Day 57: Ma’erkang (马尔康) – August 13

Taking a morning bus, it was another bumpy 5hr ride before we got to a village outside of Ma’erkang called 卓克基–嘉绒藏寨. This village is unique in that the houses were built for the servants of a Tibetan ruler’s castle. The castle is now a museum, but the village itself is also very cool! The homes here are all built with rocks, while most Tibetan homes are built with mud, or wood. Each region seems to differ, and apparently even their languages are different as there are many different Tibetan dialects.

Once again we are staying with a local family as every home in this village seems to be open to travelers. There isn’t much to “see” per say, but the atmosphere and people here really make it a neat place to be and is somewhat hard to describe.. It’s more like a Western-style suburb bed-and-breakfast as every home has beautiful flowers growing out front, and are usually three stories tall!

Dinner and breakfast was included with our stay – for $70RMB per person, and we had 3 dishes + a soup for dinner! I have to say, high-altitude potatoes are REALLY good! They just taste….more like potatoes haha. One story of why people here are great, is that they seem to have good faith. True story: After dinner, we bought some sunflower seeds from the store which sells them in bulk, so we grabbed a few handful and it came up to $1.92 RMB, so I already pulled out $2 to give to the owner. Without hesitation, the owner goes and drops another handful to top it up to $2! It may be a small thing, but it’s the little things that sometimes leaves the biggest impression…

So we sat on the roof top with a beer, $2 worth of sunflower seeds and chatted away until dark. And as I type away on my laptop, the power is actually out and the whole village is without light. First world problems, I guess. =P