Monday, Oct 19th, 2009

Doug decided to take my friend Greg and I out to a monastery called Drigung til. It was 1000 feet higher than Lhasa and I was just beginning to acclimate. I made the mistake of agreeing to a hike up behind the monastery in hopes of witnessing a Sky Burial. A sky burial, or jhator, is when the deceased is taken to a mountaintop to be eaten by vultures. The ground is very hard in Tibet so it is impractical to bury the dead. Also, as Buddhists they feel they are providing food to sustain living beings. Fortunately I was unable to make it all the way to the top. Altitude is a funny thing. Every step felt like my last. I was well rested but my body just kept saying “no”. I headed back down the mountainside and got lost a bunch of times finding myself in all sorts of places that normally only the monks are allowed. They seemed to love the company though. When I finally made my way back to the entrance I walked into the kitchen and hung out with some young men who were cooking or watching Tibetan music videos. English is rarely spoken here so it has been very challenging to communicate. My camera screen opens a lot of doors though. We sat around taking photos of each other after I showed some of them how to use my cameras. Hoping they would make me some food, I tried telling them I was hungry. I thought rubbing the tummy in a circular motion was a universal language, understood in every corner of the world. Well in Tibet it just gets a very confused look and a tilt of the head. I even lifted the lids of the pots where the noodles were cooking and pointed to the noodles and then my mouth. How difficult could this be? Fortunately I could order sweet tea properly. “Cha ngamo please”, got me a nice hot cup of bitter yak butter tea. Eventually one of the guys ran to get an english grammar book which wasn’t particularly helpful since the Tibetan word was always written in Tibetan script. At least I was able to give them english lessons which was a lot of fun. The hard part was watching them eat their noodles while I drooled.

Next we drove 30 minutes away to Tidrum, a nunnery just over 14,000 feet high, with magical healing mineral hot springs. This place was absolutely incredible! We got there just as the sun was setting, so too late for any good pix. The whole thing looked like a movie set. It just didn’t seem real. I ate some rice with yak bone. I think there was supposed to be some meat on it but I couldn’t find any. The hot springs were right in the middle of the compound. The men’s and women’s side were only separated by a 3 1/2 ft wall with one shared light bulb. It was very dark and shadowy, but if you really wanted to you could see the other side. So the only thing that really separated us was the darkness. I undressed and put my stuff in a wooden cubby then climbed into the hottest water I have ever felt. I found a comfy spot near the center of the spring which was probably about 30 feet in diameter. As I settled in I began to notice a low grumbling-chanting sort of noise. It was then that I became aware of the fact that I was sitting right in the middle of some sort of naked prayer procession. Naked women groping their way through the dark, stumbling over

rocks, and me, chanting prayers. At this point I just became another obstacle to grapple with and found myself holding the hands of all of my bare breasted sisters, one at a time, under the brightest stars I have ever seen. I was awash in tranquility with my newly acquired sisterhood, that is right up until the fat lady next to me pulled out of the depths of her innards a gelatinous loogy so thick and so large it made a small cannonball splash when she deposited it in the little teeny tiny bit of water between us. I felt so betrayed! I thought we had something special here and your spitting on me? In our bathtub? It was time to get out and back at the cubbies a very helpful young lady pointed her flashlight at me exposing my nakedness in all its glory. A few men stood nearby checking out the ladies but nobody seemed to mind except maybe me. I managed to get my clothes back on as several more very helpful young girls assisted me with their flashlights.