hello everyone, it has been 5 months since i left england on my little trip and all is well! i did think i would be out of contact for a while being in the ass end of the back and beyond, but to my surprise even these backward tibetan country folk (not much different to those kilmersdon village yokels) have herd of such revolutionary discoveries such as the t'internet, interior decorating and the wheel! so i'm able to keep everyone posted on the mis-haps of my little asia adventure, for example the involuntary bowel movements that i have recently experienced. today i took the bus from ganzi to dege and it was the most beautiful bus ride i have ever been on! i know i keep saying it but this country is so beautiful and it just keeps getting better and better. the ride took us through the chola mountains. just before the mountains there was the most beautiful sight, we passed a tibetan lamasery which was on a hill surrounded by trees with a river running in front of it and a lake out the back of it and behind that there was the mountains which are huge and these had loads of snow on them and the the beautiful blue sky behind it. just amazing. i wanted to take a picture but i didn't think lying over a couple of tibetan monks hanging my camera out the window was appropriate. i know what side of the bus to sit on on the way back! we drove over the mountains, when we reached the top there was a small tibetan prayer site where the monks and a few other guys through out some prayer papers for good luck (the pass was 5050 meters above sea level!) when we were going down the other side i realised why they were wishing for good luck. pretty much vertical drops of hundereds of meters and the smallest little dirt track which we had to go down made me want to go back pick up all the bits of prayer paper just so i could throw them down again and wish for a miracle! but, oh my god, the view was well worth risking your life for. words just can't describe! after getting here i met a nice isrealie couple (can't remember their names) and we walked around the town, which is a nice little town with a small market with fruit and veg stalls and clothing stalls which is pretty much all you could want here. we followed a river down to the end of town and then crossed to walk up the otherside, after a while we walked through a school where all the kids were playing basketball, they all shouted for us to play, and i was not about to upset the kids by not playing, i spent the next hour missing shots from all over the court but the kids loved it. i'm meeting them again tomorrow for a game at 5! not much else to report from here other than i should be going to see a tibetan print works tomorrow and then i think i'll start to head back towards chengdu. today i was woken up by a cleaning lady at 8am asking if i wanted my sheets changed while i was still rolling around in my pit, i politley declined the offer whilst pulling my face off the dribble ridden pillow, after laughing at the idea of waking up i tried to get back to sleep. 20 minutes of trying to get comfortable again and i was up and ready to take on the world. i was informed by the woman in the other hotel that i wont be able to have my first shower in 5 days till later when they turned the hot water on. rather annoyed and starting to smell like i was dead i returned to my hotel and brushed my teeth when a french girl i bumped into in a town on the way here tapped me on the shoulder and asked what i was doing for the day. we went for breakfast in a little place across the road. the french girl (i can't remember her name so i will now refer to her as frenchy) could speak very good chinese so i left it to her to order whatever was good. we were given a bowl of rice in hot water and some dumplings, the dumplings were good but bloody spicy, not what i usually what i look for in a breakfast food but good all the same, the rice in water tasted of nothing... till he put some sugar in it and then it was like licking a tate and lyle bag of sugar clean! i had 2 bowls! after breakfast we went to the bakong scripture printing lamasery. we paid our enterance fee off 25 kwai which included a guide who couldn't speak a word of english and when frenchy tried speaking to him in chinese he refused to listen let alone answer! he was actually more like a baby sitter, watching us, making sure we didn't pull out the printing blocks and start hitting each other with them. inside it was really interesting watching the workers going hell for leather wetting these printing blocks with ink, putting paper on the blocks and then another guy running a wheel up and down the paper against the block like a mad man. apparently they do about 2500 prints a day! on the roof there were a load of blocks being lacqured with some sort of mixture involving yak butter, i was straight in there to lend a helping hand, then after the blocks had there coat of yak butter they were left out to dry in the sun. we walked around the roof of the lamasery where we found a small room on the roof where a monk was praying inbetween texting on his mobile. frenchy and me did our bit by praying to buddha in his little room. back inside the lamasery we bought some printings which had been done on material, the one i bought had some pictures and some tibetan scripture on it about the size of a tea towel, mother will love it. on the way out we found a history of indian buddhism which comprised of 555 woodblocks and is the only survivning copy in the world. wow! i thought it was interesting anyway! in the afternoon we met up with an isrealie couple i met on the bus ride here and we went for a walk up one of the mountains which surround this little town, towards 2 towers which you can see from the ground. at the foot of the mountain we had to walk through what looked like some peoples back gardens, where we were scared witless by a huge dog, more like a small horse, which was barking his ass off while strangling himself on the chain around his neck trying to get a good taste of us, for the next 5 minutes we were running up the mountain pretending that we were running to keep fit not to escape the very large rabid dog which looked like he would break the chain at any minute and hunt us down. at about half way up the mountain we found the towers and stopped to take in the view of the town from high up, the scenery of the valley and to take a few pictures. we sat down for a while when we spotted a monk riding a horse up the mountain, we called him over and while he was talking to frenchy i went for a ride on his horse, well a walk for a few steps anyway. after getting back down the mountain i went to play basketball with the kids that i met yesterday at the school. for about 30 minutes i was running around the court like a headless chicken and missing pretty much every shot i took, i blame it on the altitude. i was knackered and breathing heavy. sweating like 5 sweaty pigs, i decided to go back to the hotel and take my first shower in 5 days. the shower was an open public shower, i didn't even see a different side for men and women, but luckily i was the only one worried about personal hygiene at that moment. it felt good to have that shower, i could feel the dirt just running off me. so that's me showerd for this week, i might even use soap next week! tomorrow i'll be getting the bus out of here back to ganzi which means i'll need to be up with sun to catch the bus, so i better be getting to bed to catch up on some well earned beauty sleep. i woke up today at dawn's crack (6:30am) to get the bus out of here only to be told by the rather obese, smelly and lets not forget backwards ticket guy that he has no seats left on the bus! i spent the next 20 minutes trying to book a ticket for tomorrows bus out of here, which he wouldn't let me do yesterday, fingering through my phrase book, stumbling over some chinese phrases whilst mumbling rather rude words in the direction of our aesthetically challenged friend! but alas, i now have a ticket for tomorrow, i don't quite know where it's taking me but i have the ticket! i went back to bed after the hastles of the last 30 minutes, which any sane person would do at that time in the morning, and woke up at the very reasonable hour of 11am, only to look out of the hole of my broken hotel window to see that the heavens have opened and it was pissing down, so now i'm in the t'internet bar (shed), writing my postcard well better be off, the rain has gone from torrential to a heavy drizzle, happy days!! speak to you all soon, hopefully from somewhere different. christopher.