We arrived in the small city of Xiahe around 10:00. As we often do, Sarah sat down with our bags while I wandered around a few nearby hotels. Or, in this case, just one.
In an alley off a sidestreet I saw a sign with the Chinese characters for guesthouse. I popped in and was shown around the place by a Buddhist monk. It was nice enough, the price was right, we had a room.
We dropped our bags and went out for a stroll around Labrang Monastery. It was undergoing quite a bit of construction. The very large parking lot they'd been building in 2012 was, unsurprisingly complete, and now it seemed the boons of tourism were being used to add new monastic accommodation, new temples and to pretty up the existing ones. Several of the galleries of prayer wheels around the exterior of the monastery were being replaced from scratch (intriguingly, they're put up, then painted in situ, which really doesn't seem like the most efficient way of doing it).
We walked the whole inner Kora, the pligrim's circuit around the wall of Labrang. The monastery had plenty of visitors, many looking like they were from out of town. But somewhat surprisingly, most of them looked Tibetan. Perhaps it was still to early in the year and too far away from the holidays for the big Chinese tour groups?
After the Kora, we popped back into town to pick up a large round of bread and a big (probably a kg?) tub of yak yogurt. Thus provisioned, we returned to a spot we'd seen on our Kora, a hillside across the river that overlooked the monastery and looked ideal for a picnic (on our last visit to Xiahe, the nearest bridge was probably 1-2km downstream, so the hill wasn't much visited back then.)
It was a great picnic spot and we spent a couple of hours sitting, eating and reading in the warm, high altitude (3000m asl) sun.
After the picnic we figured we ought to take advantage of the beautiful weather and decided to walk the outer kora as well. It leaves from the Tibetan part of town (on the opposite side of the monastery from the Chinese town) and climbs up high above the north side of the temples and dormatories. On this walk, every single other person (and there were dozens) was Tibetan. Since 2012 they'd installed some fences to keep walkers away from precipitous edges (and from the best views of the monastery) but these were pretty easily climbed over/under/through as many people seemed to do.
Back at our guesthouse we ran into a bit of trouble. Two young women were sitting in the office when we came in, and asked for our ID cards so they could register us. Our Chinese ID cards. The forms they had weren't set up for foreign passports, and my best efforts to use the app on my phone to translate the forms and fill them in led to pretty mediocre results.
In the end they just said that I'd done enough (really not very much) and left it at that. But I was still a bit worried. They'd been super nice and I wanted to make sure they didn't get into trouble. Fortunately, the night before I'd been reading a blog post about the computer system for registering guests (foreign and Chinese) that all Chinese hotels should have or be getting. It listed all of the fields needed to register a foreigner, and gave the Chinese characters for all of the drop-down box responses (i.e. the ones that weren't in English). So I labouriously copied out the characters for each field and the data for both Sarah and I. If you're not used to writing in Chinese, even copying it can take a loooong time. But when I was done I felt much better (and like I'd really accomplished something!)
The next morning, June 3, it sounded like there was rain falling on the covered courtyard outside our room. And there was. Just. The hillsides surrounding Xiahe were covered in snow and soon it began falling on the town itself.
This left us looking for more indoorish activities for the morning at least. We managed okay. Buying bus tickets for the following morning. Eating some hand pulled Niu Rou Mian (we were in Gansu again, and if I'd thought they were good on a sunny day in Lanzhou, they were an order of magnitude better at 3000m when it was snowing outside.)
We also did some shopping, checking out a small street full of Tibetan silversmiths to get Sarah a silver and coral ring.
By this time the snow had stopped and even the rain had slowed down, so we set out for a look around the monastery proper. This was a bit challenging as most of the buildings (even the ones you didn't need to be on a tour to visit) were closed.
We found out why when our wanderings took us to the gate of a walled parklike area where people were streaming in. After making sure it was okay to enter, we joined the crowd of lay Buddhists who in turn surrounded large groups of young monks. The older monks were already under a large tentlike structure in the middle. The groups of younger ones took turns chanting and cheering and high fiving one another into the tent. It sounded like nothing more than a high school assembly or pep rally.
Soon after the actual religious service began. We couldn't understand any of it, and could see only the tiniest bits so we took our leave at this point.
On our way home we passed Bantha, a very woolly goat that hung around on the corner of our hotel's street, and who became one of Sarah's favourite things about Xiahe.
The next morning was cool but sunny as we hit the road for another beautiful drive through the Tibetan plateau.
There were fewer jagged peaks near the road, but huge expanses of grasslands with snow covered mountains on the horizon. And of course lots of yaks.
The road had been recently upgraded, so the journey took only about 2.5 hours, putting us in to the town (village really... It's permanent population is under 7000) of Langmusi at around 11:00.
From the descriptions I'd read, I kind of expected Langmusi to be a quaint little village, just beginning to develop a tourism industry. It may have been.this about five years previous, but now the main street had been repaved and was lined almost top to bottom with hotels and restaurants.
Between this and ourn complete failure to find even the start of a trail to the top of the red sandstone cliffs overlooking the town, our relationship with Langmusi was off to a poor start.
We headed back to our hotel following this failure and Sarah had a rest there while I climbed up an almost equally high hill overlooking the town. The views were great, the thunderstorm that appeared in the near distance while I was climbing stayed away and we had a very tasty and only slightly expensive dinner at the restaurant next to our hotel, with mom the chef sending her son out to buy fresh ingredients after we'd ordered. It was all uphill (in the sense of getting better, not being difficult) from here.
