Loco

We’re in Lhasa at the moment. We’ve been here for three days but the computers are broken at our hostel and we’ve only just managed to find somwhere with internet access. Funnily enough though, we’re now in the biggest computer room we’ve ever seen, surrounded by gaming, skyping and msn-ing Chinese and Tibetans, which is slightly surreal.

We tried to do a podcast on the train coming into Lhasa, which was absolutely incredible – the best views we’ve ever seen, and so variable – but there was basically no signal from the day we left Beijing, so we recorded something but when we came to publish it, went through a tunnel and lost the connection.

The train itself wasn’t as good as the Russian trains because you couldn’t put the beds up in the daytime and there were six people to a compartment instead of the four we had got used to, (we’ve been a bit spoilt) but the journey was the best yet. We went past small Chinese hill-towns with red new year’s decorations around each door, frozen lakes in the middle of rocky mountains, terraced hills surrounding plains full of polytunnels, impressive snow-topped mountains, and flat, frozen marshes populated by thousands of Yaks and the odd Tibetan (over which we saw the sun rise; there’s only one time zone in China, apparently because the government couldn’t be bothered with the hassle of more, so in the west the sun rises at 8:30am). We couldn’t believe that every time we looked out of the window the view had drastically changed. This filled the time better than eating, which was lucky as we ran out of food on the first day of this forty-eight hour journey – whoops.

Have a look at this slideshow to see a selection of Emily and Verity’s photos. My favourites are the recycled chairs used as skating devices (absolute genius) and the condensed cow’s breath on the ceiling of the stable. I double-dare someone to make an ice-lolly out of it and eat it.

Post thumbnail: reurinkjan

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One response to “Brussels to Delhi: Beijing to Lhasa in pictures”

1. Paul Nielsen says:
   March 12th, 2008 at 12:33 am

   Great blog girls. Finally found your blog address while going through my diary. Back in beautiful Cape Town, however so jealous that you are still on the road!
   Check out my photos from the Trans Mongolian on http://www.nielsenscolumn.com

   Safe travels
   Paul