I finally began filing away my film from Tibet today. Hopefully it won’t take me two years to finish the job, the way it took me that long to finish filing my two-year old film from Vietnam.Normally, filing film for my travel photos takes longer than doing the same for nudes. With nudes, I pretty much just have to note the date, the name(s) of the model and the location. With travel, I have to really take care in noting locations and subject matter, including getting the spelling of names right - and with places in Asia, that’s not always easy. For some reason, though, the time filing today just seemed to fly by and I wish I’d had time to do more than 10 rolls. (Still, out of a total of 35 rolls, that’s not bad for a first outing.)
Of course, I’m anxious to scan the film and see the results as positives to share with the whole world wide web world, so I’ve scanned three frames just a while ago. Those three that you’re seeing here were made during my first day in Tibet, at a place called Yumbalagang Monastery. This is said to be the oldest building in Tibet, though it was mostly rebuilt in the early 1980’s.As for getting there, my small tour group was picked up at the airport by our guide and drivers and we rode east, following the course of the Yarlung Tsangpo river to Yumbalagang. As you can see from the top photo, it’s a pretty steep climb to the top – something you might not expect to do on your very first day at over 12,000 feet. Still, as you can also see, there are camels for those willing to pay to ride to the top. (What? Never heard of camels in Tibet??? For those traditionalists, there are yaks, too.)
I walked.
The other two photos show some prayer wheels on the outside of the monastery and some butter lamps on the inside. I’ll be posting more from Tibet over the coming months as I file and scan more. Like I said earlier, hopefully it won’t take two years to get the filing done.
