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by Lianna

On Saturday we departed Lhasa for the rest of our Tibet tour. Leaving early in the morning we drove for about 6 hours with stops along the way to take pictures. The most amazing stop was when we stopped to see Yamdrok lake. The lake and rivers in this area look like turquoise paint was poured into them, or as I said it looks like really thick blue Kool-Aid.

The Chinese government collects a 40 Yuan fee per person to take pictures of the lake from the highest viewpoint, but since we were told it’s impossible to know where that money goes, we opted to take our pictures 2 minutes down the road for free. The money grabs didn’t end there though, once we got out of the car there were big Tibetan Mastiffs lying around and we kept being hassled to take a picture of them for a fee until we finally left. The pictures of the lake alone do it enough justice.

We then stopped for lunch in a small town where I got to play with a little puppy the whole time which was hard to leave.

When we got to our town for the night, Gyantse, we went to check out the local monastery which has a Tantric side to it that we hadn’t witnessed yet. The Tantric monasteries are interesting because there is a much darker side to them that you might not expect in Buddhism. Here monks do an eerie chant that accompanies their drumming in order to summon the protector’s (scary looking guardians) which protect the monasteries and Tibetan people. Without this chanting the protectors grow lazy and fall asleep. Tantric monasteries are known to the Tibetans as they teach a much more powerful practice of Buddhism where in the past monks had the ability to fly and banish demons.

Today we had another early start because we needed to get to Shigatse in time for our guide to get our Everest permits. On the way we stopped to see a local man creating barley flour the very traditional way of using river water to turn wheels to turn the barley into flour. He was a character covered in flour with a huge smile, still practicing this less common and less profitable method which is on the verge of dying because most flour is now factory made. Once we arrived in Shigatse we visited a Monastery with Tibet’s largest Buddha, and witnessed a group of young girls “whistling while they worked” by singing songs to the beat of their tools they used to stamp down a homemade concrete. Shigatse Monastery only holds roughly 100 monks even though it is another one of the six most important monasteries in Tibetan Buddhism. This is because due to tensions between the Chinese government and the religious order, they limit the amount of monks allowed to attend thus keeping the numbers to a fraction of what they used to be before the Cultural Revolution.