Finding Tibet – The Qinghai Tibet Railway

The Qinghai-Tibet Railway was newly opened when my friends and I decided to visit Tibet.  We joined a tour so that we could be arriving in Tibet on the train. The ride was nice as the train was new and equipped with individual oxygen supply.

Once the train started moving, the group calmed down a bit and we settled down in our compartment. Sharing our compartment was a man from Sichuan, middle-aged, kind and attentive. The compartment hosted six beds and there were only five people, so we had some wiggle room. Throughout the ride we strike up small talks with the Sichuan man but he spoke the Sichuan dialect. Although it’s closer to Mandarin than is Cantonese, we still couldn’t understand most of what he was trying to tell us. We figured that he was going to visit his family in Lhasa. He had a home in Lhasa because both his wife and daughter were there. His daughter would be going to college soon, and she was to attend the Tibet University.

Train rides can be lots of fun if you meet the right people. There was this group of bureaucrats in the compartment next to ours. We could tell from their conversations that they were highly educated. There was this one man who, having learned that I studied law, talked to me about all kinds of legal problems in China. I was more than happy to share my thoughts with him, and realized that I have really learned something from my Beijing days. I was glad that he confirmed some of the things I talked about in the paper that I was publishing then.

We spent the day playing cards, the other three girls read a lot, and I knitted two yarn’s worth of a throw. Nighttime soon came and we were getting a bit nervous, because we would be getting to high altitude the next day.

We woke up from comfortable sleep to find ourselves already on a high plateau. Somebody in the group invented this delicacy of a peanut butter spread on Chinese spring onion pancakes, and it served us well as breakfast. I was curious whether the oxygen supply worked, so I broke open the tube to inhale oxygen. I figured that some air came out of that vent and I didn’t die so it must have been real.

We saw amazing scenery on the way. With the exception of an ocean, we saw every natural scenery on earth, from mountains to grasslands, from lakeshore to snowy hilltops, from streams to rivers, from sunrise to sunset. In my stretch of imagination I seem to see workers building this railroad one plank by another, conquering a nature so severe that only the most staunch and persistent can survive. We saw a tent or two occasionally, smoke coming out indicating human activity. There were herds of sheep grazing for grass so green and water so clear. There were Tibetan cows (yaks), scattered in a large group, looking up to the train as if to say hello to us like the Tibetan people did. We would be closer to Tibet as each second raced by.

Tibet, the destination. Mysterious, holy, irresistible.

Another day came and gone, and soon enough we arrived in Lhasa.