Experience the nomadic lifestyle, connect with nature and milk yaks at sunrise – adventure holidays on China’s Qinghai-Tibet Plateau

Their simple life in harmony with nature is vanishing, but a social enterprise using nomads as guides helps preserve it by taking visitors to camp with herders

Tourists learn the prairie dance, but also how to milk a yak, make clarified butter and grind barley by hand, and experience a sky burial ceremony

Reading Time:3 minutes

A yak herd on a summer morning on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. Milking yaks at sunrise, making clarified butter from the milk, and using stones to grind highland barley are among the experiences visitors to the plateau’s nomads can have. Photo: Nomad's Way

Published: 2:00pm, 25 Jan 2020Updated: 2:16pm, 25 Jan 2020

If you want an experience that gets you out of your comfort zone and into the wilderness, consider spending some time with nomadic herders on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in China.

A good jumping off point for such an adventure is Yushu in Qinghai province, known as “the source of the three rivers”. The Yushu Tibetan autonomous prefecture is part of the Sanjiangyuan region where the headwaters of three great rivers of Asia, the Yellow River, the Yangtze River, and the Lancang (Mekong) River, are located.

There is a Chinese expression that describes nomads as the people who “follow water and grass”. It’s an apt description of a people who for many generations have followed a simple life in harmony with nature.

Winter on the plateau is long, lasting eight months, and when the summer comes, they move with their yak herds to summer grasslands. How do they know it is time to leave their winter grasslands? When the marmots – beaver-like rodents that inhabit the alpine grasslands – come out of the deep burrows where they hibernated over winter.

Tourists staying with nomads on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau learn a prairie dance. Photo: Nomad's Way

This is a pattern that has been followed for centuries, but since the turn of the century their way of life has been under severe threat.

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