Deeper into the heart of the labyrinth Dawn. No wind. Lavender-rose light spread like butter on distant peaks. Monks and mystics, the faithful and the temporarily faithless, opened like satellite dishes on a sacred hillside above the Labrang Monastery. Slow motion clouds moving to the natural music of the Tibetan Plateau. Everything is Ice Age still for a moment as the stunned earth awakens. The birds first, calling forth the slanted light, dousing sleeper’s dreams, silhouetting the breath of stirring farm animals, glinting off riffles in the Daxia River, driving off the last stubborn traces of the monochrome night, evaporating shadows and turning up color. A low wordless chanting arises from the hillside, lifts and circles like a flock of red-crowned cranes. Smoke rises from sacred spruce fires. Farmer’s motorcycle trucks wind along the road below, moving to the open markets of Xiahe. Life stirs, puts on its boots and pisses in the alley. Breakfast is yak yogurt, Tsampa—dough made with roasted barley flour and yak butter, buckwheat porridge, Momo—Tibetan dumplings, Thenthuk—Tibetan noodles and yak tongue. Boiling hot black tea—filtered and decanted into a churn, then fresh milk and sugar are added. The wind gusts, carving new lines in faces, stealing hats, billowing robes, herding dust, pock-marking buildings, scattering anything not tied down and causing pedestrians to lean into it. Moving clockwise, streams of worshippers walk the Kora, a three kilometer route around the monastery through prayer vapors left by previous pilgrims, spinning the colorful prayer wheels, muttering chants, along a route created for moving, meditative reflection, interspersed with scarlet monks, the old, the young, the tourists, and the devout who flatten themselves on the ground, stand up, then throw themselves back on the ground, and in this way move around the entire circuit. I walked the Kora three times. Each time was different, each time was special. It’s a very active and unique form of prayer. You get exercise—by walking and spinning the prayer wheels, get to mingle with the friendly fellow Kora-walkers, get to spend time in a setting meant for reflection, say anything you want out loud, as people are mumbling in all kinds of dialects, dress however you want—some worshippers dress in the most outlandish costumes, on a plateau high above the rest of the world, surrounded by mountains. Then I rented a bike, and escaped into the Sangke Grasslands, home for thousands of years to Tibetan Nomads. The bike was old and heavy and clunky, but I was not to be stopped, grunting and huffing and puffing my way up the gradual incline, coming to the distinct conclusion that cars hate bikes. Here I was, enjoying the quiet, and though traffic was sporadic, every idiot driver that passed me felt it necessary to honk their horn in warning, as if I couldn’t hear them approaching from a half-mile away. While some cut a wide berth around me, others flew by like meteorites, and it felt as though they were trying to blast me senseless in the swirl of their passing. Still, the grasslands were miraculous. They swept away toward the horizon in fields of wildflowers, clouds, mountains and sky. I passed a lake so still I named it Narcissus Lake and spent some peaceful moments lakeside recovering from the climb up on my ridiculous bike.
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In which the birthday boy runs smack into Tibet Sometimes it takes a jet to carry you somewhere over the rainbow, or maybe a train, a boat, a fast car or a powerful wish, but in my case all it took was three and a half hours of patience and a bus filled with happy-go-lucky passengers. We climbed upward, past amazing, terraced hills, planted with produce, the sheer ability to farm the precipitous heights was astonishing, and at one point I saw a farmer pruning his crops by means of a rope attached around his waist, dropping down, then down, and down---we blasted by too fast to know how he managed to get back up. Then we leveled out and entered a biblical zone of fertile valleys with mosques everywhere. Their signature globes and towers rose above the landscape, more plentiful than church steeples in New England. But what was odd to me was that I equated mosques with desert terrain—these rose above green fields bright with a summer’s growth. I stopped counting them after I reached a hundred and one. After passing through Linxia City, which has long been called the “Little Mecca of China” featuring 1,700 mosques and an important stop along the Silk Road, we started climbing up, up, up, then leveled off in earnest, the terrain changing, growing more austere, though still summer green, with stuttering Van Gogh fields absent of crows, then angling almost imperceptivity downward and eventually arriving in Xiahe. |
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