Anna's Next Adventure: 'A Year in Tibet' .....

Sunday, 21 March 2010

'A Year in Tibet' .....

The town of Gyantse, with the walled Pal Kor monastery central to the town's life.

Several months ago, I wrote about the books I was reading and those on my 'wanted' list, one of which was 'A Year in Tibet'. After reading 'A Year in Tibet', I found the DVD at my local rental store and quickly snapped it up. For the past few weeks, I have taken a trip down memory lane as I have watched hours of footage of local Tibetans going about their daily lives. The series centres its story around a range of local people in the town of Gyantse, Tibet's third largest town. Whilst I was in Tibet, I spent two days in Gyantse, so it was amazing to see places I had visited and relive my intriguing experience there. The series shows the daily battle that the local people have with the Chinese government, just about everything they do is controlled by the communist party as they try to squash the traditional Tibetan way of life. Throughout the series, the viewer is introduced to a range of people from Gyantse and the book goes into even more detail about some of the characters. By the end of both the book and the TV series, you feel like you really know these people. My two favourite characters were Yangdron and Tsephun. Yangdron is a middle aged Tibetan woman living with her three husbands (brothers), one of whom has the mental age of a child. The family live with their sons in a village near Gyantse and lead a hard life on the land, but despite this, Yangdron always has a broad smile and a cup of chang (barley beer) to offer anyone walking through her door. The other is Tsephun, a 15 year old monk, at the Pal Kor monastery, which was my favourite monastery to visit as it was very traditional and had an amazingly calm feeling to it. During the filming year, Tsephun struggles to find a balance between the traditional life of a monk and the temptations of modern life, particularly when his elderly master takes him on a pilgrimmage to Lhasa. I won't give his story away because I hope you will either read the book or watch the series, but I'd love to see where he ended up now! Is it too early to start planning my next adventure?!