Yushu
In the early morning I flagged down the sleeper bus from Xining which passed Xiewu, and they let me ride along to Yushu for 30 Yuan, which is quite reasonable. Otherwise I had to take a private minivan, and these guys are really trying to rip you off. Asking 150 Yuan for the lousy 50km. So, lucky me again!
Yushu is a moderately sized town, I estimate about 50.000 people. Not very big, but big enough to have a post office, a department store, and two internet cafes. It is not covered in Lonely Planet, so I had to found out everything by myself, in the real spirit of traveling ;-).
While entering the town, I spotted a bright pink building labeled Yushu Hostelling International. I walked back down the road after getting off the bus and signed up for a bed in a very nicely decorated dorm room at 30 Yuan. But I'm the only guest in the whole hostel! It just opened a month ago, and the last entry in the guestbook is from August 21st.
Of course Yushu also has its own monastery, but there is much more interesting one a few km South, in the village Xinghua. There you find the Jiani Mani, founded in 1715 by a monk who found a rock withan inscribed Tibetan mantra, end decided to collect them. According to a sign at the entrance of the temple, the place now contains over 2 billion inscribed rocks. The world's largest rock pile. Some are quite small, the size of your hand, others are sizeble chunks of rock, with large Tibetan script carved out, often painted. Around the pile a monstery, or rather a temple, is formed, with the familiar rows of prayer drums, where thousands of pilgrim hurry past, as if they have to circle the complex at least a hunderd times before sunset. Maybe they do, I have no idea what the reasoning behind this ritual is. I sat there watching and taking photos for at least two hours, and the majority of pilgrims was doing the rounds countless times.
Most didn't even touch the drums, but many had there own little private prayer drum on a stick, with a string on one side with a bead on its end, to make it spin around easily by minute movement of the wrist. Thousands of (mostly women) were walking past like this, some carrying enormous amounts of jewelry on there head, in their hair, clothing, and holding a bunch of necklaces in the hand not holding the prayer-drum-on-a-stick. The jewelry is impressive, large stones and huge beads strung together, hanging doen from the forehead to the lower back.
Tomorrow back to Xiewu. I printed some photos to give to the kids who posed for me.
Yushu is a moderately sized town, I estimate about 50.000 people. Not very big, but big enough to have a post office, a department store, and two internet cafes. It is not covered in Lonely Planet, so I had to found out everything by myself, in the real spirit of traveling ;-).
While entering the town, I spotted a bright pink building labeled Yushu Hostelling International. I walked back down the road after getting off the bus and signed up for a bed in a very nicely decorated dorm room at 30 Yuan. But I'm the only guest in the whole hostel! It just opened a month ago, and the last entry in the guestbook is from August 21st.
Of course Yushu also has its own monastery, but there is much more interesting one a few km South, in the village Xinghua. There you find the Jiani Mani, founded in 1715 by a monk who found a rock withan inscribed Tibetan mantra, end decided to collect them. According to a sign at the entrance of the temple, the place now contains over 2 billion inscribed rocks. The world's largest rock pile. Some are quite small, the size of your hand, others are sizeble chunks of rock, with large Tibetan script carved out, often painted. Around the pile a monstery, or rather a temple, is formed, with the familiar rows of prayer drums, where thousands of pilgrim hurry past, as if they have to circle the complex at least a hunderd times before sunset. Maybe they do, I have no idea what the reasoning behind this ritual is. I sat there watching and taking photos for at least two hours, and the majority of pilgrims was doing the rounds countless times.
Most didn't even touch the drums, but many had there own little private prayer drum on a stick, with a string on one side with a bead on its end, to make it spin around easily by minute movement of the wrist. Thousands of (mostly women) were walking past like this, some carrying enormous amounts of jewelry on there head, in their hair, clothing, and holding a bunch of necklaces in the hand not holding the prayer-drum-on-a-stick. The jewelry is impressive, large stones and huge beads strung together, hanging doen from the forehead to the lower back.
Tomorrow back to Xiewu. I printed some photos to give to the kids who posed for me.
posted by marc at 21:11
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