As promised, Mr Cheng from our Kunming Travel Agency who arranged our Tibet Travel Entry permit, picked us up at our hotel at 5:30am for our 7am flight to Lhasa. We checked in and passed security at which point Mr Cheng wished us a good trip.
While waiting for our flight, we noticed that the flight had a stop-over in Shangri-La – the town we had just come back two days ago. Jenny pointed out, and I agreed, that we made somewhat of a trip planning mistake by flying to Lhasa from Kunming instead of Shangri-La. Although, when we had met Mr Cheng for the initial booking of our trip to Tibet, we still had some hope of visiting Jinghong in the south of Yunnan province, which would have justified returning to Kunming. But bottom line, we spent unnecessarily the airfare from Shangri-La to Kunming.
Quite a few foreigners boarded in Shangri-La. The flight to Lhasa went well. Everybody was looking our the plane window on landing. We were awaited by our guide at the airport and given a “Welcome to Tibet” white scarf. The distance between the airport and the Lhasa city center is over 65 kms. I kept wondering why the airport would be so far away but after looking at the rivers and mountains on the way into town, I thought 65 kms wasn’t too bad.
Our guide was a local Tibetan, unfortunately his English was only slightly better than my Chinese. Our first impression on the Tibetan landscape: the mountains were without any trees, mostly brownish with patches of green grassland; the river appeared more like a flood plain. Upon our arrival in Lhasa, we are surprised by its size, we were expecting a small town similar to Shangri-La. Our Guide and Jenny visited a few hotels before we found something reasonable and within our budget. We had been told that a two-star hotel in is like a one-star hotel in the rest of China. We stopped our choice on the ShangBala Hotel, a three star hotel and our most expensive accommodation to-date. The room is small but the hotel location is great.
As neither Jenny or I are too eager to try Tibetan food, we stick with Chinese and Western food for our first supper meal. In the evening, we took a walk around the streets neighboring temple, a few blocks from hotel. While we were walking I kept mentioning to Jenny that it seemed that most folks were walking in the other direction. Back at the hotel, I read in our travel guide book that the path we took should be walked in a clockwise direction as to follow the flow of pilgrims walking and praying along this circular path.
Our Guide reminded us that he had to accompany us whenever we wanted to visit monasteries or other attractions in/around Lhasa. Our permit did not allow us to venture out of the Prefecture(county) of Lhasa.
For the next day, we agreed to take an excursion to Lake NamTso, one of three sacred Tibetan lake, some 4 hours away from Lhasa. The guide suggested he could find us a driver and Land Cruiser for the excursion. In the evening, Jenny did some shopping of her own and found a better deal. Although our Guide was concerned that the driver/car were not official, he was relieved when he discover that it was one of his friend that was the driver.
The excursion provided a great opportunity to see more of the Tibetan scenery and people. Lake NamTso was quite a popular site – as the bus load of tourists confirmed it. The lake, said to be the highest salt lake in the world at 4,718 m (1,100 m higher than Lhasa). Although we stayed on-site for only one hour, Jenny, Victoria and I all experienced some symptoms of the high altitude e.g. tingling in the finger tips, lost of breath, etc.
On the way back, we stopped for lunch in small town. We also experienced first hand, the efficiency of the Tibetan police, as our driver was picked up for speeding by photo-radar.
In the evening, we discovered a great restaurant near our hotel and we later enjoyed a bit of walking.