Songpan Horse Trek

I absolutely loved Songpan - looking back, it's probably one of my favourite towns in China for just wandering around and people watching... It was our base for the horse trek that Elaine, Tom and I decided to take. A town in which the Han people are a minority, it was alive with colour. Tibetans, Hui, Qiang (a minority that I hadn’t heard of before arriving in Sichuan, and still don’t know much about)… All of them wearing national dress, totally unscripted and unprompted by the government. It wasn’t a tourist town, although there were tourists there, but it felt lived in.

The horse trek was a feast for all our senses. Such beautiful scenery, viewed while rocking back and forth on a horse. My mount was called ‘qima’ which translated to ‘ride a horse’. Not very imaginative, but apt. At first the Tibetans teased me by telling me it’s name was ‘mochenghou’ and I called him that for hours until Mr Ma, my guide, whose name rather appropriately means Mr Horse, told me that it was a bad word in Tibetan and I shouldn’t say it. So I learnt to swear in Tibetan, I still remember the bad words now, but have no idea what it means because Mr Horse refused to tell me, only that it was ‘bad’.

We rode for the morning before setting up camp sometime early afternoon. I then went alone to the Tibetan village about a half hour ride past the camp. I wasn’t going to be going to the snow-capped mountains with the others as I had a plane to catch, so Mr Horse offered to take me a little further so I could get a look at them.

So the two of us set off to the next village, where I was invited into one of the local’s homes for tea. There were two extremely cute little kids playing in the yard, neither of whom spoke a word of Mandarin, and they both laughed outrageously when I tried my two phrases of Tibetan. They loved having their photos taken, though so I snapped away until I was about to lose battery. The tea was spicy and warm, made from Sichuan peppers, better known as ‘numbing peppers’ because the flavour is, well, numbing. It’s hard to describe for people that have never had it before, but it makes your mouth tingle and salivate. Apparently the tea is great for altitude sickness, a tradition Tibetan remedy. I felt so blessed to be able to enter their home, I wanted to take photos but didn’t want them to feel like I was treating them like a tourist attraction, so I compromised by taking photos of the children who obviously loved the process, and so didn’t get any shots of the old man.