If you’re the type of person who gets nosebleeds from altitude change, don’t come here, you will die.

Everyone still drives around obliviously here, the only difference being that instead of everyone in little Cherries and VWs, everyone is driving around in big old school SUVs. Safety first.

The air for the few days I was there was not only breathable, it was actually invisible, like air is supposed to be. It doesn’t rain or snow here very often. The altitude of the city is about 3.6KM above sea level. It can get very warm during the day (20C) and cold at night (-10C?)

There aren’t any ridiculous skyscrapers, the only thing that rises in the skyline is the massive Potala Palace which sits somewhere in the middle of the city and is awesome. I could just stare at the place all day and eat yakabobs.

All of Tibet only has 1.6 million people, but about 10 million yaks. And they need all the yaks they can get, because in every Tibetan meal there’s some yak. I had yak burgers, yak soup, yak ribs, yak steak, and passed on a try of yak yogurt.

Tibetan people are very relaxed and laid back. They don’t give a shit about money, rather they’d prefer living free happy lives. Common activities include Internet cafes, hanging out at teashops and all night ragers.

Many Tibetans are religious, and practice Buddhism like it’s going out of style. They do all kinds of wacky things like doing hundreds of pushups in front of temples, walking around the Palace all day chanting and spinning prayer wands everywhere they go.

Tibetan girls are hot. They have a natural appearance; they don’t pile on the makeup or dress in designer gear. They’re do a bunch of hardcore shit like washing their hair with a bucket on the side of the road (this was common) and carrying kids around on their backs.

Tibet is one of the most beautiful places I’ve seen in China, even though that isn’t much of a compliment. Rugged mountains surround it, city-sized factories haven’t tainted the air and the rivers are actually blue. This will probably last another 2 years.

I’ve got more pics than you’ll know what to do with, after the click through.

Once outside of the station there’s really only one way in through security and as expected it’s a vortex of people funneling in through one set of doors and a bag xray machine. They don’t even bother putting you through a metal detector or doing any body searches so I have no idea why they even have the machine. They’re pushing people through so fast that someone could smuggle a patriot missile through and they would just assume it’s a model rocket.

Although Beijing West is a pretty big station, leaving to Lhasa on platform 2, basically you just go up the escalators and then hang a left and go through the first set of doors into the soft seat lounge. They have food and drinks in here, and it wasn’t so packed. There’s another room right next door which leads to the same platform, which is more packed, and doesn’t have as comfortable chairs, so why you would wait in there is beyond me. They didn’t check our tickets going into the waiting area.

Having previously taken the overnight train from Beijing to Shanghai, I was going on with some expectations, mostly because this was a brand new train and is supposedly a pride thing for China as it’s the highest altitude train in the world or something to that effect. The train ride from Beijing to Shanghai is pretty decent, as it’s 16 hours, you get a soft sleeper with 2 beds to a cab and you get your own washroom and meals. This was different. There are 4 beds to a cab in soft sleeper and 6 beds in hard sleeper. There are community washrooms on each car, one of which is a regular western toilet; the other is one of those hole-type things. There were no showers. This is a 48-hour train ride. I’ll admit I’m no stranger to not taking a shower after such an interval, but I’m sure things got pretty nasty back in the cheap seat cars.

Leaving from Beijing, there really isn’t much to do but drink, then passout and sleep. You can’t see anything after you get outside of the city because it’s pitch black. There is the occasional bonfire, and by bonfire I mean entire building with no roof flaming up, but other than that it’s comatose. There is one stop around 11pm in Shijiazhuang I’m not sure if you can get on and off at this stop. I’m also not sure why you would want to if you could, the city is the Chinese butt-fuck-nowhere.

The next day on the trip, the morning was rainy and overcast, so there wasn’t a whole lot to see. We started off the day by traveling through Shanxi province, which I will remember as having the most colourful and steamy piles of garbage I have ever seen. There is a stop at around 9am in Xian where you can get on and off, which is nice cause they have real (MSG percentage was probably under 50%) snacks and food on the station platform. Speaking of food, the food on the train was classy. If you ever take this ride do yourself a favor and bring cases of food. Don’t rely on the warm wet bread and microwaved eggs for breakfast to keep your stomach from imploding during multi-day ride. Luckily the beers are relatively cheap, at only 10 yuan for Beijing beer (brewed by Asahi I should add). I tried to order a drink, but for some hilarious reason they only sell the booze by the bottle, and they only sell 26ers. So it’s like, “well we’ll sell you some vodka, but you’re gonna have to get smashed”.

Later in the afternoon, the rain cleared away, and the sunshine made a damned fine effort to penetrate the smog that seems to cover all of china all the time. We made our way through Guanxi province, stopping in Lanzhou. At this point it was real backcountry China. The cities and towns are basically mud and brick shacks, the roads are mud, and the people of the countryside must really hate the train because they dump all their trash along side of it. Lanzhou is the last million plus people city on the way to Lhasa. It consists of hundreds of commie blocks, and a bunch of factories spewing out gases ranging in colour from leprechaun green, to black hole black. Past this magnificent example of industrial development gone awry, the mud and brick shacks become mostly mud shacks and people are using tools and animals to farm instead of machinery. I can’t help but wonder if they’re happy in their less than developed conditions. I see the kids playing, seemingly happy, and some people wave to the train with one hand, while the other hand throws back a bottle of baijiu, so I guess they’re alright.

At night, I’m in the cabin with two Chinese people. Both have headphones on and are doing their thing. The guy is dropping ass like you wouldn’t believe, while the girl is laughing hysterically. It sounds like some kind of strange fetish. 24 more hours of this.

The next day I wake up to some sweeping mountain views and a stop at some tiny station where the assman gets off, I thought we were in the clear from there, but the day is marked by the pass through the highest altitude point of the train ride. We make it to over 5000m above sea level. Much before that, the effects of altitude sickness start to set in for everyone. The most common feeling is dizziness and headache, but some are worse off. The poor girl in the bunk above me, must have got serious nausea because she threw up a few times and was moaning in agony most of the way. I definitely felt the dizziness early on, but after a while the worst thing I really had was a headache. I didn’t eat anything but a small bowl of rice all day and had multiple naps so I’m not sure if that made things better or worse. The trip through the Qinghai Pass is a display of an entirely arid, desolate nothingness with big round hills. There is no vegetation, animals, or human settlement which is a huge change from the almost constant civilization that followed us most of the way. There are however these very unnatural grids of rock that a fellow traveler hypothesized might be to block snowdrift formation.

Once we finally made it into Tibet, the scenery changes for the better, there is very light mossy grass vegetation with different varieties of animals roaming about. The mountains turn jagged, like mountains should be. There are Tibetan settlements spotting the vast plains, with much different style of housing than what was in the other parts of China that we traveled through. The houses all look like mini-castles, with tower type things at the corners. There’s lots of random Tibetans hanging out by themselves with their yaks. Because Beijing likes to have the same time zone for the entire country, we don’t see any time difference, so it doesn’t get dark until about 8pm, which is a nice change from the daylight savings nonexistence back east. We arrive at the station at about 8:30pm, which is a bonus because we weren’t supposed to arrive for another hour. The station is huge considering only one train a day uses it. Off I got to the Lhasa hotel, which was formerly the Holiday Inn.

This is the most interesting stuff you will see on the Qinghai Express