On The Highest Railway in the World. . . Illegally

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October 23rd 2007

Published: November 4th 2007

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mattylee

Entering Tibet

Near the border(ish) town of Amdo. I'm not positive where the border precisely is, but this was the point when I knew for sure that we were finally in Xizhang province.

The Problem

We returned to Chengdu to prepare for the next section of our trip: Tibet. This was going to be a slightly more risqué and thus exciting trip thanks to all the efforts of the Chinese government to keep people (excepting rich package tourists of course) away. At the outset things seemed to be stacked against us, but we decided to give it a go.

Initially we had planned to travel to Lhasa by bus, but thanks to a series of crackdowns in the towns of Litang and Chamdo it appeared that doing so would be a lot harder than it was a few months ago. Also, because I was running out of time on my visa we decided that it would be faster and safer to go by train (less time would have been lost if we were turned back). Is that legal?

Well the short answer is "yes", but there certainly are some qualifiers. The biggest one of these was the need for a TTB permit, a sheet of paper giving our "group" permission to enter and travel around Lhasa under the supervision of our "guide" and to then promptly "leave" in the specified manner.

The Approach to Lhasa

As the train descended below 4000m into the valley around Lhasa we were finally able to see mountains that were more than just tiny bumps on top of the plateau.

Of course, we didn't have a group, want a guide, or plan to leave which caused problems. We were also against paying which led to further problems and, to cut a long story short, a general lack of a permit. Therefore, we planned to get on the train regardless and just hope that we could get through.

To make things even more fun, the Tibet Tourism Bureau stopped issuing permits that week for an unspecified reason, which I intend to specify in due time, which meant that no one was going to Tibet that week. Both legitimate and illegitimate permits were not being issued (I haven't checked, but China seems to be the only country where a lack of legitimacy fails to breed illegitimacy), and nobody was heading our way. Rumors were about that planes were not allowed to take off, buses were turned around, and trains were being guarded like never before. I will admit that I was starting to get nervous about the whole deal, but we had no choice (or as little choice as it is possible to have when you are itinerant) and we resolved to try out luck regardless.

Our Saviour is

Pointy Rocks

The mountains that we saw from the train were often rocky and craggy like this one.

Hungarian

Sanyi and Sari, our friends from the van tour in Mongolia, came to our aid at this juncture. They were also planning to take the train into Tibet without a permit, but they were going to attempt it from further north. Thanks to a friend that they ran into, one who had a legitimate permit from before the no-permit-week troubles, they had managed to acquire a permit of their own. Well, to be more precise they had managed to photograph the permit, print out their own copies, after having photoshopped out the original names of course, and had then proceeded to write their own names in the blanks. These rather obviously forged documents were then passed on to god knows how many people over the following week (we're pretty sure that every westerner on the train had the same permit number).

So, armed with our duly forged and clearly illegal documents, Marjie and I set out to get on the train.

Step 1: Buy Tickets

With nerves of steel we approached the ticket booth. We'd heard that people were being refused tickets if they could not produce a permit at the station. We weren't

Crossing the River

This is almost at the very end of the train ride, as we approached Lhasa station.

worried about being arrested for forgery of official documents, although we probably should have been, but instead we were just worried that we might not be able to get the tickets we wanted.

We took the effort to check out the ticket-booth attendants, making sure that we were in the line of the young and happy looking girl rather than the old and haggard lady, and then we patiently sat there and waited. I rehearsed in my head over and over again the Chinese phrases I was going to use to sweet talk the girl, trying to be friendly and flirtatious (Marjie encouraged me to flirt with another girl!) in the hope that she would be nice to us.

Eventually we reached the front of the line; all of my nerves built to their maximum. And then, before I'd gotten through half of my lines, she interrupted me to ask if I wanted the top sleeper bunk or the bottom one. Amazingly, after less than a minute, we were walking away from the booth with two tickets in our hand. Carefully we checked the giant map in the train station and matched the characters with those on our

Window View

This is what we did to pass our time away: staring blankly out at the emptiness.

tickets: we were going to Lhasa.

