We started our hike at about 9:20 a.m. on Sunday morning. It was a beautiful day, but cold, with air temperatures staying below 40 degrees all day (below freezing in the morning and late afternoon) and a chilly breeze blowing down from the higher snow-capped mountains surrounding us.
Right around lunchtime, about 3 hours after we started walking upstream, we arrived at the beginning of what turned out to be a very, very long village. Tufang is actually made up of about half a dozen groupings of 5-10 homes. These smaller villages are situated in a line running up the valley. We arrived at the lowest point in the village, and it took us another hour and a half to walk uphill to the very top end of the village, which by then is sitting at well over 10,000 ft.
The people of Tufang are all Tibetans. They survive by raising yak, sheep, and goats, and by farming a little bit of barley where the mountains aren’t so steep. Forests blanket most of the mountains surrounding their remote valley, and snow-capped mountains tower over the forests.
I was suprised to find out that a school actually does exist in this village, although I have doubts about the quality of the education. Most of the kids we saw didn’t seem to be ‘school-goers’. In a large number of similar villages, the children will grow up never learning to read or write.
We still haven’t downloaded the pictures we took of our hike, so I have none to share at this time. Hopefully within a couple of days I will have something to share in the way of pics…
Please pray with us for Tufang!
