Rural Scenes in Eastern Tibet

I’ve just been looking at pictures from the 2009 trip to Tibet. The region where Yunnan merges into Tibet is so different, when compared to the high plain that I’ve shown here on this blog during the past month.

The region had been historically been called Kham, which now lies in Tibet, Sichuan and Yunnan. As this is a rugged terrain, there are about 14 distinct ethnic groups living there.

Our car was climbing after the valleys and the gorges (Salween), but now and then in deeper valleys there is lots of green and agriculture. You pass simple farming villages with traditional stone houses, now full of straw and hay. You don’t see cattle dung being dried for fuel. You can watch people using oxen to plough. You can see people carrying goods and hay for instance. In all this hard farming work there still is some rustic romanticism left. The fields of barley and rapeseed had already been harvested, but otherwise there wouldn’t have been ploughing.

I see many good reasons for taking the trip from Yunnan (Shangri-La) to Lhasa.

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