Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture

A priority of mine while in China was to travel to Tibet. However the hassle and cost of organising visas, permits, and plane tickets prove beyond my budget. Luckily for me, the borders of Tibet are fairly arbitrary and have no basis in ethnicity or geography. What this means is that I could travel to "Tibet" within Yunnan province, where the Tibetan plateau spills over the border. In this part of Yunnan the vast majority of people are Tibetan and the Tibetan language is dominant. This area is called the Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture.
To get here requires a bumpy 20 hour bus journey from Kunming. The gateway to the Tibetan plateau is the unremarkable town, with the remarkable name; Shangrila!!.
Five hours further along, is the town of Deqin and it was from here I had intended to trek to a famous temple set beside a spectacular glacier.

This is the start of my trek. This is a holy site because it has such a spectacular view of the mountains (aka Gods). My target is the foot of the glacier underneath the mountain on the right hand side of the photo. What isn't obvious from the photo is the 1000m drop to the Mekong valley, which will make for a tough days hike.

At the bottom of the valley, just after crossing a shaky suspension footbridge, I start chatting to a Tibetan farmer (we both have basic Chinese). He invites me in to have lunch with his family. Lunch consists of Bread, yak meat and butter tea. Their house is very interesting, living quarters upstairs, animals sheltered downstairs. Sounds primitive, but the living quarters were fantastically decorated with intricate painted and carved wood paneling throughout.

The following day I start to climb the other side of the valley towards the temple. This part of the trek is on an important 10-day pilgrimage around the mountain. The higher I climb, the more numerous the prayer flags become. Four hours of climbing brings me to the temple (staffed by two old monks). The views here are absolutely fantastic and the prayer flags festooned everywhere make this a magical place.