross the river but we weren’t sure how dangerous that could be. So we walked again up and down the river looking for a quieter spot, but the current seemed pretty strong everywhere. The idea of crossing the water vanished when Iohi put a toe in the freezing cold water and we decided just to go back.

Lhalung and below the river we wanted to cross

So we walked to the west all the way back to Sanglung and then continued until we finally saw a bridge. We crossed it and we walked again to the east, this time on the right side of the river. So after 9 hours walking, and just before the sunset, we entered in Lhalung (~3700 m). This little village in the middle of nothing had several home stays, even with signs. We opted for Khabric Guesthouse, where we collapsed on the kitchen floor and drank tea until the evening. We were hosted by the magnificent Tashi and his family, and he explained us that the bridge we were looking for on the east was washed away with the last rains.

Iohi had the chance to master her technique in momo making by helping with the dough together with Tashi’s little girl and we enjoyed of Tashi’s family’s company.

Iohi mastering the momo making technique with Tashi's

daughter

On the morning we walked four and half hours to Dankhar (~3800 m). Dankhar is the most touristic town of that area, but we found it the least interesting. It’s nice when you see it from far, the monasteries and the fort on the steeped mountain over a precipice. But when you get there, it’s only OK. Every other village on our way was much nicer and interesting.

Shichling village below of Dankhar, on our way to the bus stop

Back to Kaza, back to Manali

So we traveled from Kaza to Manali again by local bus. But this time the drive was a nightmare, the bus was very crowded, when 2 people got down, 5 got in. I even got in a quarrel with a Tibetan monk because of Iohi’s seat. I ended up on the back part of the bus with more people than seats breathing all the dust that entered from the open windows.

We stayed for a day in Manali, and then we traveled to Dharamshala to meet Iohi’s sister, Sachu.

On the following morning, we took a minibus to Upper Dharamshala, also known as McLeod Ganj, and also known as where the Dalai Lama lives…

Pictures of Spiti in Iohi's picasa

Yunnan province: treks, buses, minibuses and other adventures

So I finally wrapped up our last experiences in China while we recover from an endless food poisoning that mixed with flu in India.

Lijiang

So from Lugu Hu we traveled to Lijiang in Yunnan province. Our friends Juan and Rebeca had booked accommodation in a hostel in Lijiang for the four of us and we were supposed to arrive there together. But we didn't. Their bus tickets were over-sold and even though the guy from the station managed to get them inside a tour bus that drove to Lijiang, we arrived in different parts of the city.

The cute rather small old city of Lijiang I knew from my previous trip seven years ago grew becoming a monster. More and more traditional buildings were built to accommodate growing masses of Chinese tourists. But of course, it wasn’t enough and walking through the crowded rambling streets of the old city with our backpacks was an excruciating task. Lijiang old city is divided in different areas with street names that repeat; and we got deeper and deeper on the wrong street with the correct name, tumbling people, listening to the different karaoke music and soloist voices from the pubs around overlapping. After one hour walking, around 8pm, we arrived to the right number of the wrong street and we were pretty desperate. By then we got a message from Juan and Rebeca with the hostel phone number and we entered to the first karaoke and begged to call the hostel. Eventually a guy from the hostel picked up us, and we walked for half an hour until we arrived there and finally met Juan and Rebeca for dinner.

That’s the whole extent of my second visit to Lijiang: on the following morning the four of us took actually the same bus up to Shangri-la (at 3200 m height).

Shangri-la (originally Zhongdian)

Chasing some of the tourism of the prosperous Lijiang (and Old Dali), officials declared the Tibetan city previously known as Zhongdian, the location of the fictional place Shangri-la (described in the novel Lost Horizon by James Hilton).  It may be the case that the writer took inspiration from the writings of explorers who visited the Deqen prefecture (where Zhongdian is located), but several places in China, Tibet and even Bhutan also claim to be the real Shangri-la. But, anyway, here they went far enough to associate the city previously-known-as-Zhongdian with the fictional Shangri-la, an idyllic permanently happy land isolated from the outside world. The name of the city was changed.

And it worked. Besides, the Tibetan city became also a Western outpost: lots of expats, international initiatives to promote local handcrafts or to develop the area, and good Western food including real pizzas, pasta, yummy yak hamburgers, yak steaks, real salads. There is even a cheese shop! With excellent yak cheese! As much as we love Chinese food, it was a nice break. (And this last week in India we were craving those hamburgers!)

