Adjust your packs, ladies and gentlemen.

I think there were some important lessons learned (from my perspective) on this trip.

The main one:  the only predictable thing out here is that things will be unpredictable.

Our hopes were to meet with the village leaders of this remote town called Karong. My friends that I was traveling with had been to Karong in the past and had talked about possible community development projects they could help out with. One of the concerns the villagers had were the road conditions (I can attest that there were some truck-sized sinkholes all along the trail to the summit.) We were hoping to talk with the village leader of Karong about partnering with them on making some of these improvements.

About half-way up the mountain a guy on a motorcycle stopped to talk with us. We were shocked when he informed us in his thick Qinghai dialect that the village leader was not home. The village leader was in a city in the far western corner of the province checking out land. The mustached man on the motorcycle told us that he was the village leader’s younger brother. He wondered why we hadn’t called ahead.

Why hadn’t we called ahead?!! A truly extraordinary concept. We actually had…months ago in fact. The first time my friends tried to call the village, the village leader was visiting the same distant city looking at land. The second time they called the Karong village hotline the person who answered the phone claimed that the phone no longer belonged to the Karong village but instead had been sold to its new owners in a neighboring village. So we had no way to contact Karong without hiking in.

To make matters more complicated we soon discovered that the village leader and his 4 younger brothers were trying to determine if they would move their families to the far west of Qinghai. This would obviously have huge ramifications for the village of Karong and our potential to work on projects with them.

We scratched our heads and kept hiking. Fortunately, we were still welcome in the village even if the leader was not currently at home…