Step 2: Hope Like Buggery That Nobody Checks

Once we had the ticket things started to get worrisome. There were so many places that we could be checked for our permit: getting on the train, every stop along the way, at the border, or even once we arrived in Lhasa. There were no guarantees for us so we got ourselves into quite a knot of worry. When the day came around we had so many contingency plans that I could barely remember them all: money was strategically placed in bribe-sized quantities, cigarettes were also there for bribing, food to befriend other passengers with, enough supplies for us to live for two days without having to leave our cabin and walk past any train attendants, our fake permit, a solid story of where our real permit was, and a made up guide and travel agency. Even with all of these plans we still felt as though things could very easily end up involving a Chinese military prison somewhere in the middle of Tibet.

At the train station things weren't as I had expected. We avoided getting in line too early as

Simple Solutions

These constructions of well organised rocks are beside most of the railway tracks in Tibet. We presume that it is to keep the water and sand from impinging on the rails.

policemen were walking up and down the room (they turned out to only be passengers). A large group of the line was even moved to a different waiting hall, one that required walking through a security check, which we were told not to go to; it turned out to be a baggage check room. We just sat there (we had met an Australian couple that was doing the same thing, they even had a copy of our permit, and we waited together). When the doors opened we filed into the train alongside everyone else and found to our surprise that no guards went around the cabins asking people for IDs or travel papers. In fact, the train started moving almost as soon as we had boarded. Nevertheless, we felt that it was prudent to hide in our beds that night in case the guards did come checking.

To cut things short, we stayed pretty much in that state for the next 48 hours. We only left the cabin once to go and get dinner once we had passed the major cities on the railway line, and at all other times we kept a low profile. At no point did

Tibet is Empty

we get checked, not even when we had to change trains at Xinning (to get into the pressurised cabins, which mind you turned out to not be quite so pressurised, one guy liked to keep his window open in our cabin), and the whole trip passed in nervous anticipation of nothing.

The train arrived early and we got out and headed for the gate, passing six guards on the way, without a single permit check. We arrived in Lhasa as free tourists!

Enough Logistics, What Was the View Like?

It's weird when you look out of a train window onto a vast desert, with frozen ground supporting the tracks thanks to special refrigeration systems that keep it solid year round, the sparsely grassed plains stretching into the distance with only small mountains sticking up from the ground towards their gently sloping peaks. To think that the mountains around us were the highest in the world was strange because they only seemed to be a few hundred meters tall at most, but then, 300m on top of 5000m makes for a mighty peak indeed. The train reached its peak at 5072m, almost as high as I had

Hills Near the Rails

These hills might look small, but I can guarantee that they're over 5000m high.

ever been, but the view seemed to be not much different from that of a sea-level grassland. The barren plains were startlingly empty, nothing was out there except for the occasional nomad wandering in the wilderness and their corresponding herds of yak grazing on the limited grass available.

Vast snow-capped mountains appeared in the distance with the kinds of glaciers and jagged peaks the mountaineer’s dream of, but they hardly seemed impressive or tall. Only the tallest mountains, those above 7000m, would appear as anything worth noting, but compared to the rest of the world the entire plain was a mountain!

The railway to Lhasa is truly an engineering marvel. Besides the complicated Ammonia based cooling system that keeps the ground frozen, the hundreds of bridges, the wind and water barriers that surround the tracks, the ballast which had to be shipped over thousands of kilometers, the cold and dry conditions that had to be endured by the workers, or for the sheer impetuousness of the construction the railway is still remarkable for so many other reasons. The number of elements that were put together to connect what was the world's most remote capital with the rest of

Mobile Tower

There is 100% mobile phone coverage while you are on the train. This is one of the towers. It is nothing special by itself, until you realise that it's -10 degress outside almost all year round and there isn't a town within 300km.

the world's most industrial country made me shudder. What other country would give you 100% mobile phone coverage while travelling on a 5000m high plateau? Where else could you pipe oxygen from the walls while you read a newspaper in the Himalayas? Who else would stand outside in -6 degrees centigrade while working on a railway and still take the time to stand up from work and wave at the passing train?

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