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We drove to a local restaurant. Humble and unassuming, it had one wall open to the road and featured a selection of foods that were a little like a Sino-Tibetan variation on the McDonald’s breakfast menu. My favourite was the fried bread. These were long unsweetened donut style breads. The same style of breads was extremely popular at SWUN’s main cafeteria in Chengdu. In addition to the breads, we had boiled eggs and black tea. During the meal, I tried vainly to engage the cousin and his friends with my limited Tibetan and Mandarin.

Following breakfast, we climbed back into the hatchback and made the drive to Nangchen. It was a 3-hour trip along a wide, new 4 lane highway that wound its way through the hills, mountains, and vallies of Kham, Eastern Tibet. The route was a parade of peaks. Mountain after mountain revealed their beautiful faces to us. Now I’m from Alberta, Canada, and I’ve seen mountains and I’ve seen big mountains. Mountains with snow. Mountains with hot springs. Mountains with goats, deer, and the occasional bear. Who knows? Perhaps when I visit the Andes and the Alps, I‘ll change my mind but there was just something singular about the mountains in Tibet. They were mezmerizing. The mountains on the road to Nangchen sang a very special song. Heavy, weighty, somewhat hidden, yet deeply present. They reminded me of Carl Jung’s notion of the unconscious. Jung, the Swiss-born psychologist and protégé of Freud, came from the land of the Alps, and took a deep interest in the unconscious aspects of the mind. Perhaps it’s not surprising that Jung was influenced by Tibetan Buddhism in his formulations of psychological types, and the male and female aspects of a person’s psyche.