The Most Amazing Monasteries Ever?

Hi.  How do you like my Potala Palace selfie?

The Potala Palace is in Lhasa, the main city in Tibet.  It's a very beautiful building, all in white, red and gold.  Here's a close-up picture.

The Dalai Lama, the leader of Tibet, used to spend a lot of his time here but he lives in India now.   

China rules Tibet but lots of people in Tibet want to be separate from China, a bit like lots of people in Scotland wanted to be separate from England, Wales and Northern Ireland.  In Scotland they had a referendum, so everyone voted to say whether they wanted Scotland to be a separate country or not.  There isn't going to be a referendum in Tibet though; it's going to stay a part of China.

I went inside the palace and there are lots of gold statues of the Buddha (people in Tibet are mostly Buddhist, a bit like in some parts of Nepal).  There are also lots of monasteries in Tibet.  They are some of the most amazing buildings I have visited on my travels.  I have never seen so many gold statues before!

When I went to visit a monastery, the monks were learning about Buddhism.  They divided into pairs and one person asked questions while the other person had to answer.  I imagine Robin, Adam and Grace do this at school sometimes except they might be testing each other on maths or history instead of Buddhism.

I was very impressed by Tibetan monasteries.  I saw lots of them in just a few days though so I think it might be time to go and look at some more mountains now!

Merry Christmas!

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ADAM, ROBIN AND GRACE!

I hope you have lots of fun and see lots of grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles.

I'm having a lovely Christmas on the beach in Thailand.  It's over twenty-five degrees here and most people go in the sea every day.  I'm going to be eating rice and curry for my Christmas dinner!

I'll send you some pictures soon.  Until then, enjoy your Christmas!

Two Days on a Train

When I left Chengdu I went on a forty-four hour train ride.  That's a very long time on a train!

I slept for two nights on the train and ate some bread and eggs in the restaurant car.  Uncle Guy and Auntie Susan drank some Chinese wine called 'Great Wall Wine'.  It's named after the Great Wall of China (maybe you can find some pictures of the wall on Google images?).  Stuffed travellers don't drink wine though.

I actually had quite a comfortable train journey even though it was so long.   I wonder what is the longest time that Grace, Robin and Adam have spent on a train?

I saw lots of views from the window.  In some places I saw lots of skyscrapers being built because some Chinese cities are getting bigger very quickly.

Then the train started climbing very high to get to Lhasa in Tibet.  Tibet is in the mountains.  It was a bit like being back in Dolpo!  (I'm sorry my photos aren't very good but I had to take them through the train window.)

It must be very difficult to build a train line that goes more than 5,000m above the sea, where there is snow on the ground all the time.  I reckon there are some very good engineers in China to build such an enormous railway.

Maybe Adam, Robin and Grace will take me on the Severn Valley Railway when I get back to England.  The only question is: will the train ride feel a bit short after riding on trains in China?!

New and Old China

Hello again from Chengdu, home of the giant pandas!

Chengdu is an enormous city, much bigger than Birmingham.  It has 14 million people in it.  Wow.

Most of the city is very new.  I have never seen so many skyscrapers.  There was lots of traffic too but luckily but most people ride electric motorbikes so there wasn't too much noise.  (Electric motorbikes are much quieter than the normal ones.)  I wonder if Adam, Robin and Grace ever see electric cars and motorbikes in Birmingham?  

Uncle Guy and Auntie Susan also used the underground trains to travel around Chengdu, just like in London.  They found it quite difficult to buy their tickets though, because everything was written in a language called Mandarin.  Mandarin letters are different from English letters so we couldn't read them.  Luckily some very friendly people from Chengdu helped us.  

After seeing so many new buildings it was interesting to visit this Buddhist temple.

There are still some monks living here.  I think they spend most of their time praying but I was happy to see that they had a table tennis table so they can have a bit of fun in their time off!

You don't see as many old buildings in China as in Europe.  About fifty years ago, China's government decided that it wanted to concentrate on the future instead of the past, so it decided to destroy lots of old buildings.  This is very sad as lots of beautiful places in China were destroyed.  (The government has changed its mind now and it tries to protect beautiful old buildings.)

There are some other things that Robin, Adam and Grace might find different about life in China.  There are some websites that you aren't allowed to use.  For example, Robin, Adam and Grace wouldn't be able to hunt for minecraft videos using Google during their daily screen time because Google is banned in China.  (China's government thinks Google gives you information that's wrong sometimes.  I reckon it sometimes gives you bad information and sometimes it gives you good information, so you have to be rather clever and decide which is which.  What do Adam, Robin and Grace think?)

