En Route to Xigaze/Shigatse Tibet
September 14th 2008 06:26
Many apologies for not writing sooner but as things will have it time flies and other work has taken precedence. I will continue on this voyage through Tibet and bring you into this magic world as best as possible.
My aim of writing these short pieces and posting photos is to remind myself of something that was very special and one day maybe in the near future I would be able to do the trip again but in the meanwhile I will have to relive the moments and events through this blog and hopefully get you also motivated to one day visit .
I do not know if Tibet will ever be the same as it was and many Tibetan people who are in exile in India and elsewhere will tell you they pray for their independence from outside rule but who knows when that may be , like all other people who were oppressed and ruled the tides change . It sometimes takes many many years for this to happen but one day it does as we know .
We only have to look at the cold war changes and the fall of the iron curtain. In time all good karma goes around and one day Tibetans will be able to return to their beautiful land in peace.
The Tibetan Wanderer was one of my favourite images , he depicted the young Tibetan man wandering from village to village in these high altitudes. He had ruddy red cheeks and a wonderful carefree demeanour. None of us conversed with him and he was just happy to pose proudly. We would have liked to have found out where he was going but none of us could speak Tibetan , our guide could but at the time he was busy trying to get us out of the mud we were stuck in.
The wanderer was not willing to stay put long and therefore no talking took place.
Once we passed the ice and snow region on the road we started to get a greener scenery happening and at this altitude we saw our first lot of yaks
Scenery was full of undulating hills and mountains and valleys as we moved on and finally to Tibet's second largest city , during my trip the population was around 40, 000 people.
The city is though divided into distinct quarters , Tibetan quarter and then the new area of Chinatown. This seems to be the trend in many of the Tibetan cities.
The Tibetan part of town has the Tashilhunpo Monastery and little alley ways with buildings all over the place and in the Chinese part of town there are wide concrete dusty boulevarde like streets with big concrete monstoseties for homes as apartments.
This place also is the traditional seat of the Panchen Lama also known as the Tashi Lama ,(meaning great scholar) and is the most important incarnation , after his holiness the Dalai Lama, for Tibetan Buddhism.
The Tashilhunpo is to do with the Gelugpa order and is one of the largest monastries in Tibet which functions in the Tibet of today.
I found the monks not to be the friedliest here and it is believed that they are quite in tune with the Chinese authorities. I personally have no evidence of this but I found their unfriedliness a bit unusual. It was told to us by some of the members in our group that one had to be careful not to mention or show any pics of the Dalai Lama.
As I did not have any such pics , I was not too worried.
At Tashilhunpo what I found were dogs ,everywhere and one fear which we were warned against on this trip was rabies . The dogs seemed friendly enough but I did not venture to pat any, as I thought it better to be safe than sorry, we were way too far from any place to get sick.
Dogs were on the rooves, following the monks and just wandering everywhere.
There were many people visiting and we wandered through the Tibetan part of town and the monastery area.
.
There is much more to see here and in the next post I will show more photos of this wonderful place called Tibet.
My aim of writing these short pieces and posting photos is to remind myself of something that was very special and one day maybe in the near future I would be able to do the trip again but in the meanwhile I will have to relive the moments and events through this blog and hopefully get you also motivated to one day visit .
I do not know if Tibet will ever be the same as it was and many Tibetan people who are in exile in India and elsewhere will tell you they pray for their independence from outside rule but who knows when that may be , like all other people who were oppressed and ruled the tides change . It sometimes takes many many years for this to happen but one day it does as we know .
The Tibetan Wanderer was one of my favourite images , he depicted the young Tibetan man wandering from village to village in these high altitudes. He had ruddy red cheeks and a wonderful carefree demeanour. None of us conversed with him and he was just happy to pose proudly. We would have liked to have found out where he was going but none of us could speak Tibetan , our guide could but at the time he was busy trying to get us out of the mud we were stuck in.
Once we passed the ice and snow region on the road we started to get a greener scenery happening and at this altitude we saw our first lot of yaks
Scenery was full of undulating hills and mountains and valleys as we moved on and finally to Tibet's second largest city , during my trip the population was around 40, 000 people.
The city is though divided into distinct quarters , Tibetan quarter and then the new area of Chinatown. This seems to be the trend in many of the Tibetan cities.
The Tibetan part of town has the Tashilhunpo Monastery and little alley ways with buildings all over the place and in the Chinese part of town there are wide concrete dusty boulevarde like streets with big concrete monstoseties for homes as apartments.
This place also is the traditional seat of the Panchen Lama also known as the Tashi Lama ,(meaning great scholar) and is the most important incarnation , after his holiness the Dalai Lama, for Tibetan Buddhism.
The Tashilhunpo is to do with the Gelugpa order and is one of the largest monastries in Tibet which functions in the Tibet of today.
I found the monks not to be the friedliest here and it is believed that they are quite in tune with the Chinese authorities. I personally have no evidence of this but I found their unfriedliness a bit unusual. It was told to us by some of the members in our group that one had to be careful not to mention or show any pics of the Dalai Lama.
As I did not have any such pics , I was not too worried.
At Tashilhunpo what I found were dogs ,everywhere and one fear which we were warned against on this trip was rabies . The dogs seemed friendly enough but I did not venture to pat any, as I thought it better to be safe than sorry, we were way too far from any place to get sick.
Dogs were on the rooves, following the monks and just wandering everywhere.
There were many people visiting and we wandered through the Tibetan part of town and the monastery area.
There is much more to see here and in the next post I will show more photos of this wonderful place called Tibet.
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