Our world is becoming complicated. Cold War ways of thinking about Asia in particular are useless, damaging to our foreign policy. I wish more Americans would use their wealth to see, really see, our World, and understand that it is not as we were taught in school. Go and experience for yourselves, the lives of people, who except for accident of birth, are not that much different than you. Remember that; not that much different than you.
Litang is far from a tourist town. The roads are so bad that the Han Chinese find it quite an adventure to travel there via modern SUV to view the, strange to them, Tibetans. They found it quite strange to find two Westerners, a couple, riding a tandem bicycle, on the roads and elevations they found so daunting. They are daunting, and took a physical toll on us, leading to a well deserved rest in a town we came to love, and found difficult to leave, despite the high elevation and wonky weather.
This family took us in, hungry, tired, near hypothermia at nearly 15,000 feet elevation in Tibetan Sichuan, China. We are still thankful.
So sad to hear of the crowd disaster and all the deaths in Cambodia. In our three weeks or so in the country we found the people to be hard working, cheerful and generally happy despite sometimes difficult living conditions. Like most Southeast Asians, they love their festivals, and the Water Festival is most beloved. This is an unusual occurrence and should not deter anyone from visiting this wonderful country. We’d go back in a minute. เทศกาลน้ำ