‘Yakety-Yak don’t talk back’, would have been my answer a while back, if you ever asked me to tell you all I know about Yaks.

However, as I photograph my newly-found shaggy friend, it’s a completely different story. Let me explain.

At the moment I am on a high. Literally. 5210 metres above sea level actually. I am driving through the Gyawo-La pass, one of the highest mountain passes in the world, along the Friendship Highway that links Lhasa, in Tibet, to Kathmandu, in Nepal. Gazing dreamily out of the window at the imposing Himalayan peaks that dot this road, I suddenly spot him sitting on a blanket of snow, a few metres away, within easy reach — my companion throughout this Tibetan journey. Bigger and sturdier than I ever imagined. Every shaggy hair of him was real.

My car’s screech penetrates the eerie silence. I run out of the jeep. I’m almost emotional. Finally, I get to meet him in person –- or whatever!

My first introduction to the beast had been a few weeks back, at Rongbuk Monastery (the highest in the world) after visiting Everest Base Camp. I felt cold and groggy. I felt the effects of the altitude and all I wanted was a nice cup of tea, Earl Grey, if possible. And that’s when I tasted Cha Su Ma — Yak Butter tea. This is the traditional Tibetan drink, I soon found out, and it is rude to refuse it. So I painfully sipped this thick, salty, tangy drink, my stomach churning as I did.

Walking through Gyantse, a lovely, authentic village, I decided to visit the Pelkor Chode Monastery, one of many imposing buildings in Tibet. What initially seemed like a dark and gloomy place, was suddenly lit up by hundreds of little lights — Yak butter lamps, I was told. Apparently the butter lamps help to focus the mind and aid meditation. However, the pungent body odour of the masses of Tibetan pilgrims spinning their prayer wheels as they squashed their way into the monastery, had me focus only on one thing – the exit!

The day I got to Tingri, a tiny, one-street village, but with 360- degree views of 8000 metre peaks such as Cho-Oyu and Everest, was one of the coldest days ever. Walking stiffly into the guesthouse, my bones aching and fingertips blue, I was overjoyed to see an open fire in the “reception area.”

“Great” I thought, “I’ll just sit here and thaw.”

However, as much as I tried to look at this fire as warm, cozy and inviting, something seemed to be stopping me. A strange, disturbing smell permeated the air. Now, what was fueling this fire, I thought to myself? Yak dung, of course. Obvious to any Tibetan. Not to me though, as I cursed my way through a freezing night!

Later, I would have to taste the damn creature. I was sitting at a table in the busy Barkhor Square in Lhasa, lost in a world of prostrating women spinning prayer wheels and the humming sound of monks in deep red robes reciting mantras, when I was rudely interrupted.

‘Eexcuuuuzz madam, food for yuuu’.

Great, my steak had arrived. A big, fat, juicy steak. Ravenous, after a bout of acute gastric flu, I dug into it aggressively. Twenty minutes later, my jaw was still aching after a failed attempt at chewing the beast. Yak steak? Not top of my list at all.

And so it went on. In the form of rugs and carpets for sale in market places, necklaces made out of its sturdy horns, cheese sandwiches and fresh yoghurts in coffee shops, blankets to snuggle under at night. The list is endless.

Eventually, my journey was over, and so was the strange relationship with my newly-found friend, who till now I had never met. My travel buddy. The Yakety Yak.

Coming from the tiny island of Malta, my desire to explore the world is intense. Mountains are my greatest inspiration and I especially enjoy trekking in the Alps. I love adventure and have climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, been to Everest Base Camp and backpacked through South East Asia. I have visited 30 countries so far and hope to top 50. I work as a Physiotherapist and in my free time love reading, swimming, cycling and any other form of outdoor activity. I keep journals of most of my travels, have written several articles, and love reading about other people’s experiences, as this motivates me to constantly plan where to conquer next!

I arrived back in Beijing at the Beijing Sports University exhausted after delayed flights and bad airline “food.” The true delay was that some of my classmates decided to bring much of Tibet back with them in their luggage and so the group had to wait and help with the lugging of luggage.

Classes started bright and early this morning, so the short breaks between sessions were filled with frantic errands like buying mops, toilet paper, bottled water, pencils, pens, and mao bi (paint brushes for Chinese characters and brush stroke practice). I also spent time washing the yak smell out of my underwear and socks and generally catching my breath after the umpteen hours of bumpy van rides and the altitude adjustment.

I was surprised by the amount of development in Tibet. I discovered Tibet occupies one fourth of the landmass of greater China but has only one fifty fifth of the population. Most of Tibet is mountains and plains, but here and there they have bustling cities! The Tibet that I think most Americans tend to visualize only exists in films or in life from fifty years ago. Honestly, Xi Ning and other cities are similar to most cities, dirty and crowded. They are also a bit behind the times in technology and in food (non-yak food).

