Apr 25, Saturday, Shangri-La

We started the day with a drive through some of the mountains on the road to Lhasa.    

We didn’t go too far before turning off into a valley to walk around Nixi, a typical Tibetan village.  

We stopped to tour another typical home...

before going to a pottery shop.  The Tibetans of the area make hand made black pottery.  And instead of a kiln or oven to fire the pottery they build a fire around the pieces.  Mary liked an interesting piece that looked like a small tea pot.  It turns out it is a barley wine pitcher.

 

On the way back we drove around Napa Lake, a seasonal lake that is quite huge in surface area during the summer (wet season).  However, the lake is very shallow so in the dry season (like now) much of it is meadows used for grazing and wetlands for birds.  

On our drive around the lake we saw hundreds of cows, sheep, horses and pigs grazing on the grasses.  People also rent horses to go riding across the meadows.  Kallden, our guide, said that the seasonal meadows are owned by various villages surrounding the lake.

After lunch we re-toured a bit of Old Town and stopped at a handicraft studio but bought nothing.  The rest of the day was at our leisure.  The sun finally came out mid-afternoon and we had beautiful blue skies and fluffy white clouds.  It wasn’t too cold so we decided to take walk around the lake right in front of our hotel.  First stop was a small sacred hill with a stupa and many prayer flags.

We got some great views of the monastery and the lake.

Even the gate to the complex was pretty.

Because the weather was better today we could see the mountains that surround the area.  With good weather, when there is lots of snow on the surrounding mountains, it must surely looks like the fabled Shangri-La.

And on this third day here, we are finally getting acclimated to the altitude – no longer having to pause on our climb to our room.  And the altitude sickness root tea seems to be working.