Out cruising the greater Beijing mountain regions... back mountains of the Xiangshuihu Great Wall section (40°27'34"N 116°27'13"E), the wall connects from here to the Moyashike Great Wall area (40°26'43"N 116°28'31"E). Great spot to start hiking around Moyashike Valley and Great Wall Spur Loop and over the mountain range to the Xiangshuihu Great Wall section.
It's that time of year again around Beijing: the time to sit outside on tiny stools, order way too much Chuan'r (roadside / outdoor BBQ Beijing style = skewered meat sticks), overestimate your ability to stand mala, and wash it all down with a mug of jiapi (that delicious draft beer). Mates up here in Beijing always try but been in the lovely motherland for some years now and reckon had my fair share of roadkill, mystery meat and lousy tasteless greasy food full of MSG and not very fond of the native "food experience & adventure" anymore.
Well ~ people always ask about my favourite places to eat while in Beijing, here we go with a short list of my personal new and old time favourites go-to places within reasonable city limits during June / July 2015. Beijing's worst kept secret is back with tasty tacos and tequila, this time setting up in the Sanlitun area. Tasty and super fresh Mexican over at the Taco Bar = The Taco Bar Solid great food, prepared - cooked and expertly smoked in-house, never had a wrong meal at Homeplate BBQ (Sanlitun) = » Home Plate BBQ ~ Beijing China Sanlintun MokaBros = MOKA Bros Restaurant - Just another WordPress site ,good solid food and drinks and absolute great location for people watching. Food is split up in salads, sandwiches & wraps, savory & sweet crepes, and something they're calling "Power Bowls", which is rice and or noodle-based main courses. A fair amount of variance in each section with some pretty creative options. Stuff'd located in the Jianchang Hutong / Doncheng District, English style gastro-pub Stuff'd specializes in food that is stuffed -- nay "Stuff'd" -- with other food. Everything on the menu is the glorious meeting of one thing inside another -- sausages, pits, pot pies, calzones, and more. Recommended are their homemade sausages and beer. Popular brunch special too = Stuff'd - adjacent to Arrow Factory Brewery Beijing = Arrow Factory 箭厂空间
The ballers are back, this time with their first offline space, in a quiet Hutong just off Gulou Xidajie. The Meatball Company = http://www.themeatballcompanybj.com ,not far from Bohai Lake district and the Bell Tower. Okra 1949 is a modern sushi bar and restaurant founded by Chef Max Levy features sushi, sake and cocktails in Sanlitun's 1949 -The Hidden City- / Beijing. = Okra1949 Same area (Sanlitun's 1949 -The Hidden City- / Beijing) has the famous JingA Brewery = Jing-A Brewing Co. | Brewed in Beijing
Chef Jeff's "Frost", serves a great tasty burger (different versions) located at 55 Xingfucun Zhonglu (in the alleyway across from April Gourmet Supermarket) Chaoyang District 朝阳区幸福村中路55 (phone: 64175430). Furthermore, one can't go wrong with well established food + beverage outlets owned and operated by Blue Frog: 蓝蛙 / Wagas: Wagas / Element Fresh: Element Fresh Fresh expert brewed coffee over near the big T-Square, Soloist Coffee = Soloist Coffee - Beijing - Coffee shop | Facebook Furthermore, great coffee served by FlatWhite = Cafe Flatwhite with several locations around Beijing including a nice venue for people watching in the 751 / 798 Dashanzi, Chaoyang District: 798 Art District - Art News - Artists - Musicians - 798district.com Famous breweries are The Great Leap outlets with various locations across Beijing....Great place to bring visitors to Beijing that have had one too many Chinese meals and need a western alternative. Food is consistent and reasonably priced and the beer samplers are good for finding the brew you like best. GREAT LEAP BREWING As with every hustling and bustling Capital City, places opening and closing just overnight, really good up to date listings to explore the food + beverage options available in Beijing: Things To Do In Beijing Including Attractions, Restaurants, Bars, Clubs, Music & Theatre - Time Out Beijing -- SmartBeijing -- the Beijinger | | Beijing classifieds, forum, directory, blog, and more Last but not least, all public spaces incl. bars and restaurants enforce the newly introduced NO SMOKING ban...
The "Tail of the Dragon" (Black Dragon Pool Road S310 "That road scared the shit out of me, let's do it all over again") riding once before departure from the greater Capital City Beijing region to other destinations....
ཨ༌མདོ Amdo is one of the three main regions of Tibet found in the northeast corner of the Tibetan Plateau. Amdo is home to approximately 25% of the total Tibetan population. Parts of Amdo lie in northern and eastern Qinghai, southwest Gansu and northern Sichuan. If you think of Tibet as rolling grasslands filled with yaks and nomads, the Amdo region is what you are thinking of. Amdo covers an area of over 645,000 square kilometers and is slightly smaller than the state of Texas and slightly larger than Ukraine..... Traveling around the greater Amdo-Tibet region one can't miss the awesome grassland scattered all over the various mountain ranges, pics below are taken around the greater Labrang / Langmusi / Rebkong area.
