Vamos á Lhasa

Vamos á Lhasa

28 September 2010

Lhasa, Tibet Autonomous Region, China

This morning, Carissa and Greg picked me up in a taxi, and we headed to Pudong Airport. There we met with our fellow travelers, Yves from Switzerland, Richard from Melbourne, Felipe from Brazil. Check-in was only complicated by the fact that Richard’s passport number had been listed by his booking website as “123456789.” This was potentially a big deal. The gate agent told Richard he had to call the booking agent (which conveniently does not seem to have a phone number, or at any rate not one that is listed on their confirmation email). At length, we convinced the gate agent to change it in his own computer, and we were left to wonder why he wouldn’t do that in the first place if he could… at any rate, the lessons learned were 1) make sure your passport number is right when you travel in China and 2) if you do not like the first answer, ask and ask again.

The second slight complication was that our permits to enter Tibet were actually one permit covering all six of us. This was lesson three of the day: travel together if you are headed to Tibet and make sure no one misses the plane! (Alternatively, make sure the agency provides divisible permits.)

We had a layover in Xi’an, a place I would like to revisit. For now, though, I can report that the Xi’an airport had great noodles and horrible beer. It tasted like carbonated dirty water and had big bubbles like happy Heidsieck. Anyway, it’s a good thing about the great noodles because the airplane food was less edible than any I’ve ever seen, with the exception of the Haibao dessert cake.

The views into Lhasa were beautiful, though the mountains didn’t challenge my memories of flying over the Andes in Peru. What I’ll remember more vividly is the wide, muddy, and seemingly shallow rivers coming from slivers between mountains into a superhighway that we followed to the airport. On the banks, families of birches were green and turning yellow, and there was not one boat to be seen. Up here in the middle of the Himalayas, the river looked like a delta fanning out before it meets the sea.

Our guide, Bemba, greeted us with white Tibetan scarves and led us to our van, which looked like something Jerry Garcia would love. Our driver’s name was also Bemba, which means Saturday in Tibetan. We stopped at one sacred place on the way into town, and there we checked into the Cool Yak Hotel. For dinner that night we went to a Tibetan steak house and tried yak for the first time. Richard ordered best, and his yak steak tasted as good as a fine beef steak. After dinner, we went to a bar called Texas Bar, where some of the guys took burning shots while country music played. Then Yves impressed me by taking the guitar off the wall and playing the blues. We could have been anywhere.

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Pictures: Team Tibet; the view flying into Lhasa (2); inedible airplane food with one adorable and yummy Haibao dessert cake (Haibao is the mascot of the Shanghai World Expo); guitar waiting on the wall at Lhasa's Texas Bar

Tibet Trip Planning

Tibet Trip Planning

20 September 2010

Shanghai, China

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Apart from a weariness about group tours in general, I was reminded today of how fun planning stuff for a group of people you don’t know well can be. Even though we’ve already bought expensive one-way tickets to Lhasa, the number of people changed twice today, including a guy bailing complaining about a minor price variance --- a guy who works at a prestigious consulting firm in his real life and was recently overhead boasting that a Japan trip was fine as long as it “wasn’t more than 5,000 Euros.” Oh, the joys of planning travel for near strangers.

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The frustrations planning a trip to Tibet are many. First of all, the economy class tickets cost 2760 Renminbi. No deals. No early bird specials. No student rate. Each leg to Tibet simply costs about $400. You pay or you take the train. When the economy tickets run out, you can pay about double to fly first class. These prices haven’t changed since my old China Let’s Go guide was printed in 2004. How’s that for economic planning?

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The second frustration is that you can only travel in Tibet on an organized tour. The good news is that the norm is private tours, for which you have a small group and a car, driver, and guide, and you go on an itinerary of your choice. The bad news is that the devils in the details. Somehow we went unknowingly from a Land Cruiser chariot to some sort of minivan, but Tibet will still be Tibet…

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The group, however, albeit mostly unknown, seems to be a good group. It includes six exchange students at CEIBS from [xx] different schools, including London Business School and Wharton. Everyone seems like they’ll be fun to get to know, and it’s a good thing, because the train back from Lhasa to Shanghai takes 51 hours. I’ve always thought of myself as someone who loves trains. This fall that is being put to the test.

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We are using a tour agency called Access Tibet Tours and here is our itinerary:

Calendar	Transportation	Distance for driving/km	Program	Accommodation
2010-9-28	Arrive in Lhasa	70	Airport pick up	Cool Yak Hotel
2010-9-29	Lhasa City Tour	80	Jokhang temple/Potala palace/Drepung monastery	Cool Yak Hotel
2010-9-30	Lhasa-Ganden monastery-Lhasa	130	Ganden monastery, Drak yerpa	Cool yak Hotel
2010-10-1	Lhasa-Yamdrok lake-Lhasa	250	Karola glacier/yamdrok lake/ Visit a Tibetan family on the way	Cool Yak hotel
2010-10-2	Lhasa city tour	80	Sera monastery/ Ani Sangkhung Nunnery tea house/ a short hiking into Tibet nature	Cool yak hotel
2010-10-3	Lhasa- Namtso lake	250	Namtso lake, Yampachen hot spring	Tent or local guesthouse
2010-10-4	Namtso lake-Lhasa	250	Shot the sunrise of Namtso lake	Cool Yak Hotel
2010-10-5	Take train to Shanghai	30	Airport transfer

A: The suggested itinerary based on 6 PAX is RMB 4645 (equal to US$693) per person. It is based on 2 Four Wheel drive vehicles.