I learned a lot on the trip. I mostly studied Buddhism and cultural issues, but also learned about human endurance and what kinds of roads, meat, housing, transportation, and dairy products should be avoided. I also learned to be flexible as almost no one in my group had everything they needed for the trip: warm enough jackets, boots, Internet for contact with people, umbrellas, and tissues. I must say that I was not prepared for what I was in store for when I packed for the 10-day trip – it was quite an adventure.

Back in Beijing, I am getting into the swing of things, slowly. This university is famous, but is VERY slow with the details. Things like getting our student ID cards, laundry keys, Internet access, and housing arrangements is a painfully slow processes. I am in dorms in the International Student building now, but will probably move to little apartments on the other side of the campus next week. This makes it inconvenient to unpack fully. My classes have started and I enjoy them. There are three hours of language study in the morning, then seminars in the afternoon. My internship will be arranged next week (fingers crossed), so for now I have a few free hours in the evening- but I am thankful for time. It is the first time in ten days.

I got a converter today so that I can plug in my laptop, and can finally get some work done. It will be so nice tonight to sleep in a nice clean bed with a pillow and get full nights sleep.

Written and photography by Eileen Moran

For more on China at ITKT

We spent our first 2 days in Xi Ning, which is actually Northern China/Northern Tibet.

We have been driving by van through Northern China into Tibet, stopping at monasteries, and meeting people. Today I saw the Yellow River, which looks just like Chocolate Milk/Yoo-hoo! We also saw dead bodies hauled from a landslide. The soil here is really clay, so when it rains a lot, as it did last night. The mountainsides just tumble down.

My first impression of Northern Tibet was as follows:
Hay
Bricks
Pink Buildings
Sheep
Muslims

I was surprised that Xi Ning is actually a big city and reminds me more of Shanghai than of any idea I had about Tibet. Here there are many Han Chinese, Tibetans, and Muslims. The Muslims all wear white caps and are very courteous.

The Chinese have been building massive amounts of infrastructure in Xi Ning, so the city feels made for 40 million instead of the actual four million that live there.

Today, we are much deeper in Tibet after a 7-hour van ride with many stops due to the bad roads, and there are only Tibetans here with many monks and sheep. So far, we have been staying in the monastery hostels, which are nice and clean but minimal. The air is clean up here, but dusty and very cold!

We have been eating in mostly Islamic restaurants. The food is good and I am eating a lot of vegetables, mostly spicy cucumbers, and bread with cumin. The beverage of choice here is a lovely tea with 12 kinds of dried fruit in it. It is sweet and filling as you eat the dragon eyes and dates from it after drinking the tea. They also serve many kinds of lamb. All the food is halal [and kosher], so the restaurants/tents are thankfully clean.

One surprise, did you know that sugar helps you deal with altitude changes? Drinking sugar in your tea prevents problems when moving into dramatically higher altitudes – a good tip to know.

We spent six hours touring famous temples in Northern Tibet. All that walking and hiking was difficult in the high altitude, no air! Each temple I visited is dedicated to a different Buddha and an amazing history. A young monk who he gave me a leaf from a sacred tree led around us.

The story is as follows: The Buddha gave his mother a seed and told here to plant it so that she would always remember him. She planted it outside of the temple where he was born and on the back of each leaf is his image. This is open to interpretation as far as I am concerned, but it is a special leaf. I saw many people crowded around this poor tree scouring the ground trying to find a leaf!

I am so glad that I have come on this trip. It is long and I have had a great deal of difficulty finding any time to complete schoolwork for back home, but I think it is an amazing time for the baby and me to bond. Also, the energy in the temples is so serene and peaceful. I know it’s too early to feel the baby move, but I’m definitely feeling an energy in the womb (wow- first time I ever used that word non-religiously!) that is new and wonderful. I think this baby will be spiritual and like a roller coaster as the van ride has been quite the adventure.

I’m using a monk’s laptop!

Written and photography by Eileen Moran

Stay tuned to In The Know Traveler more of Eileen’s China experience. -Editor-

Everything here smells like Yak.

The smell I have been mistaking for Yak for the past few days is actually the smell of urine mixed with clay. The “bathrooms” here are actually sometimes semi-enclosed spaces of ground/clay with a high end and a low end. To use it, you stand/squat on the high end and aim for the low end. Sometimes (only in one bathroom I have found so far) the low end is covered with boards and you squat/stand over the rectangular hole in the middle. The problem is that the hole is large enough to fit two people and the wood looks about 100 years old. Living with the fear that your purse or worse, you will drop through the barely boards is not fun. I am going with the theory that not touching anything will keep me from getting sick – so far, so good. It is strange to me that for so long I identified the smell of the “bathrooms” with the smell of Yak- but the clay really holds on to the smell so it is in the air everywhere.