Butch, edit your post........take out/delete: width=xxx height=xxx ....from each of the image opening tags ;-) I made a start but got bored! lol Great photos as usual :niceone:
Quite awesome.you have written us a travel guide. Very inspiring. Tell me,can you ride like the wind on those seemingly empty roads.or are the police draconian against high speed. Or does it all go into,the Xmas fund?
Langmusi (Tibetan = Taktsang Lhamo སྟག་ཚང་ལྷ་མོ་) is a small village straddling the provincial Gansu and Sichuan border in the Amdo Region of the Tibetan Plateau. Sitting at approx. 3600m, Lhamo lies in a beautiful valley surrounded by alpine forests and amazing mountains. The town only has a population of around 4000, with more than 10% of the people belonging to the two monasteries located in the village. During Tibetan New Year (Losar ལོ་གསར་) and during other festivals throughout the year, many pilgrims can be found going to Lhamo from other areas in Amdo. These pilgrims often prostrate to the ground every three steps all the way to the monasteries. The journey for them can take several weeks or even months to complete. The town is home to Buddhists and Muslims, Tibetans and Huizu, government-backed monasteries, Tibetan-back monasteries, the Chinese military, nomadic herders, Tibetans on pilgrimages, and a splash of foreign and Chinese tourists. Mix all of that among a population of less than 5,000, and there you have Langmusi.... Kirti Monastery (Sichuan province side of the village with around 750 monks). Behind the monastery is a gorge with several old meditation caves. In Tibetan, “Taktsang” means “Tiger Cave” and a short hike behind Kirti Monastery will bring you to the caves for which the town is named. Hiking behind the monastery is one of the highlights of the area. Sertri Monastery (Gansu province side of the village with around 350 monks). It is the higher of the two Langmusi monasteries and sits in a less impressive setting than nearby Kerti Monastery. There is a pilgrimage Kora around Sertri. It is best to go in the morning as there are normally many Tibetan pilgrims also doing the Kora. If you follow the paved road past Sertri, it leads to several small villages home to Tibetan herders. These families are quite friendly and are worth the extra hike to reach.
Langmusi (Tibetan = Taktsang Lhamo སྟག་ཚང་ལྷ་མོ་) is a small village straddling the provincial Gansu and Sichuan border in the Amdo Region of the Tibetan Plateau.
Langmusi (Tibetan = Taktsang Lhamo སྟག་ཚང་ལྷ་མོ་) is a small village straddling the provincial Gansu and Sichuan border in the Amdo Region of the Tibetan Plateau.
In Tibetan, “Taktsang” means “Tiger Cave” and a short hike behind Kirti Monastery will bring you to the caves for which the town is named.
Walk up past the left side of Serti Monastery (Langmusi), you’ll eventually come to a clearing near a hilltop to the site of a Tibetan tradition. Sky burial (Tibetan: བྱ་གཏོར་, Wylie: bya gtor, lit. "bird-scattered" is a funeral practice in which a human corpse is placed on a mountaintop to decompose while exposing to the elements or to be eaten by scavenging animals, especially birds of prey. It is a specific type of the general practice of excarnation. It is practiced in the Chinese provinces of Tibet, Qinghai, Sichuan and Inner Mongolia, and in Mongolia proper. The locations of preparation and sky burial are understood in the Vajrayana Buddhist traditions as charnel grounds. Comparable practices are part of Zoroastrian burial practices where deceased are exposed to the elements and birds of prey on stone structures called Dakhma. Few such places remain operational today due to religious marginalisation, urbanisation and the decimation of vulture populations. The majority of Tibetan people and many Mongols adhere to Vajrayana Buddhism, which teaches the transmigration of spirits. There is no need to preserve the body, as it is now an empty vessel. Birds may eat it or nature may cause it to decompose. The function of the sky burial is simply to dispose of the remains in as generous a way as possible (the source of the practice's Tibetan name). In much of Tibet and Qinghai, the ground is too hard and rocky to dig a grave, and, due to the scarcity of fuel and timber, sky burials were typically more practical than the traditional Buddhist practice of cremation. In the past, cremation was limited to high lamas and some other dignitaries, but modern technology and difficulties with sky burial have led to its increasing use by commoners. During my last visit to the exact same Sky Burial site (May 2004), the grounds were littered with bones, skulls and decomposing corpses - body parts. The vultures and birds of prey were too fat and heavy to fly and just hopped away (May 2004)....
Knowing your shit or knowing you're shit...... One my favourite life long sayings and makes me seriously smile once again while looking at all the Yak dung drying in the sun (Langmusi) like artwork to be used as a fuel source (open + closed fireplaces) by the Tibetan herdsmen / nomads. When used as fuel source, the faeces are first dried. Faeces for this purpose is collected daily at the campsite at the end of the day's grazing or brought in from the range in the warm season. A stick wrapped in yak hair is used to cut the faeces into slices that are exposed to the sun for a day or longer on each side until dry. When fully dry, the faeces slices are stacked in heaps up to 2 m high and "painted" with fresh faeces to keep out rain. A drainage channel is often dug at the bottom of the heap to take away run-off water. If the heap is to be used up before the rainy season, it may not be painted. Completely dry faeces are also stored in the Tibetan herdsmen / nomad tents, ready for use at any time.
