Meeting Nomads!

Day 5

The morning is clear with few clouds. The world is so different here; it feels like a dream. I say goodbye and thank the small family I stayed with last night. They smile and tell me goodbye too. I swing my legs over my mule and continue riding up the rugged trail.

Around midday, I come to a nomad tribe. They invite me to stay with them the rest of my journey because they are traveling to the source also. I agree and thank them. They feed my mule and let me ride one of their bigger, stronger, horses. Riding a horse feels different than riding a mule; horses have some kind of power that mules don’t. I tell the tribe I’ve never been able to afford a horse before.

“We do not care about money,” they reply, “Nor social status. We found these wild.”

I can’t imagine how they managed to capture a wild horse, but I can assume it must have been quite an ordeal. They sing their tribe’s traditional traveling songs and teach them to me. I wish I could stay a nomad forever. They have such an easy life.

For dinner, we stop and set up a camp with tents and hitch the horses (and my mule) to some craggy rocks. The animals wait patiently while we eat and share my food. Then, it is time to let them graze. I don’t see any grass around; the animals must starve. But the nomads lead them to a small spring, bubbling water that had melted the snow around it. How can they know the area so well? I ask them but they just smile. They wouldn’t want to tell me their secrets.

With dusk, comes extreme cold. The nomads give me a furry coat, stitched together from many animal’s pelts. I thank them, but I can see that they just pulled it out of a pile of extra coats. They have done a good job adapting to harsh, cold environment. When we are ready to sleep, we crawl into surprisingly warm tents, and leave the fire burning to keep us warm. We cover the animals with blankets to keep them from freezing in the cold. The rush of the Yangtze lulls us all to sleep.