Revisit our original posts on the Yushu region here:

Yushu

She’s Fancy

Mani Mani Everywhere

Old Nomad

After the traumatic conflicts between the ethnic Tibetans and the government, the area is now being challenged by this catastrophic natural event. We hope that our friends in Sichuan are safe. To help our readers better understand this area and its people, we have linked into a small collection of postings on the region. Just click on the thumbnails above, to read the posting.

French Thomas just left a comment on our blog that monks from Dargye Gompa have been arrested while protesting for their freedom, and he left a link with photos from an online source.

This is terrible news, and we hope the Chinese government will end this nonsense and release our friends.

Many of you followed our adventure through Tibet and the Tibetan regions of Sichuan and Qinghai, so you know that it is a region we both care deeply about. We commented on tensions in the area in the following posts, which you might want to check out: Blowing Up Buddha, Attack on Serthar Monastery, Kham and the Khampa, and Facades.

Even during our travels in Tibet, certain individuals indicated such protests were on their way. We did not relate this news in our blog because we were worried that Chinese officials would leap to conclusions about who had suggested the protests to us. The people who told us this are in no way referenced in our blog. (This may seem paranoid, but we discovered while using the Internet in China that even personal blogs were being monitored and blocked. How they manage to censor so much I will never understand.)

Our friend Oscar sent in the following link to bloggers in Lhasa at the moment. Also check out International Campaign for Tibet for the latest news.

As in many third world countries, trash management in China, and even more so in Tibet, is a huge problem particularly outside the tourist areas where there don’t seem to be any centralized places for disposing of trash. The more organized municipalities have random piles of trash distributed throughout the town while less organized places are evenly littered with garbage – it is just like living on a dump.

The most shocking examples of trash mismanagement, we encountered in Tibet. Many small settlement do not have any toilets so people relieve themselves by walking a few meters to squat between a herd of sheep and a pack of stray dogs.

But the worse practice of all is to use the rivers as dump. All the plastic bottles and packaging materials, of which there are an abundance, go straight into the river and get deposited downstream along the riverbeds. This is a major problem and since China is so concerned about making money with occupied Tibet, they had better cause environmental awareness quickly in Tibetans and Chinese alike.