Shangri-la is on the edge of Tibet and a good place to get the feel for Tibetan Buddhism if you can't make the trip all the way to Lhasa (at least that is what we are telling ourselves). So far we've visited two monasteries in the area. One, the Songzanlin Monastery, is a large and famous complex of several temples built slightly outside of Shangri-la. The other was a smaller temple we spied on up on a hillside near Old Town.
I couldn't take pictures inside the temples of Songzanlin, which has amazing brightly colored murals and huge golden Buddhas draped with silken katas, but here is one of the outside of a temple (prayer wheels shown above):
The second, smaller temple was not nearly as elaborate as the Songzanlin complex, but the hike up to it was pleasant -- hundreds of colorful prayer flags draped from high points fluttering in the wind and some gorgeous clouds in the sky -- and the location was fantastic. The small temple is on ridge with a view of Old Town on one side and a valley with a small farming village, fields of crops and livestock on the other. On the way up we hiked through a field of fresh mint, which smelled amazing as we crushed it beneath our sneakers (mojito, anyone?).
On the way down we ran into three older men who were guiding their yaks in for the night and singing as they went.
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