As we drive along a bumpy, unkempt road, over and around piles of rubble left over from the occasional landslide we are GIVEN an amazing view of Meili Snow Mountain. The Chinese girl driving with us asks our driver to stop for a few minutes to enjoy the view and to take some photos. We have arrived at Feilai Temple.
Kawa Karpo is one of the eight holiest mountains in Tibetan Buddhism, and each year many Tibetans circumambulate the mountain; that is, they make a holy pilgrimmage. (Circumambulation has certain rules to follow -- sometimes this includes walking only in the clockwise direction, sometimes this means crawling on one's stomach.) Because Tibetan believe the mountain is home to a god, no one has ever summited it.
We have maybe an hour or so until we reach the first village on the trek, XiDang. After paying the entrance fee to the park, part of UNESCO's Three Parallel Rivers of Yunnan Protected Area where the Mekong, Salween, and Yangtze Rivers all run parallel, and after the Chinese guy in the minibus with us hides under all of our bags in the backseat so he doesn't have to pay the 60 yuan entrance fee, we finally arive at the hot springs. We ask the locals, with the help of the Chinese girl who has now become our translator, if there is anywhere to stay before we get to Shang YuBeng, the village in the valley. They tell us no, and since it's already 4:00 we have no time to make it there before dark. We throw our bags into a room and have no choice but to crash there for the night.
After a meal of noodles, vegetables, and some not-so-delicious egg soup, we think it'd be fun to take a hike to the hot springs and chill out for a while. I had been expecting a couple of pools somewhere nearby, but when the Chinese girl showed us where they were, I must admit that I was disappointed. Really disappointed. The hot springs were sort of like a bathtub -- just a concrete basin with a faucet that tapped into the hot water in the ground. The basins were housed in what looked like a bathroom. Getting your feet wet is really the extent of what you could do here, no swimming in a warm refreshing pool.
There wasn't much to do but lounge and practice our Tai Chi for a while. It was getting pretty dark and I decided I should probably use the outhouse before I couldn't see anything at all and risked stepping down the narrow slit in the ground where you did your business. As I walked across the dirt courtyard, flashlight in hand, I suddenly heard a loud grunt and stopped dead in my tracks. What. The Hell. Was That. Shine my flashlight around and find a big black pig lurking by the trees. I brush it off and keep walking but the pig keeps on grunting, and with every step I take towards the outhouse she takes one step towards me. If I make a run for it she'll probably start running after me, plus it's getting dark and me being clumsy as I am would probably trip over something. I try talking to her and telling her that I don't want to eat her, that I don't really like pork and would rather eat chicken, though not chicken from China because of what I read on CNN, and that I just really needed to use the bathroom before it got pitch dark. She didn't really understand but I managed to inch my way to the outhouse. The same story on the way back.
So James and I sat up for a while looking at the stars. Never have I seen the starts twinkle so brightly as I did that night on Kawa Karpo. Maybe because there wasn't a light for miles and miles around, maybe because there weren't any factories polluting the air within a hundred mile radius at least, or maybe being 2650 meters closer to the stars just makes them that much brighter. Whatever it was, I loved it. It felt like Shangri-La.
Kawa Karpo is one of the eight holiest mountains in Tibetan Buddhism, and each year many Tibetans circumambulate the mountain; that is, they make a holy pilgrimmage. (Circumambulation has certain rules to follow -- sometimes this includes walking only in the clockwise direction, sometimes this means crawling on one's stomach.) Because Tibetan believe the mountain is home to a god, no one has ever summited it.
We have maybe an hour or so until we reach the first village on the trek, XiDang. After paying the entrance fee to the park, part of UNESCO's Three Parallel Rivers of Yunnan Protected Area where the Mekong, Salween, and Yangtze Rivers all run parallel, and after the Chinese guy in the minibus with us hides under all of our bags in the backseat so he doesn't have to pay the 60 yuan entrance fee, we finally arive at the hot springs. We ask the locals, with the help of the Chinese girl who has now become our translator, if there is anywhere to stay before we get to Shang YuBeng, the village in the valley. They tell us no, and since it's already 4:00 we have no time to make it there before dark. We throw our bags into a room and have no choice but to crash there for the night.
After a meal of noodles, vegetables, and some not-so-delicious egg soup, we think it'd be fun to take a hike to the hot springs and chill out for a while. I had been expecting a couple of pools somewhere nearby, but when the Chinese girl showed us where they were, I must admit that I was disappointed. Really disappointed. The hot springs were sort of like a bathtub -- just a concrete basin with a faucet that tapped into the hot water in the ground. The basins were housed in what looked like a bathroom. Getting your feet wet is really the extent of what you could do here, no swimming in a warm refreshing pool.
There wasn't much to do but lounge and practice our Tai Chi for a while. It was getting pretty dark and I decided I should probably use the outhouse before I couldn't see anything at all and risked stepping down the narrow slit in the ground where you did your business. As I walked across the dirt courtyard, flashlight in hand, I suddenly heard a loud grunt and stopped dead in my tracks. What. The Hell. Was That. Shine my flashlight around and find a big black pig lurking by the trees. I brush it off and keep walking but the pig keeps on grunting, and with every step I take towards the outhouse she takes one step towards me. If I make a run for it she'll probably start running after me, plus it's getting dark and me being clumsy as I am would probably trip over something. I try talking to her and telling her that I don't want to eat her, that I don't really like pork and would rather eat chicken, though not chicken from China because of what I read on CNN, and that I just really needed to use the bathroom before it got pitch dark. She didn't really understand but I managed to inch my way to the outhouse. The same story on the way back.
So James and I sat up for a while looking at the stars. Never have I seen the starts twinkle so brightly as I did that night on Kawa Karpo. Maybe because there wasn't a light for miles and miles around, maybe because there weren't any factories polluting the air within a hundred mile radius at least, or maybe being 2650 meters closer to the stars just makes them that much brighter. Whatever it was, I loved it. It felt like Shangri-La.
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