Xiahe

Third most important monastery town after Lhasa, I thought it was worth a visit, only being 6 hours away from Lanzhou.

Took a bus to what I thought was the right bus station (there's about 4). Wrong station. Took another bus - the wrong way, it turns out. Eventually got there, to be told that I couldn't get a ticket. Ah, of course - Gansu prefecture has a policy of compulsory insurance for foreigners, which insures the prefecture from being sued by the foreigners in the even of an accident. Who pays? The foreigners. Bought insurance for 20RMB.

Finally got some breakfast - sour-tasting vegetables, but at 3RMB (50AUD cents) for 3 kinds of vegetable plus rice, no complaints.

Made it to the bus 20 minutes early to find the whole bus waiting for me. Got the back seat, knees pressing against the hard plastic seat in front. The driver was a maniac. Once the decent highway degenerated into village road, it was a number of near misses whilst overtaking donkey carts, trucks and other busses. Landscape - dry sparsely-vegetated hills, ramshackle Hui villages with mosques.

Once the hills got a little greener, I saw my first pagoda... or what I thought was a pagoda. In fact it was a minaret, and what looked like a Chinese Buddhist temple was a Hui mosque. More followed. Everywhere, villagers threshing wheat. Then a village that came across a unique concept : let's leave the wheat in the middle of the road - that way the cars will do the job for us.

But things soon got more Tibetan, with hillside monasteries surrounded by villages. And the road got worse - everyone being periodically thrown half a metre into the air, as the driver refused to ease off the accelerator. One interesting thing you see around these parts are goat carcasses strung up from bridges.

After the quaint roadside villages, Xiahe was a let down. Firsty, rickshaw attack - "taxi mister! taxi! Tara hotel?! Good hotel." Kept walking up the road. Something was wrong - the first Tibetan town where I wasn't getting smiles or "Tashi Dele"'s from the locals. Eventually, made it to the Labrang monastery guesthouse (10RMB). The guy there couldn't understand my Tibetan... but it turns out they speak a different dialect here. Ended up sharing a room with a Chinese engineer from Lanzhou uni. Strange guy, but friendly.

Soon I realised why the town was messed up - the whole place was crawling with old western tourists. Was craving some bland food, so I was forced to visit a restaurant that served western fair. 6 Dutch people in there, the owner bending over backwards to kiss their arse. When it came to dealing with me, I was treated like dust.

Started the following day with a kora of the monastery. The few beggars there, almost started salvating when they saw a foreigner walking past. I gave them nothing. Met some Tibetan students. They were nice. We strolled around the streets and talked about random stuff. Eventually made it to the monastery and got invited by a monk to his room. Nice guy. His brother was a nomad living in the grasslands, had some great pictures from there.

In the end, I decided to pay the obscene 40RMB admittance fee and see the monastery's halls. It almost felt like an obligation... I've seen so many things, and in the end I wonder whether it was truly worth the admittance fees, which probably don't go so much to preservation, as the support of nasty regimes. What makes travel worthwhile, and what separates it from tourism, is taking pleasure from ordinary life - observing it, or ideally participating in it. Should I travel again, it will be with a road atlas, a phrasebook and no plan.

That evening, monsoonal rain came. By morning, it was still there. I packed and left.