Xiahe: main kora, Labrang Monastery

After a week spent backtracking from Kashgar and trying to find a PSB willing to extend my visa, I decided to go to Xiahe. Somewhere new! Somewhere with a Tibetan monastery and culture, in Gansu province, which requires no permit or tour. A week of the above as well as the various stresses of travelling in China was doing some unpleasant things to my mental state (when you’re writing in your travel journal “I feel like I’m going crazy” instead of “X was awesome”… yeah…), so this town was much-needed.

Admittedly, first impressions weren’t great: a street torn up by roadworks, buildings covered in Chinese, a backdrop not particularly different to what I’ve seen before. It’s not Tibet. Once I got over to the western part of the town, though, I left some of that behind.

My first afternoon I walked the main kora (pilgrim path) encircling Labrang Monastery.

The southern section is prayer wheels, in long and far shorter sections, pleasant shelter from the cold rain. Each wheel is spun, or almost each, just a grab of the handle and getting it into motion, not spinning it around a certain number of times. I spun the wheels for about half of the southern section: some stiff, some recently oiled (that’s the source of the black track running down from its underside), some still spinning from the previous person. I got overtaken a lot, by red-robed monks and by lay women who wore robe-jackets folded down at the waist to make a skirt, exposing long-sleeved modern tops, and often had their very long hair in two braids that joined together at the ends, as I ambled, enjoying the absence of thought. It’s a very mind-emptying task, spinning prayer wheels, and surprisingly physical too.

Wonderfully calming, just what I needed.

Along the way are several temples, as well as this golden chorten (Tibetan for stupa):

The northern section of the kora is a dirt path between monastery and hill. Along the way, many people stopped to press their foreheads against certain – worn shiny-black – stones in the walls.

The woman closest to the wall had just done that and, I think because she noticed me with my camera out, starting laughing (in a friendly way) with her friend. The buildings behind are part of Labrang Monastery, which I visited the following morning. Elsewhere on the kora, a little girl kept running ahead while her grandparents (I assume) walked slower and stopped at the black stones – although once they were going to skip a stone and the girl seemed to be telling them off.

There’s a longer kora, up a hill and past prayer flags. I walked that today (slowly on the upward slopes, given the elevation of almost 3,000m), but I’ll save that for another post.

Labrang Monastery:

It’s pretty! Architecture porn for me, really. I tagged along with a Chinese tour group (they only let you enter in groups) and admired what I saw. Gold roofs, chorten, fabric decorations running along the top of several facades, prayer wheels on the roofs, the simple colours of white, black, reddish. The five fabric colours considered sacred in Mongolia are present here, too, though I don’t know if they all have the same meaning; white is the favourite. As in Mongolian temples, the insides of these are decorated with fabric in these five colours, usually brocaded with gold and hung neatly on the walls like long, thin, bright bricks. Like in this sneaky shot I took of a building’s inside from the outside, as photography is forbidden inside:

Inside another building I saw a display including giant animal horns and lots of tall tea-servers. But, back to those functioning as places of worship, as our group approached one building we saw monks removing their boots and entering, wearing yellow hats like a stylised horse’s neck and trimmed mane, which they then removed inside when they knelt of rows of red cushions. (Labrang monastery is one of the six major Tibetan monasteries of the Gelugpa order, or “Yellow Hat sect”, of Tibetan Buddhism.) Some chanted. Some leaned over and chatted to their neighbour. In side-rooms containing golden statues of various Buddhas, smaller groups of monks chanted and struck gongs.

The monks entering:

Outside the monastery, the main street shows the town’s multi-cultural status, containing Tibetans, Chinese and Hui (Muslim Chinese, not the same as the Muslim Uighurs), but inside I got a sense of the Tibetans managing to retain their culture.

(Both kora show this too. Especially as, on both, I saw no tourists, Chinese or other.)

That said, near the monastery you can buy prayer wheels:

I’ve also tried Tibetan food, all of it at Nomad Restaurant (highly recommended! ):
• Tsampa – floor and butter, tastes like lumpy dirt and looks like it too.
• “Nomad curry” – yak meat, potato and onions in a slightly spicy sauce, served with rice, very tasty.
• Momo – meat-filled dumplings, not wildly different to the Chinese and Mongolian varieties, surprisingly filling.
• Chomdi – rice topped with butter, sugar and [things], and I can’t say the butter-sugar topping worked for me.
• Rice with yoghurt, which works quite nicely. The yoghurt by itself is also tasty, although I declined the giant bowl of sugar placed next to it.
• Uh hur – chaotically shaped bread balls, sweet, fried, served marvellously hot.
• A flat, soft kind of bread stuffed with yak meat and a few scraps of vegetable, fried, quite tasty although greasy.

When I left Nomad Restaurant tonight, they gave me a packet of Tibetan playing cards, presumably because I went there 5 times. =D

It’s been good to regain my sense of travel-fun.

(A note on climate: Xiahe’s altitude-induced mostly cold weather went from “this is an entertaining novelty” to “WANT THAILAND” in under 24 hours. I don’t know what the evening temperature is, but when I go out for dinner, I’m wearing jeans and boots, a two-layered t-shirt, a short-sleeved jumper, my thin Mongolian jacket and a scarf and I’m not what I’d describe as “warm”. Not sweating much is nice, I guess – handy, too, as my hostel’s hot water is “solar-powered”, which translates to “you will never, ever enter the shower at the tiny window(s) of hot water, ever, Alex, so it’s wet-wipe baths for you”. I cannot bear the thought of a near-arctic shower with the air temperature here. Direct sunlight at lunchtime/early afternoon is good enough that I like to duck into the shade, so I do get to thaw each day.)