Even before we were close to Shangri-la we heard about Marco, an Italian guy that moved there and opened an Italian restaurant. We, of course, went there for our first meal and ordered some pizza and salad. As soon as Marco takes our order, he starts rambling in Italianspanish about fake Tibetan monks, tourists kidnapped by the Chinese army and how his restaurant isn’t in the Lonely Planet guide because he isn’t an evangelist. And then he starts to tell the history of his life: seven years ago, he married a Chinese Naxi woman, who now works with him, and opened the place. In the flow of the unclear Italianspanish that doesn’t stop, I hear something about him being a nurse. And then I remember!! I met him seven years ago in another Tibetan town called Xiahe. We even shared the room! By that time he was an eccentric 40 years old (single) backpacker, but as crazy as now, he was trying to teach English to the Tibetans to help them moving to India.

We stayed in Shangri-la some days, we wanted to do a trek “near” in Yubeng, but the weather wasn’t good and then Iohi caught the flu so we waited, hanging around with the couple we met before. They were volunteering in a school teaching English to the kids, and Iohi also eventually joined them.

Rebeca and Juan teaching English (Iohi was of course taking the pic)

Finally, we headed to our trek, and we even got an authentic Spanish chorizo colorado from Arturo who was leaving China. Thank you Arturo! We ate it with the parmesan yak cheese in toasted Tibetan bread during our trek!

Getting to Yubeng

So this is how you get to the “near” trek. You take a bus to Deqin, which takes from 6 hours to any uncertain amount of time depending on the conditions of the roads and on your luck. Then you take a minibus to Felai Si which takes around 1 hour. In Felai Si, there’s nothing but a nice view, so you sleep there and you take a jeep on the morning that takes another hour to Xidang. And then you can start. Piece of cake. Should I add that is a mountainous way and there are landslides and flooding all the time?

So fearing crowded minibuses we took the 7:40am bus and after 2 hours it stopped. We were three hours there until we understood that the bus was going to continue going only at 8 or 9 pm (yes pm) when the road was going to be cleared.

The first bus on our way to Yubeng

So yet again we left the bus and, with two Chinese couples, we took a minibus which was able to go on alternative narrow and muddy roads, where we got stuck every now and then.

Then at 9pm, when we were only a couple of hours from our destination, the axis of our car broke in the middle of nothing, and we had to move again, this time to jeep crammed with Tibetan monks. We arranged a price to Felai Si, but when we arrived in Deqin, the nice driver wanted to drop us unless we paid more.

So we paid more and then we arrived to the lousiest hostel belonging to the Youth Hostel association.

The following day it rained a lot, so we didn’t start the trek. It was so cloudy that we even didn’t see that we were surrounded by snowy peaks.

Yubeng trek (under the Meili Snow Mountain)

On the next morning we had an amazingly nice day and the snowy peaks were everywhere!

We arrived in Xidang on the morning and we started to walk up the muddy trail. Five hours later we got to the peak and we started to walk down to Upper Yubeng, the upper part of the town (at 3150 m).

Both Yubengs, upper and lower, are places which seemed to be taken from a painting. Surrounded by mountains, these small Tibetan villages with wooden and mud houses lack cars and seem completely unreal. 

In Upper Yubeng we had dinner twice on an open terrace from where the rainbow was present every afternoon.

We walked all day from there to a glacier over a half frozen lake. We drank there the best water we had ever tasted, straight from the ice in the mountains to a waterfall.

Then we moved to Lower Yubeng (which was slightly lower than the other Yubeng at 3050 m), as beautiful as Upper Yubeng, where we stayed in a room with view to the woods and a stream of water. We saw yaks and mules through our balcony and we used the first day to recover ourselves.

Our view

The next day we walked to waterfalls where we drank exquisite cold water again (yes, water can be exquisite) and on the following day we left.

I'm the blue dot

The way back from Yubeng

We took another path with two Israeli girls. It was a shorter path and without going up. For a couple of hours we walked following a river between small villages. Then we walked in a single line on a narrow trail which had a stream of water on the left near a rock wall and a very high cliff on the right. We even had to put the feet in the water when the trail was narrower and muddy or grab from the wall! The view was amazing and was scaring as hell! 

This was before it gets scary (and then we didn't take pics!)

After walking another couple of hours we reached the point where we should have easily found minibuses to Felai Si. But there weren’t.

We ended up in a construction site where we called everyone working in all the hostels around using the phone of one of the workers. It seemed that there were problems with the road again and we waited halves of hour for five hours for the minibus that didn’t arrive.

Then we caught a minibus that was going down to our direction and we cancelled the last minibus we called. But we didn’t realize until late that he was supposed to pick up a group of six Chinese that were below us. They weren’t happy to be crammed and travel with us but the driver was (he really robbed us with the price). So we contemplated again an endless Chinese quarrel until we begged the only English speaker to let us go with them to Felai Si.

