The Road Home II

On our way out of Tibet, we stayed in a little town on the border for a day, visiting a real working Buddhist monastary, in which were various interesting statues:


This statue was enclosed in a kind of closet. Looking through a crack, you could see, quite suddenly and unpleasantly, these guys glaring bloody murder at you. Eerie:

After that we traveled to a Catholic church, the only one we saw in Tibet, and it was like coming home. We had grown weary of all the prayer flags and the sense of mysterious cruelty you get from Buddhist monastaries. The cross was a welcome sight:




Back on the road; more remote Tibetan towns:



We finally made it to Yunnan Province in China, after four days on the road through amazing, dramatic, remote, rugged country. The Chinese town we ended up in was Zhongdian. There we saw one of the cooler sights on our trip: a large crowd of Tibetans were all basically line dancing to traditional music in a public square. They all knew the steps of the dance, and it was a trip to watch them as a whole, rather than focusing on individual dancers. They moved as one, as it were:



We stayed in Zhongdian for one day and two nights, then boarded a plane for Shanghai and the final stop of our trip.