Beautiful paradise up in the mountains

It's 1°C outside, but the heat of the sun and the little fire place in the hostel is keeping me warm.
Just little bit over a week ago I was wearing T-shirt and shorts and now I'm pretty much wearing everything I have.
The houses here don't really have a heating so all the beds are equipped with these electric mattresses.

For the past week I've been slowly going higher and higher and as the result find myself now in this beautiful and serene Tibetan village which is one of the highest villages in the world (nearly 4 000m).
It is also a birthplace of many famous Buddhist figures for example the 7th and the 10th Dalai Lama.

Lithang is part of Kham Tibet. Before 1950 Kham Tibet was not ruled by Tibet nor China and in fact was never ruled by a single leader.
Instead it was split with dozens of different kingdoms.
Although the Kham Tibet is a separate area from Tibet, it's culture, people and style is very Tibetan.

To travel to the part which is now called Tibet is very expensive to foreigners and the only way to get there is by booking a expensive tour.
So if you want to visit Tibet without the tour, you can go to one of the areas which are still open to foreigners like Lithang for example.

So what is Lithang?
It's a beautiful little village surrounded by the mountains where people are very warm and the air is cold.
I spent one day going through the temples and I felt like I had no words to describe the atmosphere.
The pureness and the sence of togetherness could be felt everywhere!

The biggest praying wheel I've ever seen

People are very religious here and you can see it everywhere. They're very curious about westerns as well and where ever you go you will find people smiling and greeting you.

Lithang is also one of the villages where foreigners are allowed to visit the Tibetan sky burial. Tibetans have this Tibetan book of the death which explains what happens after you die. As they believe the soul will move on and after that the body (which was only a temporary transportation) will be fet to the birds. I've read that the tradition of the sky burial started because the ground was too hard to dig a grave, but I think the idea that the body is used to feed animals is very sensible and noble.

Today I had a change to go and witness this sky burial. Even though I feel like this is a very beautiful way to let the nature's cycle go on, but I wasn't sure how I would feel about seeing it from close distance.

We started walking to this burial place at 7.00 and arrived there half an hour later. The sun had just risen and seeing the surrounding mountains on the morning light was incredible.

This beautiful morning frost

We waited for about 45 min until the bodies were brought to the site (this time there were 3).
Then the first body was placed on the hill and this person started making some cuts to the body. After that they let the vultures free to come for supper.

Warming up while waiting

The vultures knew what was coming and
came early to wait for their meal.

The cutting part was little hard to look at, but after the vultures came, you couldn't even see the body anymore.

Inside the pile of vultures, there's the body.

After a while the vultures are pushed away while few guys will break what's remained (mostly bones anymore) in to a very small dust, so that the vultures can eat it all.

In Tibet vultures are a sacred animal and if the person has done something bad before dying, the vultures wouldn't eat them.

As writing this I'm realising how brutal it all sounds, but to them it's something they do nearly every other day.
We are so used to not seeing the brutal side on our every day life and it's easy to ignore the existence of it. If we were to see who made our clothes and on what condition, how our food was raised or how our everyday things are in the long run efecting the environment, we most likely couldn't use/eat/do them.
But as long as it comes to us nicely packed on a shiny plastic, it's all good.

Before people knew exactly where their food was coming and who made their clothes, but these days there's a huge gab between the starting progress and the time when it ends up in our life.
I think we all know what the progress is more or less, but maybe it's exactly why, because we know how devastating it is that we choose to look the other way.
What you don't see doesn't excist right? Or is it?

I came to Lithang from Sahngri-La. The road between Shangri-La and Lithang was already an amazing experience.

As the bus was slowly going through a little mountain roads, I couldn't stop gazing through the window.

Shangri-La (Formally known as Zhongdian) was also part of the Kham Tibet. The name Shangri-La was made up by the writer James Hilton on his novel Lost Horizon. On the novel it was described as a mystical, harmonious paradise. So the original place Shangri-La is infact fictional. But 2001 and town called Zhongdian was renamed as Shangri-La as to promote tourism in the area and partly because the lovely village in the Himalayas really did fit the picture of the paradise on earth.

When reaching to Shangri-La you notice how the landscape and the architecture changes.

Typical Tibetan houses

In Shangri-La the weather was quite rainy, but with two girls I met in the guesthouse we decided to go for a day hike anyway. The guesthouse arrenged us a guide and we started at 7.00 to what we noticed to be a rainy and very cold day.
The higher we got the less we saw as the rain turned in to a heavy snow fall.

I believe the views would be amazing here if visible, but we did get to go through a beautiful (which to me seemed like a fairytale) forrest.

After 7 hours in a rain and snow we were freezing, but it's nothing what a cup of hot chocolate and fire place couldn't fix.

Now as my calendar is reminding me that my time in China is coming to an end, I'm really starting to look back all those vast and beautiful places I've been able to visit. On my head there's already forming a new post about all the other places I've been in China, but more about that on the next post!