For the past 900-odd years nomads, monks, and pilgrims from all over the great Tibetan Plateau have been gathering in a lofty little town called Jyekundo, jewel of Yushu County, for a festival of traditional sports, song, and dance, but especially of horse racing and praising. (There’s a saying in these parts about the epic stories lovingly told in nomadic encampments: whoever the human hero of the tale is, the real hero is a horse.)

We get started in Xining, capital of Qinghai Province, an integral part of Tibet before it was sliced away by the Chinese. The next day we drive west to Qinghai Lake, the Tibetan Plateau’s largest saltwater lake. A holy spot, 10,500 feet above sea level, the lake is a bird-watcher’s and landscape fancier’s paradise. For many of the landlocked pilgrims who frequent it, vast Qinghai is the ocean.

Now for a long but scenically smashing high-altitude drive south to the old trading center of Jyekundo, 12,136 feet up on the vast Bartang Grassland. With a Tibetan-style luxury tented camp as our base, we’ll spend the next five days roaming monasteries (there will be ritual dancing to celebrate Padmasambhava’s Eight Manifestations at the Damkar Monastery, where we’ll be granted a visit with the head lama), temples (the Bida Nampar Nangdze Lhakang was built by the Chinese wife of Tibet’s first Buddhist king, Songtsen Gampo, in the eighth century), and doing some slow hiking in the wildlife-rich Lepka Valley (on the lookout for gazelle, blue sheep, Tibetan foxes, and wolves). And on Days 8 and 9, the festival, a joyous combination of singing competitions, parades, spirited buying and selling, yak racing, and, of course, acrobatic horsebacking and racing, done by folks who don’t have to be told who the real hero of the story is.

Day 1: arrive in Beijing • Day 2: fly to Xining, Qinghai Province • Day 3: visit Qinghai Lake • Day 4: drive across the Yellow River Plateau to Jyekundo • Days 5–9: horse festival and explorations of monasteries, temples, and highlands • Day 10: fly to Xining • Day 11: fly to Beijing • Day 12: depart Beijing.

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