The tibet in sichuan

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After jumping from village to village in the Yunnan, we finally end up in the middle of the mountains in Sichuan. The atmosphere is completely different, it’s like we’ve left china to go to Tibet (yes technically Tibet is part of china, but you know …). Every village is built in the same style – the houses, doors, windows are shaped as a trapezium and those trapeziums are decorated on the top with geometrical drawing (see the pictures)! The first village where we slept, Xiancheng, made no exception. Its particularity was that the trapezium base colour was white. We initially didn’t plan on sleeping here, but when we arrived, there were no buses or minivans that were going to the next village we wanted to see. We thus decided to spend the night there and to make the most out of it by visiting the surrounding area.

We were so glad that we stayed! The main temple or should I say the grouping of enormous temples dominating the city were amazing. The monks were all very smiley and greeted us kindly and some took even more pictures than us – which made us a lot more comfortable taking everything in picture 😉

The next day, we were supposed to meet, at 7am, the driver of the minibus which was going to take us to the next village. 7:15, 7:30, 8:00 no one in sight… We finally ended up sharing a car with a Chinese woman who has been waiting just like us for her minivan. If the Buddhism was already really present in Xiancheng, it was even more present in the second town we visited, Litang - a town installed at 4000 meters altitude. We saw a lot of monks, especially in the temple but even in the village. People were really careful about having everything turning clock wise whether it was for turning their lucky charm or walking around a temple or even around a house! Few people corrected us, very nicely, because we weren’t visiting in the right direction the houses around where the 7th Dalai lama was born. It was quite funny, we ended up almost forced by those people to follow around a whole block of houses to see places that were initially at 5 meters from us. Moreover, near every temple they burn an incense with a very strong smell. In their park also, there were places to pray and again everyone was walking in the same direction. An old Chinese woman told us she was coming there every day to pray…

We are all really excited to discover such a different culture and completely unknown to us yet!