So next adventure was one hell of an excursion!! We left Xi'an on an overnight train to Lanzhou at 10pm to arrive at 7am. From there we take the 9am bus to Linxia which was a 3hr noisy ride. We arrive in Linxia and get on the bus to Xiahe after circling around town for 1.5hrs picking up people and cargo??? Don't ask, because I don't know??? Anyway Finally around 130pm we head out to Xiahe, only to get stopped at a checkpoint about an hour outside Xiahe and kicked off the bus and immediately forced onto a return bus to Linxia. So what went down was that the Chinese police are cutting off all Tibetan areas of known rioting to foreigners. Xiahe has a beautiful Tibetan monastery (The Labrang Monastery). It's the place to go if one is unable to get to Lhasa, Tibet. Xiahe is NOT in the Tibetan province, but as I said before because of previous riots the Chinese police/government has closed it off to foreigners. The last information we had before setting out to Xiahe was that it was open to foreign travellers. An unfortunate mishap during our travel, but we did enjoy a remote Chinese countryside for about $7 round trip ;) Okay so now we had to travel the 2hrs back to Lixia, the 3hrs back to Lanzhou and the overnight 8hr train ride back to Xi'an. Backtracking was the only way to go at that point. The train then put us into Xi'an at about 9am, then we took the 130pm flight out of Xi'an to Chengdu and hopped another bus for a 3hr ride to Emei Shan and that's where I am now! Finally at rest for a couple of days. It will finally be good to get into a new pair of clothes since I have been in my current attire for the past three days...and you guessed it no shower in the last few days either! The Garnier wipes sure do come in handy on mishaps like this! T.I. C. = This Is China!
Going to climb to the top of Mt Emei tomorrow!
