There's a direct bus from Xiahe to Langmusi, but it leaves early in the morning, and often sells out; if you miss it, you have to connect in Hezuo, which is midway between the two. The bus takes about four hours, or slightly longer with stops. You can find a nice list of your bus options to Langmusi
here.
Helit and I met a Spanish schoolteacher on the bus, and we ended up sticking together for the bus ride and our time in Langmusi. Other than us, almost all the rest of the passengers were excitable Chinese tourists. We stopped a couple of times on the way: once by a lake, where all the Chinese jumped out and rapidly snapped pictures and ran for the bathroom; and once on a plain near some Tibetan herders who were waiting for the bus and sold the Chinese tourists short horse rides.
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| A yak at the second stop. |
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| I took pictures while the Chinese took short horse rides. I'm sure the bus driver got kickbacks from the herders cum horse-wranglers. |
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| The sheep have horns. Unlike the sheep I would see in Central Asia, these are not fat-tail sheep. |
Unlike the trip from Langmusi to Xiahe, it's not really that noticeable that you're going uphill, but the elevation changes from the 2,900 meters in Xiahe to about 3,300 meters in Langmusi.
We arrived around noon, and then searched for somewhere to stay. The Chinese construction boom had reached Langmusi, with both roadworks and hotel construction was in full swing, and tourism seemed to be booming. A symptom of this was that beds were in short supply, and it took a while to find a place to stay. We found a place in the Muslim quarter, and run by Tibetans. It had a nice front patio perched over the stream, and although the rooms were nice the bathroom facilities were even worse than the Overseas Tibetan Hotel: they positively reeked of ammonia. Thankfully, they were so ill-lit that you couldn't fully grasp how dirty they were.
I saw a couple of other hostel bathrooms in Langmusi, and they were no nicer, with with squat toilets that visibly flushed into ditches, and things like that. The Chinese very much take these sorts of setups in stride, which is hardly surprising given that even in major cities you can find bus-station toilets that are just tiled trenches a couple of feet deep, and everyone just lines up over them and squats, with "flushing" happening when water is periodically run down the ditch to wash the shit away. Bathrooms are dirty places where dirty things happen, and that's an accepted fact of life.
Anyway, after finding a place to stay, we set out on a hike to the Red Rock Mountain just west of town, which you pass on your way into town. We had seen some maps made by a tour outfit, and it looked like it would be fairly straightforward to circle around to the far side of the mountain and ascend it from there. Unfortunately, the map was wildly misleading and the road that was supposed to be the beginning of the path quickly deteriorated into an empty, unmarked field with no discernible path to the top, but lots of thick bushes. Stubborn as I am, I wasn't going to give up, so I pushed onwards up ever steeper and more hostile slopes while the girls turned back. I ended up having to scramble and crawl my way up through a steep section to summit one part of the mountain, only to have to retreat and re-ascend to get to the main mountaintop, as I was on a secondary peak.
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| The view from midway up the mountain, before things got tough. |
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| If this is the view you get when you're climbing Red Rock Mountain, you're doing it wrong. I had just scrambled up and through a thicket of trees like you see on the left and bottom of the screen. |
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| It wasn't that difficult, as Tibetans obviously make it here with some frequency. |
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| The view of the town from the secondary summit. |
