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 All treks focus on getting to know local people. Every
step of the journey, after your pick-up in Western China, there will be translators/guides to help you converse, chat, joke, and understand our hosts-– as well as to manage logistical affairs.
Your hosts will be local people: in Tibet, a family of nomadic yak herders; in the Chinese countryside, peasant farmers; at Emei, temple monks and other mountain-dwellers. Your translators and guides throughout the treks are Angela Lankford and Ju Rui (Janice). In Tibet there are three Tibetan guides in addition.
Angela is an American who grew up in a Colorado ranching community on the east side of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. She spent her childhood and teens climbing, backpacking, doing forestry work for her father, and getting used to cowboy culture. Then by strange circumstance she ended up getting a degree in Economics with an Environmental focus from Williams College, and joined the Peace Corps.
The Peace Corps sent her to China, where she lived alone in a small Chinese town for three years. She learned Chinese and got to know the countryside and its people.
During her first vacation in China, Angela met her Tibetan family and started spending time on the high grasslands with them. One of few Westerners to have close contact and serious time with the nomad people, she has been very fortunate to meet such amenable people, and to hit the right time in Chinese history to get to know them well.
She has been visiting the grasslands and studying them since December 2001. She has now led seven official Tibet treks and three official China treks. She has also hosted numerous visitors, and climbed Mt. Emei seven times.
 Ju Rui's English name is Janice. She is a Chongqing girl, a recent graduate of Southwest Agriculture University. She has helped with three treks so far. She was Angela's student and subsequently has become her good friend. She possesses a keen, open, inquiring mind, and speaks English well. She is a great guide and translator because she is primarily a student of life. She is currently working to get into and pay for graduate school in psycho-analysis, with a focus on Buddhist philosophies.
Our main host in Tibet is Djarga Mira, a yak herder devoted to religion and living well. He has an endless sense of humor and capability for organizing and solving problems. He has lived all his 32 years in this village, as have his parents, grandparents, and so on. He is working on improving his Chinese language and enjoys studying English from Angela and from trekkers. He is a wealth of information on Tibetan religion, customs, folk tales, jokes, and thinking. He understands how to share this information in a way that foreigners can understand, and loves spending time with and getting to know Westerners in a real way.
 Catherine "Cat" Hardie hails from Melbourne, Australia, and has lived in China and Tibet for over five years. She studied Law and Chinese Studies at university, and spent in total three years on exchange at Peking University and Tsinghua University in Beijing, and Cheng Kung University in Taiwan. She has a deep academic and personal interest in Chinese and Tibetan folk culture and religion. For the past eighteen months, Cat has been training young Tibetan teachers from the Ganzi region in English under a Tibet Fund- sponsored program, and her network of friends and students from across the Kham region lend her tours a sense of warmth and community.
Other guides will pop up here and there, especially in Tibet. There will be one or two other guides for the horse trek, family members or good friends. |
