Saturday, September 27, 2014

Harvest Time in Lhasa


The air is cooler, the leaves are turning yellow, and the fields are gold or brown. Here are some photos of little farms near Lhasa harvesting their crops. The main crop is barley, used for their breakfast zamba (mixed with butter tea), noodles, and beer, but hundreds of greenhouses yield lots of green vegetables. One notices the Tibetan Buddhist influences everywhere: the watertap even has its own burner for offering sweetgrass. The kind older lady let me take her photo - complete with traditional apron and wooden rake.
It was the last weekend of the "Bathing Festival" Gamariji when the water is thought to have extreme powers to cure, where family go out to remote water to take a bath. Most, however, were washing clothing and carpets in the rushing stream. The hanging cloths are weathered prayer flags, not washing! I should have shot a photo of the traffic jam as family cars found a place to park!















September 2014 Returning to the Top of the World


People still envision Tibet as a place of deep river valleys, green mountains covered in snow, and rural farms. This is still the case in most areas (except for the trees - just green meadows in summer). We live in a high desert, above the treeline, but in a growing city overlooked by dry mountains that turn from grey to green to purple as the sun shadows them. A huge lightning storm the other night left the tops covered in white, but today that is all but burned off. This summer, though the monsoon season had raised the water level significantly
Here are a few photos from the plane to illustrate. Lhasa's airport is actually in the next valley, and is now connected by a 10 minute tunnel under a mountain then a raised road following the the train. You can see haystacks as the fields are being harvested in late August. My next blog will show scenes of local harvesting.
Let me know what you'd like to see and I can try to shoot/upload those.