This is it

Wednesday morning my mum will take us to Cape Town for a last lunch, an embarrassment of tearful hugs, dinner and too much wine before we grumpily get on our 8am flight to London on Thursday 1 March.

Amanda's dad will no doubt rue his offer to pick us up from Heathrow in the 6pm rush hour, but we're very grateful and look forward to staying in his and Sue's house for a week while they rush around India and Nepal.

We've postponed reality for a week by skiing in France with Les Girls. So our new life in the UK officially starts on Monday 19 March - one in which we will eat only organic food, watch no television and ban the car. And probably do some good deeds and smile piously at cab drivers who knock us off our bicycles.

Good bye travels. The past 15 months have been the best of our lives. Thank you.

In full view

Elim dune near Sesriem in the Namib Naukluft National Park

Our second crossing of the Tropic of Capricorn - the first time was in Australia

Camping spot at Sesriem

The starkly beautiful Deadvlei (dead pan) in the Namib

Dune 45 (45km from Sesriem)

Kolmanskop, near Luderitz, where surface diamonds once were nearly as plentiful as sand. The diamonds ran out, the sand didn't and it's now a ghost town

Favourite passtime - in the garden of Hotel Helmeringshausen, Nowhereville

Luderitz, on the coast. A million miles from anywhere

Fishriver Canyon near the border with South Africa. A gruelling 5-day, 80km trek which is closed to hikers in summer

The end of the road as we know it

The sands of time are fast running out on our travels, but we're having a last good-time fling before bowing to the inevitability of having to wash every day and actually work for a living.

When we arrived in Cape Town on 19 December two and half months of indulgent luxury (viz clean, sit-down toilets, good wine and typhoid-free salads) expanded ahead of us. It would last forever.

It didn't.

Christmas and New Year with my family wooshed by as quickly as saying "more wine?"; the Boardman clan's three weeks in the White House of Onrus were over after three bottles of Newton Johnson sauvignon blanc (apart from four days of looking after 6-month-old Isabella and fabulous '2 and half, soon I'll be 4' Beth); and on the Whale Trail, despite our best efforts, five days caught up with us before the five of us could kill a box of red. (Mind you, we did manage to work our way through 12 bottles of white. Easy hiking.)

And now we're in Swakopmund, on the coast of Namibia, moaning about the slow internet connection and wondering what the big deal is about Swakop. It does touch the heart for its tenacious perch on the Atlantic Ocean in a desperate effort to fend off the marching dunes of the Namib desert. But it's flat, modern (apart from a few stodgy remains from the German era), and its grid-like layout reminds too much of Australian towns of similar isolation.

But maybe we'll be converted to the charms of the town when I frog-march Amanda down to the beach in gentle persuasion to swim with me in the Arctic.

Sesriem and Sossusvlei, on the other hand, blew us away, and will probably be on the podium when it comes to handing out Highlights of our Year awards.

Sesriem is the campsite and Sossusvlei the dry (now) pan with centuries-old dead trees, both in the desert of big red sand dunes of the Namib Naukluf National Park. Starkly, deeply beautiful. If it had had broadband internet one could have lived there. (And I could have uploaded a few pics onto this blog).

Our campsite is a large spot under an immense camelthorn tree, enclosed by a low-packed stone wall (like Voortrekkers in our kraal). Our braai spot overlooks a plain of vividly yellow scrub while, on the left, the dunes climb to 300m and, on the right, raggedy mountains change colour throughout the day.

We share it with birds at breakfast time, stripy field mice during daylight hours and jackals, who come for dinner, circling our enclosure. One even enters our tent while we have dinner around the fire. We fall asleep to the sounds of their high-pitched yelping, and once or twice during the night have to shoo them from our tent with our imitation of lion-growls.

Mrs and Mr F Mice impertinently invade our space (admittedly, we invaded theirs first) and fearlessly sniff around us, our tent and our food. Even my tent-pole-in-hand menacing stance and lion-growls fail to instill fear, so we succumb and spend the rest of the three days in perfect harmony with the local wild life.

And so we cling to our last days as we traverse this immense country of perfect gravel roads, painfully beautiful scenery and no people in our sissy city car (never before have I suffered such four-wheel drive envy). Soon it will be over.

The thing about India

Sunset over Khuri, in the Thar desert

We leave India for South Africa, via Dubai, with a mixed bag of sadness and relief.

