Soul Searching in Shangri-La pt. II

 So there we were at the entrance of our first ever Tibetan Buddhist monastery.  I'm not really sure what kinds of preconceptions any of us had about it, and the culture of the area.  It's one of those topics, you know, the sort of thing everyone has heard of, but most people know nothing about, and are nevertheless attracted to it because of this discrepancy.  I tried to keep my mind clean of it all, and just accept whatever was inside.

Soul Searching in Shangri-La pt. I

(Note: The next 48 hours of traveling, or so, works best as a contiguous unit, but is also around 14 or 15 pages of text in MS word. So, I’m chopping it up in three sections that will be posted in rapid section. It should be easy to figure out where to start)

So there we were, aboard what was for all of us our first ever overnight bus. I can safely say it is not what any of us were expecting. During my time in Japan, I had glimpsed a variety of long haul tour buses, and they came equipped with double decker chairs that would recline in an almost bed fashion, that looked relatively comfortable. They had toilets.

Midnight Express

So, Saturday morning we get up for our first full day together as a group of fourteen people. I’m pretty sure this whole entry is going to be dedicated to the clusterfuck of that day, so this isn’t going to progress the timeline too much, but it’s probably worth it.

Here was our itinerary for the day:

1) Eat

2) Get on a bus to go to a place called Jiuxiang

3) Come back, then get out stuff and go on a overnight bus to Shangri-la

And that was it.