Dear Family and Friends,

When I presented my passport and travel permit (on shiny fax paper) to the police officer guarding the lobby in which one waits in Xi'an to go to Lhasa, the police officer frowned - a lot. Another officer approached, flicked his eyes over my paperwork and began talking to me in rapid, grave Chinese. Having long ago decided to strategically play dumb in the face of Chinese police, I allowed some panic creep across my face in order to show that I do not speak Mandarin. The frowns of both officers deepened and they made various efforts to get through to me. I remained dumb.

Finally, after more frowns at my permit, one officer pointed me and my obviously weighty backpack to some chairs while the other reluctantly scooped up my passport and permit and strode from the waiting area. Without taking off my backpack, I sat, my heart thumping and mind racing. I was resolute. I darn well was getting on that train to Lhasa - even if I had to shamelessly pitch a fit.

10 minutes later, the first police officer had warmed me with his smiles and I had repaid his friendliness with a comedic demonstration of my grasp (or lack thereof) of the Chinese language. I had learned all of 3 words: hello (nee how), thank you (shee-eh shee-eh) and soup (tahng). The first police officer's laugh revealed gapes between his teeth and a fair number of wrinkles and didn't at all impress the second police officer when he re-appeared to wave me deeper into the waiting room. I took up my papers and inquired, "Ok??" Both officers nodded. I smiled. "Shee-eh shee-eh."

The police officers' behavior not to mention the waiting room with dirty, torn benches didn't bode well for the next stage of my journey. But what truly caused me alarm was the station bathroom: a series of stalls of squalid squat toilets, the stalls barely reached my waist and there were no doors. I gritted my teeth and tried not to notice the lady in the stall next to me, simultaneously squatting and texting on her cell phone.

When the dark green lacquered train with a sign that said "Shanghai to Lasa" arrived, everyone else boarded while I was marched along the long platform - this time so a military officer could inspect my permit. The officer was handsome, frowned less, detailed a civilian into carrying one of my bags and escorted me back to my assigned car. I waved to the officer as I pulled myself aboard... and sighed in relief. Despite non-favorable odds, I was on my way to Lhasa. Tibet.

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For me, going to Tibet this year was a product of personal stubbornness and no little perseverance. Because, as you no doubt recall, this last March protesters for independence took to the streets of Lhasa hoping that they'd capture the world's sympathy in the months leading up to the Chinese Good Public Relations Blitz (also known as the Beijing Olympics). Initially the protests were peaceful however long-standing Tibetan anger regarding authoritarian Chinese government control combined with the enormously corrupting Han Chinese immigration erupted into violence - and a lot of it. Chinese authorities were quick to crack the military over the protesters and shut Tibet off from the rest of the world amid rumors that thousands of protesters were unaccounted for. Period. End of story.

Well, that was the end of the story as far the Chinese government was concerned. However, exiled Tibetans and sympathetic people around the world rallied in support of the Tibetan cause, both in neighboring provinces around China and in cities around the world such as Vienna, Munich, Paris, London, Montreal, and San Francisco. In response to this fresh round of protests and the worldwide bad publicity, the Chinese government tightened its lips in acute disapproval and maintained its stranglehold on Tibet.

The protests had faded into old news the night that it occurred to me that I had the time and the ability to travel across China, visit Tibet, go through Nepal and land in India. Once I hit upon this brilliant travel idea, I clung to the notion that this year was a unique personal opportunity. There was no way - no way - that I was going to let petty details such as the fact that China was no longer issuing traveling permits to Tibet get in my way. And once China relented and began issuing travel permits in August, there was no way I was going to let the fact that the cost of going to Tibet was, after the protests, much greater than I budgeted for to stop me from going. Later, nor would I let the Chinese denying me a regular tourist Visa get in my way. And certainly, I wasn't going to let a pesky 102 degree fever, followed by a nasty viral cold stop me from getting on the train to Lhasa.

