Langmusi (郎木寺)
14 June 2019.
Woke up at 0612 for my bus to another Tibetan town, Langmusi at 0740. Walked to bus station which was about 15-20 mins from Crystal Hotel. Reached the bus station around 0730 and was instructed to board the bus which was waiting outside the bus station, the staff would check my ticket in a while. The passengers were quick to realize that it is alright not to adhere to their allocated seat number and I was glad that I was allowed to bring my backpack up! This time, majority of the passengers were Han Chinese with only about two or three Tibetans.
Outside Xiahe Bus Station. 0714 hr.
Bus to Langmusi. 0735 hr.
The bus picked up a few construction workers, travelling Tibetans, one Hui Muslim man along the way. A man came down the aisle to collect the prorated bus fare from them. We stopped at Hezuo Town (合作) for some passengers to alight and a quick toilet break at the Bus Station for the rest of us.
Hezuo Town. 0902 hr.
Passed by Luqu Town at 1030 hr.
Sceneries along the way.
Langmusi ( 郎木寺) Taktsang Lhamo
Langmusi is a small Tibetan town located on the border of two Chinese provinces, Gansu and Sichuan. Interestingly there are two shrines within Langumsi, one known as the Sichuan temple and the other, the Gansu temple named after their respective locations either on the Sichuan side or Gansu side. The locals at Langmusi also practise sky burials, which are carried out at the Gansu Temple. In the evening, the locals make circumambulations around the outskirts of the temple. Langumsi may the smallest Tibetan town I’ve been on this journey, yet its surrounding areas are breathtakingly beautiful. The town may be comparatively rudimentary but offers sights of yaks, horses and resident monks in ways I have never seen. I looked around for an ICBC, Langmusi was deep enough within Tibetan territory which had none of the bigger banks and this would continue until I reached Chengdu, Sichuan’s capital.
Langmusi. 1301 hr.
We were dropped along the roadside in town as there is no designated bus station in Langmusi. A young couple from the bus pulled at their luggage in front of me and it turned out that we were heading to the same youth hostel which was just a few seconds down our bus drop off point.
“Do you want to share a ride later?”
“Sure! Where are you both intending to go?”
“We’ll tell you, have you eaten? Do you want to eat with us?”
They scrolled their phones for the address of a particular Tibetan eatery recommended on the 美团 app which turned out to be right beside our hostel. There, I had my fill of potato strip rice and sour yogurt. Like myself, the young couple have been working for one year after graduation and were currently working in the travel industry. They were planning to go to Zhagana (扎尕那), a scenic area still unknown to most foreigners and highly raved by domestic tourists on Chinese travel apps. To do so, they will need to hire a driver for the full day out and we decided to visit the place the next day as already, half the day was gone. We still had half a day to spare and returned to our hostel after lunch to ask for suggestions.
Lunch at a TIbetan food store beside our hostel, 1221 hr. Their potato strip rice (土豆丝盖饭) was exceptionally flavourful! Bus Information from the Hostel.
There’s horse racing now, are you interested?” the hostel staff asked.
“Of course! Are you?” the young couple turned to me.
“Sure!”
“Let me call the driver. But I must say there’s nothing much there, I’ve been there before the horses just run about and after a while you’d just get bored.” the hostel staff warned.
“That’s ok.” We had nothing better to do anyway.” I replied.
I was wondering why a hostel staff would be so honest, it turned out that she was a Chinese volunteer from neighbouring Chongqing who once travelled to Langmusi on holiday, loved it so much and has been returning every few months to help out at the youth hostel. A Tibetan driver soon came to pick us up for 60 yuan, he was so jolly he was forever smiling though unfortunately his accent got into the way and we were not able to understand his words. That didn’t matter too much though as the guy seemed to have an innate ability to understand the gist of what our Tibetan driver was trying to express. We drove into an open field ranch amongst low-rise hills, I remembered a bottle of water sold at the makeshift fair there was priced at 1.5 yuan.
Tibetan Horse Racing Event. 1540 hr.
“The locals laid out mats around the concourse to watch the race. During intervals, there were locals who would make their rounds around the ranch holding out printed images of distressed looking Tibetan eldery and children, claiming that these people depicted were their family members who were in dire need of medical attention. As their target audience seemed to be everyone who was at the event rather than approaching only the few Han Chinese, we decidedly donated to the cause.
Another local attraction we visited. 1646 hr.
After the jolly TIbetan driver drove us back to Langmusi town, we still had some spare time to explore the Langmusi shrines. It started to rain again and our visit was mostly spent in the shelter of a building within the monastery. When the rain subsided, the young couple decided to return back to the hostel for an early dinner whilst I continued. Langmusi may be well known to the off the beaten road Chinese traveller but just like its small town, the monastery has neither been rebuilt nor retouched to accommodate growing tourism, it was an ordinary, rundown monastery with unkempt lawns and grey prayer halls built entirely for worship by its locals. None of the glamorous and glitzy for tourists to gawk at. Little monks were playing on the hills, the teenage monks were washing their robes and carrying pails of cement for they built their own residential quarters, there was so much to see with every head turn the shrine really comes across as a bustling residential area rather than an area of worship.