We arrived to the same lousy hostel, but this time even lousier, the electricity was cut. Anyway, it was worth while; I guess that all the effort that implies arriving there makes Yubeng a rather clean, quiet and beautiful place. And we stayed there four nights, because we had already plane tickets from Kunming, but we could easily have stayed much more time, just sitting there on the nature.

We went back on the following morning to Shangri-la anyway, and we met again our friends. From Shangrila to Kunming, we suffered again with the transportation.

We thought the problem was the unreliable minibuses, but official buses were also uncomfortable and got stuck. We thought the problem was also being far from the big cities but the sleeper bus we took to Kunming, capital of Yunnan province wasn’t a joy either. It was roughly like sleeping with thirty more smelly guys in the same moving bed. Twelve hours later we arrived in Kunming.

Kunming

In Kunming we enjoyed our last days in China, a rather big but quite city with the perfect weather: it’s at an almost-tropical latitude but with a 2000 m altitude. We mainly got ready for our next destination, India, and of course we acted in a movie.

All the pictures are in Iohi's picasa.

Qinghai province II - how we got the hell out of there

Amnye Machen

Last time I was telling how we got stuck on the flanks of Amnye Machen Mountain between two dusty Tibetan towns for 6 hours. The Amnye Machen is a sacred Tibetan mountain and walking around it is supposed to be one of the holiest pilgrimage for Tibetan Buddhists. How they decide that a mountain is sacred, I've got no idea. I asked English-speaker Buddhists but their answers were completely vague and we kept finding holy Tibetan places where Buddhists walk clock-wise in many areas. Anyway, pilgrims make the 200 km circumambulation of the mountain while prostrating every other step and groups of tourists suppose to ride horses around half of the mountain to get to the other side. We couldn't find a guide and horses anywhere and we decided to just move on, get to Xiedawu on the other side of the mountain by jeep and try to do a short excursion with horses there.

So Iohi and Maya got inside a house that had a jeep parked outside, and persuaded the woman of the house to wake up his husband from his nap and make him take us to the other side for a normal price. (We discovered that bargaining was out of the question with Tibetans and we could be considered lucky if they don’t raise the price after it is settled).

So we jumped into his brand new jeep and when we started to go we saw a guy coming with row of saddled horses, but… fuck it! We were already leaving!

The driver happened to be a pretty cool guy and agreed to stop every other time to see the magnificent landscape. So we had 5 hours of amazing views driving on the mountain, seeing snowed peaks through the zillions of prayer flags and even a glacier!

We finally arrived to Xiedawu, a town which was even dustier and uglier and smaller than the previous ones. It even seemed poorer and there was no hotel or guesthouse around. Maya and Tomer, the Israeli couple, had a phone with a local sim card, but the cherry of the cake was the lack of phone signal! We managed to persuade some local guy to call the woman from a travel agency who had assured us that there is a hotel (and horses! And of course there were no horses there).

So she said that yes, there should be, but she’s not sure, she hasn’t been there, she doesn’t know, yada yada yada. We understood from some guy that we can sleep at the local school, which was falling apart as everything there. So we begged our driver to continue to the next town, which at least was on the main road that goes from Xining, capital of the province to the south, to Yushu. He called and asked permission from his wife and some more money from us and we continued to Huashixia.

At 10pm, exhausted, we arrived in the rainy, muddy and cold town of Huashixia and we settled in the first place we saw. After trying to swallow the Qinghai specialty, either some noodles in a kind of greasy soup or very greasy noodles fried with beef; we joined all the beds in the room to bear the cold weather.

On the morning, a little miracle happened, the dirt and the mud were gone and instead there was a magnificent layer of snow! Besides, we saw for the first time the snowed mountains that surrounded the town. I guess it’s not a miracle to see snow in summer above 4000 meters high and the mountains were all the time there (even during the night), but it was surprising for us, and the town seemed at least prettier.

So we booked by phone some beds in a guesthouse in Yushu, and we were said that there’s an afternoon bus to there and that we would arrive around 9pm. After hiking on the mountains during the morning, we tried to precise the concept of “afternoon bus to Yushu”.

I walked all the town (like 1 km) with Amori, who speaks Chinese, and we asked virtually everyone we saw at what time the bus from Xining to Yushu was supposed to stop in the town. So we heard between 2 and 3, between 4 and 5, between 7 and 8, between 8 and 9, there’s no bus, and today there’s no bus. And then we just moved all our stuff and bags to the street and waited from 2 till 8:30 pm, when the “4-5 hour” bus finally arrived. 

Waiting the bus - taken by Amori

We called the guy from the guesthouse, and asked him to pick us up at 12 am instead. At 12 am we were still on the bus, 2 hours more, they said, and so we called again to postpone the pick up. Around 4 am we arrived in Yushu.

