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Willkommen auf davidholler.online.de!

uploaded 26.04.2012

I probably spent more than one year with my Namtsho nomad friends, not at one time, but over many years since 1995 again and again, during all seasons, all their camps. In the past I did research for my MA and my PHD there and often stayed more than one month, sometimes two to three months, always sitting on the floor, eating tsampa, working with the girls.

Now my friends built a house in their winter camp like all other nomads as well, lost some pastures to neighboring groups, have a living container in the summer camp, the pastures are fenced, the road from Lhasa/ Damshung got paved, everyday in summer probably close to 10.000 mostly Chinese tourists come to the lake which got one of the main tourist spots in Tibet, and have to pay an entrance fee higher than for Potala Palace. Sure the tourists dump their garbage (like the nomads as well), they all shit there, there is a little tent/ containertown built, with hostels, restaurants, shops, even tent disco, tea houses etc. For the tourists they built concrete stairs onto the top of the little holy mountain and errected a little Chinese concrete pavillion on top, they built four concrete toilet houses on all four corners of the little half island, a sacred spot of natural beauty, with natural rock pillars, cliffs, the lake shore, caves in the rocks with ancient rock paintings, ... it all got destroyed and is a real shithole now. It is sad.

Here my pictures of a past time when the world was still in order.
Some pictures were scans from slides and pictures from a time when there was no digital cameras, and the quality of some pictures therefore is bad.
I have thousands of more slides ... one day I will scan and put online, promised. Enjoy!

Returning from Biaffra ... no this was after a 5 week stay at Namtsho 1995. It was a bad year, many animals have died, during the five weeks I ate exclusively Tsampa ... and lost 15 kg. Sure there was no water touching my body during these 5 weeks.

A local offering place (khrus sgo). In the background mount Nyenchen Thanglha, 7162 meter, and lake Namtsho.

Pema Deki, the eldest doughter of my friend, buttering.

1995 many animals died because of drought.

Me exercising.

brother in arms

My friend with whom I stayed all the time and his father.

Spring camp. These beautiful pastures belonged to an other group and then they were allowed to use them, now no more: "we don't need it but you can't have it"

The whole family with barley harvest. The barley won't have fruit at this altitude, but the stalks are used for winter fodder.

Winter camp. Later the animal corrals got more and bigger and now there is even a house.

Damshung horse festival.

Winter 1998. I planned to walk to the winter camp.

Half way I met friends making tea.

and inviting me to a cosy noontime tea.

I got a lift in a truck ...

but we had to dig our way through.

Pema Deki with makeup.

Lümikyi with our dinner.

Karma making me a slingshot.

An other khrus sgo. It si a ritual bathing place. Nomads offer wool instead of prayer flags. Sculls of some special or beloved or even liberated animals are placed here for a good rebirth of the animal.

Karma going muslim.

Nyenchen Thanglha in his full beauty.

Nyenchen Thanglha and Rigsum Gönpo, the three protectors.

A local Ngagpa. a lay tantric priest.

Local Jiefang truck. It is an old Russians model of the 1950s copied by the Chinese. The trip which now takes half hour then sometimes took 2 days.

These salt traders who got salt from the Changtang lakes could not make the pass with all the salt. They took off half of their load down the pass, went up with the remaining half load, downloaded on top of the pass, went back empty and took up the second half of the load. The trip was free but took 2 days and I had to help ... the 50-80 kg salt sacks burnt the salt nicely into the frozen sore wounded hands ...