Left: Ticket to Langmusi Monstery. Center: Entrance to the Monastery. Right: Within the Grounds of the Monastery. 1713 hr.
I headed to the washroom designated by enlarged blue chinese characters 厕所 spray painted on its walls. A keeper was stationed a few feet away from the entrance, collecting the one yuan entry fee. The washroom was a simple rectangular hole in the ground shared by all, whilst it was only a moment of sensual agony for me as I swat at the flies and held my breath, its keeper was going to have a tortuous experience. Accumulated human waste is visibly tormenting, we probably don’t even smell the full extent of pungence our waste gives off with proper flush systems and automated air fresheners back home. Everything unwanted conveniently gets flushed out of our sight with the push of a button.
There was no running water from the taps so I washed my hands with bottled water. I exchanged greetings with the keeper outside and he gestured for me to sit in one of his wooden chairs. As he spoke about his car and travels in heavily accented Chinese, I realized Tibetans miight be richer than they appear to be. I dared not ask how he ended up collecting washroom entrance fees but the crux was that he could bring myself and the young couple to Zhagana (扎尕那) tomorrow for 250 yuan total. The jolly Tibetan driver who drove us to the ranch had previously quoted us 350 yuan for tomorrow. I had only just met him but he seemed genuine self-proclaimed tour guide and I took down his contact anyway. The skies only darken after 2000 in Langmusi in the summer and I had to leave the shrine to get dinner.
Once the skies darkened, it began pouring again. As much as I wanted to return to the hostel, I had to find dinner first. It was nearly 2100 after I exited the Sichuan Temple and most shops were already pulling down their shutters. Many were serving hotpot dishes meant for big groups. I hurried into the first lone traveller friendlier-looking eatery I could find and was glad to hear that they served potato strip rice. The boss was a friendly Tibetan man who spoke Chinese without an accent who ushered me to sit at a big round table meant for ten. There was no one else in the restaurant, except a Tibetan couple directly across me. I called the young couple to tell them about the washroom keeper earlier at the shrine and his offer. They would call up the jolly Tibetan driver to negotiate a better price.After I hung up, the Tibetan eatery boss asked me about our plan for tomorrow. He had overheard my phone conversation, I was a little too loud. He advised that the washroom keeper was trustworthy for they Tibetans often rent out their cars and themselves as drivers to earn extra keep. He himself have also taken tourists to Zhagana (扎尕那) and related that the initial price of 350 yuan was a reasonable amount for the whole day journey. My phone soon rang and we decided on the jolly Tibetan driver as we had met him first and he made an additional promise to drive us to his house to see his Tibetan Mastiff after the trip. The Tibetan eatery boss was quite unlike most Tibetans I encountered, he was cautious in his speech, taking time to think through what he was about to say. He spoke slowly and deliberately whilst asking about my journey.
“I’m heading towards Litang in Kham. I’ve been worrying about it.”
“Why?”
“The altitude there is 4000m. I’m not sure if I would encounter problems.”
“You should be fine. You came all the way from Xinjiang and Qinghai.”
“Xinjiang is on low lying land, I thought.”
“Qinghai and even Langmusi here are in the highlands.”
“What’s Langmusi’s altitude?”
“3,300m”
According to him, I was already acclimating myself along my route in the past three weeks. I knew Langmusi was in Gansu’s mountainous region but I never thought its altitude would be significant.
“What time do you close?”
“We close when our last customer leaves.”
“I better hurry then.”
“No no, take your time. We have the dishes to do.”
“You’re back in Sichuan.” he smiled as I left the eatery. “Sorry?” I didn’t quite understand. It turned out that his eatery was straddled between two provinces, the front part of his shop was in Sichuan and the rest in Gansu. He also had this interesting geography written outside his shop too.
Looking for a place for dinner. 1919 hr.
Dinner. 2050 hr.
The next day, I met this Tibetan eatery’s boss again on a chance encounter when we were returning to Langmusi from Zhagana (扎尕那). Zhagana (扎尕那) was two hours away from Langmusi and we were one hour into the journey when our jolly Tibetan driver rolled down his windscreen to speak to a friend in the vehicle that was passing by us in the opposite direction. His friend looked familiar…it turned out to be the boss of the restaurant I ate at – he was heading home after closing his shop in town for a few days which meant that I would not be able to patronize the shop that night. I was more impressed by the coincidence and that the Tibetans seemed to have a heartwarming gesture of acknowledging fellow Tibetans driving their way by bellowing out greetings from their driver windscreens.