Muddy and rainy Yushu

I should say that China is huge and it spans across five different time zones, from +5:00 in the west to +9:00 in the east. However, as many things in China, time is centralized. There’s a unified time zone +8 for all its territories which of course was set according to Beijing longitude.

Being Yushu 2000 km west from Beijing, 4:00 am was more like 1 or 2 am and it was pitch black, muddy and raining.

Yushu is a fairly populated place relative to Qinghai province: 300.000 inhabitants. What was once a big and pretty city (or it was supposed to be), it’s now ruins with most of their population living in temporary blue tents over the mud and many without any kind of toilets. On April 2010, the city was completely destroyed by an earthquake and today, more than year later,  the reconstruction is still a work in progress. We were in the rainy season and the city was a complete mess. We knew that it would be like this but the main road ended there and we hoped to sleep and then move south to Nangchen. However, the guy from the guesthouse didn’t come and didn’t answer the phone when we arrived in Yushu and we had no idea where his place was. So we were wet and freezing on the mud with the only light coming from the bus that was going to return to somewhere and with no idea what to do, when a Chinese couple told us to come over (When I say Chinese, I mean Han Chinese or I don’t know the ethnic group, but at least Tibetans and Hui Chineses are easily distinguished from Han Chineses). They were a very well educated electric engineer and his wife and had stopped a minivan-taxi and asked us in English if we wanted to go to Nangchen now. It was a 5 hours drive and we would arrive there on the morning (and we had the address of a hotel there.)

One day in Nangchen (was enough)

The driver of the minivan-taxi was a 21 year old guy who was completely asleep and drove us in a zombie state nodding every fifteen minutes in the complete darkness. He refused to stop and take a nap and instead he played loud dance music in the stereo which included hits from the ’90 like Salta sin parar (salta y salta y salta salta salta salta salta sin pararrrr) and Lambada. He kept nodding his head and around 7 am at dawn, fearing for our lives we told him to stop in some place to get us hot water and we forced him to drink a super strong black coffee.

Our driver drinking a super strong coffee

And again after driving through an amazing landscape, we arrived in a dusty and muddy and ugly one street Tibetan town. The “lonely planet hotel”, San Jiang Yuan Binguan,  had a thin layer of dust everywhere and it stank, literary. On the top of that, it was expensive. I think that our daily budget was at least 3 higher in Qinghai province than anywhere else in China including Beijing. Anyway, Amori and I went to check for others places while the others bargained the price, fearing that if this was the only hotel that accepts foreigners the owner will even increase the price if we go and return. We checked some dirtier options which included a place with dog shit in the hallway where I almost throw up from the smell. On our way we understood from a local guy that our San Jiang Yuan was the poshest hotel in town.

We bore only one day there; the amazing surroundings didn’t make up for the ugly and expensive place, the bad food and the hostile people. We had some pleasant surprises like a guy who knew English and took us to see a nearby monastery but mostly we wanted to get the hell out of the province.

Nice surroundings, ugly city

Yushu again

Next morning we traveled back to Yushu, where the group split. The Israeli couple couldn’t take it any more and decided to go back to the capital in order to take a flight to more tourist and normal places. Amori traveled back to see the Qinghai lake and  Iohi and I went to find another bus because we still wanted to get to Chengdu through Sichuan province’s Tibetan Highway on the flanks of the Tibet.

We drove in a taxi for 15 minutes across tents and scattered buildings until we get to some kind of bank neighborhood and then to the appropriate bus station. (There were many). This bus station was closed until 3 pm, but some guy there offered to help us and asked the stallkeeper from the kiosk of the station about buses to somewhere in Sichuan province. Our translator, as many Chinese people, studied English but had a hard time understanding and speaking the language and after some seconds of frustration he wrote in a piece “no tickets to foreigners”.

By that time, we had already heard so many times different things from different people that we didn’t believe anything so we just waited until the place opened.

Then I asked for buses to Ganzi in Sichuan – meyou (there isn’t) for tomorrow, meyou for the day after tomorrow. There was only for July 16^th, 4 days later. I asked for buses to Serxu, which was nearest town in Sichuan, but meyou, meyou, meyou…

So we either had to go north back to Xining by a 15 hours bus and then try to book a train or several trains south to Sichuan, or find a minibus there to Sichuan. (To wait four days there was out of the question.) Many times, minibuses are the only possible option when either there are no buses or they are full or they cannot go through a road because of landslides. Armed with a phrasebook and our 20 words vocabulary, we started to ask people around.

Then after several failed attempts, a 20-something-years old girl who spoke a bit of English explained us that her lama (kind of her Buddhist guru) happened to go to Sichuan and could drop us in Serxu…

And our luck began to change.

To see all the pics of Qinghai, you should check, as usual, Iohi's picasa.