Qinghai Province

Photo: Brad eating breakfast on the street in Golmud, Qinghai Province, 1986.

The last time I was in Qinghai Province I was fascinated with everything: the landscape, the people, the food ... everything! Everything, that is, except the dog that leaped down off the roof of a house and bit me in the back of the leg. That hurt!

In the photo above, I was slurping down a hot and spicy breakfast with my traveling partner, Gerry (who took the photo). Because it was cold on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau on those December mornings I was layered up under a cotton-quilted People's Liberation Army jacket and a camel-fur-lined Kazakh hat. I'd purchased the hat off a Kazakh in a Gobi Desert community several weeks earlier in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region (Chinese Turkestan). The Kazakh had just dismounted from his Bactrian camel at the post office where I haggled him for his hat. It was a good investment because the hat was as warm as Qinghai was frigid!

Tomorrow we depart for Qinghai, which I suspect Sander will find as the most unusual landscape he has ever experienced. I also suspect that this will be my last posting until after we arrive in Hong Kong.

后天见!