From Northern Sichuan I made my way north over the provincial border into Gansu province and to the monastery town of Langmusi. We passed through some vast, flat grasslands on the way - the biggest I've seen in China, and amazingly sparsely populated. The town itself was again not much of a destination but it had a lot of budget accommodation, with a number of places frequented by foreigners. Having met two Israeli girls on the bus and changed my plans to come here instead of the town directly before, we found a cheap but popular guesthouse, which was pretty marginal, and set off to check out the local monastery. Frankly the monastery was a big disappointment - as usual we had to pay to get in (not a lot, but it's the principle) and most of the buildings were closed, so there wasn't much to see. The monastery in Litang was much, much more impressive. The one cool thing about the visit was that I got chatting to a young monk. He took us up to the top of the hill to see the view, pointed out the local sky burial area (and told us we could watch the burials in a couple of days if we kept our distance and didn't take photos) and explained how happy he was to have foreigners like us make such an effort to come to visit his monastery. He'd noticed a big surge in numbers of visitors in recent years, and then a big decline again and couldn't explain why. It was very cool how he went to great lengths to explain to me (with my weak Chinese) that as far as the monks are concerned the monastery is not just theirs, or just the Tibetan people's, or the Chinese people's, but for everyone in the whole world and we are especially welcome as foreigners. It was a very nice sentiment, and somewhat rare in a country where as a foreigner you feel welcomed, but often welcomed only because you represent an income just waiting to be made; with this guy his intentions were pure.
The next day I woke up around sunrise and took off up into the rocky hills opposite the monastery and behind the town. In about 2.5 hours I reached the saddle above the town, a few hundred meters up. The views on the way up were spectacular and from the saddle into the valleys behind amazing. It's quite different up here in this part of China from almost everywhere else I've been - here I can look out over huge valleys and not see a single sign of human habitation. All over the rest of China there are people and villages absolutely everywhere. A little disappointingly the clouds came in over the town as I reached the saddle and obscured the view in that direction, but the walk was nice and well worth it to get away from the town, people, buses, noise and pay-per-entry tourist traps for awhile.
One of the nicer monastery buildings
Locals working on the monastery - repainting, I think
Lack of people - a rare sight in China overall, but not uncommon in Gansu Province
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