Women with many husbands

Travel date - 29th April, 2016.

Yes I am talking about polyandry. But I will come to that later. Day 3 began with early morning bus ride to Shigatse which is few hours from Lhasa.

I was dreading the long bus ride until the picturesque views started coming up back to back. While everyone got busy with their cameras, I had the terrible luck of somehow getting stubborn dust spots on my DSLR mirror.

But this turned out to be a blessing in disguise as I was forced to enjoy the moment by being present and observing with just my eyes instead of through the lenses. I, somehow, managed to snap some cool shots of the landscapes with my phone but I didn't go crazy with it like I otherwise would with my DSLR.

Half an hour after exiting Lhasa, we passed by vast pastures and valleys with yaks grazing everywhere.

Once we were past grazing land, then came the never ending scenery of mountains and streams. Almost all throughout our long ride (4hrs approx), our bus was driving between mountains, beside a river whose colour kept changing mysteriously from emerald green to deep blue.

Once I got used to the vastness of everything around me, I relaxed and leaned back on my chair totally immersed into the surrounding and my thoughts. As usual, I started thinking about life and its several mysteries and what brought me here. How beautiful and enormous the world is and how tiny it made me feel in astronomical proportions compared to the vastness around me.

What felt even more tiny to me at that time were the things that we worry about in our everyday life. I made a mental note to remind myself of this time, place and feeling every time anything close to worry or sorrow tried to creep into my mind in future.

It seemed like I wasn't the only one immersed in thoughts. The entire bus was silent throughout the ride with everyone staring out of the window, lost in their thoughts. I wondered if everyone had the same realisation of our insignificant problems as I did.

A sudden pang of sadness crept in nonetheless as I tried to capture the view with my camera and got spotty pictures. So much for the spiritual enlightenment about life. It left as fast as it came.

*This is the terrible spot I was talking about. Sigh!*

We finally reached Shigatse around noon. Instead of heading to the hotel, we went straight to Tashilhunpo Monastery which was founded in 1447 by the first Dalai Lama. The future Buddha statue, the world’s largest gold gilded bronze statue, was so tall that all we could do was tilt our heads back and gawk at it.

I was more interested in the people and the surroundings so I was walking around inside the main gates of the monastery. And that's when I struck up a conversation with our guide asking about the local culture and lifestyle. Turns out Shigatse is one of the last few remaining towns which still followed the ancient tradition of polyandry whereby a woman has more than one husband. In most cases, the husbands are brothers. So if there were three brothers in one family, they all would share a wife.

More than astonishment, I felt impressed as I thought about the excellent management skills the women needed to have in order to handle more than one man. Sharing sexual partners was obviously not something to be ashamed of in Tibet. In fact, it is treated quite casually. But when you think of the technical details like who needs to do what and when, you definitely need management skills to have a happy married life.

For a moment, I felt sad for being born in the wrong country. And then I remembered that men are such egotistical hassles that one would be more than enough for one lifetime. Besides, I had come to Tibet with the idea of becoming the 30th Buddhist nun (which obviously didn't happen).

*When the cat had two extra pairs of wise old ears to listen to her problems with her third lover.*

I snapped pictures of some interesting people hanging around inside the monastery grounds like the man below who walked like Charlie Chaplin.

Found some cute Tibetan school kids on their day-out. After that headed straight to hotel to rest for the evening, as next day we had to start early morning to reach the Mount Everest Base camp by early evening. I was too exhausted to eat out so had cup noodles by myself in my hotel room and dozed off to sleep to dream about the next day.

To be continued....