Xiahe: outer kora

The main kora is easy to follow: prayer wheels on the southern half, an obvious and well-populated path to the northern half. But Lonely Planet mentioned a longer route, walking along a road further west of the main kora’s circle, uphill to a nunnery and turning left along a path up one of the hills surrounding the town.

I found the nunnery – along the main road, a young nun in red robes shook my hand as she passed me – almost empty, besides two young nuns repeatedly prostrating themselves to the side of the closed door. They wear hand protectors when they do this, quite sensibly to avoid slowly skinning their palms, but it makes it look like they’re trying very hard to clean a small patch of floor.

The front of the nunnery’s main building:

From the small compound there’s no path leading “to the left”, as Lonely Planet suggests. I walked around the main building and, behind it, found a sheer wall of rock. So I left the compound and noticed a narrow path continuing uphill to the left, alongside a stinking channel used, evidently, as a toilet, and I saw a nun walking up it. A-ha! I walked up – it didn’t take many steps at ~3,000m elevation before I got out of breath – and before long stood in front of the doorway to someone’s house.

I backtracked. The wider part of the dirt road to the nunnery forked, so I took the left fork instead of the right (which had led to the nunnery). I could see the hill above, but no obvious paths up it. I was walking along a road in the Tibetan part of the town, surrounded by houses, just aiming up and for the town’s end.

Further along this road, it forked, downhill to a woman laying out some kind of plant to dry while her very well-fed cat looked on, grooming; I took the uphill path, and alongside one of the houses I noticed a narrow trail. I followed it. It took me up behind the houses, along the lower curve of a hill, until I looked up and saw a spire-like shape at the hilltop: the promised prayer flags.

There was no one path up the hill. Many narrow trails wound up its side. I took one that led me on a longer way round, away from the prayer flags at first.

Once I got to this part, I stopped seeing plastic bottles, confectionery wrappers and pill packets sporadically discarded among the plants – replaced by white squares of paper, a tangle of white fabric over a rock and tree, and these small pyramid-shapes tucked under jutting rocks:

Then I got to the prayer flags, strung between a pole and a far taller series of wooden shafts, beside the ruins of a hermitage: earth-coloured walls overgrown with what looked exactly like Mongolian stinging nettles. So I refrained climbing over them. Anyway, the prayer flags and the view behind them were thoroughly captivating.

Colours! Bright, bright colours!

And the ground around here was covered in the white squares of paper, like snow.

I walked along the ridge-top away from the prayer flags, passing a cairn covered in white fabric, admiring more views of the town below, until the path – from the prayer flags on there was a single path, walked by no one except me and two Tibetan women – went downhill back into Xiahe.