Somehow I have never posted about my journey through Tibet to see Mount Everest.  I did post about my 24 hour train ride to Lhasa, which you can find HERE.  But never anything else about my trip, not even about seeing Mount Everest with my own eyes.

I always think this has something to do with me deleting everything I typed up in Lhasa, once I got down to sea level.  The altitude in Lhasa is 11,995 feet.  When I read what I had written, it seemed to day dreamy and I felt embarrassed so I deleted all of it.  I wish I had not done that.

I also have no idea where to start.  This was the most epic trip I have ever taken.  How do you condense that into a blog post?

If you are familiar with my blog, I tend to write more diary style than travel blogger style.  I don’t include history of the places I have visited.  Honestly, I learn about most of the history by reading other travel blogs.  It feels like cheating to just regurgitate everything on my own blog.

But I would be remiss to not encourage you to read out more about Tibet being oppresed by China.

Here is a thing about the Tibetan Autonomous Region.  It is a weird place.  You cannot go alone if you are a foreigner.  You cannot put “Tibet” as a place you are traveling to when applying for a China visa or else it will be automatically denied.

You absolutely must not have any photos of the Dalai Lama on you.  You should walk around sacred places in a clockwise fashion.  You will be asked by your guide to please don’t take off and go out on your own, or vanish on your last day, assuming you can stay and get around by yourself.  Your guide is responsible for you.  If you do anything wrong, they get fined.

There will be miliary on top of buildings, watching you.   This was kind of a weird one because I didn’t notice it at all until lunchtime on day two when a member of my group pointed it out to us.  Sure enough, right ouside the window were military men with rifles, watching us through binoculars.

We were warned to not talk to the locals.  Tibetans do not have freedom of speech under China.  I have read a lot of other people write about visiting Tibet and for the most part, they were not discouraged from talking to locals.  That being said though, I tried to not engage just in case.

I am not going to say anything about whether or not you should travel there.  Despite the fact I did, I also am fully aware that anyone who is reading this is not going to be swayed by me to ever visit.  I am absolutely nothing close to an influencer.  I am simply a story teller.  And now I will begin my story.

When I was a mere child, we had a dog named Bagel.  She was a mutt, but part Lhasa Apso.  We always remembered her with long, flowing, silky hair.  A true beauty.

Here is what Bagel actually looked like. It was easy to find a photo of a dog who died 35 years ago because I still carry this in my wallet.

Bagel loved digging holes in our backyard.  My mother always joked that being a Lhasa Apso, she was trying to dig her way back to China.

Once I began planning my first trip to China, I Googled Lhasa.  Seriously screw the public school system of the 80s.  How did I not know anything about geography or this place?  It has the world’s highest train, a road named “Friendship Road” which I find a huge draw to be on by myself.  The more I researched, the more I was ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

I did so much research. I had to go there.  Is Potala Palace even real?!  Through my research, I discovered this is the gateway to seeing Mount Everest.  ARE YOU KIDDING ME.  No question mark this time because it is not a question.  You are in fact, kidding me.

I went with a tour group, because that’s the only way foreigners can get there.  The company I used seems to no longer be in existence, likely due to Covid.  This trip is considered “expensive” but that primarity applies to backpackers, attempting to see the world on a shoestring.  I paid around $800 for this trip, including the single supplement so I could have my own room.  The trip was 8 days. Looking at the internet, this trip has gone up a minimal amount in the 8 years since I took it.

Of course as someone who never wants to do a group tour, I had reservations about it.   Turns out I was very wrong in my expectations.

Of the group, there were 7 solo travelers, all who paid the single supplement.  There was also one couple.

Out of the 7 solo travelers, four were female.  There was me from the United States. One from Canada who was in China for work.  She had 2 weeks off and decided to join this trip.  One was from Argentina, and she was taking this trip before flying to Shanghai to learn Mandarin.

The last solo lady, I really don’t know where she was from.  She started off as a complete lunatic everyone avoided and it wasn’t until about halfway through the trip we realized she was not completely crazy, and instead was actually hilarious.  When we were instructed to leave our stuff at the hotel once we began our journey, and only to bring our warmest clothes, she became shocked that it was going to be cold at Mount Everest.  She also tried to commandere the entire trip and have our guide take us to some lake that was ten hours away, in the opposite direction from which we were going.

The 3 male solo travelers:  One was at his second to last stop on a once in a lifetime journey.  He had traveled to Tibet from the UK, only overland on trains.   He went through Russia on the Trans Siberian Railaway.   One was an older man who was crossing the final things off his life long bucket list.  And one was a Chinese man who did not speak English, but was still able to communicate with body language.  My favorite memory of him was from the Friendship Highway.

The internet says the Friendship Highway is now paved.  It was absolutely not paved when we took it.  It was so bouncy and terrible.  We were being thrown all around the bus.  It was physically painful on its own, but added to the altitude, I felt like I was going to puke.

This man took out a hemorrhoid pillow and no sooner did he show us the hilarity of using it to sit on, we hit a HUGE bump and he smashed into the ceiling.  No problem, he put the hemoroid pillow on his head.

The couple pretty much kept to themselves.  The woman was from China, the husband was from Germany.   They lived in Germany together.

I stayed in this hotel:
I pretty much have photos of every hotel room I have stayed in during my entire life except for this one.  Room view:

After arriving, we checked into our hotel and were told we would be meeting in the lobby to head out to our dinner.

We went to a local restaurant and we were treated to traditional Tibetan music and dance.  You can see a bit of it here, please notice the dancing yak on the left hand side of the screen!

This was the first time the group was meeting in person.  We ended up discussing price since we had all booked our trips from different companies.   We indeed all paid the same price.

Dinner was nice, it wasn’t as uncomfortable sitting and being social with strangers as I had feared it would be.  No, group tours did not win me over though.

After dinner, it was back to the hotel.   I got really sick overnight.  I don’t believe it was food poisoning because no one else got sick.  It may have been the altitude.

I’ll continue on about this trip in my next post, taking you to Potala Palace and Jokhang Temple.