Going to Meet the Buddha

Wow, just realized I haven't written since Lanzhou... We've gone to a few cities since then, and I've seen quite alot of monasteries...I'm pretty much monaster-ied out.

After Lanzhou, we traveled to Luijaxia as a stopover point on our way to Xiahe. Luijaxia is a small small small industrial town where I met the friendliest people. While there, we went to Bingling Si, which are referred to as Buddhist caves, but not in fact caves at all. Buddha's carved on the mountainside, hundreds of them, along with one of the largest intact Buddhas, if not the largest, in the world. It was 27 meters tall and awe inspiring. The best part about getting to Bingling Si, however, was the fact that we had to take a 50 minute speedboat ride down the Luijaxia Reservior to get to it. It's not accessible via roads, so the fact that we could only get there by boat, in my opinion, was pretty damn cool. The only weird, well, pretty much gross thing about the speedboats was that we saw a dead body floating in the water as we sped by. The driver actually had to swerve so we wouldn't hit it. Ummm... yeah. WTF?!?!

Next up was Xiahe, the last city we're stopping at before heading to the Tibetan plateau. Xiahe is supposedly the closest thing to a Tibetan town in China.

In Xiahe I spent alot of time at the Labrang Monastery, a large monastery of the Yellow Hat Sect. It used to be the largest monastery outside of the Tibetan capital, Lhasa. However, the beastly Chinese ransacked the place and killed most of the leaders etc in the early 1960s. The monk population is slowly regenerating (currently about 1200) and I've seen many a Monk cruising around in their red robes while talking on mobile phones, playing video games in the internet cafes, etc. Pretty hilarious.

Today about 20 of us did a daytrip outside of of Xiahe to visit the Black Hat Sect monastery about 17 miles away. I think for me, the journey there was more exciting than the actual monastery itself. We caravaned in 5 taxi buses out to the countryside, going back and forth between paved roads and dirt roads. We even did a pseudo rally car race as we hit a patch of dirt road that was a muddy mess (a car had gotten stuck in it and was sitting there for about 4 hours till we came along to get it out). So our psycho taxi driver just gunned the bus and we flew over the mud, swerving and swaying with tires spinning and mud flying. It was awesome!!! Some Germans filmed it while we went through the mud and is going to post it on Youtube. I can't wait.

Well, next up is the Tibetan plateau. I'm ready to undertake some serious camping because honestly, some of the places we've stayed have not been so great. We'll be camping for the next 4 nights starting tomorrow as we make our way to Golmud. I'm actually really excited to get out in the more barren land and away from the large cities.

Thanks for reading!!! More soon...