We woke up just after sunrise and found a completely changed scenery. Farm fields had been swapped for arid land and sand dunes.
We arrived at the Lanzhou train station about 6am and were trying to make a bus to Xiahe at about 7.
While we were on the bus, the landscape transformed even more. It was starting to look a lot like Tibet! It was about a 5 or 6 hour bus ride, I think.
After an overnight train and a long bus journey, we got to our hostel and needed to rest.
After our rest, we walked down to the monastery, which was the whole reason we came to Xiahe.
Labrang Monastery is the largest Tibetan Buddhist monastery outside of the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR), but it’s in an ethnically and historically Tibetan region of what is now Gansu Province. The politics and stuff is a bit complicated, but because it’s not technically in Tibet, it’s much less restricted than the monateries in Tibet. There are many more monks living there, there are renovations going on, and the whole place feels a lot more vibrant and alive than the monasteries in Tibet.
One of my favorite things is seeing monks doing really normal things. The picture above is a picture of a monk walking and talking on his cell phone.
We bought our tickets, then realized we had to go with a timed English tour at 3pm exactly. Still, there were some restrictions. We walked around and found shops with jewelry and even this amazing shop that had a wall of monk robes!
We did eventually get in and the tour wasn’t really that long, but at least we got to walk around a little bit afterwards.
This monastery looks like all the monasteries I went to in Tibet, so if you can’t go to Tibet for financial or visa reasons, this would be a great place to go to get a feel for Tibetan Buddhism.
They had a room full of butter sculptures, which I had seen before, but never this elaborate. these sculptures are completely made of yak butter! I think they’re then painting and gold leafing is added. Let me tell you, I am not a fan of the smell of yak butter, so I didn’t stay there long.
As we finished our tour, these two young monks came up to us – we were a group of four foreigners – and they came up and made fun of the other woman because she had freckles! I laughed and told her what they said, because they had said it in Chinese. They did let us take pictures of them after. They were so cute and their attitudes didn’t seem to match well to the idea of a Tibetan monk.
We left the monastery and then walked back to our hostel and on the way we passed a storefront where two men were painting thangkas. I was so mesmerized! We watched for a little while. It’s incredible how long those take to paint.
We just hung around in the hostel and recovered from our long journey. There wasn’t much to do there, but we did find Xiahe to be a surprisingly pleasant little place. It’s definitely a village by Chinese standards. There couldn’t be more than a few thousand people there.
The next morning, we got up and left on the 6am bus to Xining. Because we got to the bus at 5:30, we caught the amazing sunrise!
We watched the landscape go by on another 5-hour journey.
Our traffic that day consisted of sheep and yak in the road.
We passed a few really tiny little villages, which were more traditional. They seemed to be mostly families and groups of families that made a living off animal husbandry and herding, which is the traditional Tibetan way.
In one little village, we passed this man. I got a picture this time, and I saw two or three other men who were dressed really similarly to him. I loved his look. The round glasses, the long beard, and plain clothes just gave him this look. It definitely made him stand out from the image of a typical Han Chinese man.
Finally we made it to Xining, where we were staying for a few days. We were definitely in need of that.
