Myself and Martijn (the Dutch fellow) had a wander around the town, and climbed a mountain at the back of the towns huge monastery. Litang is one of the highest towns in the world at 4100m and many rests were needed due to the lack of oxygen. Martijn got altitude sickness so I climbed the last 100 metres or so, on my own. I was well chuffed to have got to the top. Flying around the mountains were huge Crows and Vultures which have a good balanced diet of humans and more humans. The people in this area believe that once the body dies it is worthless and they don’t get all sentimental about their relatives corpses. The bodies get taken to the top of the mountain and a monk opens out the ribs to let the birds eat out the organs and once that is all devoured the bones get cracked to allow them to eat the marrow. Unfortunately no-one was having a funeral when I was there; it would have been fascinating to see. I like this tradition. We take so much out of the food chain during our lives; it’s good to give something back when you’re dead. Getting buried or cremated is such a waste of protein. When I die, I want to get made into pig feed and have a nice wee picture on the bag, a bit like the KFC logo but with me on it and pig feed written in bold capitals.
Two little piggies
In the evening Longlife took Mimi the Japanese girl and myself to one of Litang’s two nightclubs. Everyone stands in a big circle moving in a style very similar to line dancing to Traditional Tibetan music with techno drum beats and the occasional Indian song. The T.V plays Bollywood films in the background as do many Tibetan restaurants, The Tibetan people seem to affiliate themselves more with Indian culture than Chinese culture. Myself and Mimi got invited into a private booth where we got free drinks and I served as a translator for all the single men who wanted to tell Mimi how pretty she was. They don’t waste time in talking about marriage. Some of them were carrying big swords that were razor sharp. Longlife says it is normal for young men to protect themselves in this way. Needless to say, I wasn’t brave enough to try chatting up the locals even though the girls that weren’t wearing face masks were very attractive. I got involved in the dancing instead and managed to learn some of the easier repertoires. With the air being so thin and the light pollution being more or less non existant, the stars were unbelievably bright on the walk home. Were it not -11 degrees I would have watched them longer.
Paranoid about the threat of snow I went with Mimi and Martijn the following day to Daocheng. That’s only 1 days travel from the Tibetan Plateau to warmer climates so the chances of getting stuck in ice and snow for months at a time was drastically reduced. Whole towns and cities in the plateau are pretty much isolated for months. Daocheng is thoroughly not very special. Were it not for the evening games of poker using sesame seeds as chips I would have been pretty bored.
There are supposed to be daily busses from Daocheng to Shangri-La in Yunnan province but a Japanese fellow named Shuzi had been waiting for two days and we were told at the bus station that we’d have to return daily to the bus station to check if a bus was coming and we’d have to wait a minimum of two days. Along with a Swiss girl and two Chinese we hired a 7-seater mini bus. It was a 10 hour very bumpy journey across unpaved mountain roads. I had diarrhoea 3 times before the minibus left and contemplated waiting a few days for the bus but thought about Aarons epic touching the void quote. I went to the toilet 9 times in total that day. I’m glad I went because I later met an English girl who was supposed to meet her friend in Shangri-La but she was stuck in the Tibetan Plateau due to snow and ice on the roads. If we had been in Daocheng one day more we’d have been stuck as well. Not many people can claim to have squatted on the side of a 4000m mountain pass in late November; I’ll be putting that on my C.V too.
Although Shangri-La is not exactly tropical, it is much warmer than where I have come from. It has felt strange being in Shangri-La, I’m used to being alone not in a big group. It’s good to have company and sharing 5 dishes between 7 is a lot more interesting than eating alone. I got given a proxy by Martijn so I’ve bypassed Chinas stringent internet laws and updated my blog and I’ve been reading my Khaled Hosseini novel and have decided that Afghanistan has replaced Nepal or Iran as the country I most want to visit in Asia. I’ve been researching on visas, places to go and which are the safest border crossing. Maybe that should be reworded to least dangerous border crossings? I don’t think I’m a reckless person and if I get to Pakistan and conclude it isn’t safe I’ll go just go through Southern Pakistan to Iran. Maybe I’m naïve but I think the most dangerous place would be getting from the mountainous areas on the Pakistan border into Afghanistan. So long as I stay away from Helmand and Kandahar, Afghanistan should be relatively safe, certainly in comparison to the tribal zones in Pakistan. I’ll learn some Pashto before I go and grow a decent beard.
The old town of Shangri-La isn’t very appealing to me. It has 3 names, a Chinese one (Zhongdian), a Tibetan one (Diqing) and one that they created to attract tourists. They claimed Zhongdian was the paradise named Shangri-La in some book that inspired a hotel chain. I can imagine that Shangri-La is nearly as bad as Fenghuang during warmer times of year but it is relatively quiet in Late November. The locals far outnumber the tourists, not that I’m justified in complaining when there are lots of tourists. By the sounds of it, Lijiang, my next port of call is far worse than Fenghuang regarding crowds of inconsiderate tourists.
The locals dance every night in the square to the same line dancing moves that were in the nightclub in Litang. It was really nice seeing a young man with very fashionable modern clothes doing the same moves as the woman next to him who was old enough to be his granny. You just don’t get that kind of cultural connection between young and old in the western world.
On my last night in Shangri-La/Zhongdian/Diqing they played the DVD of Into the Wild. It’s a fascinating story of a young American who donated all his money to charity living a nomadic lifestyle on peanuts before going to Alaska where he died of starvation and from eating poisonous species of plants. I felt a bit embarrassed about what I had named my blog. He had called himself Supertramp and I could see a lot of similarities between the lifestyle he chose to live and the lifestyle I aspired to live and having reflected on my 4 and a half months on the road feel a bit embarrassed about how easy I’ve made it for myself. I acknowledge that sciatica played a part but it’s no longer relevant and I haven’t made many changes to my lifestyle since I’ve been unaffected by it. I’m looking forward to getting a bike in Dali and living a less planned; less predictable and less wasteful life. Even though I’ pretty good with the language considering I’ve only been in China for 3 months and have got more off the beaten track than most people I've met, I feel like I’ve wasted a lot of time and opportunities. I’m off to Lijiang then Dali. My time In Tibetan culture has been fascinating but brief. I’d love to return in warmer times but I’m glad to be heading south to lower altitudes. I am looking forward to some change.
