All Good Things in Time

Sorry, it is not a picture of a Yak. Since I don't have a picture of a yak I took a picture of the beautiful Scottish Highland Steer in our side yard. He looks a little yakkish but he is about half the size.


Two hours after the knock on our door, I opened my eyes again and began to really appreciate my new surroundings. This was not the boring neglected over used dormitory that I had come to expect during my low budget travels in China. This was a simple but clean room with a beautiful jewel and lotus design stenciled all around the top of the room.


I pushed my quilts aside and sat on the edge of my ancient bed. My brain was spinning. Rather than try to stand immediately, I slowly turned toward the window sill where I had started a collection of wadded up, pink toilet paper that was more like a light gauge sand paper. I put my hand to the tip of my battered nose and felt for permanent damage before I blew again. Cheryl rolled in her bed, so I took the toilet paper and tip-toed out of the room in search of Colin. When I found him in the restaurant, he had just at that moment, after waiting for two hours, received his much anticipated breakfast.

The menu board, which was written in English, included Yak-burgers, yak-cheese, and yak-milk yogurt. More importantly, pizza, apple-pie, and minestrone soup were also on the menu. These were foods we hadn't encountered in months of traveling. I ordered apple pancakes and in another hour, I received a delightful breakfast.

*If you are from the US, it is hard to imagine being anywhere where you couldn't find pizza or a place that couldn't serve you a burger in minutes. But these are all things of a modern world. Imagine if you had so little money that you had to go and buy the groceries when a customer asked for a meal. Then you had to light the yak dung fire to cook it. And when the fire was lit, everything that you cooked took much longer to cook because of the higher altitudes. You could spend your time griping about lost time, or just do what you can and not worry about it.