DAY ONE OF EXPLORING THE QINGHAI-TIBETAN PLATEAU–Wifey‘s Side of Story | Todd and Ziqin's Travels

Alright, in my husband’s post, he said he was sitting in a tent right now typing his article. You might wonder what I was doing at that moment. Let me tell you, I was taking a nap. And I did not wake up until the last minute our driver/tour guide summoned us to leave.

Let me put it this way, on our trips, be it on the train, the air plane or a shuttle bus; be it domestic or overseas, as long as it is over half an hour, I’m taking a nap. In contrast, my husband never takes a nap unless he only sleeps less than three hours the previous night. He is a total different species but luckily we complement each other perfectly. He takes advantage by taking a lot of pictures on the road.

Todd always wanted to go to Tibet, not for political reasons but for Mt. Everest. Climbing some of the highest mountains on earth is his dream, but in the case of Mt. Everest just seeing it was good enough. At this phase, he is trying to persuade me to climb Kilimanjaro with him in the foreseeable future. So not surprisingly, going to Tibet was on his to-do list for China. After digging around on the internet, he contacted one of the travel agencies and was about to wire transfer the fee. I, on the other hand, as a much more cautious Chinese, asked him a few questions: first, they did not even have an office in Beijing, what if we wired them the money and they disappeared whereafter? Two, seemed like right now the government had banned individual foreigners to go to Tibet, how could they guarantee that we could make it through the check point? My husband didn’t know how to proceed, so I took over the case and contacted them. For a moment, we thought we would not be able to make it. Because I contacted other state-owned travel agencies, and was informed the only doable scheme was that we made it a team with only the two of us, and the fee was 15,000 RMB per person (2,200 USD) for seven days; while the one my husband contacted only charged 6,000 RMB per person (less than 1,000 USD). Later on, I clarified with the first agency Todd had contacted. Their answer was they team up individual travelers to Tibet like us. And it turned out later during our trip that no matter which travel agency you found outside Tibet, it was always the same one that took care of us all. The contact agency submits your information to the specific Tibetan travel agency and they will assign a tour guide for your team. Smart. I understand from the government’s point of view, it is much easier to manage the practice.

We decided that since we would travel west, why not take advantage of the trip and check out some of the places along the road. We had been to Xi’an for a couple of times, so we skipped it and headed directly to Xi Ning. Here the word “Xi” in Chinese means “the West”. It felt like the Journey to the West, one of the four great classical novels of China.  We found a youth hostel online and with their help we booked a Buick Mini-van tour along with two other couples.

Our driver/tour guide was a chubby local young man who was in his late 20s. He said he had been in this industry for a decade, so… do the math yourself.  Our first stop was a Buddhist temple/monastery called Ta’ersi.

I remembered clearly that I wore a pair of Converse sneakers but unfortunately it rained kinda heavily, so I had to change back to my Nike running shoes. It was a magnificent place with lots of religious treasures. Devout men and women on pilgrimage travelled all the way here to pray. Most of them would purchase a small barrel of yak butter and scoop some to the big barrel in front of the Buddha they were worshiping. Also, there were so many dogs running around the temple, and most of them were street dogs.

I guess the dogs here were veggies as well. My memory is a bit blurry now but one thing particularly stood out, which is the figures of several Buddha made of yak butter.

The figures were delicate, colorful and life-like. They were really breathtaking; however, the story behind the figures were ten times more breathtaking. Since the figures are made of yak butter, the melting point of it is pretty low, at around 20 C, it is only possible to make them in winter time. But the problem is body temperature is around 36 C. In order to avoid the effect of body heat on the creation of the artwork, the specially trained monks would have to soak their hands in the icy water or snows, and constantly grabbing at the ices to prevent their hands from getting warm. The working process of the yak butter figures normally lasts for three months. And almost each of them suffer from arthritis or different degrees of disability due to the extreme work condition. It is hard to imagine them doing this for any other reason than their religious piety.

Anyway, if you ever have a chance to visit Ta’ersi, DO NOT miss these masterpieces created at great cost.

After Ta’ersi, we headed to Qinghai Lake. On the way there, our driver was not so positive on the weather cause it was still dripping. He said if it was cloudy at Qinghai Lake, chances were the lake looked gray and not so pretty.

But as we drove closer, the sky was brighter. Right before we saw the Lake, we noticed that the color of the sky not far ahead of us was much lighter, which indicated to us that we were only a few miles away from the Lake! My husband is more accurate with numbers, so he has already listed all the necessary figures about the Qinghai Lake in his post here, so I’ll skip them here in mine.

I had never seen sky bluer and brighter than it was there. We walked a bit along the lake, and I couldn’t help but to taste the water. It’s true, the water’s very salty.

It is said that Tibetan do not eat fish in the Lake, for two reasons. Firstly, all plateau lakes are the holy lakes for Tibetan people, it is blaspheming their gods to fish, swim or bath in the lakes. Secondly, Tibetan people have the tradition of water burial. They place the deceased on a timber raft and drift it on the lake. They believe the fish in the lake eat the bodies of their ancestors, subsequently eating the fish from the lake is equivalent to eating the flesh of their loved ones.

 

Chaka Salt Lake was our second stop of the day.

In my husband’s post he kinda explained the meaning of the name. But he mentioned he was not so sure about it and would ask me later, because at that moment I was asleep….Chaka is Tibetan language which stands for salt lake. Before we took our trip to Xi Ning, I saw the pictures of Chaka Salt Lake online and told my husband that if Mt. Everest was his must go place, then Chaka Salt Lake was mine.

It is located in between the snow-capped mountains and grass land and is very reflective. It’s called the Mirror of the Sky. There is a huge salt cap on top of the lake so people can literally walk on the lake. Along the bank of it, there were many salt sculptures.

We took lots of artistic photos, at least to us they look artistic.

 

We drove back to the tent camp, wound down for the night. The tent was not bad, given that it had electricity in it for 50 RMB (8 USD) per person per night. Unfortunately the public restroom was not so user-friendly and to be honest, it was very gross. I never camped, and this wasn’t a bad start!