It drives you mad

• It's a dirty country. The streets are a free-for-all of cars, motorbikes, rickshaws, people, cows, dogs, goats, pigs and tourists - all vying for space, business, food, sex, directions, sometimes simply for survival.
• It smells of pee. Sanitation (like road rules) is a vague concept - perhaps an unaffordable luxury - not rectified by the occasional "I am clean. Use me" sign on a public convenience. Men urinate where and when they need, everybody shits on the railway lines simply because there's nowhere else to do so and cows have carte blanche. Dogs, presumably, eat so little that they leave little behind.
• Every man, woman, child, cow and dog on the street wants and expects something from tourists: money, chocolate, pens (kids sell them for chocolate to stall holders, who sell them back to tourists to give to the kids) and food. The standard opening line "Which country, medem (or sir, infuriatingly, when they see only short hair and trousers) is a precursor to a persistent hard-sell of "buy in my shop, very cheap", "Rupee?", "Rickshaw, rickshaw?" Even the holy men ardently flog their blessings at a significant mark-up.
• Every man, woman and child (and sometimes, one suspects, cow and dog) is either a tout or has a secondary line of business which involves touting. From rickshaw drivers insisting on taking a detour to their brother/uncle's pashmina/crystal/leather shop to children begging for milk that can only be bought from a specific shop at a ridiculous price. (The scam being that the child returns the powdered milk to the shopkeeper in exchange for a commission.)
• While train travel is a pleasure (at least for us), buying train tickets is not. In the bigger centres, some train stations have special tourist quotas where foreign travellers huddle together in air-conditioned offices to buy tickets in orderly and peaceful conditions. But we feel guilty and, where possible, queue in the "Ladies, foriegners (sic), senior citizens" line. The ladies being young women who buy tickets for their (and others') men folk and the senior citizens very pushy, grumpy old men. The foreigners are polite tourists who wait patiently (but silently seething in the heat), sometimes for hours, while young ladies with immaculate timing and grumpy old men push in with impunity.

Amanda's steed

It touches the heart and makes you want to go back

• For all the rubbish lining the streets, nothing is ever wasted. What the holy cows and lowly dogs don't consume (rotting vegetables, discarded carton and plastic mostly make their way into some underfed stomach), end up on rubbish heaps where rag pickers meticulously find uses for everything unwanted. The mountain of empty mineral water bottles we tourist leave behind in our budget hotels are a welcome - if labour intensive - earner at one rupee for 100 bottles (8,000 bottles will earn you a pound).
• It soon becomes apparent that one traveller's beggar or tout is the next foreigner's businessman or entrepreneur who, just like everywhere else, is trying to make a living.
• The food is excellent. In dark and dingy kitchens, on street corners and in mobile stalls men and women practice culinary magic on little gas hobs and open fires. (Fortunately for the waistline, the wine industry is in its infancy and the result is mostly atrocious - Chateau Indage the closest to being vaguely drinkable.)
• The Times of India is a very good newspaper (probably better than anything we read in Australia), despite the sometimes idiosyncratic use of English. 49 people dying in a bus accident is not a tragedy but a "mishap". The lonely hearts section is a fascinating insight into caste, arranged marriages, wealth and education. (The first prize goes to a lady looking for "effeminate man or eunuch for marriage". We still wonder whether she found one.)
• One can have only warm feelings for a country where, in the 1920s, a Maharajah of Varanasi is awarded Belgium's Order of Leopold II for "his prowess in shooting tossed coins with a rifle". Or where our friend Mary visits her very ill husband in a Chandigarh hospital only to discover a monkey having a shower in the en-suite bathroom.
• And then there's Mr Singh, a Brahmin teacher in Jaiselmer, who, with no outside funding, opened a little cultural museum "to teach the children their heritage". He explains the importance of the kama sutra, without which many women "lay with their head turned away while their husbands satisfy only themselves on top".
• Luckily for us, we give in to Amerjeet Singh's request to "come to my house, see my children" as he follows us for about 10 minutes through the streets of Chamba. Back home Mrs Singh, an English teacher, grimaces only slightly as her husband brings home yet some more tourists to speak English to her and the children. We spend two hours with them, chatting and admiring photo albums. Amerjeet ever sends the servant to buy us some biscuits.

