What? A new blog post from Brandon? (Around a sacred Tibetan mountain)

Whoah, the last time I posted anything here was 2008 (I'll leave that up for posterity). Guess it's time to dust off the old blog to write about backpacking around the sacred Tibetan mountain Amne Machin in Qinghai China for almost two weeks with my free-spirited, tent-dwelling, hitchhiking master, Valerie...

Why we went: Speaking for her if I may (can't ask her because she's somewhere off the grid in China at the moment) - Val had traveled this region in northwestern China before we met and she had fallen in love with the Tibetan people, their culture, and the landscapes. After almost a year in southern China exploring Hong Kong, Macau and Shenzhen she was set on getting back to Tibetan territory and lucky for me she wanted to drag me along with her.

Knowing that she was good at finding exotic places and people and having amazing experiences on the road and that she had experience in the region, I let her make all the choices on where to go and how to get there. She being her, she started her journey about six weeks before I could take time off of work in Hong Kong...and off she went overland from Hong Kong toward the little town of Xining in Qinghai province of China where I would fly in and meet her later. (That's only about 3,000 kilometers that she managed to make solely by hitchhiking alone and sleeping in her little solo tent along the way).


The place and the route: To give a rough idea of place - see the map below: Xining (yellow circle) is a smallish city town of very mixed ethnicity - Han Chinese, Tibetans, and Muslim Chinese being the most visible in terms of dress and food... From Xining we hitchhiked down the highway (yellow line) to a little town called Dawu (aka Machin), which was much more Muslim and Tibetan and less Chinese than Xining. After another day's hitching rides we began to walk and hitchhike and camp our way clockwise (mostly) around the snow covered and sacred Amne Machin peaks along the route known as a Kora - a pilgrimage around the foot of the mountain that faithful Tibetan Buddhists make, often in the form of three steps followed by kneeling prostrate in prayer the entire circumference of the mountain (come rain, sleet, snow, mud or dust). (We opted against a similar path around the large Qinghai Lake - the largest saltwater lake in China (Asia?) after learning that it was becoming crowded with tourists and spoiled with litter and construction.)

A broader overview:

And so our 12-day journey among Nomads, monks, construction workers, Muslim cooks and all sorts of (mostly) good people began...

Come back for a day by day account full of photos and video...