China happens. Look around. Just look. A transition forest: jungles of cranes and rebar point towards empty skeletons of mostly-finished apartments. Go up - yaks and the elderly. The retirement homes are almost 3 miles into the sky. Moss carpeted forests and alpine lakes - don't swim in them. Don't wash. They are spirit filled lakes, and deep too.
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| sleeper train north from Kunming | | | |
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| umbrella sighting in the gorge |
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| a brief respite |
Destined for a hard wall - this major tributary to the Yangtze froths chocolate through Tiger Leaping Gorge - on its way to the largest capacity dam in the world - Three Gorges. Some of this water, circulated to the bottom of the reservoir, will help embalm villages and ancient pagodas, long covered over by a thirst for illumination and toaster ovens.
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| primary yangtze tributary below |
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| shrouded |
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| mossfall |
Thickest walls - smallest windows - shafts of light have to force themselves into these traditional Tibetan abodes. The people aren't much different - they aren't warm and bubbly - the father wears a large traditional sword and knows how to tie a pig to a horse. How else do you bring your pigs to summer pasture? Courtyard out front for chickens, dogs, horses, etc. Storage for crops, wheat, drying meat, rusting equipment. Window detail is bliss.
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| window detail |
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| on the yak pasture, 13600ft |
These people are centered around yak - yak milk, yak cheese, yak butter tea, yak meat. A man is measured by how many yaks his family keeps. Recently, in a perverse twist of the utter, yak meat has become too expensive to eat - it fetches such a price at the market a days walk away, that it is rarely consumed by the local Tibetan herdsman. Its butter tea and porridge for the summer.
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| grazin' |
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| white peaks of Sichuan |
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| chinese foliage |
Old Tibetan men and woman still living in the village are sent each summer to care for the yaks in the high summer pasture. They corral the baby yaks into the shed to protect them during the night, and lure the mother yaks close in the morning in order to milk them. The grandpa we were staying with was sick - his wound from being kicked in the side many years ago by a mother yak was acting up - it was the winds, he told us.
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| banking |
Woman from a nearby town climb this mountain on the edge of Dali lake to pay homage to the spirits in the pagoda - they cook, pray, and chat.
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| modest omelet |
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| no caption necessary |