Admittedly, I can be stubborn. And although I am no Asiaphile and although Richard Gere has not converted me to Buddhism; on the subject of Titbet, I became stubborn to the edge of reason. I was going. I wished to see majestic landscape and get an inkling of the endangered culture. And then there was the mere challenge of traveling this deep into the Asian continent. Much as I'd run a 5K and then trained to run a half marathon, I'd traveled to accessible Asian destinations such as Bangkok and Singapore and now I wanted to go to the next level of travel. The odds may not have been in my favor. Nonetheless, I was going to Tibet.


From Xi'an, the train to Lhasa is two days and one night. I heaved my backpack onto the middle bunk of my assigned compartment and sat myself by the window. The train clicked and swayed through fog and a city that refused to give way to the countryside. After an hour or so, I grew sleepy and levered myself into my bed only to awake a few hours later when my ear drum popped. While I had slept, the landscape had changed from flat and developed to hills, towering and terraced. The lady next to me had the hiccups. The trees were showing touches of autumnal gold. I chewed sugarless blueberry gum for my ears and became re-transfixed at the window. We cut through a surprising number of corn fields, passed under a cable system that looked like it should be hung with shiny cable cars but instead supported giant iron buckets built to harvest corn over the disruption of the train. Leveled hilltops were planted with power poles. It grew dark but the train steadily clicked and swayed and rocked.

I didn't sleep well. I awoke before dawn as the train shuddered to a stop. I popped out of bed and followed other passengers down to pace the platform, immediately regretting that I hadn't put on a jacket. The air was cool - the kind of cool that stuck to your clothes and feels good to breathe but makes you shiver. The train resumed as dawn began to light the horizon. At first all I could see were clouds or mountains - I couldn't say which - but I could see that the green vegetation that I had enjoyed the day previous had vanished. More light revealed brown mountains, folded and bare except for fried tufts of reddening grass. The mountains seemed so close that I wanted to run my hands across them fitting my fingers into their grooves. My breath caught when we crossed a blue-brown river, framed by brown hills and snow-capped peaks. In my journal I tried to fit words to what I could see. Forbidding. Empty. Profoundly beautiful.

As the day and the train proceeded, the hills took on more red in their color. The landscape seemed mostly empty: yak corrals sometimes framed the tracks and I spotted a herdswoman covered in hot pink wool with her heard of yaks on the precarious edge of a hill. The rails began to follow a narrow highway. Red dump trucks left roostertails of dust across valleys and incongruous gas stations occasionally popped on the horizon. Sometimes tarp-covered lorries would be forced to slow on unpaved portions of the road and the hills became mountains draped with cloud-shadowed snow.

The day turned cerulean blue. I figured that we had crossed into Tibet when our train stopped near a mercury-colored lake. No passengers disembarked and no passengers boarded but a police officer in silver buttons walked the platform swinging a club. The lake beyond was beautiful amongst shadowed hills of subdued gold with low lands of green and tips of red - the had hills aged and smoothed as the morning progressed. After we pulled away from the station by the lake, the presence of the military became even more pronounced. Camouflaged uniformed soldiers lined the tracks at regular intervals, often standing at stiff attention as the train passed but just as often relaxed at their lonely posts.

By this point, my fellow passengers and I had become friendly. The bottom bunk of my compartment was occupied by a Tibetan lady and her toddler. The little girl was afraid of me but her mother and I got acquainted as the baby slept, the lady telling me that she and her little girl were returning to Lhasa from the big city of Shanghai so that the little girl could attend Tibetan school. Another Chinese lady, who I instinctively liked despite the fact that we did not share a word in common, brought me a spicy sausage to accompany my strange train-prepared breakfast. The man who slept on the bunk above me opened the train's oxygen vents but remained decidedly unfriendly.

At sunset, herds of yaks and flocks of sheep were herded through tunnels beneath the railroad tracks and into stone enclosures. I imagined the cold winters in this part of the world and found myself thinking that the small villages that we were passing must require hay to feed their livestock. Soon after, I noticed green and yellow haystacks and women in ankle-length skirts raking fields.

The sun disappeared and there were few lights outside our train windows. The announcement, in Chinese, that we had reached our destination was unnecessary for me. We rounded a corner and in the distance I spotted a white, brightly lit palace atop a hill. Sure enough, that was Potala. I had reached Lhasa. --Laura