The first week of classes, our school had arranged a trip to Chengdu from Wednesday to Sunday for group travel-minded students. Since Pravit and I like doing it on our own, we decided not to partake in the trip, but that a five-day long weekend would have to be used for travel outside of Xi’an, despite not yet being particularly familiar with our temporary home town. Thus, whilst going to register for the 汉语水平考试 (Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi: the official Chinese for Foreigners proficiency test, roughly similar to the TOEFL or IELTS for English, but with an exclusive focus on multiple-choice questions), we ran into a train ticket agent and got two hard sleeper tickets to Lanzhou (兰州) for the same evening.
没想到乘火车会这么舒服！
兰州站 (Lanzhou Train Station)
It is said that Lanzhou is the most polluted city in China, and Western media frequently publish pictures from Lanzhou of people wearing face masks, not being able to see more than a few meters ahead. In general, this is an exaggeration. Pollution in Lanzhou might be substantial, but hardly much worse than in any other big large anywhere in the world. Nonetheless, since the Lanzhou surroundings boast quite a bit of fine-grain sand, and I would imagine that there could be substantial dust storms on a windy day, which opens up the opportunity for taking pictures making Europe forget about Bush signing Kyoto.
However, the stop of our journey was not Lanzhou, but Xiahe (夏河), a small monastery town in the Tibetan Autonomous Region in western Gansu. Since the last morning bus would leave within less than an hour from our arrival in Lanzhou from the long-distance bus station across town, we got into a cab (we seldom do this nowadays, because we consider going on public transport an intrinsic part of the China experience) . The five-hour coach trip involved quite an altitude change (Xiahe is located more than 2,900 metres above sea level), and took us through a lot of beautiful Gansu scenery. Most people around here are Hui (Chinese Muslims), and impressive mosques dot the green hills.
We also passed by a number of small villages, such as this one, which had a huge market, selling every style and every kind of things.
Xiahe is quite different from most other small towns in this region. The Xiahe population comprises 50% Tibetan, 40% Han and 10% Hui. The Labrang monastery (拉卜楞寺) does not only make the home for some 1,000 monks, but is also a major site of pilgrimage for monks from Tibet. Consequently, the streets of Xiahe are filled with monks in dark red robes, as well as a large number of people dressed up in the Tibetan traditional style of dress.
Apart from the monastery itself, there are a number of colleges concentrated on related teachings around Gansu, such as the 甘肃省佛学院 (“Gansu Province College of Buddhist Studies”), hosted in buildings just as pretty as the monastery itself.
The masses of Tibetans do not enter the monastery itself, but practice their religion along one (or many) of the countless rows of “praying wheels”. Attention all beggars in China: the entrance to one of the rows of prayer wheels is the place to be – one jiao from hundreds and hundreds of people feeling particularly virtuous before they go to pray must add up to more per day than what than what most people employed in the general service sector can hope for.
Although you can wander around the monastery grounds on your own (assuming you have purchased the admissions ticket), tourists can only enjoy the interior of the temples by going on a guided tour. We happened to arrive about ten minutes before the daily English and joined an older white couple of unknown origin and their Chinese guide. However, if you speak any amount of Chinese, it is probably more ideal to take the tour in Chinese, during which explanations are likely to be slightly more vivid.
Tibetans in general and in this region in particular, raise a cow like creature known as a “yak” (pictured below). Yaks are important in Tibetan culinary tradition (yak milk, yak butter, yak meat, etc.). What I would never have thought is how important Yaks apparently are for the monks at the Labrang monastery. There are tons of yak butter sculptures around the monasteries, which must be sculptured and painted anew about every week (as the butter goes rancid). Before, I had wondered how all of these monks keep themselves occupied, but now I know.
Yak
Yak Butter Statue
The Labrang monastery has hundreds of years of traditions, but the monastery as it is today to a large extent reflects the renovations which took place following the Cultural Revolution (the Chinese introduction says that the monastery was “renovated”, whilst the English version claims it was “reconstructed”: something lost in translation?). However, despite the quite recent revamping efforts, some facilities of the monastery do seem a bit “ancient”, e.g., how they deal with waste and sewage.
Getting rid of excess waste was never a problem
Sewage was never a problem
The second day in Xiahe, we decided to hit the grasslands nearby. Since public transport in Xiahe is lacking, your best bet is to get into a taxi, a three-wheeled motorbike, or a minibus to transport you the ten kilometers or so out to the grasslands. What we would never have guessed when we jumped on a minibus in Xiahe, was that the minibus driver would be so “caring”.
Our first stop was in a Tibetan home: in the midst of the grasslands, small cottages are set up with no more than two rooms in each, out of which only one is heated and decorated. On the little platform next to the stove, you can eat, sleep and socialise. Apart from a stove with open fire, each Tibetan home around Xiahe also hosts a TV and a satellite receiver (the latter presumably to receive TV in the Tibetan language: no one speaks or understands Chinese).
The Tibetans are very cordial, and will prepare some of the most excellent Tibetan-style snacks for their foreign visitors. The standard fare is “tsompa”: barley, sugar, yak butter and milk tea stirred into a smooth paste, to be enjoyed the way it is. Generous servings of milk tea is best enjoyed with copious amounts of sugar, and can be topped off with some yak butter to make the famous “butter tea”. (The bread on the picture is just for decoration: no one dared trying it.) Not shown in the picture is the home made yak milk yoghurt, which has a fresh sour-sweet flavour and about the same consistency as jello – not bad at all!
Sugar, "Bread", Milk tea, Tsompa, Yak butter
After our first meal, we went for the horse-ride: compulsory for every long-way tourist visiting the grasslands.
Following the one-hour horse ride, we thought it was the time to reclaim our role as independent, adventure-minded tourists, and stroll around the grasslands on our own for a while. Now, the above-mentioned driver initiated a heated discussion (which would last for about half an hour) on big and blood-thirsty wild dogs roaming the grasslands. He held a long speech about how he was responsible for us on the grasslands after driving us all the way here, and how we could not possible want to be bitten by a dog. Since the medical facilities in Xiahe looked quite a bit dirtier than the Chinese average, this may well have been true. Nonetheless, since we had seen no dogs during our horse-ride, we ignored the well-meant advice and set off.
From a distance, we could see another Tibetan settlement. We figured that if our driver would have gone back to town after our argument, we could probably find someone over there willing to drive us back to civilisation for ten kuai or so.
As we approached the houses, a slightly older lady in beautiful Tibetan dress invited us into her house for a second serving of tsompa. Here, we also got to try a second – more diluted – variety of tsompa, fairly similar to porridge. As we were sipping our milk tea and admiring the new-born kittens and lambs proudly brought into us, our beloved driver suddenly re-appeared, more furious than ever.
We got back to Xiahe a couple of hours before our bus back to Lanzhou would depart. Pravit made sure to buy another long-sleeved shirt in a tiny shop he had discovered the day before (this boy doesn’t like big city fashion), and we had a quick lunch (another varitey on the theme "beef noodles").
That evening in Lanzhou, as were searching for a genuine north-western restaurant to have our dinner, we ran into a Korean Barbeque place. Feeling we had had a bit too much tsompa lately, we simply could not resist...
Night Market in Lanzhou
To be continued...
