Fra Tibet til Qinghai

Leaving Tibet on the train in Danish: ‘Himmel ekspressen’. The only train I have been on with oxygen, should it be needed.

It’s the Lhasa to Qinghai express train. Hard sleeper with the locals as Laerke wishes a truly local experience for us. Truth be told, we both enjoyed it.

Kids from next door came to play. They were from the countryside in Tibet and their mother was mumbling religious texts in the hall for hours and hours -Testing my tolerance.

Our train was cancelled We had to change our plans. Not that easy as most trains are sold out soon after the tickets are released. As with tourist attractions in China, one needs to know when tickets are released and be ready to book immediately. To make things worse, IT systems are designed for locals only as foreigners and all exceptions are way to expensive to program for. To me this makes sense and on this point I do not take it personally and just line up in the left side when entering trains, attractions etc to get the staff to manually write our passport numbers as we show passport and the locals show their ID.

As we so often do, we ended up turning the cancelled train into an improvement. We left Lhasa half a day early to get a train to Qinghai instead of Lanzhou. That way we got to experience a mosque important to the many Muslims in this town and a huge Tibetan temple… well, one more. One last one. Then continuing by high-speed train to Lanzhou.

The view was as astonishing as expected. Not all the time, but most. Yaks grazing. Mountains. Plateaus of grass. Enormous amounts of water from the mountains in the many rivers that crosses the roads and floods the plateaus. Long roads running parallel with the train tracks between the mountains through the valleys.

Most of the small towns with or without a train station had the feel of the depressing countryside cities of Russia and the USSR.

Making me think of my two trips with the transibirian railway many times.