Out the bus window, the Wild West of China began to unfurl, as did lush peaks towering over muddy rivers. We whizzed past tiny Sichuan mountain villages, whose daredevil residents sell exotic fruits mere inches from the highway, affording them harsh breezes as tourist buses came and went. We even passed one particularly brave woman doing her daily exercises using the highway guardrail as a makeshift ballet bar. We had left Sichuan's comparatively glitzy provincial capital, Chengdu, that morning. After a total of nine hours of winding up and down cloud-cloaked mountains, we arrived in Kangding at about 8 p.m. Most of Kangding, considered by Chinese standards a mere blip of a town with a population of 80,000, is squeezed into a valley and sidles up to two rushing rivers that converge near the center of town. The water sounded distinctly frothy, the air crisp. Local street-goers were adorned in a wide array of attire, from sleek blazers to traditional colorful Tibetan robes to Adidas T-shirts. My travel companion and friend, Thomas, and I wore shorts and T-shirts, expecting a climate similar to the one we left in sweltering Chengdu.
Read more after the jump . . .
Post originale: http://blogs.nationalgeographic.com/blogs/intelligenttravel/2010/11/tibetan-food-and-the-tourist-t-1.html
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