Chapter 214

Distance covered: 180 km (total 10 883 km)

We got up early as always, got a quick breakfast and walked to the famed temple Langmusi draws its name from. We had to pay a small entrance fee, walked through the dilapidated village among young and elderly monks in crimson robes sneering at us. I was volunteering to take care of the dog in case we can’t bring him in, as I’ve already been to a buddhist temple (and therefore have been to them all), but nobody stopped him from entering the courtyard. We did take turns with him while the others went to check out the rooms with idols and artefacts and golden buddhas though. In one of the side rooms were older monks loudly arguing (or having a casual conversation, not sure), I peeked in and they were sitting on cushions, making cheese from metal bowls full of curdled milk. Rarely have I smelled anything that foul, and I was a few meters away.

Like everywhere I go, curious people came to talk to the strange bearded foreigner. 100% of the Tibetans were bare-faced, like normal rational people, and maybe 20% of the Chinese tourists were wearing a stupid little fayssah mursk. One woman took it to the next level though, with some kind of electronic thing strapped to the lower part of her face that made her wheeze like the bad guy in Batman and gave her a robot voice. I asked her why she’s wearing that, and she replied “For safe” in Chinglish. But then she took it off to show the girlfriend and I the little fan inside and the USB port to recharge it. Man oh man. We’re always urged to “wear a mask according to science” and as someone who teaches actual science for a living, this shit makes me cringe so hard. Very little of it is scientific and rational, it’s all so goddamn dogmatic and dumb.

Past the temple was a big grassy yard with a creek, where I let the dog run around like a spaz. Then we went up a hiking trail, it was a bit of a tough one, with lots of huge rocks and creek crossings. The dog loved it, hopping from one stone to the other. There was a bit of a commotion ahead, the tourists splitting to let a herd of sheep go through on the narrow flooded path. The Tibetan family was whipping them with branches, and when one of the poor wooly animals would have trouble negociating the big boulders, he’d be grabbed and tossed ahead, landing with a confused “baaaah”.

“Oh no! Poor little yang”, the girlfriend said. Yeah, it sucks, but it’s not as if those little guys are not all destined to slaughter.

I climbed in a cave, using a knotted rope allowing me to get up the steep sandy slope, and then we made our way out to meet the in-laws.

We hopped in the car and got on the road for a day trip. I snaked on an impossibly picturesque road at the bottom of a valley, dodging or stopping for the cows or yaks who would cross the road.

Looking for a nice spot to rest and have lunch, we stopped at a village which had a walled park with some kinds of stupas. We asked a man if we can go in and he said yes, but after we set up our folding table and all the stuff we need, some random parasite came and said we have to pay 2 yuan (lol) each. I wanted to tell her to go take a flying fuck at a rolling donut and stop bothering us, but mama-in-law just paid the paltry sum to get rid of her. I remember how my first interactions with Tibetans in 2009 were mostly negative, I found them not nearly as friendly as the Chinese and constantly asking me for money (and I wasn’t a fan of the stench coming from the rancid butter tea they were guzzling by the gallon), but either the culture has changed or has been beaten out of them, as I didn’t have to deal with much of that nonsense this year and last year when we went to the Tibetan part of Yunnan province.

I heated the rice, bean and meat mixture, plopped a spoonful or two on a tortilla, added salsa, and made burritos that were very well-received. We also had nacho chips, the last of the honeydew melon from Guazhou, and soup made with the beef broth. A group of kids were amassed along the wall, curiously looking at us, no doubt finding the pale-skinned eastern Chinese almost as strange as the overseas barbarian. I went to play basketball with them for a bit, laughing and high-fiving when one of them would score. Great fun. Then I shared some of our food, they were very polite, saying “xiexie” after each piece they took. They spoke Chinese without any trace of an accent (to my ears) but also babbled in Tibetan among themselves and with the adults, that’s nice.

When I went back to have a sip of my now lukewarm beer, there were two donkeys by our table. We fed them melon peels and that only emboldened them to overstay their welcome, inching closer and closer. The dog was in a state of confusion in front of those two imposing herbivores.

Then we made our way to Zhagana (a lot of place names are a bit odd here, as they are Tibetan names turned into Chinese), one of those superfluous tourist sites I described in yesterday’s entry. After an hour and a half driving for free through yet another superb valley with imposing rocky peaks on the horizon, I questioned the point of going there, but the price was fair and my companions really wanted to go, having been sold the hype by the popular travel TV show Baba Qu Nar?, which features young hip dads going on trips with their almost inevitably annoying primary school children.

Well, one can’t deny that the place is seriously breathtaking, even after all the traveling I’ve done on all corners of the world. The village is nestled in a valley with huge steep mountains all around, and the asymmetric buildings on a slope are very reminiscent of those touristy but magnificient towns in Italy, like the in-laws (who went there last year just before covid hit) pointed out. And despite what the ominously packed parking lot suggested, it wasn’t packed with tourists and the horse flies who typically follow (and annoy the fuck out of) them, we walked in the quiet narrow streets before going down an ad hoc hiking path down a barley field, across a stream and up a long staircase, only encountering occasional adventurous tourists, and hardy Tibetans harvesting bundles of barley.

After circling back, we stopped for victory cold drinks at a rustic hotel managed by a young skinny Tibetan guy with a mullet. The in-laws wanted to stay until the sunset, a few hours later, so I drank beer over beer in the meantime. I had a Yellow River, which had a surprising subtle spiced aroma to it that reminded me of the Coup De Grisou (but much less potent), and then a Qinghai Lake, a white barley beer with fruity notes. It’s rare you stumble upon locally made beers that are not run-of-the-mill Chinese light lagers or the occasional chocolatey stout.

Mama-in-law looked at the menu of the downstairs restaurant, with a selection of Tibetan and Sichuanese, and said we should all pick one item for dinner.

“Mapo tofu”, I said, sipping my third beer.

“You want to look at the rest of the menu? They have...”

“Mapo tofu”

“We had mapo tofu yesterday. Don’t you...”

“Mapo tofu”

I love mapo tofu.

After the meal, we went to a viewpoint, which involved a pretty long ascent up a long staircase. I was feeling nice and bloated, after all those beers, and had a cold one in my small backpack for when I arrived up top. The round platform was packed shoulder-to-shoulder with people waiting for the sunset, but there was a big expanse of grass where we could sit, picnic style, and watch the sun disappear over the rocky peaks. The sky then took a bunch of orange hues. Nice.

On the way down, I kept farting unconrollably, something that had been afflicting me a lot in the past few days. The girlfriend said:

“I’ve been fangpiing a lot too! I think it’s because we’re at an altitude of 4000 m, the pressure outside of bodies is lower than the pressure inside.”

That’s... not the dumbest hypothesis I’ve ever heard. I’d say it’s more likely to be the meat-heavy diet but who knows.

The way back to Langmusi was smooth, aside from a near hit with a yak that baba-in-law swerved around at the last second, the dumb jet-black long-haired cow being nearly invisible in the night. We got in past 9 and went to bed soon after, tomorrow is going to be a long day.