Driving Round the World: Across China and Tibet

The six vehicles

Apologies for no posts over the past five weeks but China blocks access to the Blog. We are now safely in Laos on top of a hill amongst tribal villages and have free access to all the web.
We met successfully with the other five vehicles which were to cross China with us and have had a fantastic time, the group working well together and seeing some of the most fantastic and varied scenery, getting to grips with the local culture and enjoying the beautiful weather we were fortunate to get.

Tibetan Plateau

China - first impressions were of a massively bureaucratic country taking three days to get the relevant permits stamped and our cars tested for brakes and lights. This was not helped by the officials having a 3 hour lunch break from 1.30pm to 4.30pm, then finishing for the day at 7.00pm. We were to meet this paranoid bureaucracy time and time again, particularly through Tibet where there are police checkpoints at the entrance and exit of most towns, and also at major road junctions. Each one could take between 30 and 60 minutes to get through. Added to this there are cameras on all routes which take photos of the vehicles and they check times between checkpoints to make sure you are not speeding - all a bit big brother-ish. Once you get used to it the scenery really takes over.

Unmade Tibetan road

The biggest surprise was the huge variation in scenery through Tibet and China, starting in the lowlands we drove through grey dusty flat desert for a couple of days before suddenly starting to climb up a long narrow valley. After spending a couple of nights at around 3,000m the final climb onto the Tibetan plateau started to test our breathing, with crossing passes at or around 5,000m each day for the next week. The Chinese road engineering is fantastic with many of the roads graded so you could climb in 3rd gear, and with hundreds of hairpin bends. In the parts of central Tibet where the roads have not yet been improved they are building hundreds of kms of new road with massive engineering projects to build long tunnels and elevated sections through the steeper sections.

Cathedral like gorge in Tibet

Travelling Group

the Tibet plateau is an amazing place, you really feel on top of the world, and we lived above 4,000m for around 2 weeks, even camping above 5,000m at Everest base camp. It is hard to describe the scale of the landscape - it is huge, and empty. In the west the landscape is bare - bare rock mountains separated by incredibly wide flat rubble filled valleys, with little vegetation and virtually no habitation. We could drive for hundreds of kms without seeing anyone, just an occasional animal, with huge blue skies. At this altitude the sun is hot during the day, but temperatures rapidly plunge below zero at night. As we drove south and east we caught our first glimpse of the big 7,000+ m mountains - a spectacular sight, and soon we were seeing them off to the south on a regular basis. The landscape gradually changed as we drove east, with more grass and more small communities of goat and yak herders, and we started to see Buddhist temples. At every pass, and every spectacular location there were forests of prayer flags fluttering in the wind, and at some special places engraved stones. We visited two of Buddhism's most holy sites, Kailash Mountain where pilgrims walk clockwise round the mountain to gain favours (usually taking 2 or 3 days), the most devout prostrate themselves flat on the ground every body length for the entire circuit taking around 2 weeks to complete the Kora. Everywhere - in the temples, around stupas and even around a 40km long lake there are pilgrims walking clockwise, some prostrating every 2 metres. It is an extraordinary display of devotion and a huge commitment of their time.

First sight of Himalaya

Camp by Lake Mansorova

After 2 weeks we saw our first really big mountains, privileged to see sunrise on the Annapurna range one day, and a beautiful sunset on Everest. Until 2 years ago the trek to Everest base camp took several weeks of plodding through a desolate rubble strewn valley, but now it has been turned into a tourist location, with a new road climbing 2,500m over a pass with spectacular views - Everest dominating the skyline, , before dropping down 1,500m and then climbing up to 5,000m at the Rombuk monastery - a traditional place for climbing expeditions to get their last blessing before attempting Everest. Base camp is somewhat disappointing as it has become a series of stalls selling tourist stuff, and it is now a long way from the foot of the glacier - I guess the real climbers base camp is further up the valley, now off limits to anyone without a climbers permit.

Everest Sunset

1000 Buddah Stupa

East from Everest the land is more cultivated and we started to see trees in their fantastic autumn colours, and people harvesting their small patches of arable land, threshing the grain by hand. Villages became more numerous and we started to see more monasteries and temples, until we reached Lhasa where we managed to get tickets to visit Potala palace, the monastery on the hill top where the Dalai Lama lived until exiled after the Chinese took over. All through the country there is a massive amount of building, some of houses to replace those destroyed by the earthquake last year, but much of the development to build housing so they can move Chinese people in, and dilute the Tibetan culture. Lhasa has a huge number of high rise apartments and new shops as well as a smart railway station. The old part of town is restricted to a small area around the Potala Palace, but it has all become sanitised and touristy.

Potala Palace Lhasa

Rombuk Monastery and Everest

East of Lhasa the country gets more deeply gouged by rivers with very deep valleys. The Chinese are rebuilding many of the twisting roads with new highways extending for hundreds of kms much of which is tunnelled or on elevated bridges across the gorges. Each day we climbed and dropped several thousand metres along twisting roads, but as we gradually descended the trees became more numerous in spectacular Autumn colours. We drove along the upper reaches of the Meking and then the Yangtze passing some fantastic gorges and snow clad mountains as we crossed from Tibet into Yunnan. This is now China proper and has a much more developed infrastructure with huge expenditure on tourism. Old towns have been preserved and become major attractions for Chinese tourists as well as some of the more spectacular areas of scenery such as Tiger Leaping Gorge and the Karst Stone pillars. A side trip to the Lufeng quarry museum was fantastic. Over the past 40 years around 100 complete dinosaur skeletons have been excavated from this one quarry and are now mounted and on display alongside the quarry wall where there are some exposed skeletons waiting to the excavated. Sas we headed south towards laos the climate became more tropical with bananas and palms, and at higher altitudes some beautiful rice terraces, now flooded so creating a dramatic sight.
It was a sad farewell to the rest of the group at the border as we each made our separate ways into Laos and the less well developed roads and dramatic forested mountains.