The breathtaking winding bus trips from Chengdu to Kanding

Chengdu
While we were in Chengdu Anna and I stayed at a really nice hostel and met this super nice guy named Keith who's from New Zealand. We were going to go and check out the pandas but we ended up sleeping in. Chengdu is a really nice city and I think that I'm going to go back there and work in January and February to save up some money so that I can spend March in Nepal and Tibet. It'll be hard to find work, but I'm going to do it, i know I will. The reason it'll be hard is that many schools only want white teachers from Briton or North America. Anna helped me buy a SIM card for my cell phone which I unfortunately needed to buy in order to find work and a guy at the hostel helped me change my cell from chinese to english.



Luding
Our bus trip out to Luding was only 5 hrs long instead of the anticipated 8hrs. The drive right out of Chengdu gave us views of steep farmland divided into small squares of vibrant green and darker greens. The next leg of the trip we found ourselves in a lush green jungle canyon. There were huge rock faces musky-orange in colour and fresh mountain water running down in small streams beneath us. Luding itself is very small just like all of the places we've been visiting lately. It reminds of me towns on the drive up to the interior of British-Colombia, like the trips that our family would take on the way to Quesnel. It's at the bottom of a valley, wedged in by mountains and beside a small river which reminds me of a smaller Fraser River.




Moxi
From Luding we went to Moxi, a small village that hosts China's biggest Glacier. Anna was really excited to see her first Glacier and after an hour hike through the Chinese forest, passing by small partially frozen creeks and slipping on the snow covered trail(being followed by men carrying chair like stretchers incase we decided that we were actually the Fat Westerners too lazy to carry our own body weight up the fairly easy hour hike that they thought we were) we reached the base of the Glacier. Anna, having never been on a Glacier before was very shy in her first attempts to climb up onto the jagged snow covered ice but, by the end of our few hours spent navigating this land of white mysteries she was sliding down and climbing up, exploring like a true pioneer expert. I've only been on one Glacier before, the comox Glacier, a little baby compared to this more complicated and massive piece of ancient ice. The old man that owned the hostel, Xin Fei in Moxi was incredibly kind and very enthusiastic in his game of communicative charades. Anna and I enjoyed looking in many of the jewelley stores and I took my time choosing some colourful jewellery(one of my weaknesses). We walked by a gathering and took a closer look, only to see that they were roasting two goats on rotating sticks. I like the way that the locals sing so freely, the music here is different than in the rest of China, it sounds almost arabic, indian. I really had to go pee, and so I walked down this dark alleyway following a store owner, then a dog started to bark echoing in the hallway and making me jump. Then he turned on the light, and to my surprise and maybe horror, there, where I had to squat down there were four HUge pig nostrils leaning in through a weakly barricated fence. When I was doing mything, the 2 PIgs disgusting noses were inches away from my right thigh. I ran out and grabbed Anna so tht she could experience the scariest toilet to this point of my trip.


Kanding
From Moxi we travelled West to Kanding. I was excited to be here because it is the first town that had Tibetan script, which looks like arabic writing. We had some butter tea, which tastes absolutely delicious and is made with goat milk. Our hostel had swinging seats which I thouroughly enjoyed. We walked around town, looking in shops as per usual. Anna's ankle was hurting and there was a wonderful hike up a steep mountain that passed by many temples and so we parted. There was an hour of daylight left and I figured I had time to go up and down as our hostess said it would take minimum 1 hr if hiked quickly. Unfortunately 1/4 of the way up I recalled what I had read in my Lonely PLanet Guide, which said that a German traveller had been killed on this hike. I was determined to finish the hike and so I picked up a sharp rock, and started sprinting up the mountain, sweating nervously, my head throbbing from the high altitude, on my toes ready for an attack. I though halfway through, 'Holly! You need to caml down!' , but it didn't stop me from looking around at every snap of a twig. I finally reached the top, there wasn't much of a view because then sun had set. I took a few victory pictures of my sweaty anxious face beside some of the Lions that were at the top and then left my weapon at the top and tried to calmly descend. This of course did not last long, and I found myself sprinting down the mountain, and then looking for Anna.


next post: Christmas in Litang, a true border town of Tibet.
... Here are some pictures from Litang. We spent an amazing Christmas together in a magical place. Christmas morning we watched a sky-burial...