The rest of our time in Langmusi was spent going for walks/hikes/ tramps in the surrounding hills and valleys.
Day one took us through the Kerti Gompa/Ge'ergai Si (Tibetan/Chinese) monastery. We had to buy a ticket for the monastery to get to the Namo Gorge behind it, but I really didn't mind as it was an old, pretty place and probably the friendliest monastery we'd visited on this trip. Some of the younger monks had great fun talking with us and touching my beard just to see what it felt like. They also allowed photos inside one of their main halls, which was a rarity at Tibetan monasteries (admittedly, it was the new, slightly gaudy one, but still...)
In behind, the gorge was absolutely beautiful. At first it was narrow, rocky, full of prayer flags and caves sacred to the monks (including Langmu [fairy] cave, or which the town was named).
After about forty minutes of walking and rock hopping it opened up to reveal the towering, often snow capped mountains all around.
We took a fork in the valley and stopped for a picnic lunch at another open meadow. Sarah sat down for a read as I carried on up and found a saddle over to the next fork of the valley and walked back down to her making a loop. On the way up I met a family of wild pigs which, with the deer I'd seen the previous afternoon made this probably my best wildlife spot in China.
The route down was steep, but had just the right amount and thickness of vegetation so that it was thin enough to get through, but thick enough that you couldn't go much of anywhere if you slipped or fell.
Dinner was a nice (if, again, slightly expensive Yunnanese meal.)
Next morning we headed out of town on a small road towards the source of the White Dragon River that runs through town. On our way out we acquired Slobbo, a very friendly, drooly (mostly) golden retriever who seemed very well looked after by the townsfolk, even though he didn't seem to belong to anyone in particular.
He'd keep running off, chasing birds or jumping in ponds or the river, and at one point it seemed as though a shepherd on the other side of the river fired a (warning, hopefully) shot at him before he got too close to the flock.
Not too long after this we stopped for another nice picnic lunch, but decided not to carry on past more livestock, as Slobbo wouldn't stop following us and we didn't want to end up with him getting shot by some overcautious herdsman.
Back in town we managed to sneak into our hotel room without Slobbo following us, but when we opened up the ground floor window, up his head popped, looking at us and panting through the security bars. An hour or two later when I decided to have one more crack at climbing the red sandstone plateau, he was at my b side again the moment I left the front door. And still at my side when we were accosted by three wild dogs outside of town. I'm still not sure if they were growling at or charging down the hill towards me or him, nor if he was protecting me by his presence, or if I was protecting him by holding on to baseball-sized rocks and occasionally pretending to throw them at the other dogs if they got too close as we slowly walked back to the edge of town.
The next morning it was two more bus trips, first to the town of Zoige, then after a quick breakfast of noodles, a change of bus to the city of Songpan. During this journey we reached our highest point on the trip, 3840m, and saw a never-ending parade of yaks. Sarah was delighted!
Songpan is the gateway to Jiuzhaigou National Park. It's supposed to be pretty impressive, but was severely damaged by an earthquake in 2017. So entry tickets are limited and all guests must take the same standard bus trip through the park. And they cost about as much as an annual pass for all of the US National Parks. So we decided to give it a miss and content ourselves with the immediate surroundings of the town.
The central part of Songpan had a lot of the Disneyfied Old Town thing that is common in China going on. Rebuilt city walls (though with pretty cool looking original Ming dynasty gate) and dandied up faux-old souvenir and speciality food stores. But it also had some cool un-redeveloped alleys and marketplaces and some great restaurants including the one where we had a couple of spectacular Sichuanese meals during our stay.
And the area around town was fabulous. The last remains of the old city walls and the western gate tower above the Guanyin temple and the city. I climbed straight up the hillside (I was still pretty puffed despite having been above 2500m for ten days) and back down the much gentler walkway.
And Sarah and I took a fabulous walk up and over the other side of the valley to the next one over.
With 5km and ~400m almost every hint of tourist development vanished. Just yaks, goats and horses, traditional Qiang minority extended family houses/compounds, and a rarely visited Buddhist monastery. Plus, of course, absolutely stunning views of the snow capped peaks and the green valley that (but for the monastery and water powered prayer wheels) looked just like it belonged in the Swiss or Austrian Alps. Indeed, this walk over to the next valley was one of my favourite parts of the trip so far. I almost wished that we had more time and that my Chinese (or Tibetan!) was better so In could spend a week or two just walking from one valley/village to the next through this lovely part of China.
Songpan was our final high altitude stop. Our 07:00 bus just went down, down and down though narrow but incredibly deep valleys on its way to Chengdu, Sichuan's capital. We saw a few final "show yaks" at roadside restaurants. And after a few hours on good but steep and windy roads, the motorway began. It seemed like it was almost half bridges and tunnels, some up to 8km long, and plenty of them over 5km, and all through areas that had twice in the past decade been devastated by major earthquakes (Wenchuan, where the motorway began was the epicentre of the 2008 earthquake which killed almost 90,000 people).
But it was all of this development that took us down over 2500m in about four hour of bus travel, an deposited us in warm and sunny Chengdu by 13:00.
