Our guide

Our guide was a monk, who took us round the monastery's buildings explaining about the monks' lives and their religious practice. He had been living in the monastery since he was eight and seemed quite happy with his lot. Tibetan Buddhism seems very heavily influenced by Hinduism and features one thousand Buddhas who are worshipped as gods, not to mention a multitude of protector spirits, of which there were many paintings around the monastery, painted in an incredibly Hindu style and very much resembling the Hindu goddesses Kali or Durga. This is not at all the way I had understood Buddhism to work; I didn't think there were gods as such and I'm sure that the Buddha, Siddharta Gautama, did not intend for people following his teachings to worship him or any other Buddhas.

The monastery

Most of the buildings featured an image of Maitreya the future Buddha who he informed us is extremely important. He told us that they were members of the Yellow Hat Sect and this is one of six temples dedicated to their sect. He explained that they focused their studies mostly on philosophy and music, whereas other sects such as the Red Sect tended to focus more on medicine. Every building we entered, our guide started with “This building was not destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, so everything is original” then for a couple of buildings he said “This was completely destroyed during the Cultural Revolution”. He clearly had no love for the Chinese and made occasional snide but fairly light-hearted remarks about the Chinese tourists who visit the monastery. Throughout our tour we were only just ahead of a noisy Chinese group.

The car park in front of the monastery

There used to be over four thousand monks in the monastery, he told us, but the numbers were greatly reduced during the Cultural Revolution and currently the numbers are restricted by the Chinese government to twelve hundred. He explained that their line of living Buddhas was third in importance after the Panchen and Dalai lamas who, explained, choose each other's successor when one of them dies. While he was talking about that I remembered the posters we had seen in Macleodganj protesting about the Chinese government's kidnapping of the Panchen Lama when he was six years old. He has been missing for over a decade now, so I asked what would happen if the Dalai Lama died without the Panchen Lama being found and he said “Yes. It's a big problem in Buddhism”. He said he couldn't say very much because it's difficult to talk about these things since the recent trouble. The day before Reitse's guide had told him that during one wave of protests, twenty thousand soldiers arrived and announced that they would be staying in the monastery, where they stayed until they had searched the quarters of every monk and taken dozens away for questioning. Many of them had still not been released.

Unfortunately the weather wasn't very nice that day, so we didn't spend much time outside taking photographs and we were not permitted to take any inside.

We spent all afternoon working on our New Zealand itinerary, not wanting to run into the kind of transport difficulties we did in China. That evening we returned to the same Tibetan restaurant we had eaten on the first night and had a delicious meal. Afterwards we finalised our New Zealand plan and even went as far as booking all the transport: we had discovered a cheap bus company called Naked Bus, which worked out much cheaper than hiring a camper van, paying for petrol, and parking it in places with facilities, which had been our original plan. The final missing piece in our plan was the return flight from the south to the north Island in time for our flight to Santiago. Excited by the fact we were now thinking about Santiago we even started to work on our South America plan, resulting in an eye-stinging six hours online.

Yak hot pot

Joanne's nice Tibetan food

Tibetan bread

Muslim tea

written by  The Happy Couple on August 9, 2009 from Xiàhé, China
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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Really interesting blog. It sounds as though you like the Tibetans. Are they quite like the Nepales I wonder? Nice photos too.

written by  Rosalyn Faulds on September 2, 2009

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