Kailashmanasarovar Tour

This is the story about one of the most impressive moments we have ever witnessed anywhere. “Saga Dawa is an important Tibetan Buddhist festival, held each year on the full moon day of the fourth lunar month of the Tibetan calendar, to celebrate Sakyamuni’s enlightenment”, that’s what every guidebook will tell you. But actually having been there, at that moment it is more like being part of a magic event, something that gets a total grip on all of your senses. So what’s going on? Each year, they replace the Tarboche flagpole, a huge pole that stands round of Kailash. People from all over Tibet gather here that day to attach their prayer flags they brought from home, to pray, and to help erect the flagpole. The flagpole should stand perfectly upright, or else things are not good for Tibet . A Lama leads the whole ceremony from the nearby monastery. It’s his job to make it work ‘right first time’. Day of Saga Dawa: People circulate the flagpole that is down on the ground now. They pray and throw ‘wind horses’ (little pieces of colored paper with Buddhist scriptures on them) into the air. They help to remove last year’s prayer flags and attach new ones. As a visitor you are almost forced to follow them as they go around and around, time after time. Along the sides, on the slope of the nearby hills, a lot of people are sitting to watch the ‘spectacle’ and there are musicians, which play all the time on their horns and symbols.