9/9

9/9 9:19am CST

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We're heading out of Lhasa for today. There's a ceremony for which we have to stay overnight at another site.

Had a decent headache for most of today, thanks to my dry sinuses. It took a bit out of my recall for the outings, but I'll try my best.

First, we had a schedule change. The basis for this is that when you enter Tibet, because of the political overcast, you need to fill out a fairly detailed tourism itenirary. The sites you want to visit may require explicit prior approval. So if you didn't apply to visit Temple X, you might not be allowed to visit during your stay. The consequence for filling out a limited number of sites (like we did) is that you schedule may be kind of light. What happened was that Tsenam took the list of sites we asked for and spread them out evenly over the number of days we'd be staying. We'd basically be doing an hour's worth of sightseeing per day for the last 3 days. When we heard the schedule for today and tomorrow, it was obvious that we could fit the 1 site per day into 2 sites on just today, so we asked to do it that way. The guides obliged, but it means tomorrow is up in the air. We'll try to figure out some stuff to do, but we don't necessarily have permission to go to any major sites.

Anyways, for today, we drove south out of Lhasa to visit two places, whose names I can't quite remember thanks to my headache. The first is the castle built by the first king of Tibet. The second is a temple whose particular significance escapes me. Going south means driving on the so-called Friendship Highway. This connects Lhasa to Kathmandu in Nepal. They're separated by only 900km, apparently. The road goes into a tunnel at the point where the Lhasa River empties into the Yaluzangbu River. Once you're out of the tunnel, you run alongside the Yaluzangbu for a while. The drive was scenic, but still quite a rollercoaster of honking and close calls. These are bound to happen when, around any blind corner, a cow can decide to bolt onto the road and have the right of way. Drivers respect the farm animals a lot and will make it a priority to work around them. We've encountered at least 3 animals simply sleeping on the road and getting away with it. Once a hawk decided to land on the road and we had to swerve to avoid it.

Lunch was at a restaurant in a city before our final destination. This was I think my best Tibetan meal to date. I ordered the blood sausage, and the guides ordered other dishes for us. There was no bad dish and a couple were outstanding. Everything fit together well. The only thing I've been avoiding is Tibetan tea. I guess the milk aspect just scares me. All the details in the picture section. Once we finished we got back onto the highway.

Anyways, when we got to the castle, there was a whole support village built nearby to handle the tourism needs. Not quite as artificial feeling as before, but still obvious. The path up to the castle is shaped much in the same way as it has been for centuries. The very start of the path is also conveniently where the road ends and the village is situated. Tsenam said it might be about a 2km hike to the castle, so my mom opted for the horse option. A guide helped her onto a little horse and led her up the horse path. The rest of us started walking. I got winded pretty easily on the uphill parts of the path, and soon my head was throbbing. I had to take a few breaks on the way up. I passed a woman selling small boiled potatoes for what seemed like too much. It just doesn't strike me as the best snack. It might work when it's cold, but it was like 80 degrees. In what I'm sure was much less than 2km, I was at the castle. I got to really catch my breath as I waited for my mom and dad to show up. Tsenam took us inside and explained the very interesting, bordering on mythical history of the castle.

Many centuries ago, there was no kingdom of Tibet. An Indian prince was exiled and began journeying north. He is remembered as Nyaturi Gyampo (don't quote me). Nyaturi means on the shoulders. When the natives in the area of Tibet saw this strange looking man, they tried to ask him who he was. He didn't speak the language and merely pointed up, meaning that he came from the heavens. The natives bought it and decided to hoist him up and make this heaven-sent man their king. And thus began the Kings' Time in Tibet. The king commanded that a castle be built on this hill, and it was done. A nearby field became the first cultivated farmland in Tibet. Any fantasies aside, this castle probably is one of the earliest constructions in Tibet. It's not anywhere close to original form, however. It was razed during the Cultural Revolution, and on top of that, the 5th Dalai Lama rebuilt it to be a Buddhist temple. Restoration has brought it back into the form it was in after that rebuild.

The tour inside was brief (delivering the story above, among a few repeats from Jokang temple). There was another adopted cat, and a monk who was chatting on his mobile. Mobile phones are so common in China that it doesn't bother me in the slightest to see a monk using one, from neither an ethical or practical standpoint. After touring the insides (no photos again), we went to the roof and looked around. The view is dazzling. Even though the village below isn't very original, it lends a great reference for how isolated the castle would have been in its time. Around the back, Tsenam pointed out the field where archeologists found fossilized evidence of cultivation. I didn't get details on how it could be concluded that this was the first farmed field in Tibet, but that's what it was. It was cool to look out onto a landscape, that, save for a road and the village, looked as rugged and natural as it must have been 2300 years ago. Regardless of current political borders, it's obvious this is a special place among all the peoples and cultures in south central Asia, and it's obvious that Tibetans have a unique stake in history from very early on.

Two more stories about the castle. After the 1st king built it, a scroll with Buddhist teachings fell out of the sky onto the upper landing of the castle. Because it was written in Sanskrit, no one could decipher it. These Indecipherable Sacred Scrolls were unknown until Tibet sent scholars to India to learn Sanskrit and create a written Tibetan language. When they came back, they translated the scrolls. The original relic, carefully housed in the castle, was lost when the castle was destroyed in the Cultural Revolution.
Story two: in the full Tibetan mythos, Tibetans (the natives the 1st king encountered, I suppose) came from the offspring of a monkey, which was an emanation of the goddess of compassion, and an ogress. Tsenam elaborated that the ogress looked like "a bigger monkey," but maybe he meant, I dunno, "a Yeti." The current Dalai Lama actually states that Tibetan Buddhists' standout tendency to enjoy meat might be attributed to Tibetans' monkey origins.

After we got down from the castle, we went on to a nearby temple. Once again, no pictures is disappointing. The inside was packed with statues of various deities, some of which were new and others the classic Tibetan pantheon. Frankly, I've been surprised by multitude of different kinds of gods and beings described by Buddhism. My high school world literature class level understanding of the religion had always presumed it was a simpler, no-god affair. I have to assume a lot of these gods overlap into Hinduism. Worth looking into later.
Ringing around the outside of the temple are the prayer bells that you can spin. Tsenam led us around in a short kora. A kora is a prayer circuit. There's one around Potala and another one around all of Lhasa. That one takes about 2 hours to complete. So going around this temple makes for a quite a short kora. Both when we were on top of the castle, and during the kora, Buddhism's principle of clockwise motion was carefully observed. Once we finished it, we drove back to Lhasa.

The last place we stopped at was a specialty shop that sold yak meat products. Our driver told us that Tsenam is contractually obligated to bring us here, and that he gets a cut of our purchase amount. Well, there was definitely a lot of interesting jerkies for sale, so I don't feel bad about the built-in money-making aspect. I'm sure most of the restaurants we land at, Tsenam has a deal of some sort. I can't complain; it's all new experiences. Anyways, I'm planning to bring various yak meats back to the US. Hopefully, if the US customs gives me grief about bringing in beef products, I'll point out that yak is a different species.