8 June - Tibet - Lhasa

Another local day with a morning visit to the Drepung Monastery a little way out of town. It is huge & used to house over a 1000 monks in the past. Today's it has less than 200. The point of interest at this one is the fact that it has nuns as well. ( I take the guides word for it because they look like men to me. ) A couple of these nuns live in caves hewn into the hillside surrounded by their worldly possessions.... Such that they are.

One of sights that is becoming increasingly common is seeing the monks chanting & beating drums. Some use paper chants but increasingly the younger monks have iPhones & use these for chanting & communicating. The reason why it has to be iPhone is because its the only smart phone that has the Tibetan alphabet. This alphabet was developed from the Indian Sanskrit. One of the comedians in our group suggested 'monkmatchs.com' as an app.! I'm surprised we were not asked to leave such was the level of mirth.

Our group is made up of us, a father & son and a guy & girl travelling on their own, and 2 young Singaporean young men who have just finished studying. The father & son duo come from Guangzhou but have Canadian accents..... Dad left Hong Kong at 14 to explore the world & landed up in Saskatchewan Canada where he went to school & uni. The son is a businessman in Guangzhou in partnership with a NZ business partner .... It's absolutely fascinating listening to his stories of how business is conducted..... Also interesting is the fact that he & his family ( Canadian born & bred wife & 2 little children ) are happy living there. They have a spacious apartment in the centre of town & active social life etc. his
3 yr old speaks both Chinese & English.

Our afternoon expedition after a local lunch was to Jokhang palace/temple. It is also a Unesco site. It's placed right in the centre of town & in the week we have been here is constantly busy with people praying at the temple & walking in a clockwise way around the temple. The very devout travel around by totally prostrating themselves.

We leave here tomorrow .... An early start of 6.40am.