Encore China - Personalized Tours to China

Tibet: (Why did you want to go there?)

Joan and George Hellmann and I were making small talks with a lady at our table while having breakfast at the Los Angeles International Airport in the fall of 2004. When she found out we had just returned from China and Tibet the day before, she asked us the above question. Indeed, why?

Tibet was a lot more beautiful than I had expected. It is unfortunate that many visitors to Tibet do not venture beyond Lhasa, the capital city. The beautiful mountains and valleys are a couple of hours out of Lhasa. Somehow, some of the valleys we saw just matched my notion of Shangri-La, deep, lush valleys with fast-running rivers, and snow-capped mountains over 20,000 feet.

We were very fortunate to run into several groups of nomads with their huge yak skin tents and herds of yaks, goats and sheep. We were surprised to find quite a few families had motorcycles parked outside their tents; a few even had pickup trucks. We were happy to see some horses too. We were also pleasantly surprised to find a young nomad girl reading in the middle of a meadow. She must be the first one in her family to have attended school. It was a beautiful sight, a meadow with a river in the middle, snow-caped mountain peaks, yak skin tents, children and animals all over the place, just like in the moves! I was so mesmerized that I did not even try to take pictures because I knew they would not turn out the way I would like to remember it.

We managed to talk ourselves into the homes of two different Tibetan farm families. We were impressed. I actually liked these houses better than the living quarters of the Dalai Lama in Lhasa. These houses were well constructed, with many windows. They had nice TV sets, refrigerators and very decorative furniture. They had a faucet and bathroom in the courtyard but not inside the house. We were in one of the most affluent areas in Tibet, so we don't know how typical the houses are for the average Tibetans. One of the houses had a room just for prayers and the other house incorporated the praying area into their family room. The Tibetans are very religious.

Going back to the question from the lady at the LA airport, maybe we were mentally fatigued from the long trip or just plain lazy. We did not try to answer her question; we mumbled something to the effect that Tibet was beautiful and took our leave.