And there are many more such encounters with extraordinary people, funny people, serious ones, downright weird individuals and people just like us.

We hope India will welcome us back - we still need to get beyond the surface and understand it better.

* We're now in South Africa, not doing a hell of a lot and sad that the great adventure is over. We're booked on a flight on 7 February but may postpone the inevitable until the begging of March.

Ladies walking home with water

Dog in a coat in Delhi

School rickshaw in Paharganj, Delhi

Anger management

Jaiselmer fort

Aids Day in India

Jodhpur, the blue city

Pig in Pushkar

Udaipur City Palace

A lot on her mind

The view on the Lake Palace Hotel from our 'lets spoil ourselves' haveli in Udaipur, and the haveli, Jagat Niwas, below

And the view from the rooftop restaurant

Our first anniversary

Today exactly a year ago we left London for Havana, tired, cross with each other, worried about what we were leaving behind and hardly thinking about what was lying ahead.

Here in Jaiselmer, Rajasthan's golden desert city, over a glass of beer, then a lemon soda and finally a masala chai we perform the necessary toasts to each country we've visited and are yet to visit, with a special double-salute to India and all her touts. We'll be sad to leave in just over a week.

We congratulate ourselves on spending nearly every hour of the past 365 days in each other's company without too much unnecessary scarring. And every now and then the inevitable "can't believe it's already been a year" slips out. Because we can't believe it has already been a year.

We wonder whether we'll ever do another full year, whereupon Amanda's "maybe when we're sixty" makes me reach nervously for an empty beer glass.

We talk of all the places we'd still like to go - from London to Beijing by train, the rest of South and Central America, Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan etc. We need much more than a year and can't wait until we're sixty.

We finish the evening by buying a skin-and-bone cow six cauliflower heads and 5 tomatoes while turbaned men wrapped in shawls hasten home in the wintry desert night. Near our hotel, a lone camel is parked outside a house, much like a black cab outside a driver's house in Hackney.

It has been a good year for us, and - give or take a few hundred typhoid antigens - we are very grateful to have been so fortunate.

On typhoid, journalism and the Raj

Patient update
Amanda left hospital after ten days with a cold and more typhoid antigens in her blood than before, as well as an enlarged liver, but feeling significantly fitter and fever-free. Further tests in a few days will hopefully reveal a bug-free outlook. In the meanwhile, the medicine cabinet has nearly doubled the weight of her backpack. (And I should know - I'm carrying both backpacks while the patient regains her strength.)

Since then we've been back on the road, first stopping off in Varanasi on the Ganges. Our hotel overlooked Harischandra Ghat (a burning funeral spot) and so death became part of our daily ritual, along with the best cup of coffee in India and the most superior cheese cake in the world (both at Open Hand coffee and silk shop, owned, of course, by South Africans). We marvelled at the faithful not only bathing but also drinking the near-septic water of the holy river.


Colourful queue into the Taj

And then we hit the All India Cliche Spot - the Taj Mahal in Agra. It is, unequivocally, the most beautiful building in the world - can anyone think of a contender that comes close?

Despite the thousands of tourists jostling for camera space, the ignominy of having to pose for one beautifully dressed family/giggling group of naughty boys/lecherous old men after the other and the potent whiff of a million sweaty feet (shoes have to be removed), we swoon for hours over this mausoleum to love. The sensuous, marble symmetry, the perfect proportion, the sheer romance of its raised position, the jewelled inlay work. It takes your breath away.

We blow the budget - and suffer great guilt - by spending sunset on the balcony of the Oberoi hotel, where I pay Rps 500 (more than GBP5) for a glass of wine while Coups has a lemon soda. To put it in perspective: our hotel room - obviously not the Oberoi - was a 'luxury splashout' at Rps 450.

The train that brought us from Varanasi to Agra (four hours late), is the same train that takes us to Jaipur, capital of Rajasthan, a few days later. We congratulate ourselves on our foresight not to get to Agra Fort station on time for the supposed 6.15am departure, but at 9am. Just as well, because the train eventually pulls in at 10.30.

Jaighar Fort, near Jaipur. Showing the Coups in fine fettle

Jaipur surely wins the award for the Most Hassly Town in the Land. Every rickshaw driver, man, woman, child and goat in the street is a travel industry entrepreneur - whether it be through customised trips (every one has exactly the same customised trip), see my brother/cousin's shop, only look, baksheesh (I thought that was an Arabic word?), I help you/you help me, always accompanied by the Which country? refrain.

