Monastery Roadtrip, Part III: Dorje Drak

After a bit of a restless night, I got up early to make my way to Dorje Drak, the next stop on my trip. The weather maintained its consistent pattern of early morning rain and hot, sunny afternoons. That was all well and good for the afternoon bit, but it made my travel in the mornings less than pleasant. I said goodbye to some of the monks (and got fed some tsampa and yak butter tea by the "chi guo le" monk), and then headed out of town. I was hoping that somebody would also be heading out of town at the same time, preferrably with some sort of motorized transport; unfortunately that was not the case. I ended up walking the 7km from the monastery to the main road - at least the rain had calmed down to intermittent drizzling rather than full-blown showers. On the way I passed a tour group bus full of foreigners going the opposite direction. I think they looked a bit sorry for me, walking along in the rain, but I was just as happy to do a little extra bit of walking if it meant I didn't have to be carted around according to a pre-approved tour group schedule.

Once I got to the main road, my hitch-hiking luck picked up. I stuck out my thumb and the first car passing by stopped. It was a luxury SUV with four Chinese businessmen who were just returning from a trip to Samye. Before this point, being in Tibet was making me like Chinese people less and less. All of the Chinese tourists I had encountered were like whiny children whose experience in Tibet never met their expectations. Everywhere I went there were Chinese tourists complaining in high-pitched whiny voices about the slow service at a restaurant, the lack of privacy in a shared dorm room in a hostel, or having to wait in long lines to get into temples because of all of the pesky pilgrims. In Samye I had just about had it as I watched one Chinese tourist, rather than going to the hotel office to find the receptionist, stand in the middle of the courtyard and whine "Fuuuuuuwuuuuuyuuuuuuuuan" (literally, "employee/staff") repeatedly at the top of his lungs until the receptionist came outside to attend to his needs. But now that these guys were giving me a ride for half an hour with air conditioning and leather seats, I suddenly started to feel myself warm up a bit. It also surprised me how comforting it was for me to be speaking Chinese. Now that I was used to being almost completely incapable of expressing myself in Tibetan, the ability to communicate even basic concepts in Chinese was a huge relief.

Anyway, they dropped me off at kilometer marker 112, where I needed to catch the ferry across the Yarlung Tsangpo to Dorje Drak. I got there about noon, and the next boat wasn't leaving until about two. I could charter my own boat for 50 yuan, they said, or I could wait and pay the 2 yuan standard fare. So I sat around and watched two monks and a couple of local guys play a dice game whose rules I never quite figured out while eating instant noodles from the little shop. The ferry ride across was an interesting experience; the ferry was a wooden boat about 30 feet long, onto which we crammed several dozen people, multiple bags of grain and gas canisters, and three horses.


[A round of the Tibetan dice game which I later learned is called "sho"]


[My company on the ferry ride over the Yarlung Tsangpo to Dorje Drak]


[Dorje Drak Monastery: I climbed up to the white structure at the top of the hill (in the first picture) and then back down the middle]


[1 - Unloading the ferry, 2 - The empty ferry waiting for passengers for a return trip]

Dorje Drak monastery has a beautiful location right on the bank of the river, nestled into the side of a big rocky hill. By the time I got off the ferry and hiked up to the monastery office, the sun was shining and the sky was bright blue. An old caretaker set me up in a room right in the middle of the monastery with big windows overlooking the river and traditional Tibetan style bedding (hard mattresses with rug coverings and big warm blankets). It was clean, they gave me a thermos of hot tea, and they didn't charge me for it (I made a donation later).

I went to check out the assembly hall, but it was bolted shut. The caretaker invited me in to the monastery office, which doubled as a dining hall, and fed me some tsampa and yak butter tea. He explained that normally there were about 40 monks, but most of them were at home right now - I only spotted 6 in total the whole time I was there. That explained why the assembly hall was closed. Without much to check out in the monastery itself, I decided to walk the kora up to the top of the big rocky hill behind the monastery and back down. The walk up wasn't too awful, and the 360 degree views from the top were amazing. From the back, it started off with dark mossy mountains, moving to shrubby beaches, then crossing the Yarlung Tsangpo to views of a beautiful landscape of clouds and mountains, looking back at the Yarlung Tsangpo again to see little trees growing out of sandbars along the opposite coast, ending back on our side of the river with sand-swept dunes that led back up to the original mountains. I was joined by some mountain goats, among whom the males let off some not very intimidating bleats when they noticed my presence.


[View from the hike up the kora]


[Panoramic view from the top of the Dorje Drak kora]


[At the top of the kora: 1 - Me, and 2 - My company]

The walk back down was not fun. In order to be respectful and complete the kora in the proper clockwise direction (or because I'm an idiot, take your pick), I decided to go down the east side of the hill, which I had not seen at all before attempting the descent. The climb got steeper and steeper until it was just sheer rock face. I backtracked up but realized that I'd already descended quite a ways and I wasn't sure if I could make it back up to try another descent. I decided to go down the center of the hill (that's still clockwise, right?) but that had it's own share of sheer rock face. After a couple of terrifying moments and some leaps of faith, I was on comparatively easy ground. It was even more frightening because I knew that if something happened to me, nobody would know where I was. I finally stumbled back to the monastery by 7:25, just in time for the 7:30 dinner to which I'd been invited. At dinner, the caretaker sympathized with my tiredness; he said that the descent is really hard on his knees, too. Either he knows a much better route down, or he's one nimble old man. He was pretty clever, too - he was the only one there who spoke Chinese, and he had even picked up a few words of English. He asked me to teach him a couple more phrases in English; he did pretty well, especially for only having a couple of teeth.

The next day I got up early for a breakfast of, you guessed it, tsampa and yak butter tea. I caught the ferry back over - no horses this time, but it was much slower as we were going against the current. I was pondering the best place to stand and hitch a ride back to Lhasa, as the part of the highway where we were being let off wound along the side of a mountain and was not really conducive to cars stopping and picking me up. It hadn't occurred to me that all of the other people on the boat needed to go somewhere, too, and somebody would likely capitalize on that and provide transportation. Once we got off, there were multiple minibuses waiting right there to take us to any of several major destinations, Lhasa included. A slow and cramped (but cheap) ride later, and I was back at the Oh Dan, taking a very wonderful shower.

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