Greetings from Lhasa, the forbidden city!
I've been in Tibet for the past 8 days, after having joined a tour in Kathmandu,
Nepal. We drove by Land Cruiser for 4 days before arriving in Lhasa, the largest
city in the Tibetan Autonomous Region (as the Chinese have renamed it) and
the center of Tibet. The same flight is 1 hour 10 minutes, just to give an
idea of how bad the roads are on the way here.
It's the end of monsoon season here - lots of rain, so there was a big landslide on the road before we got to the China/Tibet border. We had to get off the bus, walk over the landslide, and have our guide negotiate for transport - a cattle truck stuck between the landslide and the next one (the next one everyone in our group asked?) - the only transport available at the time. We proceeded to heft our stuff, walk up and over, hop into transport (bus/truck/whatever) a total of 4 times before we got to the border. It was hot and muggy - we hired locals every time to carry for us, at about $0.75 to $1.30 each time for each of our packs, but it was still a serious exertion.
Once we arrived at the Chinese border, there was ankle-deep water rushing past that we needed to walk through. Then, you guessed it, another landslide - we had to walk 1 1/2 hours uphill before the land cruisers provided by the Chinese tourist agency on the other side could pick us up.
Once we passed the border be began to see many Tibetans (none really until 0then). They had very different features and dress from the Nepalese I'd been seeing for the past week and a half in Nepal. We hired porters again for our backpacks, and then were ushered up the shortcut - straight up the hill through the brush, instead of taking the long way up on the road. We went up three of these shortcuts before collapsing on the road, where things became much more confusing. We had been travelling with about 20 people; various tour agencies in Kathmandu had condensed several tours to take advantage of a large bus. No one was sure who was in whose group. We weren't even sure who our guide was! The man we thought was "our" guide took half of our larger group in 2 waiting land cruisers, and the rest of us were left behind. We waited a long time as more and more foreigners and locals showed up and waited along with us. Land cruisers kept arriving, but we didn't know what was going on. Eventually, one came for us - one. We were 9 people and luggage. We managed to squeeze our luggage, ourselves, the driver, a guide, and someone else hanging on the back into the vehicle (it was not comfortable!), and we bounced our way to the first town. I counted 11 people inside the landcruiser, but everyone else tells me it was 12.
Once we arrived in town, we still had to clear the second chinese checkpost, where they checked our passports. The first person in line caused the most delay. She was unable to express to them that she was Greek (a nationality they were apparently unfamiliar with). Once this was resolved, we quickly moved through - no problems though I had expected quite a few, from all the traveller's stories I'd been hearing.
It wasn't nearly as difficult as had been reported getting through the border. I saw several individuals coming in, and some jumping out of trucks with mountain bikes. Biking is supposedy the only possible method of getting into Tibet without being on a group permit.
>From this point we travelled by land cruiser - no more landslides!
The second day was very difficult - the road was completely bogged in knee-deep mud. Big trucks were stuck everywhere and we often left the road to try and navigate around them. Many times it seemed we wouldn't make it (we were 8 people, 2 drivers, 1 wife and 1 guide divided into 2 vehicles). Walking would have been faster most of that day. We proceeded to go higher and higher. Toshen and I had been at 3300m (13,000 ft) trekking in Nepal 2-3 days earlier, so we thought we'd do okay. But as we got up to 4,000m it became a little more difficult to breathe. I was worried we wouldn't make it over the 5150m pass (15,500 ft) that night - we were an hour away and it already getting dark. The roads were so bad it would have been quite dangerous to drive in the dark. Luckily, it was dry on the other side so we drove 2 hours relatively safely in the dark before arriving in a town and a guesthouse.
That night nobody slept well, if at all - it was difficult to breathe being so high. Typically, you'd wake up anxious, trying to gulp enough oxygen, and sleep fitfully. After that night the trip became long. Most of us had some degree of headaches and mild nausea - nobody was in good shape as we all adjusted to altitudes 4500-5000m. High altitude travel is very tiring, even just bouncing around in a truck. Another issue to contend with was our driver's wife. She chattered non-stop in chinese from the moment we started to when we got out of the car. She would be silent for about 3 seconds at a time (I am not making this up). She must have been trying to keep her husband awake. We all wondered that trip what on earth she could possibly be talking about. I have never met a married person that had that much to say! Shakespeare would have been proud of the length of her monologues. She did entertain us occasionally by singing along with Chinese music tapes. She did have some modicum of talent, luckily for our ears (really, it was rather pleasant).
Unfortunately for the other half of our group, the other driver had a bad mishap - he must have fallen asleep. All along the road are knee high (and taller) piles of sand every 2 meters for road repair. He hit 6 or 7 of them before going airborne going off the road. Luckily for them, there was no ravine next to the road. Many buses, cars, and trucks, drive over the road and fall to the rivers below all the time - many people are killed. Our driver was very careful - he owned both vehicles, but I can't say the same for the other driver, who was a bit of a hotshot.
So now we're in Lhasa. The organized tour is over. We've done visited about 7 monestaries, and all of us are very tired of looking at gilded buddhas and statues of famous monks and lamas. The architecture is quite nice, and the pilgrims (mostly tibetan) are very colorful. We're taking care of necessities today, our first "free day" since arriving. We hope to arrange some kind of trek soon. I fly out of Lhasa on Sept. 21, so i've got 2 1/2 weeks to arrange permits with the chinese government, find a trek (they are all difficult, and go over 5000m), and arrange transport and the hiring of a yak or two to carry our packs, and a yak driver - it's quite high even in Lhasa (3,600m), and we're still having trouble breathing fully most of the time - it takes about a week to adjust to Lhasa's altitude, according to Toshen. Just walking up 2 flights of stairs feels like extreme exercise, but its getting easier.
What I've learned so far: