I didn't know that before mounting one.
I was getting a crash course - literally - to the guffaws of my nomadic Tibetan herder hosts.
I clasped fistfuls of wool as tightly as I could and teetered as I tried to crawl atop the writhing beast's back.
To add to the yuks of me riding a yak, my hosts had dressed me in traditional Tibetan attire.
Moments before, my host family's patriarch, 54-year-old Ahzhub, had blasted up the mountainside at lightening speed atop another bolting bovid, with a thunder of hooves.
More locals are buying motorcycles and cars. But many still ride horses and yaks to cross the crumpled crags to their camps, far from any road.
From the creature's back, I surveyed crinkled topography, fleeced with grass, freckled with prairie flowers and studded with livestock. The sunset painted iridescent water ribbons that fluttered across the terrain.
Less enrapturing were the pyramid of yak dung - used for heating and cooking - crowned with a sheep skull, and the snarling mastiff, choking against his chain in fury at my presence.
Locals jokingly call the manure "Tibetan coal". They heap hunks of flammable feces into walls around tents or adobe hovels.
I'd been shooting a "Tibetan gun" - a slingshot hand-woven from yak wool, used to direct herds - moments before boarding the yak - a "Tibetan all-terrain vehicle".
Ahzhub's mountainside shelter is like Yege's other nomads' - haloed by yaks and an outer orbit of guard mastiffs. The canines are the home-security system, especially when the family is out to pasture.
You can't lock a tent.
Not all burglars are human. Bears regularly raid nomads' food stores.
A bear set a herder's house ablaze - a tale I found difficult to believe until the local government confirmed it had investigated and paid compensation. (He'd set his stove in the doorway to burn bears and scare them off. This particular marauder instead knocked it over.)
It's perhaps a reminder the most gorgeous geology and enchanting ecology often host some of the poorest people.
Ahzhub's family struggles to extract a living from postcard-perfect landscapes. They pulled in about 5,000 yuan ($800) a year beneath a snowcap.
I was spending my last night in Yege in their tent in Qumalai county's peripheries, after two weeks of terrific yet tough travels through the remote nomadic fringes of Qinghai province's Yushu Tibetan autonomous prefecture in 2013.
(I also traveled there in 2011 and 2014.)
Over the previous two weeks, I'd led a group of volunteers to install solar panels, computer labs, multimedia centers, a music room and a library in far-flung primary schools. We also bought food staples for the poorest families.
Our journeys were equal parts delightful and deprivation.
Volunteers had to be extracted because of the average 4,500-meter elevation. Altitude sickness had bedridden many. They suckled oxygen bags.
One 2012 volunteer realizes his father skydived - that is, leapt out of planes - from lower altitudes than he was driving over in Yege.
In 2013, there were breakdowns. A landslide. An earthquake.
And other - you could call them - "bumps" in the road.
A downtown cabbie pulled a knife on me the last night in Yushu over a fare disagreement, for instance.
But the amazing blotted out adversity.
It's no destination for tourists - but an astonishing place for explorers.
Qumalai and its hinterlands very rarely see outsiders, let alone Americans. The same holds true in inverse. I was hosted not only with the best the nomads could scrape up but also to such questions as:
"Is Washington DC in Latin America?"
I'd immersed myself in Tibetan herding life for weeks, learning about an existence few outsiders penetrate, set in otherworldly terrains. (Locals joke Yege's altitude and temperatures keep outsiders away.) And I'd enjoyed the excessive hospitality of those with little to offer materially.
The nearest hotel was over a hundred kilometers away.
Places like Yege township's grasslands offer glimpses into lives rarely seen by non-locals, a way of being that's as equidistant from that of a rural dweller in the United States and an urbanite in a Chinese megalopolis. (I've lived as both.)
Azhub's family didn't have meat but prepared a special meal with vegetables, having heard foreigners like them. Nomads prefer yak dairy - yogurt, butter and cheese - and meat. Attempts to get children to enjoy fruits and veggies to enhance nutrition have met with mixed results.
Crumbles of yak cheese swelled from on tarps outside the tent. I was surprised to discover the lumps are tooth-crackingly hard.
Also tough are yak ribs, which many splurge on to treat an outside guest.
But I can't chew the meat - no matter how hard I try.
Ribs are eaten with a double-edged knife.
Diners carve the flesh from the bone by slicing toward themselves to avoid puncturing dinner mates.
I committed a faux pas my first year by chopping away from myself, as American children are taught
to do to avoid injury.
I was informed that ran against etiquette. For safety reasons.
So I slid the knife toward me to lacerate a chunk of yak flesh and embedded the blade in my thumb. Blood oozed down my wrist.
This made me cagier about the next step according to table manners - licking the meat off the blade.
We'd eaten yak ribs the night before heading to Azhub's camp.
One guy - nicknamed Obama, because of his resemblance to said US president - snapped bottle caps off beers with his molars. Another painted his protracted pinky nail black.
The next afternoon, our truck juddered off road and splashed through creeks toward Ahzhub's summer camp.
Antelope cavorted. Tiny owls peeped from burrows bored into a bluff.
Grasslands squirm with pikas in Qumalai. Stare at any patch of prairie, and it'll seem to swim. At any given second, dozens of the critters dart among tunnel entrances that pock the terrain.
Over the years, we've encountered such fauna as wolves, wild yaks, foxes, marmots and vultures, stabbing beaks into shredded carrion.
Summertime flora looks like a rainbow shook off its pollen to dust the grasslands.
We transported animals the first year I joined nomads for such off-roading.
I was in the back of a pickup truck cab, and a ram a passenger purchased was lashed by its horns to the back window behind my head. It bleated and its brow clacked against the glass millimeters from the back of my head for the next eight hours.
The ruminant's exhalations created clouds of condensation that rained down the glass pane.
In 2013, I spent 12 hours with a monk, being shaken like dice in a cup along choppy roads and praying for a seatbelt - less for fear of a crash than to strap me to the seat, so I'd stop cracking my crown into the ceiling. (Best part was, the monk gave me cookies.)
The following year, I broke my glasses when a particularly violent thump shoved my temple into the passenger window.
Qumalai's hinterlands aren't an easy trip for everyone. They're a journey of discovery for the daring.
That is, a sojourn sometimes best completed on yak-back.
Source: China Daily by Erik Nilsson
from China Travel & Tourism News http://ift.tt/1iB6EFm
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