Following this farmer out of town; we are leaving this frontier town for the wild west......
But in route we discovered a counterfeit Dong Feng which had inadvertently damaged a local bridge. We spent the next hour helping to haul rocks to the sight in order to lift the trucks tires out of the river with the hydraulic lift. Julie rescued the little dog that was hanging from the top of the truck bed. Peter is surveying the situation.
We arrived in Sanla a little frontier town at the end of the road at 1:00pm; we were greeted by the Chinese Mayor and a local Tibetan Rock Star. This town was an interesting mix of Tibetan farmers and Chinese military; not a cheerful a place as we were used to.
After the entire town came out to help negotiate the price of our horses we departed at 4:30pm into the Genyen nomadic trade route. A short first day.
The weather was spectacular the entire 10 days!
We were so excited to be on the trail our horsemen, SeDorge and Thkidd, thought we would never stop to rest; finally when we reached our first sighting of Genyen we stopped to rest.
Then we hit the trail again.
The second night we made camp with three Tibetan families; they were hesitant at first, the kids did the initial spying and soon the entire crew joined us for some music, tea and picture taking.
Joe discovered that he was keeping up with local fashion.
Jay had the crowd captivated with his monocular.
Joe later discovered that all Tibetan nomads are rock stars.
We finished the evening with an amazing sunset over Genyen, settled down to sleep.
The next morning we discovered that while we were slumbering in the early morning the nomads were on the move; we were immediately greeted on the trail by a huge herd of heavily laden yaks and colorfully dressed horsemen, women, children and monks.
This young horseman was the leader of the pack!
The third day.....the landscape seems to go on forever; not knowing exactly where we were going we stopped to consult the map frequently.
After some scouting by Jay and Joe up two different valleys; we decided that we had found the valley we were looking for and we headed up. The trail petered out after a short distance into a talus field the group started to get worried. The horsemen thought we were leading them on a wild goose chase. We started following some faint yak trails up into the forest; thankfully they panned out and we came through the trees to this incredible valley.
We arrived at basecamp on the third day. Jay earned his nomad stripes and SeDorge gave him a ride on the horse.
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