It's so draining to apologise for being bad tourists (we're not here to buy, just to walk around the streets and look at the buildings) and nobody accepts no for an answer.

Of course not

Story of the day:
from the Times of India

Negligence cry over death at hospital

ANGRY protests rocked (no less) the premises of a local veterinary (yep, veterinary) hospital on Monday following the death of a cow (what else) allegedly due to medical negligence. An irate mob gheraoed (Indian press loves this word) the 'errant' doctor's chamber for (get this) nearly an hour on Monday - Sunday being a holiday (of course).

...followed by reams of waffle about the unfortunate demise of the poor cow, which, it transpires, received a diarrhoea injection instead of fertility treatment. And then this, surely the most pithy quote from an unlikely source:

Sukdeb Shaw, a milkman of Makrampur, alleged that the vets at the hospital were lazy and never examined their patients. "They read newspapers or chat with pharmacists while clerks turn into doctors."

Hurrah for colonialism
Or at least as far as the dissemination across the former colonies of Marmite is concerned. Thank you, Britain, for enabling me to buy the black gold in a small corner shop, guarded by a sleepy buffalo, in Varanasi and in the madness of Calcutta's New Market. And shame on Australia for daring to think it could do it better with its paltry, repeat-tried-but-failed offerings (Vegemite, Promite, even their own version of Marmite - all shite-mite).

Indian food continues to charm the pants off us (literally) - a cullinary extravaganza that reaches fulfilment every morning with butter toast, covered in our delicious Marmite, and a cup of hot, sweet masala chai. Life is indeed beautiful.

Camel enjoying a shave

Typhoid Trixy sweeps across the City of Joys

Trixy directs operations from her command centre at the Woodlands Hospital in Calcutta

I think it's my fault. As I was saying it, I knew I was inviting the gods of fate to a risky dance. On our last night but one, as we were having yet another celebratory meal with people we'd encountered on the Annapurna trail, I boasted with pig-headed confidence that we've been eating our way across three continents without any ill effects.

The next day we had to delay our departure from Nepal by a day because I had erupted at both ends.

Four days later Amanda is running a temperature of 40 degrees Celcius, suffering from severe headache, light sensitivity, no appetite, massive sweats. Within two days she's on a drip in a hospital in Calcutta with severe typhoid.

Yep, despite having forked out the GDP of a small country on vaccinations, lotions and potions - including typhoid - the bird ingested something bad and dirty and succumbed to the inevitable.

It could have been the cold dal baht that we ate against our better judgement on the train to Calcutta or the hidden bits of ice at the bottom of the papaya lassi in the backpackers hangout in Sudder St wot did it, but it could have been anything.

After five days of really being very ill, Amanda is now feeling much better. She's complaining about the ice cream, got the nurses well organised (after an uncomfortable moment of having to explain to one rummaging through her bedside drawer what a tampon is) and is writing down To Do lists for me. (Sympathy cards can be addressed to me)

Hopefully she'll be evicted by the weekend, and be fit to continue travelling. Calcutta is great, but I'm itching to hit Rajasthan. Time is fleeting - despite having delayed our departure from India by 10 days.

Shaky repairs: scaffolding on the Indian Museum

Mum left all her possessions unprotected on the platform for a while


Victoria Memorial at sunset

The Hooghly River with the Howrah Bridge in the background

Nepal behind us but in our hearts

Supply chain: donkeys with provisions for remote villages in Nepal's Annapurna region

In the dark the rickshaw-wallah stumbles, mumbles and stops. "This India, you get off."

It seems we somehow managed to avoid both the Nepalese and Indian border controls, but no matter, because they're closed in any case, we're told (it's 6.30pm, after all). Come back tomorrow.

So it happens that we spend the night in the veritable shit-hole at the bottom of all shit-holes, a no-hope place where one would prefer to be neither man nor beast. A place where one wouldn't want to be.

Next morning we forego the pleasure of another Nepalese stamp - too far to walk - but decide to keep it legit in India, so pay the customs officer a visit.

