The fourteenth day of our adventures on the other side of the world was spent traveling, mostly. It was a bit of a drive returning to an airport that had flights out to Lhasa, so we stopped off briefly at the oldest building in Tibet. It was a hike climbing up to the actual building, but there were various animals that one could ride for 5 yuan on the way up.
Now, as I was explaining earlier, the members of our vehicle were rather obsessed with yaks by the end of the trip. Ryan’s excitement inspired Caitlyn’s fervor, and her interest sparked mine. At one point, Caitlyn proclaimed that she had only two more goals left to complete in Tibet—ride a yak and go swimming in one of the rivers. I sort of laughed at her, since riding a yak seemed a ridiculous feat and the local water was filled with all sorts of diseases. I later found out, however, that we would have the opportunity to ride yaks! So I became extremely interested in doing this as well.
Now, the day that I was sick, we stopped off at this one pass where you could get on a yak and then the locals would put a festive hat on you, take a picture, and charge you x amount of yuan.
Like so:
I was obviously not well enough to be involved in this, so I thought I had missed out on my chances to ride a yak.
But have no fear, the oldest building in Tibet is here. And you guessed it—I got to ride a yak up to the top. Sweetness. I must admit I felt rather like I was chancing death, considering the thing was so wide and the path wasn’t… but I had to keep reminding myself that despite its ignorant looks, an animal would not throw itself off of a cliff. Or so I hoped.
Here’s my yak!
There’s a picture floating around somewhere of me actually on said yak, but I haven’t received it yet. We’ll just leave that up for imagination (think: I was frightened out of my mind but loving it—that was the expression on my face in the picture).
Caitlyn, of course, had already been on her yak, so she chose to ride a camel up. Here she is:
And here was our beautiful destination: the oldest building in Tibet.
Here’s a better view.
When we finally got up there, some of us decided to actually explore the building, while others climbed up part of the hill that was to the left of the building. This was really neat, as the entire place was COVERED with prayer flags, and the view from the top of the hill was brilliant. There were mountains, fields, and farm plots extending into a seemingly infinite distance. Breathtaking. I sat up there for a period of time, letting the Tibetan wind play with my hair, and drinking in Tibet's beauty for the last time. We were all a little sad to leave, and yet, we were all aching for home at the same time.
Here’s a picture of the hill we were relaxing on.
I never did end up exploring the oldest building in Tibet. At that point I felt like I had had enough of musty old buildings—plus, I later discovered that there were a bunch of restoration projects being done on it anyways, so it wasn’t as interesting as some of our group members thought it would be.
After enjoying the landscape for a while, I slowly meandered down the hill and went to the small restaurant across the street to wait for everyone else (it was our meeting place). We finally hit the road again, and arrived at the airport just in time. There was a huge and somewhat overdramatic series of goodbyes from Tenmpa… or maybe not. He gave us all katas to wish us a safe journey home… and even though a lot of us were crying and just wanted to stay with Tenmpa or have a longer goodbye, we were running late, so we just sort of ran through the airport security and kept waving goodbye once we got to the other side.
Even though this all happened more than a month ago as I write this, I still feel a little teary-eyed thinking about it. Tenmpa is just such a wonderful human being—I can only hope that one day I reach his type of enlightenment, his type of compassion. Phew. Let’s move on, shall we?
And so we returned to Beijing through a series of flights—one from Chengdu to Lhasa, and one from Lhasa to Beijing. As it was about two hours for each flight, plus an hour layover in Lhasa, plus an hour drive to our hotel in Beijing, we didn’t get back to the hotel until about midnight, so we all just passed out. Flying itself is pretty exhausting—here’s a picture Crystal snapped of me being a little silly as we were getting off of one of the planes. I may not look too tired, but do note that I had to lean on the wall to be comfortable. Ahhh. So tired.
And that was the fourteenth day.