The edge of the Himalayas by Liesl Pfeffer

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Somewhere on the edge of the Himalayas
Sichuan Province, China
June 2018

Right now the name of these mountains and lakes escapes me. Three Sisters? Four Sisters? Our guide dropped us here to eat the lunch of bread, momos and fruit that we’d bought at the market in the morning. A storm rolled in as we finished eating and we returned to the car across wet fields, leaping small streams, drenched in our rain coats.

West of Litang by Liesl Pfeffer

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West of Litang
Sichuan Province, China
June 2018

In Litang, a guide drove us and a German couple to see the countryside west of the town. We met some nomadic shepherds who were resting in the grasslands beside the highway, eating their lunch in a large circle. The journey ended in a small village at dusk where we saw yaks grazing in the fields.

Litang by Liesl Pfeffer

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Litang
Sichuan Province, China
June 2018

The air and the light here at +4,000 metres felt so different to anywhere I’ve ever been. It’s cold and bright and sunny and open. Litang is magic. People are dressed so beautifully, both the nomads in town for the market and the locals who live there. I just walked around in a daze. The nomad men wear big hats, cream coloured belted robes over their shirts and trousers and tall black boots and sit astride their motorcycles, some offering baskets of caterpillar fungus for sale. Everyone is gorgeous, with cheeks worn red from the wind and sun. There are yaks walking the streets and being grazed in the hills around the monastery. The city is situated in grasslands surrounded by mountains. We met some school kids who were learning English in school, and they invited us to come to their school graduation the next day. They photographed us like we were celebrities and we added them all on WeChat to share photos and emojis. The last photo here is a sky burial site, a funeral practice where the body is placed on a mountaintop, exposed to the elements to decompose and to be eaten by vultures.

Xiangcheng to Litang by Liesl Pfeffer

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Xiangcheng to Litang
Sichuan Province, China
June 2018

The drive between Xiangcheng and Litang went through high mountain peaks, so despite it being summertime there was snow on the ground. We were certainly over 4,000 metres at times. There was a monk dressed in burgundy robes sitting next to me on the bus and we leaned together excitedly over the Compass app on my iphone, which has a barometer that shows elevation.

Bsampeling Monastery by Liesl Pfeffer

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Bsampeling Monastery
Xiangcheng
Sichuan Province, China
June 2018

Despite all these signs of habitation, my memory of this monastery is of extreme quiet and barely another soul to be seen. The monks must have been inside or in other structures. (There were certainly no other tourists on this day). The joyful colours and patterns of the decorations made my heart so full.

Xiangcheng by Liesl Pfeffer

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Xiangcheng
Sichuan Province, China
June 2018

Tibetans have really cool motorcycles, no? Xiangcheng, elevation 3,200 metres, is a small and necessary overnight stop on the bus route between Litang and Shangri-La. I’m so glad it is, because it’s a special, quiet, beautiful place in the mountains, overlooking grassy fields, not really a destination in itself so it has a strange frontier feeling. We didn’t have any accommodation booked and we spent a very long time walking up and down steep streets trying to find a place to stay. The elevation made my backpack feel twice as heavy and I had to stop to rest a few times.

Shangri-la by Liesl Pfeffer

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Shangri-La
Yunnan Province, China
June 2018

Shangri-La was our last stop in Yunnan province, and the beginning of our travels through the culturally Tibetan part of China. It was also the beginning of traveling at high elevations (3,160 m). (We would be getting to a higher elevation with every stop on our way to Litang and Tagong in Sichuan and we were making our way slowly and in steps, to avoid high altitude headaches and such). Shangri-La is where Yunnan, Sichuan and Tibet meet. The drive into Shangri-La was through green grasslands surrounded by grey mountains on a cloudy day. We saw yaks for the first time on that drive, and the distinctive and colourful architecture of Tibetan farmhouses. That landscape is incredibly beautiful but I didn’t get any pictures. There are no trains in this part of China so we were on long distance buses and as we got closer to Shangri-La I really began to feel far from the world I knew and so so happy about it.

At dusk in Shangri-La, and in many of the towns in this part of China that we visited, people dance choreographed dances in a large circle in the public squares to extremely loud music blasted out of portable speakers. As a foreigner it’s a very joyful thing to watch. Everyone knows all the moves, knows the songs.

Tiger Leaping Gorge by Liesl Pfeffer

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Tiger Leaping Gorge
Yunnan Province, China
June 2018

At a maximum depth of nearly 4,000 metres this is one of the deepest canyons in the world. We came here because there’s a two-day hike along the top of the canyon which we read about in our guidebook. I was really scared of doing this hike, and I spent hours leading up to the arrival in Qiaotou reading the few English-language blog posts I could find when I used my VPN on my phone to google things. I read them over and over, trying to judge how scary it would be. It’s famously steep and slippery in the rain, and there’s a section that is called the 28 bends that is just uphill switchbacks for hours. I kind of pretended to myself in the lead up to arriving in the town where the hike begins, that I was game to do this hike, because I knew how much Nico wanted to do it. But over breakfast on the day of the hike I cried into my oatmeal (not joking) and said I really didn’t want to do it. My toes and heels were covered in blisters from walking in the rain in Dali and I was scared. I hate heights, a lot a lot. So Nico set off to do the hike, and I agreed to find my way to the endpoint of the hike. I walked the low road for a while, I hitchhiked the next part, and then I got picked up by the son of the people who ran the guest house at the end of the hiking trail. I got to enjoy a glorious two days in that guest house eating delicious home cooked meals and drinking beer and reading and meeting other travelers and looking at the mountains and the canyon and the Jinsha river and drawing. Knowing I wasn’t hiking just made it even sweeter.

Dali by Liesl Pfeffer

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Dali
Yunnan Province, China
June 2018

It rained the entire time we were in pretty Dali, which I think was maybe three or four days but it’s all blurred together in my mind into one endless, soggy experience of clothes never drying, sitting inside steaming buses, walking walking walking in the rain and getting blisters from wet socks inside my only pair of very wet shoes. Dali is a big backpacker chill destination for domestic tourists, and it’s full of teens and twenty-somethings with (fake) flowers in their hair and lots of shops selling drums and rose petal cakes and rose yogurt (both of these are really delicious). The old town is beautiful, but there is a commercial-hippie vibe that feels very manufactured. I think I’d have liked it about a hundred times more if it wasn’t endlessly raining, so I don’t want to be unfair.