His official table is outside the office, which has no roof. He has a moustache worthy of a life-long bureaucrat, is very pleased to meet us, and meticulously enters our details in his heavy ledger. "Your are visitors 923 and 924 this year. Many, many people come to Raxaul." Not by choice, I think. And not that many either.

We chat about cricket, and as we discover later, he represents all Indians in his utter incredulity over India's exit from the ICC Championship. South Africa would be his next choice, but there is Herschel Gibbs and the match-fixing thing, you know.

The serenity of the passport formalities, sitting in the morning sun with only a faint whiff of urine in the air, is complete when we are served a cup of steaming hot chai. Ah, how different could that queue be in Heathrow.

2AC (two-tiered sleeper couch with air conditioning) Mithil Express train (only 20 hours) turns into an unexpected luxury, with clean sheets and a pillow each, as well as two fellow travellers who, apart from the occasional burp, do not fart, spit or rub their genitals excessively.

We arrive in Calcutta at 7am and immediately like the vibe of the city. The moment - and maybe the shock of being back in big, bad, mad, smelly India - proves too great for Amanda and she develops a severe fever of 40 degrees, which we're still struggling to bring under control.

Blood tests for malaria, dengue fever and chikungunya, and checking platelets, ERS and probably the presence of green aliens too, come up alright, but we await the typhoid results with bated breath. And Coups continues to feel grim.

A few random pics:

We saw this amazing 'fairground wheel' in Ghandruk, our last stop on the Annapurna trek, on the last night of the religious festival Tihar (Nepalese version of Diwali, festival of lights)

Celebrating the last day of Tihar with Rajesh, our porter, and Sibrenne from Holland


At the end of Nepal trek there was room on the roof of the bus only - a very refreshing 3-hour ride

One up to the Chinese - their obscene finger juts outs disrespectfully across the square from the Potala in Lhasa

Boogeying down to Madonna in the jeep to Everest Base Camp

Verjaardaggroete van Nepal

Freezing our bits off in front of Annapurna I, the world's 10th highest mountain at 8090m. We walked for days through sun, rain, thunder, hail and a snow storm just to have this photograph taken


Happy birthday, ou tannie. Hoop Ma geniet die dag ten volle.

We wanted to have the picture taken in Tibet with Everest in the background, but I think the altitude affected our memory (and ability to obtain a felt tip). So instead we walked for five days to Annapurna Base Camp to do the necessary at the bottom of the 10th highest mountain peak. (Nepal has 8 of the world's fourteen 8000m-plus mountains.)

Our trek started in beautiful sunshine, with the only eventful moment on the first day being the elastic failure of my cherished black and white stripey underwear (Marks & Spencer, 1997 collection), which to the delight of Amanda, a herd of buffalo and three Tibetan refugee ladies, elegantly peaked out from the bottom of my shorts (only the left leg though; my right hip managed to hold up my dignity). I now only have five pairs of knickers left.

We walked up a very steep mountain and down the other side, just to scale another massive vertical incline and down again. And so on. All the way, every day for eight days. But it is spectacular and we enjoyed every painful, knee-jarring moment. The apple pie, dal bhat (lentil soup, rice, curry and pickle) and Snickers were very helpful in agony management.

The trek was also very good for talking in tongues, and I managed to speak French, German and Dutch about as much as English, while we both realised that our Spanish has been woefully neglected since South America when we met Joseba from San Sebastian. No Afrikaans, but we did meet three South Africans who also live in London.

The higher we walked, the colder it got (and the more expensive the guest houses and food - understandably so, because every morsel has to be carried up the mountain on some skinny but very strong guy's back).

The meteorological culmination was the walk up to Macchapuchre Base Camp in a snow storm (only for about an hour, admittedly), but the cold was quickly banished by sitting in the dining hall of the guest house with a flame thrower under the table for heat. (It's up to the individual to ensure that their feet/legs/rest of body are not incinerated.)

We're back in lovely Pokhara by the lake, eating steak, pizza, ice cream and fresh salads - often all at the same time. On 29 October we will be feeling severely car sick on a bus to the Indian border.


We walked up the million stairs of the Swayambunath Stupa (Monkey Temple) in Kathmandu for this one. It was clearly somewhat warmer than Annapurna Base Camp.

Tibet - a very nice part of China

Dear Dalai Lama

It pains me to tell you - although I am sure you already know - that the country you once knew is now irretrievably part of the People's Republic of China. Your people are Chinese - they only look and dress differently, and practice a different religion. A bit like the indigenous people of the Andes and the descendants of the Spanish being Peruvians or Bolivians.

