Asia is the setting for my travel experience short story. One of the things my husband and I were most looking forward to doing on our first trip to China was going to the Labrang Monastery. Labrang is a sacred site and a pilgrimage destination for Tibetan Buddhists, and it is in the remote Gansu province in the west of China.

We were having a difficult time getting where we wanted to go because neither of us spoke Chinese at the time. We had no idea why the bus drivers would not let us board the buses that were headed toward the transportation hub, from which all of the other buses that would take us to Labrang left.

When one of them finally let us on, he made us get out on the town’s outskirts, well before we got to the bus station. We started walking in the direction we thought the station was going because we were confused and didn’t know what else to do. Six police officers with S.W.A.T. badges on their sleeves suddenly surrounded us after two police cars skidded to a stop next to us.