Litang horse festival

Day 1
The festival opens with a gallop through the crowd by the horse riders.
Then it's a parade. All of the traditionally dressed groups of dancers are, of course, preceded by chinese flag and machine gun bareing representitaves of the chinese army hmm. Then a bit of dancing.
Then a show off firing of these giant military weapons, you know big ones that stand on the ground and chinese tourists pose with for photos.

Then comes the horse riding stunts.
Riders come tareing down the runway then lean sideways off their horses to pick up ribbons attached to prizes from the ground. The prise is usually a pack of cigarets.
There is also some who place an arrow in a pile of turf target or shoot it.
The most impresive is where the rider puts both hands in the air and leans backwards and to the side untill he is dragging along the ground and then pulls himself back upright with only stomack muscles, kind of impresive.

What also leaves an impresion is the method that the cinese police use to move the crowd into position, back half a meter or so.
No "would you mind" or words at all for that matter,
it's just run in with a belt or a big stick whacking people left right and center.
Or just punch them in the face, don't wory no danger for tourists though, any punches inadvertently aimed at a westerner will be redirected at the last second to the nearest tibetan.

There is a festival atmosphere like a rock music festival in the west.
The toilet is a big pit with half logs bridging it to balance on.
Quite the communal experiance.

It's common to be invited to eat at the tent of friendly tibetans.
They wait for you to finish before starting, like to have photos taken and chat.

The crowd is really cool,
a big gathering of tibetan people, load of cool traditional clothes and interesting characters. Long haired tibetan cowboy types and orange hated monks abound.

The weather is quite extreme, one minuite bakeing sun burns you in less than five minuites, then clouds come it's frezing cold and there's a hail shower.


Day 2
The day starts with the long horse race, at the end the ground is really bumpy and wholey so the finish is quite slow but there is great excitement at the result.
More crowd management as described above.

The afternoon brings a dance competition,
Although nice and colourful after a while all the dances are the same so it starts to become a little boring. Never fear the police decide to make it a bit more interesting by coming into the back of the crowd with belts and sticks again.
This is usually taken with alot of laughs and good humour by the tibetan crowd but this is the last straw so with alot of whooping and rocks the crowd chases the police and army out of the festival. At the road the police let off a few shots into the air to say come no further, so there is a stand off with the police excluded from the festival.
The dance competition continues without the crowd encroaching into the dancing area unduely.

We were invited to shelter from hailstones in the tent of a tibetan living in india with perfect english. He said that there had been someone shot a killed by the police in the morning and that the race was "awarded" to the only chinese entrant.
This could explain a bit of the crowds displeasure.
This sort or inforamation is never in the media and word of mouth is all you have.

There are many tibetans living in india,
it takes about a month to walk acros from Lahasa at night without flashlights.
This guy said he went when he was twelve.

Day 3 and 4
The festival continues peacefully with no uniformed police presence.
Singing danceing and more horse riding stunts like above.
Sideline activities include trading in horses area, gambling on dice, roll a ring onto a prize game etc, food tents and of course sitting and chating, all very cool.