Danba County is a 12 hour, very bumpy bus ride from Chengdu. The roads are narrow and dusty, and many sections are either being upgraded or repaired from damage from the massive earthquake in the region a few years ago. There were several spots with delays of an hour or so while we waited for traffic coming from the other direction to pass. Fortunately, after a certain point, there weren’t too many other vehicles. Higher into the mountains, and closer to Danba town, the obstacles were cows snoozing in the road or pigs jogging by the side. The county is in the far west of Sichuan Province, under administration of the Garze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture.

Danba town itself is not much to speak of. It’s got one main street, and since all the traffic in the region passes through, it’s incredible noisy. Trucks, construction vehicles, passenger cars, minibuses, motorbikes, all blast their horns for one reason or another. There are blind corners, dogs or people in the way or, we are convinced, horn blowing is just a national obsession.

The Dadu River runs along one side of town, and a mountain rises steeply on the other. The women of Danba are said to be some of the most beautiful in China, (They’ve got many beauty competition wins to prove it.) and the valley has come to be known as Beauty Valley. Danba seems to be as much a Tibetan town as Chinese. The region is filled with both Tibetan and Qiang minority villages. Some say a visit to the area is more like visiting Tibet these days than Lhasa, which has been overrun with Chinese businesses and visitors.

The scenery is that of the high-mountain areas of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. There are rivers, lakes and valleys, terraced farms, villages and steep mountains. Suopo village has many of the stone towers famous in the region. They dot the mountainside sometimes looking like smokestacks, other times like castle watchtowers. One of the most famous ones is octagonal. Traditionally, when a son was born, the family started to build these towers to protect him from a local evil spirit. Each year, a level was added, until the son’s 18th birthday, when he was also presented with a sword. Later, the towers were used as storage-houses and lookout towers in less peaceful times.

Jiaju is a picturesque Tibetan village set high in the mountains north of Danba. The architecture is distinctly different from anything we’ve seen elsewhere in China. The houses are made of stone and wood, white with maroon trim. The roofs have upturned corners and large, flat areas on top. Doorways are richly carved and painted.  We can’t wait to get even further west…

Danba photos are HERE.