Hiking around Dege
Info 2005.Itineraries, Trek, Destionations, Sichuan

Following some information we saw on chinabackpacker.com we did one more hike close to Dege. We thought that the information might interest you, so here we're writing again...

It was a 2 days hike from Dzongsar Monastery to Anzheshi - a village close to the road to Dege, about 30 minutes drive. We guess you can do it the opposite way also, but we found it hard to find this Anzheshi place...

There is a bus from Dege to Dzongsar every other day - 6 hours, 20Y. You arrive to this charming village called Meisu, lying on the foots of the monastery. We were lucky enough to arrive there on the weekly debate day, when all the village people gather to hear the monks debating. It's well worth a visit (if one has the time), even without the hiking. The bus back to Dege leaves in the morning after. In Meisu we took horses & a guide for quite an expensive price of 250Y per day for 2 horses and one guide. If you're not lazy as we were, you could probably find a better deal. We had one horse for the bags, one horse for Orit and Nir was walking all the way.

The first day is walking from Dzongsar monastery to Babang monastery. It's 7-8 hours of walking in beautiful green scenery, with only occasional people coming across here & there. On the hiking side, it's not a difficult day - the climbing is relatively moderate. For us it was more difficult as it rained quite heavily in the last 2-3 hours, the road was quite muddy and eventually we had to sleep in the village underneath Babang as we were wet & cold. It was a very nice experience sleeping in a Tibetan family's house (40Y for two), but the original plan was to sleep in the monastery, as we understood it is possible.

The second day was absolutely gorgeous, though more difficult. We did quite a lot of climbing this day and every time we though we reached The Pass, we just saw that there was another pass ahead of us. After all the climbing it was also a long way down - this time we saw on the way more Tibetan villages than on the first day.  It's hard to describe what exactly was so beautiful, but we can just say we were walking/riding parts of the day with big smiles on our faces (when Nir was not breathing heavily from the climb). It is a 9-10 hours walk on the second day.

When we got to the road it took us about 5 minutes to catch a ride to Dege (it happened to be a taxi) and it was 5Y for one.

We got a little bit of information + a rough map of the Dege area (in Chinese) from the lobby walls of the Queer Mountain Hotel, just behind the market. We can also send pictures if you want, although the weather was quite cloudy most of the time and the pictures would not reflect the true beauty of the scenery.  

We hope all is good with you. We had a great time in China and we can truly say that part of it is due to chinabackpacker.com that "brings" you to places that you would not know about (not speaking Chinese). We highly recommend it to other travelers.

We also wanted to tell you that you can trek from Dege to Dzongsar Monastery (2 days) and from there continue to Manigango (about 4 days). we didn't to it so no personal recommendations, but it supposed to be amazing.