Day 52, 53, 54

It's early in the morning of the fourteenth of June. I'm on the train to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. I was hoping to take the bus over the 5500 metre high passes that this trip requires, but with this NEW train service (it started last year), the bus is going out of style, and only runs a couple times a week.

The train originates somewhere in the west. I got on in Golmud, the last stop before the train spends 17 hours crossing the Tibetan plateau. Golmud is a STRANGE place. A 1985 edition of Lonely planet says this:

"Locals will tell you that from Golmud to Hell is a local call."

Twenty years later, my current edition says something like this:

"Unless you are an engineer or an escaped convict on the run, there is little reason to visit this strange outpost in the oblivion end of China."

Eeeep.

Really, though, Golmud is odd. It's very clean, with wide streets lined by landscaped gardens and cute little pools of water, covered with stepping stones so that pedestrians can reach the sidewalks. The shops suggest some kind of wealth. The town IS reach, I suppose, because of the resources extracted from the surrounding countryside. Honestly, it's all quite pretty, despite what the Lonely Planet books say.

But God, it is really out there. I was wrong when I said that Vladivostok and Kashgar were at the ends of the earth. THIS place is the end of the earth... those places line up with borders and oceans and trade routes. But this place lines up with nothing but nothingness... mountains and desert. Those places have neighbours!

There's nothing to DO in Golmud, no reason to visit... but it still has a three star hotel. How does that happen?

Moving on:

I've been travelling these past couple days with an American couple - J and K - and E, a solo French woman. Some company made the boredom of Golmud easy to bare.

And thank God for that, because Golmud serves as a sort of bottleneck for travellers to Tibet, easily trapping the unwary for an unplanned stopover of two or three days. The trap lies in the paperwork required to enter Tibet, specifically a 120 dollar "permit" that takes at least one day to arrange. It's just a sort of moneymaker for the Chinese tourism industry, but everyone is supposed to have it.

The other trap is getting train tickets for Tibet. For the four of us, that was a real nightmare. Acting on a tip, we lined up at 6:00, two and a half hours before the ticket office opened. We waited and waited and then, at 8:30, all hell broke loose. The Chinese, you see, aren't so big on the concept of a queue, and the mob that appeared two hours after we arrived weren't so big on the prospect of not getting a ticket (limited availability, you see), so they sort of broke out into a mob with everyone pushing and kicking and shouting and swearing and really trying hard to get ahead in the line. Two hundred people fought for about 40 tickets. Myself and my three comrades had to literally shove back the masses as they tried to get ahead of us.

You ever see "Dawn of the Dead?" Where the zombies really want to get into the mall and bang away at the glass doors? It was sort of like that. But with living, breathing people. I actually grabbed some guy's wallet and told him I would throw it over my shoulder into the crowd if he didn't go back to his place in line.

In the end, we managed to purchase three tickets (the last three!) and paid an extra twenty bucks to get one on the black market and the 150 people who showed up after us went home unhappy.

And now I'm on the road to Lhasa. Just five minutes out of town, looking out the window I saw a very barren landscape. The LED display at the end of my carriage says that our current elevation is 2833 meters, while in the distance some very high peaks loom. Like I said, we will reach heights of 5500 meters before the end of this trip (as a comparison, Mount Everest is 8200 at it's peak, I think) .

Sitting a couple of seats down from me is a trio of Korean retirees who are taking a year long trip around the continent. They are a very odd bunch, with the guys sporting a pair of very long and very un-Korean beards. The beards are about as long as the one that the guy on the 1000 won note has, which is pretty damn long. They are all hippies of a sort, and when I dropped a few references of Hongdae district and the "Art Free Market" they were duly impressed. Hee.

Okay. The train is picking up speed...