Tagong is a one road town, surrounded by pastures, backed by mountains and full of Wild West charm. It’s home to Tibetans who pride themselves on their horsemanship skills. After exploring the very traditional Tibetan towns of Litang and Garze we were a little surprised to find Tagong had catered to domestic tourists with lots of fancy dress shops. We’ve really enjoyed escaping that mad trend of everyone dressing up and having big photoshoots so we were a little gutted to see it again.

We checked into a ‘boutique’ hotel which was rather questionable. I think it looked lovely when it was first built but it’s been totally neglected. It was a Tibetan style hotel with wooden floors and furniture, huge bathrooms which even had a bathtub but there was no chance of us getting in it, the place needed a damn good clean and there was a huge slab of black hair on the floor along with urine in the toilet from the previous guest. Lovely.

The vibe felt a little different to the previous towns we’d visited, the people were still friendly but a little less jolly or forthcoming with us. We opted to just have one full day here and we woke to a fresh dusting of snow. To take advantage of the beautiful views we walked out of town and along the main road where there was a fabulous vantage point across the pastures where hundreds of yaks grazed. Behind the yaks was the massive Ser Gyergo Nunnery, home to around 500 nuns and more than 100 monks, and then the jagged snowy peaks rose up in the distance.

Back in town we walked a kora around the monastery where a few Chinese were posing in their Tibetan costumes, leaning against the prayer wheels which infuriates me, it shouldn’t be allowed in a religious site if it’s interfering with people praying and spinning the wheels. I guess another testament to this town being a bit more on the tourist route was we had to pay to enter the monastery which we hadn’t in the others. It wasn’t worth the money either, it was the least impressive one we visited as two of the three room were closed off. Feeling a little disappointed we decided to take a walk out of town to a monastery which was used for teaching Buddhism to young monks.

Just as we arrived two monks came out and began blowing a conch – it was time to pray. The complex consisted of a long building with lots of small rooms where the monks lived and then a couple of large prayer halls. Suddenly like moths to a lamp the monks all started appearing and heading up the stares to the hall. The last arrivals were desperately running up the stairs, aware that they were running late and not wanting to get in trouble with their teacher.

Locals were walking around the outside of the complex so we took a seat on the grass and enjoyed some tea from our flask while watching them chant and push prayer beads between their fingers. On our way back we came across a yak nursery and a tiny fresh yak came running up to the fence-line to see us. It was so adorable and fluffy and was very happy to get some head scratches.

Turns out leaving Tagong was a little trickier than we’d hoped but luckily when we asked an English speaking lady in a restaurant about the shared vans out of town she said her husband could drive us to Bamé about 30 minutes up the road. It’s a transport hub and from there we could easily transfer to a vehicle heading for Danba. She offered a fair price and even communicated with the drivers in Bamé to help us with our next ride which was very sweet. The vehicle that took us the next leg was just a 5 seater car and it did the classic stop halfway where everyone gets into another car so the drivers don’t get too far from their home towns.