Anyway, that's why you didn't hear from me for a while - because I'm using Google Blogger to write my blog and it isn't allowed in China.  I hope you didn't mind too much!

I enjoyed my visit though.  China is an enormous country with lots more to see.  I'd like to come back for another trip some day!

Visiting the Pandas

Look what I've seen.  Giant pandas!

Last time you heard from me, I was in Dolpo in Nepal, and I was looking for snow leopards not pandas.  After I finished my trek, I flew to a place called Chengdu in the South of China.

Chengdu is one of the only places where you can still see giant pandas.  (There are giant pandas in zoos in other places, like Edinburgh, but not in the wild.)

Pandas are in danger of going extinct as there are not very many of them left.  I visited the panda conservation reserve in Chengdu to see them.  Pandas are specially protected in the reserve to try and help them survive.

I was very happy to see them up close!

Giant pandas eat bamboo and there aren't very many areas where lots of bamboo grows.  This is one of the reasons why pandas are in danger of extinction.

Also, the bamboo doesn't give them very much energy, so a lot of the pandas in the reserve were having a nice long rest.  (Adam, Robin and Grace eat lots of pasta, plus their five a day, so they have much more energy than the pandas!)

I also saw some red pandas.  They are much smaller than giant pandas but they are still very cute!

I've seen lots of amazing animals on my travels.  I enjoyed riding elephants and seeing monkeys in Sri Lanka, but seeing the pandas was just as good!

Harvest Time

When I was in Dolpo it was harvest time.  (It was October - unfortunately I've got very behind with my blog!)  

You see the different levels of ground behind me in the photo?  These are all fields of wheat and you only see them near the riverbank.  Further away from the river, the hillsides are far too steep to grow things.  (I know this because I climbed some of the slopes - well, actually, I mostly let Auntie Susan carry me!)

In Britain, the farmers use machines to thresh their wheat but in Dolpo the villagers do it by hand.  They use tools that look like big whips to thresh piles of wheat lying on the ground.  It looked like very hard work - probably as hard as playing football or running round the park or cycling to school.   The villagers need to make sure they finish before the snow arrives!



Dolpo is very pretty in the autumn sunshine but in a couple of months there will be so much snow that even Adam, Robin and Grace would not be able to go sledging there as they would get lost in a snowdrift!

It's quite difficult to be a farmer in Dolpo.  Apart from the snow, there is another problem: there isn't very much water.  You can see that the ground is quite bare except for some beautiful red flowers.

I don't think I'll become a farmer in Dolpo but I enjoyed visiting!

I've told you lots of things about Dolpo, in Nepal, so in my next blog post I'll be talking about a different country.  I wonder if Adam, Grace and Robin can guess which one?

The Snow Leopard and the Wolves

Hi.  I've been tracking snow leopards!

A snow leopard is like a giant white cat.  It's smaller than a tiger though.  (Perhaps you can find a picture on Google images.)  It's very rare, but there are more snow leopards in Dolpo, where I went trekking, than in most other places.

I saw this footprint and thought it might be a snow leopard.  It's definitely not a goat or a yak or a person or even a stuffed traveller, so what else could it be?  There aren't many other animals in Dolpo.

I saw lots of other footprints too, like these ones:

In fact, I followed the footprints all the way to our campsite!

Grace, Robin and Adam might think this is a bit funny but one of the best ways of identifying an animal is to look at its poo.  Cats leave 'scat' (long thin poo).  Horses and donkeys leave big round droppings.  Goats leave smaller round droppings.  And I think you know what human poo looks like!

We saw some long thin poo - a bit like a cat's poo but much bigger - so we thought it might have come from a snow leopard.

Unfortunately we didn't see the leopard but it would have been very exciting if we had!  We asked some local people and they said they had seen the leopard recently.

We heard some other big, scary wildlife nearby though.  When we were getting ready for bed we heard some wolves howling in the mountains.  It was very frightening.  They howled again in the night and then we heard them coming through our campsite.  I was desperately hoping that wolves don't like to eat stuffed travellers!

The wolves must have found a small yak or a goat to eat, because they soon went away.  I was very happy when we woke up the next morning and everybody was still safe and I couldn't hear the wolves howling anymore!

I wonder what is the scariest animal that Robin, Grace and Adam have ever met?