We have arrived at the western most point on our trip: Tagong. The scenery here is beautiful with rolling grasslands at elevations more than 4000m and a backdrop of snow capped mountains with the highest named Yala Shan at 6000m.
Tagong is one of the smallest towns we've stayed in with a population of 8000 people and was the most Tibetan town we had visited. We spent our three days here hiking around the area. You can literally just walk anywhere since we're way above the treeline. Along with some new friends, we visited the local Monk's College.
It looks like the Monk's take care of this old guy (we think he may have been blind).
We then went to the Nunnery where we watched many locals walk the kora. We met this local who was very interested in Esteban's pictures and really tried to communicate with us. (Esteban is a professional photographer from Argentina who has been travelling for more than twenty years! Check out his blog: http://www.unviajerocurioso.com/)
The Kora was built around a Mani Wall. The wall was built by all the locals and took almost 30 years to build. Each stone is hand carved with the phrase: "Ohm Mani Padme Hum", which is the buddhist mantra. One of the staff at our hostel in Kangding is from Tagong and he explained that his parents volunteered to carve stones for this wall for four years! During this time all food and supplies were donated to them by the community.
The one big warning about Tagong are the dogs, both wild and domestic. Everyone knows how much of a dog lover I am but I have never been so scared of dogs. Any time we saw dogs we would pick up a handful of rocks, just in case, to use as projectile weapons. Unfortunately, Esteban got bit by a dog the day before we met him. He was walking down some stairs and a dog was sleeping nearby, the dog just jumped up and bit him! The dogs are all some sort of mix of Tibetan Mastiff that are known for being very aggressive towards strangers and were typically used to protect the Tibetan nomad herds.
Click here for more photos of Tagong.
Next we travelled to Danba, about three hours north of Tagong. Danba itself is not a town to write home about (although...I guess I just did?) but the surrounding villages are so beautiful. Danba is located at the bottom of a valley surrounded by steep dramatic mountains scattered with small villages (some literally clinging to the side of the mountain).
Some of these villages are more than 800 years old and what puts them on the map are the "mysterious" towers.
The towers are owned by local families and it was explained to us that these were used for storing food, for surveillance and for archers fighting during war times. We were given a tour by a local who showed us through his ancestores' home and tower.
The most ridiculous adventure we had was when we took a taxi to a village called Suopo. We had tried to walk there the day before but were turned away about five minutes from the first house by a pretty bad thunderstorm so we knew the general direction. We knew that we had to cross a river and there were two options: 1) a pedestrian and motorbike suspension bridge, and 2) a car bridge. Turns out our driver didn't actually know how to drive to Suopo because he turned off the road and continued to drive towards the pedestrian bridge on a river side dirt path that barely fit his car and continued to taper as it got closer to the bridge. We could not understand what he was doing and finally we just jumped out of the car too scared of it sliding right into the rushing river. Yet our driver took this as an opportunity to ask Tom to guide him on the path - he wanted to continue! At this point, he had driven too far to just reverse. We both screamed out twice when his tire slipped on a rock at a very narrow point. We thought we were going to have to fish him out of the river.
Inevitably he hit a rock and broke his fog light and bumper. Finally he made it to the bridge where there was a large area to actually turn his car around but that also meant he had to drive back, which we again guided him through. In the end, we abandoned the taxi and just walked the rest of the way. We were both shocked at his utter lack of forethought.
The next day, we took an eleven hour bus ride back to Chengdu to start our combo plane/train ride to Guilin. We naively thought that our white knuckle ride the day before was well behind us. Turns out that the first half of the highway is still being built so we had to use the temporary construction roads built about 200m above the river, which explained why the suspension on the bus appeared to be destroyed. The best part was when we had to drive through several kilometers of tunnels still under construction dodging scaffolding and signs that we half joked must say "under construction; keep out" at 70km/h. Ah sketchy China...
Click here for more photos of Danba.
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