I bought a wheel of yak cheese and things haven't been the same since.

I can't even comment on the over one month delay. I've been hacking away at the computer working on other things but never updating my blog. I've got my reasons but you (here you refers to those who still have faith in my blog: me and maybe my mom) will have to wait two weeks to see what that's all about.

Finally, we got into some big mountains and did some trekking. We hiked the old 茶马古道(tea horse old road), that is the old trading route between two towns in southwest Sichuan. In the olden days they only had these tea-horse routes cutting up and over mountains to connect towns in isolated but often parallel valleys.

That's a cool thing about hiking in China. Often the routes best for hiking were the trade routes of times before. The route we chose (Xiangcheng --to-- Daocheng) took us up an alpine valley to a picturesque cirque know locally as "the Bamu 7 lakes."

The 7 lakes are stacked and tiered from high to low like a pyramid of ever- and over- flowing champagne glasses at a rich guy's wedding. Instead of an ice carving of a jumping salmon cooling the drink, here the cool source is a reserve of mountain top ice under the sun at 5000 meters. Also different is here the lewd calls heard aren't from the groom's mates saying what they shouldn't but from resident yaks paging their girlfriends.

Getting the morning milk.