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.

Our first week in China

Now I'm hearing about demonstrations and a train and dead people in China, but I'm uninformed not because of the The Great Firewall but because of the the slow connections of the hostels. I'll post what happened more than a month ago, and I'll try to understand what's going on now...

So Beijing woke up

So Beijing woke up. At 6am the streets started to pack with people, cars, bikes, motorbikes. It took us a while to understand where, in this huge city, we were, but we managed to find the hostel some people in U.B. recommended us. It resulted to be a very nice place in Xicheng district, near the Houhai lake and Nanluoguxiang alley, one of the most young chic streets.

It was one of the nicest areas we saw, there were a few parks around the lakes where Chinese people were doing exercise or playing some sort of badminton, children were running around, women were dancing Chinese folk songs, and a bunch of middle age to old guys were jumping into the lake and swimming.

The post Olympic Beijing is a much modern city than the city I knew 7 years ago. Part of the city has been completely rebuilt. And now you see toilets everywhere, I guess to prevent hordes of tourists from peeing in the alleys during the Olympic Games.

When I was in the city last time -it was one of my last destinations, I remember to be craving for coffee and ice-cream, and having a hard time to find them. Now there are international brands and chains everywhere, and to find coffee and ice-cream is as hard as finding rice. In general lines, the city is meant to be easy to navigate, there are big signs everywhere also in English with street names or pointing tourist spots and the cardinal directions, and the main streets are designed following the exact cardinal points (but this we have to thank to the Ming dynasty, I think).

I heard people complaining that Beijing is not what it was, that it’s now a Chinese Disneyland. I don’t agree, I liked the old Beijing, and I like the new Beijing.

On the downside, many hutongs, the small alleys in the traditional neighborhoods, were replaced by modern buildings, malls, banks. Most of those neighborhoods lacked plumbing, and most people were happy to get compensation and move the hell out of there, but many of those alleys had hundreds of years, and they could also improve the plumbing without demolishing the whole place.  I’m reading a fantastic book about China called Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler. The author is a journalist from US, who lives in Beijing since 1999 and recounts his experiences, as an English teacher and as a journalist. I recommend this book to whoever wants to try to understand something so vast and huge as the Chinese culture. Anyway, the book has a chapter about the hutongs, and tells about the order of demolition of a hutong in 2000 even though the hutong supposed to be an historic relic even  “older than the United States of America”. If the pace of demolition was fast at that time, I can’t imagine what China did with Beijing towards the 2008 to “deserve” the Games, a real plastic surgery.

It’s really a shame that old buildings were destroyed, but at least I think that maybe now, maybe a late though, the city is understanding a little more what makes Beijing special. We saw a lot of construction sites where they were building traditional Chinese buildings, for example, and we were in an area which had the traditional hutongs with a lot of signs that asked to protect the old Beijing.

Anyway, we spent 3 days just waling and biking around. We put certain places as objectives to ourselves, just to ignore them when we found something more interesting on the way. We were like moths distracted by any bright light, but we enjoyed more the distractions than the actual objectives.

Postcards!

 We spend a lot of time just eating, we wanted to try everything everywhere, and we found out that we could split food in three categories: amazing, tasteless and awful. So we fought to get as many of the dishes from the first category, but no matter what the taste is, food almost always surprises you: what seems sweet is salty, what seems hot is cold, what seems strange is something known.

The best soup ever!

Stinking tofu! puahh

By that time, China was warming up for the summer break vacations and many of the tourist spots were already packed with thousands and thousands of Chinese. So we avoided the more or less closed sights, but we did enjoy the classic food market (I guess you’ve seen pictures from any person who traveled to Beijing) and the even more classic Beijing duck, we walked through the silent hutongs and we visited the average 798 art district, but basically we just enjoyed the city. We had the chance to meet our friends from Mongolia for beers in Nanluoguxiang alley and to meet up with our Israeli friend atthe shining Sanlitun bar street in Chaoyang  district.

Biking on the hutongs

And after 4 days in the civilization we decided to make an adventurous side trip.

Great Wall

Just FYI, there isn’t such thing as The Great Wall, there are a lot of Walls built by different dynasties with different materials to protect themselves against different invaders. Now many of the Walls are invaded with tourists and vendors of sweets and Coca Cola and women that chase you while they yell postcards and put them inside your face. So many hostels sell you trips to go to less accessible parts of the Walls, which means less people and less vendors.

We went far with the part of less accessibility, we read in a forum about a part of the Wall called Jiankou Wall which is unexploited and not far from Beijing, but there’s no public transport to that place, and parts of the Wall are literally falling apart, I mean pieces of rock fall while you walk.

We took a bus from Beijing to Huairo, an ugly city which seems as the continuation of the furthest and ugliest part of Beijing. From there we couldn’t find buses that would drive us closer to our destination and we had to take a taxi. So after 1/2 hour bargaining we got to a convenient price and we started going.