The food is OK- mostly yak products and breads. Butter, yogurt, candles (not eaten but found everywhere) cheese, milk, and milk tea are the yak products. The bread is steamed and flavored with saffron or cardamom or deep-fried like an unsweetened donut – or flour seeped in oil. Did I mention that the yak butter and cheese are left out to “dry” on the hillsides? They are mostly rancid and always chewy. I have been eating a lot of pears and spinach, as they are the only non-yak, non-bread products that are available, which are not candy. Although we are all keeping up the sugar intake to keep our blood heavily oxygenated, I do not want to over do the sugar.

It is really, really cold here and the air thin. That may have something to do with why I finally got a Tibetan jacket and scarf. The jackets are 100% wool with a fake yak lining – because the real ones are not cured well and smell like rotting meat, because they are rotting meat! The clothing is interesting here. Most wear many layers, mostly wool, and mostly black, but adorned with many bright colors. The women wear lots of jewelry. It is common to see $10,000 to $15,000US worth of coral, gold, and turquoise on a Tibetan woman. They sell plastic replicas (that would not fool even a small child) for pennies, but the real stuff is very valuable and priced accordingly.

The hillsides are lovely, spotted with sheep, yak, and tent villages. Small adobe homes sprout out of the mud like strange plants, and the clay is a beautiful color in contrast with the green grasses and wild flowers. We drove by a Chinese army outpost – rather scary. They had tanks, anti-aircraft guns, and a whole lot of soldiers…makes me think.

The monks are so much fun. We picked up a monk in ReKon and brought him with us to Labrahn because he needs to buy new robes for his monastery. He is a Tanka artist. Tanka is the traditional Tibetan way of painting Buddhas, protective demons, and life themes to decorate the walls of temples. He is very skilled and we saw a lot of his work. Each small tanka takes over a month to complete, and some of the larger ones can take over 3 months! If he is lucky, he sells one tanka a month, usually the equivalent of $50US and that income is his monthly salary. Of course, the money goes to the temple, not to him. It is a lot of work for $50!

I bought a tanka of the Buddha who is in charge of learning. In his right hand he holds a sword to slice ignorance, and in his left he holds a rose with a book resting on the bloom. It is beautiful but not too high quality as the higher the quality and detail, the higher the price. I think it would be good in the baby’s room because it would impress cultural understanding and the importance of education.

Here in Labrahn, we are staying in dorms. The five girls are in one room, and the monk, the professor, and boys in the other. Our married couple, Missy and Brian from San Francisco, get their own room. The hostel is nice, and breakfast is served on the premises. Breakfast is roasted Barley flour mixed with water, yak butter, yak cheese and sugar. You stir it for about five minutes until the only lumps left are the cheese. The cheese is actually yak yogurt that is spread on a blanket and left to “dry” on a hillside/mud pile. It is fine as long as you do not chew the cheese. Anyway, this is served with the steamed and fried breads, and yak milk tea, which is salted and smells like old candles too.

The temples here are immense and amazing. They burn a kind of pine that gives off the same smell a crematorium gives off, so each trip to a temple is an olfactory adventure. In Rekon we went to the temple of the Living Buddha, amazing! Unfortunately, photos cannot be taken inside the temples. The Buddhas are big and the ornate decorations inside the temples are mind-blowingly beautiful. There is such a sense of calm and beauty inside these temples. Many were destroyed in the cultural revolution, but were re-built in the ’80s. Many of the roofs were reconstructed in the traditional 1680′s style when the emperor was into Tantric Buddhism and liked gilded roofs.

Here there are three kinds of Buddhism: of the head, the heart, and the belly/body. Meditation practice by those focusing on the head and is the only kind I had any contact with in the states. One cultural practice I saw was people have to collect merit by walking off karma around the temples clockwise, praying and turning the prayer wheels. Many people bring their children here to gain merit for them. Children are taught to walk around the temples and spin the wheels. It is very cute. The idea is that all selfish deeds/thoughts build up bad karma, and that gaining merit by praying, giving to the poor, and walking around the temples etc. wipes out the bad karma and gives good karmic merit.

I have been spending a lot of time with the monk, talking about his life here, and what his goals are. We spoke for 3 hours last night about the American dream of all things. He is very interesting and very nice.

Written and photography by Eileen Moran