Tibet - touring - Nyingchi 西藏 拉萨 林芝

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Pictures here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/ourgmb/NyingChi?authkey=g57qg2CzUP4


As I am writing this (July 26, 2007), I have to take out my itinerary from the tour company. As we did not travel on our own, places and sights seemed to be on the blurry side. We are rushed to a place, spend one hour, then rushed to shopping where we spend another hour, may be more.

Anyways, transportation in Tibet is more difficult to arrange than in other places, so a tour is a bit more economical and convenient. Since we decided to join a tour, and as this is an unplanned trip, we did not have too much information of the places that we will visit.

After the 45 hour train ride and arriving in Lhasa, we were taken to dinner and then to our hotel.


Lhasa

We were surprised by how developed Lhasa is. It has a population of about 400,000. It is NOT the Tibetan place that we expect. We were expecting a place as small as the JiuZhaiGou town, with lots of Tibetans in their traditional clothing. But there are shopping malls, computer stores and many cell phone stores.

From the centre of town to our hotel, it is about a 2-hour walk (about 5 to 6 km). Taxi rides are Y10 anywhere in town, so it is very cheap, comparatively. Taxi's are generally quite cheap in China, especially when compared to SOME (not all) transportation sharks in Thailand, Bali, Cambodia, etc.).

We were surprised at the quality of the hotel (and we paid a bit more for "3-star hotel"). It is very clean and nicely furnished, carpeted, with working showers, toilets, phone, etc.. Even the air-conditioner worked. They provide little shampoo bottles, toothbrush, soap, etc, which we saved and put to good use later on our trip. They have free internet, but our room does not the socket for ethernet cable, and therefore no internet.

In the morning of June 9, we had a buffet breakfast (included in the room rate) at the hotel. I guess what we had was a typical Chinese breakfast, as we had similar food in JiuzhaiGou and in Tibet. It consisted of rice porridge, peanuts, hard boiled eggs, small steamed buns, and preserved vegetables.


Our Lhasa/Tibet Tour

Of our 10-day tour, three days were spent on the train. The last day is a free day. So we are actually on a 6-day tour in and around Lhasa. Of the 6 days, the tour company divided it into three 2-day tours. So, for every 2-day tour, we have different tour mates, and even perhaps a different tour guide.

We were picked up by our tour guide, in a not-too-good tour bus. But it is a 23-seater and there were only 13 of us, so there is no need to fight for a good seat.

On this first 2-day tour, there were two tour mates from Shanghai, two from Kunming, two from Beijing, a father (70 years old) and daughter from Xian, and two Chinese from USA. The one from Shanghai is on a company-paid vacation, and his wife pays her own fare. We later learned many government officials get government-paid vacations. Therefore, it is not unusual to see a whole tour bus load of male tourists, with no spouses accompanying them. They call this "research tour".

We had excellent weather throughout our trip, except it rained a bit in the morning of our departure. We were told by our guide that two days earlier, it rained heavily (which coincided with our original travel dates, so we have been lucky to have postponed our trip).


Day 1 of tour -- Nyingchi

The first day is to "Nyingchi" 林芝. The highlight of the Nyinchi trip is the Basum-Tso lake (巴松错湖,又名错高湖). It is considered one of the "holy lakes" by the Tibetans.
http://www.travelchinaguide.com/attraction/tibet/nyingchi/basum_lake.htm

The road to Nyingchi is very good. Actually all the roads we travelled throughout our tour is very good. We learned that the Chinese government put a lot of money into road construction to boost the tourism. The roads that we travelled were definitely better than some of the roads we traveled in rural Yunnan (Dec 2005) and Sichuan (May 2007).

Along the way, we passed by the beautiful "Tibet River" and the "Nyang River" (not sure if I got their names correctly). The colour of the rivers is clear bluish-green. The river stretches miles and miles. We drove 400 KM from Lhasa to Nyingchi.

We passed by "Mila Mountain", which is at 5030 meters. The Tibetans hang a lot of flags, and I think they represent some kind of prayers to be offered to the gods.

Then after lunch, we came to Basum-Tso lake. It is a beautiful lake, with a small island in the middle. However, the admission of Y100 is pretty steep (although included in the tour price) and we only spent about an hour there. I would have loved to spend the day hiking around the lake.

After the visit to the lake, we went on to the "Pa-I" town to see a tree. Yes, to see a 2500 year old cypress tree. The we had dinner and went to the hotel.

The best part of today's trip is to look at the scenery along the way. The rivers were really beautiful. Unfortunately, most of our tour mates fell asleep along the way and then complained that the road trip was too long and there was not much to see.

The vegetation is a lot more lush in Nyingchi than other parts of Tibet that we visited. It is probably the Nyingchi is of slightly lower altitude that other parts of Tibet.



Day 2 -- Return to Lhasa


Today, we quietly celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary. And we are happy to celebrate it in Tibet !!!!


Today's itinerary is take the same road to return to Lhasa from Nyingchi. So, Gary again took lots of photos from the bus. He is glad no one wants the "dead seat", the seat next to the driver .

It is pretty uneventful and there was snow when we reach Mila Mountain.

Later, we were taken to shopping, the "heavenly beads". According to the guide, the Tibetans love the "heavenly beads". She said it is the next precious stone to diamonds. Right....

They were selling them at ridiculous prices, Y200 or more, and we have no guarantee that they are real. We picked up some fake ones for less than Y10 in the market a couple of days later.

We were then taken to the "yak meat jerky" place and they were selling them for Y98 per 500g. We picked up similar items when we were at Chengdu for about Y25.

So, my friends, if you are reading this, you would know how I feel about the shopping places the tour guides take us to.

When we return to our hotel (same hotel), we asked for a room with an ethernet socket.
The hotel staff said that the internet does not work. Anyway, they gave us a cable to try. Yes indeed, the internet does not work.

However, Gary noticed that SKYPE worked, which means there is some kind of working internet connection. Gary then logged in as "Admin" (Ha Ha, the password is also "Admin") and checked it. After many trials and errors, it turned out the network had two DNS (Domain Name Server), and one of them did not work. As soon as Gary eliminated the non-working DNS, voila, we got internet connection. We did not tell the hotel staff about this, and probably until now, the hotel staff only know that their internet does not work.


Other thoughts

We found most of the tour operators, guides, bus drivers, etc. are all from Sichuan. We have bumped into a few English speaking Tibetan guides. Most Chinese tours are led by Sichuan guides. We later learned from another guide that the Chinese government provided monetary incentives to the Sichuan tourism people to move to Tibet.

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