B: The suggested itinerary based on 6 PAX is RMB 3858 (equal to US$576) per person. It is based on 1 Minivan

Now your mind might be racing with all sorts of questions about these places… mine certainly is. It’s also racing thinking about what sorts of new birds I can see in Tibet…

The Western Treasure House

The Western Treasure House

16 September 2010

Shanghai, China

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I am so excited.

And I just can’t hide it: I am going to Tibet!

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I booked the ticket through CTrip.com under intense worry that it could double in price at any moment.

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I cannot believe I’m actually going to Tibet. I was exactly this excited a few days ago about Beijing, though buying my train ticket did have the dramatic touch of happening in person at the station and involving a paper ticket, which was handed to me by a special Expo English-speaking hospitality-proving hostess. Still, Tibet trumps.

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In the end my agonizing travel decision came down to a Tibet trade-off. Cost was the definite con, along with the annoyance of dealing with the required travel permits and the inflexibility of having to travel on an organized tour. On the other hand, Tibet is Tibet, and it will most likely be a very long time before I have another chance to see it. Also, it is changing rapidly and each day is reportedly less and less like the Tibet of the imagination, so in that sense it is best to go as soon as possible.

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With that in mind, I sent an email out to a group of exchange students who had expressed interest in going to Tibet and offered to lead the travel arrangements for anyone who was available and ready to commit to flying out on the 28 September and coming back by train about one week later. (A one-way flight costs $400 and the train only costs $150 for the nicest ticket, called a “soft sleeper.” So taking the 51-hour train back was a money-saving option as well as a way to mix it up and get an interesting perspective of China: from the tracks!)

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After hearing back from enough people to fill up one Land Cruiser, I booked my ticket. Now to find a tour.

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NB: Tibet is Xizang in Chinese and means “the Western treasure house.”

One, Two, Three, Four

One, Two, Three, Four

15 September 2010

Shanghai, China

I’m going through wild spasms of indecision among four alternatives. They relate to the coming Chinese National Holiday, which runs from 1-6 October, but effectively for me it begins on the 28 September. The facts of the case are that everyone is going somewhere, and it is highly advised that the somewhere be outside of China, since approximately 1,300,000,000 Chinese people travel around China during this time. This is arguably less emphatic a rule if you are going to a western autonomous region, like Tibet or Xinjiang or even Inner Mongolia, because, let’s face it, they’ve got space to spare.

1. Indonesian Pet. Fly into Kuala Lumpur or Singapore or Jakarta and bust around Indonesia.

2. Tibet. The Indonesian Pet will cost as much as Tibet, so why not just throw my towel in with the group going from CEIBS?

3. Flight Optimizer. Bangkok to Nanning, China. Fly into Bangkok (only $250) and travel by land through Thailand, Laos and/or Cambodia, and Vietnam, and fly back from Nanning (<<$100 flight back to Shanghai)

4. Homebody. Maybe I should just stay in Shanghai? Except option #3, this all looks like it will cost a good grand. Wouldn’t that be better spent on Mandarin lessons? And I could do some Zacks (my remote part-time job writing about financial anomalies). And get my blog in order. But I would certainly be the only person I’d know in Shanghai during the break…

Tonight Gerald and I had dinner with our sublessors, Chris and Hannah, and their friends, Monica and Shawn. We ate at a yummy and cheap kebab restaurant just off Nanjing Xi Lu where everything is served as a kebab: from meats to potatoes to asparagus. Then we went by Monica’s flat before going to Xintiandi to a bar called Brown Sugar, where it was ladies’ night. This meant free fizz for the ladies and dancing to great live soul music. (Finally it started to get bluesy with “I Got a Woman” but I was crushed when they cut into another song early. The lead singer said he was from LA, but upon further questioning I found he was from Alabama.)

Brown Sugar was also a good chance to play “I Spy a Chinese Prostitute,” though this scene did have some very endearing normal Chinese groups as well as lots of potential expat friends. By the end of the night I had five potential new friends’ phone numbers. Two comments on that: 1) I was clearly sending out the wrong vibe because only one of these was a guy. 2) In Shanghai it is incredibly easy to meet people. It’s like English-speakers are on an expat island. “You speak English! You think China is incredible! You are here for some indiscriminate amount of time between a month and a few years. Wow, we have so much in common! Let’s be friends!”

Picture: Shanghai Metro travel on a normal day in; kebabs for dinner