Posts Tagged With: Sichuan

We weren’t able to buy a bus ticket out of the city, so we spent the day reading novels and eating fried chicken! Seriously, this place was awesome…

Then some Szechuan hotpot for dinner, and we called it a day. It’s so hard to find good Szechuan hotpot outside of China!!!

Walking across the street to the Tibetan Chieftain’s ‘castle’, we were welcomed by a fire truck hosing off the street. A bit confused, we asked what the heck they were doing, and apparently a gov’t official is coming later in the day.

The chieftain’s mansion was pretty cool, built over 5 stories tall. The chieftain was a way of different dynasties to ‘control’ the local tribes by electing a local leader, and it started during the Yuan dynasty, spanning 17 generations until the current govt pwnt them. We recommend anyone that’s interested to read the book, “尘埃落定”, written by 阿来 – son of the last chieftain. One interesting thing though, is that the chieftain’s bedroom is actually smaller than his jewelry collection room. Does anyone else find that strange? Continue reading →

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

The best part about living in remote areas is that, you’d get spectacular views of stars! The problem was, the next morning when we woke up the clouds came up again… W T F. Fine, we left the village without seeing much of anything and headed into our next destination.

The village we stayed at was too small, so we had to transfer buses. We got dropped off at a bridge, which also serves as a bus stop as proven by the fact that a bench and a snack bar exists. We fueled up with instant noodles and waited for our transfer. One funny thing is, we were actually standing RIGHT at the border of the Gansu province and the Sichuan province!

The bus ride was extremely bumpy and dusty over a dirt road. Some locals stuck their heads out the window to throw up, while us foreigners took a nap! The scenery along both sides though were splendid.

When we got into town, we were blown away by how ridiculously dusty this place is. Seems like a lot of these rural towns are in ‘development’ phase, where every road is being re-paved and new buildings are being put up. This means, extremely horrible air conditions….

We spent the day relaxing, and gathering necessary supplies and information.. Tomorrow we’ll be going into a park to do a 3-4 day hike, with highest altitude levels of over 4800m!

Once again, we get into a monastery-town. The cool thing about this monastery is that, half of it is located in Sichuan province, the other is still in Gansu! Another great thing about these Buddhist towns is that, there is a strange abundance of foreign foods and people. There were 3 coffee shops within 150m of each other! I don’t think you can find 3 independent coffee shops in most large cities….

We took a hike into a gorge, and were joined by two little kids. We got to a nomad tent, which was guarded by three, very very scary dogs! The first two were chained up, but the third and most aggressive one, was in the distance and looked like he was going to break out of his chain any minute! The funny part was, each one had its own territory, so once you got past their territory they would actually ignore you and go back to sleep! Hahaha…we got past the dogs safely. Continue reading →