Glaciers, temples and hot springs! Oh my!

Pictures will be the only way to recount this trip fairly. Suffice it to say I've never truly seen mountains before now. Also, I'm going to have to do this in parts if I want to keep any readers by the end.

For July 12 and 13

Friday July 12, began with finals for Chinese and history. I took my history exam early so we could catch our flight at 3:45 pm. I only packed one book bag full of thins a true survivor might need. In it I included a recently purchased cute little pocket
knife to fend off tigers (they're in Tibet, right?), tweezers (a website told me they were useful to pull out bee stingers), a flashlight, poncho (which turned out to one of those Asian ones designed to cover your arms when riding your bike through gridlock traffic in the rain--you'll have to see it to believe it), peanuts, a Chinese dictionary, and dirty clothes (hey, what's the point of clean ones?). Clearly, I was ready to tackle the world. Several people had told me to leave valuables, like jewelry, at home. Not wanting to have my fingers chopped of Gollum-style, I followed this advice. But I took it to a higher level. I also didn't bring my passport. See, I thought a copy of the important parts would be enough. But it wasn't. So Will had to jump in a cab with instructions to the driver to drive like a bat out of hell to get me my passport in time. (Later, he informed me the driver called me a dumb bitch. It happens.) Luckily, Mo and I had arrived early-ish, but it was going to be close and he (understandably so) informed me he would leave me Casablanca style with no qualms. He had already checked his bags when we discovered my little hiccup of a problem. Will did end up arriving with the passport just when Mo's ultimatum (3:15 pm) came. Saved! As I was making my way back toward the airport brandishing my passport, I realized I had handed my plane ticket to Will with a wad of cash to pay for his cab ride. Back I ran screaming his name like a cat in heat and got it from him before he caught another cab. Upon relaying this story to Mo, he told me he would have given up on me on the spot. We ran like crazy to the terminal only to find the flight was delayed by an hour. We killed time by doing what one can ONLY do in an airport--eat and balk at overpriced crap. As I was walking from store to store, a man came up to me and handed me my plane ticket. Apparently it had fallen out of my pocket. Perhaps it is good that I am not religious because at this point, all signs seemed to point that I was not destined to be on this flight. Episodes of LOST began to flash through my mind. Oh, at one point I also had two cute little girls teach me a game they were playing that turned out to be a punked-up version of paper-rock-scissors. But make it we did and we arrived at Kunming airport at about 8:30 pm. This was a problem though. Our transfer flight to Zhongdian was at 9 pm and Mo still had to pick up his bag. I ran ahead to find which line I was supposed to be in for my flight and finally gave up and begged the help of an info lady. She was a godsend and ran around with me giving me VIP treatment a la cutting lines to make it to my terminal. She asked if I was alone and a look of "Well, he's fucked" crossed her face when I told her no. Once I safely made it to the terminal, I called Mo for real-time updates (man I love being able to drop that in a sentence) on where he was. He said he was having problems with security since the counters to check bags close 30 min before the flight. He ended up losing his (real) knife and lots of water. They gave me a slip I could turn in to pick up mine later. By this point, a worried Chinese couple who spoke English came over to me and told me not to worry and that I was indeed in the right terminal, the plane hadn't left yet, and we'll stay with you and wait until your friend arrives. Added incentive here is that they are with extended family, and if I'm sure of one thing, the loyalty the elders would have would damn well keep that plane grounded. Mo came, we got on, and that concludes the transportation part of this saga.

I would like to take this time to note that despite my telling you all I was going to Tibet, I was mistaken. I know, hard to believe. Or maybe not. Some of you know my track record with geography. And lacking sense of direction. By Tibet, what I really meant was the northwestern Yunnan Province in southwest China (thanks Wikipedia). In all fairness though, Zhongdian, re-named Shangri-la by the Chinese gov't, is considered part of the Tibetan cultural region. Now, had I taken the time to apply for a permission slip thingy to get in to Tibet, I totally would have gone. But I have no regrets and fake Tibet, as I shall hereby term it, was awesome!

I made friends with the couple and asked them for advice on where to go in Zhongdian since they were on a real tour. Mo and I ended up not doing anything they were doing (it would have been rushed and super touristy) but we did manage to catch a free ride on their bus to Old Town in Zhongdian. Mo and I found a hostel, made friends with the charming owner, Becky, got recommendations on trips we could make in the amount of time we had. She also told us what buses in town could take us to Buddhist temples (super easy since there were only three to choose from). Then we settled down in what was, for me, my very first hostel bed. It was quite chilly. I can't quite remember what elevation we were at but it was enough to get us complimentary altitude sickness pillz on our second flight. So concludes Friday.

