Tiantang Si, or Tiantang Temple was a tiny town grown up around a large Tibetan temple nestled in a mountain valley separating Gansu and Qinghai Provinces. The day after having climbed Maya Snow Mountain, we took a bus up to the temple, a three hour journey up dirt roads. The temple glimmered atop the town, …
While we were sweating our way up Maya Snow Mountain, the clatter of the baahing sheep enveloping us as a herd passed by, I asked our Tibetan friend, “Other than herd animals, are there any wild animals up here?” “Oh, yes. They have bears, wolves and a kind of leopard. In fact, just a few …
If you haven’t already checked out Part I or Part II of this series, take a look at them before reading this post. In the 1990’s, our Tibetan friend had once done the hike we were doing, though it was different. Back then, they had travelled on foot from their village for two days. They …
Continue reading ‘Hike up Maya Snow Mountain – Tibetan Gansu Part III’ »
Note: If you haven’t already read the post about Huazangsi, click here. We were moving up out of the city and on the mountain road by 5:45. Though the sun had not yet risen, light illuminated the brown, scrub-less hills. The air had not quite dropped to freezing where we were, but, in the mountains, …
Continue reading ‘Approach up Maya Snow Mountain – Tibetan Gansu Part II’ »
The invitation came unexpectedly. An old friend on Facebook saw that the post I put up on our Silk Road Hitchhiking project. She contacted me in a message, telling me that a friend of hers was in Huazangsi, in Tianzhu County, just along the Silk Road in the Gansu Corridor, and she and an Australian …
Continue reading ‘Tibetans along the Silk Road – Tibetan Gansu Part I’ »
We were leaving Lanzhou trying to make an appointment in Huazangsi, an hour and a half northwest along the Gansu Corridor. Lanzhou is a dump of a city in country known for its dumps. It is an industrial wasteland of two million people. This provincial capital is surrounded by desert mountains, and, in the winter, …
Continue reading ‘Red Flags and Lemonade – Failure and Success in Hitchhiking’ »
One thing I love about living in China: trying to decipher the meaning of the English language t-shirts. I have always tried to figure out what the people who buy shirts like this see in them. Whatever it is, I love it because it is hilarious. Somebody needed to say it.
I thought I was imagining things. We were just about finished with a temple dedicated to Fuxi when I saw a score of oldish people hustling into the temple, orange sashes tied around their waist, all speaking Taiwanese, a language related to Mandarin about as closely as French is to Portuguese. I was only able …
After getting a ride back from Maijishan, Galen and I went to the temple dedicated to Fuxi. Fuxi is an ancient Chinese god/mythical ancestor who was the first at a lot of things in Chinese mythology. According to Chinese legends, Fuxi and his wife/sister, Nuwa, created all humans after a flood washed everyone else away. …
One of the reasons we chose to try to hitchhike our way across China is because we wanted to meet people and show folks back home the real China, in all its weird variety. When we hitched a ride from Anna, the spazzy girl I mentioned in the previous post, she struck us as one …