So this has been a long time in coming but I figured I'd finally add to my posts on Tibet. I went for a week in January and already detailed the expensive and somewhat frustrating process of actually getting there:
Let's see... I left off talking about the Barkhour, which is the square that pilgrims circumambulate. After spending a day or two resting and getting used to the altitude, I decided to explore a little further afield. First I went to Drepung Monastery. You can just hail a cab to get there and your tour guide will know how to do all this. This Monastery is HUGE, absolutely ridiculously large! I was there for a couple of hours and maybe saw 1/4 of it... What made this worse was the crowding. As I mentioned in the previous post, winter is the time for nomads and practitioners to make their way to Lhasa and where do many of them go? Drepung. As an advance warning to any who hope to go around this time, Tibetans have no sense of personal space and have no qualms with pushing up right against you in order to get closer to the statues, etc. Also, they shove. A lot. There was one statue towards the end of my adventure that was said to have been naturally formed from the rock. It is literally a battleground trying to get to the statue. You must never give ground and you have to fight your way to the front. This is not for the faint of heart. Even when I got up to this ledge that gives you a boost so you can look at the statue, people kept crowding from behind me to the extent that I couldn't even move to get down and let them take my place!
However, there are some perks to being a foreigner who is a non-practitioner. Since there were so many people, authorities created lines outside of the chapels so that there wouldn't be a stampede. For most of the chapels, I was allowed to skip the line and go straight inside because they were banking on me to just have a quick look-see before heading right back out rather than spending the time to prostrate and go through that whole thing.
If you decide to go to Lhasa, Drepung is a must see but be warned when there is supposed to be a high volume of people, it's not the most pleasant experience.
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| Beautiful view from Drepung |
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| Lots of people asking for money on the way up |
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| I snuck some of these pictures... |
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| One of the chapels |
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| These stairs were NOT fun with the altitude |
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| You have to stoop to walk through here, it'll get your heart pumping! |
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| Massive line |
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| Randomly found this... |
After leaving Drepung, I headed to Nechung Monastery. It is only a short walk to it, so we didn't even need to bother with getting a cab or anything! I really loved Nechung. It was peaceful, beautiful, and apparently no one got the memo about it because it was wonderfully not-crowded. This is a smaller monastery and only really has one main complex. This monastery was built where a protector deity, Pehar, manifested. This whole monastery is a tribute to him.
Protector deities are usually wrathful deities who have been subjugated and roped into the duty of maintaining Buddhist teachings. In exchange they get prayers and offerings like alcohol, symbolic blood, fruits, and yak butter. Pehar is kind of a big deal. He is/was the protector of Samye Monastery, which is the oldest Buddhist monastery in Tibet.
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| Ran into some yaks along the way! |
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| There it is! |
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| More of a crowd in the center room, I sneaked this picture... |
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| There's Pehar! |
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| This was the restaurant at the back of the complex... |
That's it for now, don't want to overwhelm with photos or information! I'll put up one more post about my trip there later.
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