This morning we had breakfast at Helen's Cafe and then we went off with a guy in a mini van with Helen as our English speaking guide to do a couple of farm visits. We ended up being taken to the driver's property where we partook of some Yak butter tea which is a traditional drink, along with yak cheese (quite tart), yak yoghurt, Tibetan traditional bread and ground barley. We weren't too fussed on the yak butter tea and the ground barley is usually mixed up into a ball with the yak butter tea. The house is three storied with animals being kept under the house in winter, living quarters in the middle section and the upper story is used for storing hay. The walls are made of mud brick and lightly plastered and the inside is lined with wood. They have very few windows in their houses, in order to keep warm in winter. The living area in the house we visited was quite large and the walls were quite ornate with carving etc. as you can see in the photographs. Our driver was the grandfather, daughter served us the food and Grandma and son-in-law were out doing the farm work.
We also visited another farm which was using a small 17-18hp tractor to plough a paddock but only using a single furrow plough, also in the paddock were two yaks pulling a single furrow plough. Until we came to Shangri-La we had not seen any tractors in use. Dave and Jim were pretty intrigued with the tractors as they have a flywheel and are quite different to what we are used to, not sure how many cylinders they had. They also grow a fodder that looks similar to turnips and these are also put on the drying racks along with barley straw. Generally it seems that the women do most of the physical work on the farms and these are always the older women. None of the young women seem to work on the farms so unless in the next few years the farms become more mechanised there is certainly going to be a shortage of labour.
This morning I was suffering from altitude sickness but we had met an Irish couple yesterday and we saw them again this morning and they gave us all a tea type thing to drink in a glass of hot water which they had been advised to use by a Tibetan monk so after having taken it and drunk the tea type mixture, within a couple of hours felt much better. When we arrived back to Helen's cafe she gave us a tea mixture which is also for altitude sickness and we had several cups of that. Jim was feeling pretty terrible and he had to agree that after taking it he felt much better. Dave is the only one that hasn't had any effects from the high altitude, other than every now and then having to take a deep breath.
Tomorrow we head off back to Lijiang for the night and then on Tuesday morning hope to catch a bus to Panzhihua and from there do a 13hr trip on an overnight train to Chengdu. It is a long and arduous trip to do it by bus, something like 28hrs.