The owner of our guesthouse, who also suffered from a touch of the crazy, had arranged our horse-riding expedition with a local Tibetan family he knew. He sent us off with gleeful stories of how a girl had broken her front teeth horse-riding the day before. We were dropped off at a small, one-storey brick house the size of a portakabin in the grasslands, set in its own large yard amidst a small collection of similar buildings. Inside, we were gestured through to a living area focused around a small stove and offered zanba by the friendly elderly mother of this family. It was drizzling a little outside, so we made conversation for a while and had a nice laugh at Cat's expense when the old lady jokingly tried to set her up with her own teenage son. The same old lady talked us each into donning traditional Tibetan robes for our riding expedition. These all looked ridiculous. Hannah's sleeves flapped about a metre past her wrist, and my fetching khaki number was lined with fake tiger fur. Cat liked to think her navy robe looked classy, which it almost did - if only when she stood beside me and Hannah.

It was lucky all three of us had ridden horses before, because there was minimal assistance from anyone in getting us onto the horses and absolutely no instruction as to how we ought to control them. I could barely get on my horse (I like to blame the weight of my new robes for this), which was an excellent start, and my horse lost it's balance and nearly toppled over in the mud before we made it out of the yard, which was an even better one. The three of us set off down the track and made it a fair way down before realising that we were alone and unattended, which was a little concerning, although one of the teenage sons did come sauntering after us not long after. My horse, Lionel, quickly established itself as the fastest of the trio so I got to stride smugly ahead whilst Cat and Hannah dropped behind, bickering over whose fault it was that their horses kept walking into each other. It has to be said that these horses were not the brightest, and that our little excursion probably didn't deserve to be called horse 'trekking'. We kept to the small dirt tracks between the fields and only briefly broke a trot, but it was still nice to be outside and doing something different. The surrounding scenery was beautiful in an understated way, and ours was as good and cheap a way as any of seeing it properly. Excitement came in the form of Lionel's continued poor balance and frequent slips. At the halfway point of our ride, we all dismounted and squeezed through a barbed wire fence. Our guide didn't really explain why we were doing this, and then he disappeared, so we stood aimlessly in the wet grass for a while. We sang a couple of lines of "The Sound of Music", struggled up one of the hills for the view and then returned to the horses. Cat and Hannah swapped horses, Lionel and I set off again at great speed (relatively speaking, of course) and our guide, who clearly couldn't be arsed walking all the way back, hopped onto the back of Cat's horse with her, where he promptly fell asleep leaning on her back.

We were driven back from our horse-riding extravaganza by a certified maniac, who told us excitedly of his love for English culture such as Justin Beiber, and sped through the muddy, heavily pitted tracks back to the main road at a stupid speed. We skidded sideways too many times to count, narrowly missing ditches and fences each time. I cried out several times, and we deployed our arsenal of situation-appropriate Chinese phrases ("be careful!" "too fast!" "save our lives!"), but I'm pretty sure the attention only encouraged our driver. Once on the main road, he switched to singing snatches of Western songs he knew to impress us and when we said goodbye to him after being released from the deathmobile, he was definitely aiming for farewell hugs - we deflected his outstretched arms with jolly handshakes and went on out way.

That afternoon, we returned to Labrang monastery to visit a large gold stupa we'd noticed at a distance the day before. This looked like one of the highlights of the monastery, but clearly we weren't the only ones who thought so, as someone had decided it required a separate entrance ticket to the ones we already had. The three of us were very unhappy about having to fork out an extra 20Y for this, and seriously debated walking off in protest and not visiting the stupa. Pleading for a student ticket did nothing. Telling the ticket-seller-guard that we were poor student backpackers who needed that 20Y to buy our dinner did nothing. Eventually we caved and stumped up the money, telling the guard on our way in that we hoped he was happy because we wouldn't be able to afford to eat now. He only laughed. We climbed through the temple at the base of the stupa and wound our way (always clockwise!) up to its topmost level, where a two-foot wide pathway encircled the big gold bulb at the stupa's peak. There was a small glass window into the bright shrine in the heart of the stupa, with a little letterbox stuffed with yuan notes. From here, we had a view across the whole of the sprawling monastery and the hills on either side, which went a long way to justifying the 20Y we'd spent to get up there. We stopped to talk with the ticket-guard guy again on our way out - "we like it, but we like eating too. And now we have no money to eat tonight..." We pulled our saddest faces for his benefit, but the cold-hearted Scrooge only laughed at us. Unbelievable.

Having spent all our money visiting the stupa, we went back to the hostel hungry (after only the smallest of meals at the same restaurant as the night before and the most frugal of shopping trips in the indoor market on the main street), where we stayed up late planning bets about things that would happen during the rest of our time travelling.