The concrete and the buildings gave place gradually to more and more rivers and green and cultivated lands. Suddenly the road started to go up and down on the mountains and we continued going and going for more than 2 hours. And it already seemed too much and the driver started to call and ask people around until he turned around and we drove back one hour to take the right turn. He was so ashamed that he stopped in kiosk to buy as mineral water.

We finally arrived to Zhao's guesthouse at Xizhazi village, the closest village to Jiankou Wall. It was a small village surrounded by mountains and corn fields. The guesthouse was managed by a young family and besides us only a young Chinese couple was staying there.

We only took small backpacks to the village and our plan was roughly to start walking from the nearest part of the Wall on the next morning until we get to a more transited area and take a bus to Beijing from there.

The woman of the family, Zhao's wife, seemed to be in charge of talking with the foreigners and I tried to explain her our plan and ask for a map using simple English words and our magical Chinese phrase book. She answered us back using the translator of her mobile phone; we got a schematic map of the Wall written in Chinese and of the size of a credit card, and we understood that it will take around 7 hours walking until the point where we could take a bus, the part of the wall called Mutianyu. The afternoon we got there we just explored the surroundings and we prepared boiled water for the following day.

We woke up around 6:30 and there was a drizzle which made us start to doubt our plan of 7 hours walking. When we finished breakfast, the day was still very cloudy and humid but the rain stopped and we understood from the Zhao’s wife that there won’t be heavy raining and that it’ll be ok.

So we walked half an hour between the thick vegetation until we got to the Wall. In order to only start our trek, we had to climb a part of the wall which consisted of destroyed stairs (I guess) which become with time a 70 degree floor of rocks sticking out of the surface. I said to Iohi, “Don’t worry this should be the ruined part we heard about”.

 This came out to be one of the easiest parts of the trek along the wall. For 6 hours we walked completely alone, up and down, up and down, we had to climb with legs and hands in many parts, we walked over falling stones, we crawled into holes/doors and we jump from roofs, we walked down on surfaces so stepped that we had to grab from the sides.

Then suddenly we found ourselves in a refurbished area: all the tiles are in their place, there are signs, and refreshment stalls! We got to Mutianyu Wall! We started to see tourists everywhere; we were completely worn out and covered in sweat and around us many Europeans with leather shoes and their new clothes. Around one hour more, we found a cable car –yes, we deserved it. And we went down to an area full of shops, restaurants, and the bus stop to Beijing!

And back to Beijing –some successful negotiations

So we returned to the same hostel and Iohi found out that she forgot her Shoresh (Source) new sandals in the village’s guesthouse. For the next two days she conducted diplomatic negotiations to get her sandals back. She made the hostel workers to call the woman from the village’s guesthouse several times and discussed options that included making a whole day bus trip just to take them. She finally acceded to ship the sandals after a money bank transference, and shortly before we left, we won back the sandals!

Those days we were fed up with the lack of usb in the internet café, we walked around with the camera from internet café to internet café trying to download the pictures without success until we made the drastic decision of just buying a computer. So we went to the famous Zhongguancun District, which has several buildings full of computer and telephone shops. I did the proper research and we decided to buy an Asus so we had to look only for an official Asus vendor. Once we found it and found the computer, we started a new round of successful negotiations this time through Google translator, which ended in the computer I’m using now.

 From Beijing, with the new computer and the Shoresh sandals, we took a sleeper train to Pingyao, a rather touristy place but, anyway, a cute and small old city, in Shanxi province.

More of Mongolia -Vegetarians beware, "hot pot"

We were kind of stuck in Pingyao for a couple of days, waiting for the train than goes to the exotic Yinchuan, once the capital of the Western Xia Empire. The guy of the hostel was stunned that we want to go where there are people that don't eat pork. (There is a lot Hui population there which is Muslim). Then we were stuck in Zhongwei for other day (and that's a very interesting story that will be told some days (or maybe weeks) later and we finally got to Xining in Qinghai province to realize that most of the inland ways out of the province are closed because of Tibetan unrest. Anyway, more of this later, the point is that I had time to continue the Mongolian story.

Eight Lakes Valley - the yak's way

The Yak!

So we hit the road (or the mud) again: 400 km (see footnote), 12 hours, several stops when the driver had signal and only one Mongolian tape played in loop. Almost a month later we still hum the songs.

Taken by Teresa

We were supposed to start a 2 day walking, 2 day horse riding trek, but the evening we arrived it was raining so heavily that we started to doubt the plan. But when we woke up, it was sunny. But (again) when we were ready to go, it started to rain. We decided to start anyway.

One hour later, it was raining so heavily that we were completely wet and we had to stop in some ger on the way. We were received, as usual, in the Mongolian way, salty milk tea and some more diary products, and we had the chance to dry ourselves.

Wet!

We asked our guide for the forecast, and for what will happen with the weather and our trek. However, in a country where weather changes every other hour, it was useless. One hour later, the rain stopped and we had a sunny day again.

“It’s better for you to go on”, I’m pretty sure the guide said.

We went on for another hour until the storm forced us to stop in another ger. It wasn’t the place we were supposed to spend the night, I mean, the guide knows the families that are glad to receive foreigners for some tugriks, and we usually stopped at those families. However, this family was also happy to host us and this place happened to be highlight of our countryside trip.

