Ganzi and its surroundings
- meganagathe
- 5 déc. 2017
- 3 min de lecture
We arrived in Ganxi after a long but beautiful bus journey. Walking down the main street we were already greeted by many people saying ‘hello’, waving and smiling at us. By chance we meet in the street the owner of the homestay we were looking for who had overheard us talking about her home. Her home is beautifully decorated in colourful Tibetan style with wood carving all over the walls. We decide to go for a walk around and get a feel for the town. We immediately love it. The streets are very colourful and the friendliness of the people continues to impress us. We come by really nice woods covered in Tibetan flags on the outskirts of town. Once evening falls we decide to try out the hot springs, which is little rooms with mini pools filled with naturally warm water due to the sulphur. Once we get over the look of the room and the smell of the water, we really enjoy relaxing in what feels like a big bathtub! The next morning, we decide to go visit the big monastery overlooking the city. We walk in one of the main halls of the monastery, not sure if it’s okay for us to be here. Next thing we know; we are getting ushered by a monk to a small room. We get showered with goodies from Tibetan tea, to tzampa (a local speciality of barley flour, yak butter, tea and sugar rolled into a ball) and sugar covered nuts. There we also meet two Chinese teachers from the region, coming to pay their respects. They are very friendly and bring us around the rest of the monastery and drag us to get blessed by various monks with ‘wholly water’ that you need to drink and splash on your head and a red dot on our forehead after being chanted to in Tibetan! We then have lunch together before heading off to Darjay Gompa.
Darjay Gompa is a monastery 30km out of Ganzi. We arrive at a small temple behind the monastery where we have read that monks gladly take in travellers. The monks are very friendly and tell us that once we have visited the monastery we should walk to the nearby hot springs. We decide to try it out and arrive in what looks like a big clear watered pond with all the locals washing themselves there – a big communal bathtub! Under the watchful eyes of the few kids and adults in the water we decide to give it a try. The water is lovely and relaxing, getting out though is a whole different story! Half trying to not die from the freezing cold, half trying to awkwardly change into our clothes without shocking the locals! We then get back to the temple happy to find out the monks had lit a nice fire in their table length stove. We have a nice warm meal and head to bed bracing for the night of freezing cold ahead. The next morning we wake up early as one of the monks has offered to drive us back to Ganzi as he is also going to visit someone nearby. With that said we find ourselves at the back of a tractor in a trailer being driven by a monk back to the town. It was quite comical but we ended up being frozen to death as the journey lasted a lot longer than when we had taken the bus the day before! Once back in Ganzi we were hoping to reach the town of Seda famous for its Buddhist universities, however once in the bus we were told foreigners weren’t allowed to go (we had read about this online but hoped it would all work out for the best – alas!). We therefore found ourselves heading to ournext stop to Kangding in a 11 in 7 seaters (oh China we love you!).
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