Litang
Sichuan Province, China
June 2018
The air and the light here at +4,000 metres felt so different to anywhere I’ve ever been. It’s cold and bright and sunny and open. Litang is magic. People are dressed so beautifully, both the nomads in town for the market and the locals who live there. I just walked around in a daze. The nomad men wear big hats, cream coloured belted robes over their shirts and trousers and tall black boots and sit astride their motorcycles, some offering baskets of caterpillar fungus for sale. Everyone is gorgeous, with cheeks worn red from the wind and sun. There are yaks walking the streets and being grazed in the hills around the monastery. The city is situated in grasslands surrounded by mountains. We met some school kids who were learning English in school, and they invited us to come to their school graduation the next day. They photographed us like we were celebrities and we added them all on WeChat to share photos and emojis. The last photo here is a sky burial site, a funeral practice where the body is placed on a mountaintop, exposed to the elements to decompose and to be eaten by vultures.