26/9/09
This trip now drawing to a close, as well it should after seven weeks on the road. Today I just returned from a twelve-day drive through Tibet east of Lhasa, ending at Qamdo, which brings the total mileage for the month up to a little short of 4,000 kilometres, all in 4WDs, a little of it on surprisingly good roads but much of it on predictably bad ones. The worst of all are the roads under construction, as is a large part of the national highway between Sichuan and Tibet. Endless delays as vehicles have to give way along muddy detours (and no drivers like doing that). Many of the passes are over 5,000 metres, and when the weather turns….. But what am I complaining about? Toyota Land Cruiser is luxury – you could always do it the hard way…
These Tibetan pilgrims have been on the road (literally) for two months already, on their way from Litang to Lhasa, with probably three more to go. It’s every bit as bad as it looks.
But there were some wonderful places along the way. In the far east of Tibet, within a hundred kilometres of the border with Yunnan, are salt wells bordering the upper Mekong. In what is probably the last of its kind, villagers draw the salt water and pour it out on pans constructed on stilts to evaporate — and have been doing for 1,300 years….
The salt pans of Yanjing, in the Mekong gorge. The reddish colour is from the local earth, and the salt itself — sold for livestock — is also tinged red.
Raising the salt water from the wells to storage tanks underneath the pans.
And yet more yaks, of course…
A nomad encampment on the Mei Lu (Beautiful Jade) grassland near Bangda.
It was from near here that we left this morning, and it wasn’t altogether a certain thing. The easternmost airport in Tibet also has the distinction of being the world’s highest, at 4,300 metres. This is the nearest flat land to the city of Qamdo, but with the road under construction, it takes four difficult hours. And when we arrived, before dawn, it was snowbound, so for a few hours we waited for clearance. The runway, incidentally, is appropriately long for such thin air — another world record at 5,500 metres long. Our Airbus didn’t need all of it.
