20250923 Tuesday, September 23, 2025 Lhasa Anitsangkung Nunnery, Goodbye Tibet, Hello Xi’an

20250923 Tuesday, September 23, 2025 Lhasa Anitsangkung Nunnery, Goodbye Tibet, Hello Xi’an

Our checked bags were picked up at 7:30 a.m. outside our rooms, and we headed to the buffet for another excellent breakfast. 

We loaded into our buses while admiring some of the Bentleys that had remained overnight. Our morning tour was to the Anitsangkung Nunnery.  The nunnery has residential, teaching, worship, and utilitarian spaces, including a kitchen and medical clinic.

The nuns shave their heads just like the male Buddhist monks do.  This is a vastly smaller facility than the Sera Monastery we visited yesterday.

The nuns were busily taking care of chores while we toured their nunnery.  We dropped in on the kitchen, which was a surprisingly compact facility to feed all the nuns.  They had the largest pressure cooker I have ever seen.  It figures they would really need one because at 12,000 ft above sea level, water boils at only 80ºC, which is only 176ºF.  The woman manning the kitchen has been in that position since the 1970s.  Yet she remains spry and full of energy.

We next visited the temple where the nuns do most of their worshiping and studying. Like many other Tibetan Buddhist temples, there were rows of cushions in the middle of the space, surrounded by decorated columns.  The perimeter of the space is surrounded by cases containing innumerable depictions of Buddhas.

Another common feature is butter candles.  Pilgrims carry tubs of this around, and in lieu of or in addition to a monetary offering, they scoop some butter from their tub and add it to the large basin-like bronze or copper vessel with thick burning wicks.  

In addition to all the flammable butter, there are bowls all around the room where pilgrims can make offerings of fresh water to the Buddhas.  The nuns apparently collect and use this water.

After completing the tour of the nunnery, we were given some free time to browse the market surrounding the nunnery, which happens to also be on a pilgrimage route busy with pilgrims spinning prayer wheels, counting prayer beads, or even prostrating themselves. 

We also saw some unfortunates begging.  Some clearly had cerebral palsy, while others had other afflictions.  In this modern-day China, many only had to display their WeChat Pay QR code on a lanyard hung around their necks to elicit cashless payments.  On the whole, however, China seems to do a pretty good job of either dealing with homeless populations or keeping them out of sight from the tourists.

  
We headed to the Lhasa airport.  En route, someone noticed thousands of apparent pipes coming down countless hillsides in the mountains surrounding Lhasa.  China has been engaging in terraforming, trying to alter the environment by planting millions of trees to generate oxygen, reduce flooding, and create more habitable land.  Those pipes are irrigation systems feeding the millions of trees planted high on those hillsides.  It is unclear if China will succeed in this venture.  Those irrigation systems must be very costly and complex to maintain, and if the environment hasn’t produced trees in hundreds of millions or even billions of years, there’s something more fundamentally wrong than a simple lack of water.

The Lhasa airport is a dual-purpose facility with both civilian and military usage.  As we approached the airport along a river, a camouflaged military helicopter was flying very low and slow just above the surface of the river.

The check-in at Lhasa airport was complicated by overly sensitive suitcase screenings.  Several of our suitcases got pulled for secondary inspection.  Ben had his tagged because of AAA batteries in a flashlight and electronic thermometer/barometer.  All batteries, including alkaline, are prohibited in checked luggage.  I have no idea what the rationale behind that is.

Viking has done a pretty terrible job with the flights on this overland tour.  Ben and Janet, and most couples, were again separated and scattered around the cabin as if Viking had gotten absolutely last priority in seating assignments.  I would have thought they would have been able to book blocks of seats on each plane months or even a year in advance because they know how many guests will be booked on each of these excursions. They have always been sold out months before departure. 

 
Ben had offered a ¥50 bribe to the woman who was seated on the aisle next to his middle seat to trade seats with Janet, who was in the middle seat on the opposite side of the aircraft.  To our surprise, she waved off the money and simply traded seats, giving up her aisle seat for a middle seat.  That act will bring her some excellent karma.  

It was a 3-hour flight to Xi’an, and although it was a very smooth flight with no noticeable turbulence, the pilots kept the seat belt sign on the entire flight.  We got an inflight snack (atiny piece of spicy beef jerky, a roll, and a cupcake) with a small cup of Coke Zero.

Upon arrival in Xi’an, Viking had a luggage handler to pull all of our marked checked bags and transport them to the hotel, but some passengers just couldn’t help themselves and had to pull their bags off the belt instead of letting the baggage handler do it.  One bag sustained some damage, so Jimmy had to stay behind to file a luggage damage complaint with that passenger while the rest of us made our way to the bus.  Surprisingly, Jimmy turned up at the bus just as the last passenger was boarding.  He said now that we were at a normal altitude with plenty of oxygen, he could run at superhuman speeds to catch up after filing the luggage damage claim.

The Xi’an Airport is a huge facility.  When we were there, it was like a ghost town, but Jimmy says Xi’an is China’s number one tourism destination both domestically and internationally.  The airport can handle millions of passengers a day.  Xi’an’s infrastructure is every bit as impressive as that of all the coastal cities we visited, and although we had arrived during the evening rush hour, the traffic was certainly not as bad as Seattle, Portland, or Los Angeles during rush hour.

Our only excursion for the evening was the dinner buffet.  The JR Marriott Xi’an is another very nice business class hotel, and its buffet lived up to the billing Jimmy was portraying.  It had just about anything you could dream of.  We had lobster delivered to our table, and they had a great noodle chef, grill master, vast sushi spread, endless Chinese, Thai, and European hot selections.  There was also a very impressive dessert collection.

 
We have to meet at 8 a.m. in the hotel lobby to start our day with a tour of the famous Terra Cotta Soldiers.  In the afternoon, we will tour the Xi’an City Wall, and in the evening, there will be a Tang Dynasty cultural show, so it will be a very full day.