11 to 14 August - Lhasa to Sakya (Tibet)

Route Map

The map shows the route between Lhasa and Kathmandu which I start on today. It will take six days to travel the distance, but after a huge landslide on the Nepal side of the border which has killed numerous people and taken out two kilometres of road, there is talk of having to use a helicopter for the last section of the trip. At the moment no-one knows what is to happen, we have to wait until the border to find out what we are to do I suspect.

The trip to  the border is to be in a bus when I expected to have to use a 4-wheel drive such as a Land Cruiser. Apparently the roads have improved so much that 4WD vehicles are no longer necessary. Just as well as we have 30-seated bus for the 15 of us, more room to move around. Along the way we stopped at high passes, glaciers, rivers and lakes to take photographs with the driver taking care not to be caught by the speed cameras of which there re quite a few on the road before arriving at Gyantse in the early afternoon.

Views between Lhasa and Gyantse (there are names to these places but I am not sure of how to spell them so have left them out)

Nuns enjoying the view

Tibetan wares for sale

After lunch I walked around the city. The following morning we visited the Pelkhorchode Monastery and an old part of Gynatse. The town is 3977 metres (13,050 feet above sea level) with the fort being a British garrison up to 1940, manned mainly by Indian soldiers. It was flooded in 1954 and many people moved away then but during the Cultural Revolution when there were riots in the town  people were killed while the Chinese ransacked the fort and the monastery. The part of the old town still remaining was being repaired (to show the tourists I expect as the railway line from Beijing to Lhasa had been extended to include Gyantse).

Gynatse Fort

Gynatse Fort from the Old Town

Gynatse Fort

 Hand spinning sheep wool

Old Town farm yard

Old Town street

The original entrance to the monastery

The monastery from the hill opposite

                                                 The stupa (or Kumbum)

Pelkhorchode Monastery (built between 1427 and 1437) should be renamed ‘the rip-off monastery’ for the money it charges. There’s £6 for entry, £2 to take photos in the main hall then £1 each for the six chapels around the hall. Not content in charging for these the monks aggressively chase people around for payment if they think they have seen them take photographs. The stupa (or Kumbum) has nine floors and 76 chapels with each chapel having a statue and mandalas. The mandala is a circular design symbolizing the notion that life is never ending (that’s what the definition shows). Some of the chapels are locked and the top of the stupa looks as if it is falling down it is only £1 to photograph what one likes there. I remarked to the guide about all the charges and he thought that they were cheap compared to other places. Later he did suggest that we not go to a particular monastery as he thought that the charges were too high and the inside of the monastery was no different to what we had seen previously. 

A chair decoration

Monastery Guardian

Monastery Guardian

From Gyantse we travelled to Shigatse (with three police checks of our travel permits in two hours), a place I remembered as a sleepy town with a couple of streets. It is now the second biggest city in Tibet and although I found a street I recognised near the monastery I did not recognise anything else. There’s nothing else that can be said about this city, it’s almost all new buildings.I did not go into the monastery, the 600 year old Tashillumpo Monastery, which is the traditional seat of the Panchen Lama, one of the spiritual leaders in Tibet. As usual I walked around, saw the fort over the city and had a bowl of soup in a local restaurant. The fort had been rebuilt in 2007 after being destroyed in 1961, why rebuilt, I do not know. I came across a solar kettle heater again and realised that there were differences in them with the ‘wings’ being either polished steel, having small glass mirrors stuck to the surface or lined with a heavy aluminium foil. The shape of the ‘wings’ seemed similar in all cases and although they looked a simple device they must be quite complicated to focus the sun’s rays on the kettle.

Solar water heater

Shigatse Fort

13 August and on the way to Sakya along the Friendship Highway. I have just found out that this highway actually starts in Shanghai, not Beijing as I thought. The road is being paid for by the Shanghai Authorities and when completed will connect Shanghai to the China/Nepal border. This is of some concern to the Indian Government as they suspect that it may be extended into Nepal and down to the Nepal/India border. With the huge landslide in Nepal near the border it is possible that the Chinese Government will offer assistance to the Nepalese in the rebuilding of the roads in this area as it seems that completely new roads will be necessary to get round, once and for all, the local conditions of gorges, rivers and landslides in the area.

Sakya from the mountain opposite

The stupas on the mountain

The derelict monastery

Inside the derelict monastery

The door decorations

A monastery guardian

A monastery guardian

A monastery guardian

A monastery guardian

Sakya must have been a huge monastery in past years as the whole mountain side was covered in monastic buildings and many derelict ones. The derelict buildings are part of the Northern Monastery built in 1073 which still uses some of the repaired buildings as a teaching monastery for the School of Tibetan Buddhism.

I decided to walk up the mountain to look at the stupas there then noticed an old building further up the mountain so decided to walk there. With the town being 4300 metres (14,105 feet above sea level) I must have added to that few hundred metres by the time I reached what I thought was a ruin. The herdsman was about to leave but gestured to a small building and pulled back the curtain to unlock the door when I saw the door decoration, the like of nothing I have seen before. This was a temple for the monastery guardians, and I found out later it was because these were so grotesque was the reason they were so far up the mountain. It was very dark inside and photos were difficult to take, and it was spooky but well worth the visit.

The Southern Monastery was actually in the town. It was built in 1268 and has a huge 16 metre high wall around it. I preferred walking up the mountain to visiting the Southern Monastery but I understand that it is well worth a visit if someone should go there one day.

The North Monastery

The North Monastery

Frescos

The meeting hall. Note that the clothes were laid out tidily, not like in the older monastery's . 

Ceiling Decoration

Ceiling Decoration

The founding lama

Young monks exercising

This blog has taken me days to do what with poor wifi and misleading indications from the blog site itself. I don't know how the laptop survived not being thrown out of the window in frustration.