Saturday July 13 we got up early to make it to the bus station to buy tickets since it gets pretty competitive for seats during this season. There were two options we were flip-flopping over on what to do. Hike to a glacier and see some temples, all of
which we figured would be somewhat touristy. Or get a guide and hike into a mountain to the South. I wanted to see glacier since I hadn't seen one before and wanted the rights to casually drop it at a dinner party. Mo was leaning toward the mountain because it would be less touristy. We contemplated doing both as well, but we would have had to leave for the glacier RIGHT THEN, skipping some towns. I wasn't prepared to do that since I had brought no warm clothes on this trip (Beijing is hot as balls, thank you very much). I also needed to find a bank to play the money game again. We split off to think about it and I went in search for a bank. My phone didn't work so I couldn't contact Mo again and went to the station by myself and decided to by the second earliest bus out to Deqin for the glacier. I randomly ran into Mo later in Noah's Cafe, a cute little joint with some Western food a girl on our NU trip had recommended to us earlier. He informed me he had gone back to buy the same exact ticket and the trip was on! We met some interesting people in Noah's, talking with whomever we felt like talking to, and I got some pages on "Rainbow Gatherings" from this hippie chick from Spain. No, it has nothing to do with gay rights. Look it up yourself. Mo and I decided to explore Zhongdian and caught bus #3 out to the temple nearest our town. It was big, it was old, it was pretty, and it was very sadly commercialized to the point of being offensive. Mo was especially pissed, being someone who takes religion very seriously (he's Muslim). The monks walked around with cellphones and Rolex watches that blinded our poor eyes in the sun. You could pretty much roam wherever you wanted in this temple and one of my curious ventures brought me to a main dining hall right when a meal was being served. This was really cool. We went in and everyone one was sitting indian-style in row after row of floor cushions. Down the row in the middle of the room, the men were banging drums that were on top of poles (think giant lollipops) as a monk was walking through singing/chanting. Little boy monks were running about pouring soup in bowls while some of the sitting monks took out pouches and put some sort of powder in their soup. I felt wrong being there, watching this like it was a performance, and also felt conscious that I was the only one with another X chromosome in the whole place. Oh, at one point during the visit (this was in another part of the temple) I wrote down on a slip of paper a wish and put it under one of the many candles and a monk came over and prayed for me for it to come true. Not telling what it was for, but just in case it comes true, Mom, start preparing a stall that could possibly hold a pony, okay? Overall, I'm glad I went because it was very pretty and held a lot of history. It's inspired me to look into books on Tibetan culture and Buddhism when I return. The day was still young and we still had hot springs to look into. Mo, bless him, had done a little more research on the region and gathered from Becky that there was another temple, much less touristy, on the way to the springs. We got a private taxi for the rest of the day to take us to both. Our driver let another guy hop in for the company and off we went. The road leading to the second temple was horrendous and my behind was numb from all the bumping a good five minutes into it. At one point we had to stop and wait for them to pave a part of it! And by wait, I mean follow on the bumper the bulldozers who are "flattening" part of a mound of rocky dirt (in the middle of the road) that could *maybe* pass for gravel. The temple truly was tucked away in this village and we saw no other tourists the entire time. We saw no other people around this temple except for the monk himself. We were informed his understudy (there are only two people in this temple ever) was asleep. Our drivers prayed and then took us around showing us the rituals and traditions. Their complete lack of English skills and our complete lack of Chinese surprisingly didn't prove to be that big of a barrier. I gathered it is important to go clockwise around a temple and that doing things in multiples of three is very important. Our drivers even donated a dollar for all of us so we could all pray. Mo was a little weirded out praying for a different god, but I loved it. They had me light three incense sticks (and no, I could not take them for myself) and stick them in a little pot. Then they had us take a white sash and tuck it over a rope hidden beneath hundreds of other white sashes, in front of statues of Buddha or some colorful gods. Then they dipped a stick with what looked like shorter pieces of incense tied on the end of it, in a bowl of water and put it in our hand. We were supposed to take a sip of whatever water fell from the end of the stick onto our hand and then wipe the remaining water over our hair. I'm finding this very hard to describe, so I apologize. As we exited the room, we passed a huge pile of what looked like cheese or butter, in sacks or just out in the open. I gathered it was yak butter and they said it was used to make the wax in the millions of little candle goblets around the place. We went into another room and spun (three times, of course)this huge apparatus that I can only describe as an inverted rolling pin minus the handles. Then we left the temple and walked around the outside
passing thousands of little multi-colored pieces of cloth with Buddhist scripture? on it, strung up on anything that could possibly hold a place to tie it. It was the most beautiful thing I've seen. Erik, it was so peaceful, you would have loved it. There were kilns where pine branches were burned in the morning and lots of little piles of rocks, Mo later termed "Chinese-style Jinga." We finally concluded the informal tour by going down stairs, turning mini-rolling pins as we went by. I can safely say that temple was one of my favorite parts of the trip. The second fave part would be having to push our van "Little Miss
Sunshine"-style out of the "gravel" on our return trip since construction on the road, of course, was not yet finished, and our fearless and persistent drivers tried to forge the mound too soon. It's all good though. Everyone was in good spirits. And I think the workers were amused by me getting out of the van before it got stuck and taking a man's hoe from him to have a go at scraping mud off the side of the road. Hey, I was bored and now I can truthfully say my sweat is part of some road in fake Tibet.

From the temple we went on the the hot springs which were quite unimpressive. Hippie lady from Spain had warned us the outside springs looked like sewage water, so Mo championed for a private room. It was a glorified hot tub, but enjoyable nonetheless. I don't think I'll ever be interested in spending money on it again. Oh, by this time I had developed a splitting headache that I believe to have been a mix of altitude sickness and lack of food. Our drivers had really taken a liking to us, so instead of taking us back home, they drove us a little past Zhongdian so we could take pictures with the beautiful rolling mountains in the background. Then they made me a flower crown with the local purple wildflowers. Very nice of the fellows. Finally, exhausted from a full day of seeing things, Mo and I crashed. We had a six-hour bus ride to Deqin in the morning, after all.