Day 98 The King's Caves

Today we are taking a trip outside of Lhasa. We want to visit the sacred caves where one of the Tibetan kings (I forgot which one) retreated to practice Buddhism. The murderer of the last anti-Buddhist king also hid in the caves to meditate.

On the way to the caves, we had to drive over a small pass, but the traffic stopped just before reaching the summit. We were informed that today is Sunday and also a full moon. For Buddhists, it is a holy day when a lot of prayer and religious practice takes place. This includes hanging prayer flags.

Prayer flags are often hung in special places, such as on a mountain pass. We were allowed to watch the whole spectacle. It is impressive to see what the believers had hung up in a short time and were still hanging up.

The caves were located at an altitude of about 4200 meters above sea level. Since the various caves and buildings were built into the mountain everywhere, it meant hiking for us.

It turned out, as we already knew beforehand, that it is much more exhausting to climb stairs at this altitude than at home. So we quickly ran out of breath and were easily overtaken and laughed at by some much older locals. We were more or less the only tourists here, otherwise there were many Tibetans here due to the holy day, visiting the monastery. For a change, that was quite pleasant. And we were even allowed to take photos in the individual small temples and caves.

The weather mostly cooperated, so we could enjoy the panoramic view of the valley.