We got dry there, and ironically it stopped raining for the rest of the day. The little boy of the family was glad to show us the sights of the place. Everything was bright green because of the rain and the yaks moving slowly into the twilight added a surrealistic flavor to the view. There was a small frozen body of water and also pieces of ice that broke the earth from underground (I think it’s called permafrost). And maybe one kilometer after that, a big transparent lake under the mountains.

The permafrost

The new little guide - taken by Duncan

We walked around until it was getting dark. When we came back, we saw the poor family cat tied to the front of the ger. Our guide was so afraid of it  that she wanted to have it tied outside!

Next day was sunny, but we were worried that we would have to make up for what we didn’t walk the previous day.

The distances and the times she told us didn’t make any sense and they seemed to change depending who asked…

The thing is that asking for information to English speaking Mongolians is a very hard task.

I’ll give my linguistic explanation, for something completely different. Mongolian is an SOV language: first, the subject, then the object and then the verb.

“The boy ate the goat” is said by a Mongolian speaker as:

“The boy the goat ate”, change of course every word and use a completely different phonologic system.

Then something more complex as “The boy thinks that the girl ate the goat”, should be something like “The boy that the girl the goat ate thinks”.

So think about the effort for Mongolians to understand complex sentences such as:

“What do you think we should do if the rain doesn’t stop?” or “Do we have to walk today for all the distance we didn’t walk yesterday?”

So we ended up making simple yes/no questions or multiple options questions. The problem is that most of the time we got a “yes” as an answer (as it happens in many Asiatic cultures), and the yes, we found out, has many meanings:

1.      “The answer is yes”

2.      “One of the multiple options you gave me is correct”

3.      “I don’t have the faintest idea what are you talking about”, or “You talking to me?” or, simply, “I don’t understand”

So the rule was to only take “no” as a valid answer.

Anyway, it take around 5 hours walking with many stops and very minor rains through an astonishing landscape of mountains and lakes and we got there – handmade dumplings waiting.

Lunch!

What’s more, after 5 days far from a shower, we had the chance of a bath in the cold lake.

We slept there one night and we spent the next two days riding horses through more of that beautiful landscape and many yaks everywhere. The riding was amazing; the horses didn’t hesitate in running and galloping with a small kick and some “choo choo” at their ears. But those two days killed us, and we could barely move afterwards!

Evening after our first day riding

After horses

Next morning, we met our driver and van again and a big pot of stew. We started a short drive again and we had new promises of “hot pot”.

Orkhon Valley – where we ate the famous hotpot and the driver gets into a fight.

After half an hour driving, we stopped near a herd of goats. Our guide left the van and we see her talking with the herder. 5 minutes of discussion, she  points to a goat and pulls some tugriks from her pocket. Then she and the herder start to chase the goat until she almost throw herself over it and grabs it from its horns. The driver runs out to open the door, and the guide drags the goat –next day lunch- to the front seat.

They were thrilled and happy and talked loudly, and our vegetarian girl was completely in shock!

It seems that doing a hot pot is an especial occasion and kind of a celebration. I think it’s pretty clear but picking a goat is not so different than going to the supermarket and picking some meat, only that in the Mongolian way, you don’t need a fridge.

So we drove with the goat screaming once in a while and the girl silently crying in shock until we arrived to our next destination on the side of the Orkhon river.

The father of the family that received us there seemed very glad with the goat and the prospect of doing a hot pot and they killed it while we were exploring around... By the time we came back the goat was clean, the little girls of the family were playing with it, and our guide was again preparing inside meat sausages (not our meal this time).

Next day, after a beautiful sunny morning and 2 seconds under the freezing water of the river, we had the famous hot pot.

They put a rather big pan with some water over the stove in the ger, then some layers of meat and hot stones, onions, carrots, potatoes, and again meat, stones, veggies, etc… The meat was assorted pieces of the goat, which was cut in chunks of different sizes with bones and skin. This was an activity that involved all the women around cutting veggies, and all the men trying to catch the incandescent stones from the stove and putting them in the pan...

Our driver putting goat pieces in the pan

The hot pot is ready!

The result was, well er.., pieces of boiled goat. By Mongolian food standards, it was, well er…, kind of ok.

The same day started sunny became a stormy day with hail that caught me, and two of the girls, Teresa and Jen, several kilometers away. And again I had to unfreeze myself in front of the stove. The gers were packed with people this time. It seems that it was a popular spot and another group was also there, and we slept in tents despite the rain.

The night in the tents was ok, except for the yells and what I correctly guessed were the sound of punches. It was raining heavily and none of us left the tents, but on the morning our guide told us that our cheerful driver got in a fight with the father of the family when he refused to provide him with cigarettes and vodka. It seems that the fight also included our driver waving a knife, but everything ended there.

On the morning, the driver did his best to hurry us out of the place.

The footnote: Distance are provided as perceived the Mongolian sense of distance and I’m not sure regarding the relationship with reality. But it was a relatively short distance done in a very long time.