A lot of foreign travelers want to travel to Tibet but the Lhasa and Mount Everest Base Camp region can be expensive and requires special permits and paperwork.
Another option if you don’t want all that extra work is to travel to Garze – the eastern part of Tibet; known by local as Kham Tibet. Here you will not need all the extra permissions and permits, but you will experience almost everything that you would experience in central Tibet (officially known as the Tibet Autonomous Region) as far as monasteries, culture, art, and stunning landscapes full of alpine lakes and snowy mountains.
With this trip you will see the geographic diversity and the culture, lifestyle, and spiritual life of local Tibetan nomads. Through trekking Sichuan and our immersive travel you will learn things on the road with our guide in a very hand on and grassroots level. In some parts of the trip, you may even have a chance to experience true cultural engagement as you live like and talk with local nomads and farmers on the high grasslands.
Kham is one of the three traditional provinces of Tibet, the others being Amdo in the north-east, and U-Tsang in the west which includes Ngari (including former Guge kingdom) in the north-west. Kham covers a land area largely divided between five regions in present-day China: especially in the Tibet Autonomous Region and Sichuan Province, with smaller portions located within Qinghai, Gansu and Yunnan provinces. But in this trip, we will visit The Sichuan part of Kham areas.
Kham has a rugged terrain characterized by mountain ridges and gorges running from northwest to southeast and these are collectively known as the Hengduan Mountains. Numerous rivers, including the Mekong, Yangtze, Yalong River, and the Salween River flow through Kham. With most of the areas in Kham having an average elevation over 3500 meters, the land is covered with snow-capped peaks, alpine forests and deep river valleys. This is surely one of the most beautiful and unexplored parts of the Tibetan Plateau and is definitely some of the best trekking in all of Sichuan Province. We will discover the harmony and heart of this ancient land as we travel through the wide grasslands, pure lakes, deep river valleys, and under the spires of some of Sichuan’s most legendary snowcapped mountains. You will also see hundreds of small villages, thousands of yaks, sheep, horses around nomads’ tents, and unique Tibetan wildlife. As an isolated area, the people of Kham were famous warriors renowned for their marksmanship and horsemanship and we will get the chance to experience one of the world’s last truly nomadic cultures.
Kham has a lot of different monasteries of all different Tibetan Buddhist schools including the original Tibetan religion that predates Buddhism, Bon. In this trip we will closely engage these monasteries and talk with the monks and nuns about their daily lifestyle and rituals.