To Lhasa we tourists flock with such great excitement and expectation of an exotic otherness, only to find a thoroughly Chinese city, with a few quaint 'original' quarters.

We glower at the military guards at the Potala, your former palace, and try not to go to Chinese-owned restaurants, shops and hotels, but it's difficult because we don't always believe them when they tell us something belongs to Tibetans. And we know that we can't blame the average person for what's happened. (It'll be like resenting our German friends for the Holocaust, right?)

We are infuriated by the gross disrespect that is the People's Square with its obelisk like an obscene finger in the air - as in all other towns, mockingly facing your important monasteries, and most blatantly so your Potala.

And you were right about the train from Beijing to Lhasa. (The building of the railway line was an engineering feat, and even completed ahead of schedule.) It opened on 1 July this year, and already it has spilled more than 400,000 tourists into the streets of your city. The smartly dressed set demand the luxuries of Beijing and Shanghai, push up the price of everything and, together with the Westerners, shove their cameras in the faces of the 'quaintly dressed' pilgrims from out of town.

Your monasteries - those that survived the Cultural Revolution or, ironically, have been rebuilt by the Chinese - fill us with awe, but we have to confess to virtual monastic overload. One monastery stacked to the rafters with the most priceless Tibetan treasures per day fills the mind too much to contemplate a second.

But even we who didn't know the real Tibet question the authenticity and sincerity of the monks who perform their duties according to Chinese dictates and are surrounded by camera-toting tourists. The debating sessions, shown to the world by Michael Palin, feels like a circus, with the monks beefing up their palm-slapping for the greedy mass of digital cameras.

It brings a mixture of sadness and unpalatable taste in the mouth. How, do we ask ourselves and our shy guide, can real monks practice, learn, teach and evolve their religion in such an unquiet environment? The gentle (Tibetan) guide cannot or will not answer.


Some days we say it's not so bad - maybe because we don't look deep enough, the surface looks content and well-fed. Then, on the gringo grapevine, we hear of foreigners who witnessed the gunning down of 7 Tibetans trying to cross into Nepal, and the bile of helplessness rises again.


We notice, too, the new, bland, flimsily built housing - next to piles of rubble, and we know that your people's pretty, sturdy houses are still being destroyed in the name of egalitarian sameness. (Is this part of what some call cultural genocide?)

But you know all of this, don't you? Is that why you're no longer calling for independence for your country, but asking for it to be treated as an autonomously governed territory? For the freedom to elect your own religious leaders?

They still laugh, though
However, the spirit of your people is not completely broken. The young girls with the rosy cheeks giggle at the grandfatherly flatterings of our fellow overlander Yuda, and the men mock-wrestle him with great guffaws. And, admittedly very seldom, we feel deeply for the elderly man or woman who refuses vehemently to be photographed. There is a quiet pride that will not be crushed that easily.

We are at first repulsed by the people defecating in the open, sometimes on designated corners, other times whenever nature demands, but realise that in this arid, high-altitude country that it is the best path to rapid decomposition.

Speaking of high altitude, can you remember the crisp thinness of the air here? It at once intoxicates with its sweetness and nauseates with its lack of oxygen, until the brain and blood reach acceptance and we become ourselves again.

The Friendship Highway (who do the friends refer to? and how can it be called a highway? It didn't exist when you fled to India in 1959, did it?) from Kathmandu wends its way up gaspingly to Lhasa via Shigatse, Gyantse and the most spectacular views of Mount Everest. We foreigners are only allowed to visit on an 'official' trip, but the authorities are so sure of total surrender that these days we're allowed to stay on as individuals for a further 15 days. We don't get a stamp in our passport, only on our paper permit.

The barren bigness of the countryside takes our breath away, and your people harvest the barley in essentially the old way, although a few tractor-like harvesters are starting to appear. The whole family still work the land together.

I include a few pictures of Tibet - as seen through the eyes of foreigners spending 21 days on the roof of the world.

Our first glimpse of Everest

A ruin in the countryside

Monks


The Friendship Highway


A boy with a new toy


A pilgrim from afar



Prayer flags



The morning sun hits the Potala

Barley harvest

Prayer wheels