Prayers, chants and utmost bliss

If I were a landscape photographer this would be my holy place. I am not alone there, other photo pilgrims jostle for position on a steep hill. Only the wind whistling through my bones and fingers, numb with cold, reminds me it’s time to go down.

The trip is not easy to the magical, remote Larung valley, with its study centre and large Tibetan Buddhist community. The nearest airport in Chengdu, capital of China’s Sichuan province, is more than 500km away - even if you take a shorter, more difficult road, as my colleague and I do.

The 15-hour drive starts smoothly on a highway but that only lasts long enough for passengers – snack-eating tourists, monks and wizened locals - to squeeze in their many bags and settle into narrow seats.

We leave the highway behind and the narrow road soon enters mountains. After another few hours on endlessly curving roads, the asphalt disappears and our bones jar on endless, bumpy macadam.

The bus stops in the middle of nowhere. The driver points to a distant red light, saying we need to reach our final destination on foot as the road is blocked. Once there I shiver under a blanket in a hotel room with an open-air toilet and no heating under a red, flickering light. The temperature outside drops to minus 10 degrees Celsius.

Next morning proves I am wrong to complain. Once through the gates of Larung valley, the festival of light and sound starts and yesterday’s hassle seems irrelevant.

The end of the ninth month of the Tibetan calendar is a festival time in Larung valley - the last of the four annual Dharma assemblies at its Buddhist Institute.

Tens of thousands of believers join monks and nuns in daily chanting and praying. The main gathering point is a Buddhist laymen’s lodge. Even before the sun comes out people start arriving, sitting on the frozen ground and praying in sub-zero temperatures.

Tibetans’ traditional clothes - funky hats and jackets with endless sleeves - seem to keep out the cold much better than my fancy all-weather gear.

Thankfully, I get some of the hot yak-butter tea distributed to believers shivering under blankets.

Then the sun comes out behind the hill, hitting straight into my cameras. Pictures are painted in gold and I play with flares in my lenses, a rare pleasure. I enjoy every second even if balancing between people packed onto a steep, frozen hill needs mountain-goat skills recalled from my childhood on the slopes above Sarajevo.

Chanting, praying and listening to monks’ teaching lasts eight days, from sunrise to sunset. I am one of the very few non-Asian people in the valley and people are extremely friendly.

I have more “selfies” taken in those few days we stay at Larung with complete strangers than with all my friends and relatives since the start of selfie-mania.

We climb another hill to see sky burials: bodies of deceased ethnic Tibetans offered to vultures.

On the top of yet another hill we visit monasteries and simple monks’ homes to see how they live. We eat vegetarian festival food and drink more yak-butter tea, almost forgetting about the 15-hour return drive.

Somehow the bends in the road don’t seem as tortuous nor the trip so endless. Perhaps that’s what a pilgrimage does for you.