Nam-Tso

After a couple of days in Lhasa, relaxing, seeing the sights, and saying goodbye to the others from my Everest group who were heading home, I left for a two day trip to Nam-Tso. Nam-Tso is a huge saltwater lake up on the Tibet's northern plateau, the Changtang. It's a popular place to visit both because of the beautiful blue/green waters of the lake with a great mountainous backdrop, and because of the chance to run into some of the Changtang's nomadic people (drokpas). It's also another place that you have to go to with a tour group because there's no public transportation and you need permits. Luckily, this time it worked out a lot better. Our driver was a lot more friendly than the previous two and let us say what we wanted to do and when, rather than just carting us to the places he wanted to stay and eat. I went with 6 French guys in a 7-person minivan, but I didn't end up spending much time with them.

Soon after arriving, I was walking back from the public bathroom when I ran into a local family who offered to let me stay in their tent that night for 20 yuan. That sounded good to me, so I took them up on it. After finding lodging, I spent the afternoon walking around the lake. The walk along the shore of the lake is also a kora (pilgrim path) around the local monastery (really not much of a monastery, more of a small chapel). The lake was a beautiful shade of blue, with towering mountains in the background. There were some other tourists, but it was still a pretty peaceful walk.




[Nam-Tso: a great view, drokpas offering rides to tourists, and prayer flags strung up everywhere]

Along the way, I ran into three Tibetan monks from Qinghai province and their relatives who were completing the kora. One of the monks spoke Chinese, so I chatted with him and walked the rest of the kora with them. They showed me all the spots of religious significance; one spot was a tiny hole in a rock that we all tried to squeeze through in order to prove something or other about our merit, another was a hole in the wall that we all had to try and find with our eyes closed (kind of like pin the tail on the donkey). It was a great afternoon, just walking along the beautiful lake and hanging out with the monks.


[Me, squeezing through a rock to prove my merit (I made it eventually)]

After the monks left, I went back to the tent where I'd be staying that night. The family had two daughters (14 and 20), and two sons (5, and about 18 or so). The father was one of the local guys who made money by giving tourists horse rides around the lake, but he didn't come home until pretty late. I spent most of the afternoon playing with the youngest son and daughter, jumping rope and making faces at each other. I amused the adults (the mom and a brother-in-law type who was around) with the Tibetan/English phrasebook I'd picked up and the pictures in my Lonely Planet guide. I also got my first (forced) introduction to some of the staples of Tibetan food - yak butter tea and tsampa. Yak butter tea tastes about as good as it sounds, but they kept filling up my cup no matter how I tried to politely refuse. Tsampa is a barley-flour/yak butter dough thing; it is edible, but a palmful was really more than enough. Luckily dinner also included some lamb. I felt very rustic, chopping off pieces with a butcher knife from my big hunk of bone & lamb meat. I felt slightly less rustic when I saw that the kids just got right in with their little knives and dug out the eyeballs and brain.

Overall, it reminded me a bit of staying with my host family in Guatemala. Probably because that's the only real host family experience I've had, but some things did seem pretty similar. For one thing, they all spoke their native language to each other and only spoke Chinese when they were directly addressing me. But in Guatemala at least everyone spoke some Spanish, here only the eldest son and daughter spoke some (very limited) Chinese, so all communication ran through them. Also, there were three beds for 6 people plus me, but they still insisted that I have my own bed (In Guatemala there were 4 beds for 11 people, and I still got my own bed there, too). The family here, though, was a bit more used to hosting foreigners. On the one hand that was nice because they had some backup instant noodles for when I didn't feel like downing a pound of tsampa. On the other hand, it also meant that they were ready with various woven or beaded handcrafts to sell me. That's definitely understandable, as their income is almost completely based on tourist dollars (and they were definitely undercharging me for the food and lodging), but sometimes I just don't feel like buying something everywhere I go. In the end the selling mentality didn't bother me too much, because after they saw I wasn't interested they let it go. And the success I felt at being able to make everyone (even the serious-looking father) smile a couple of times over the course of the day made the whole thing worthwhile.




[The family I stayed with at Nam-Tso, as well as some family friends]

Now I'm back in Lhasa, back at the Oh Dan guesthouse. It's strange how comfortable a basic bed, toilet, and running water feels even after a day of staying in a different situation. It's also a bit quiet now that almost everyone I know here has gone. I think I'll hang around one more day before heading out again.

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