Formerly China only allowed group tours. Now they allow individual travellers as well, but they are not comfortable with them. The China International Travel Service (CITS) does its best to shunt individual travellers onto fixed tracks, so that they are in effect one large tour, and can be managed more easily. At certain bottlenecks, CITS is able to put a stranglehold on the routes of travel, and there is almost no avoiding them. Golmud is one of those places. It is the only place you can get into Tibet from China by land, and CITS controls the access. A sign on the bus station ticket window directs all foreign tourists to the CITS office in the Golmud Hotel. The price for a ticket was about $120, probabaly five to ten times what a Chinese would pay.
The morning after I arrived, at 8:30, I went down to the CITS office to see if I could get on today's bus. There were two people in front of me already--a young Japanese woman named Aska and a young Japanese man named Yoshi. They were not traveling together. Aska spoke reasonable English; Yoshi none.
The CITS agent was just telling them that they could not take the bus until five or more foreign tourists were ready to go together. New regulation. We had to be part of a tour, and a tour was five people. It didn't matter if the bus was going anyway and had plenty of empty berths.
We were three. We had to find two more before the bus left at 3:30. We learned there were no others in the hotel, but we knew the train from the east came in at noon and all foreign tourists had to stay at the Golmud Hotel. We agreed to meet in the lobby at 11:45 and try to recruit two more people.
The first in from the train was a Canadian couple, Nicholas and Heather. I was unable to convince them to join us. They thought they could get tickets a lot cheaper directly from the bus station, and they went off to try.
Next came a Japanese woman named Yumi, and Aska recruited her. Now we needed one more.
Next came two emaciated, bearded Germans, Buddhist monks in training. They weren't going all the way to Lhasa and thought the price was extortionate. They turned us down and went off to look for another way.
Then three Japanese tourists, a man and two women. Aska asked them, but they said they were too tired from the train trip and wanted to rest in Golmud a day or two. They said one other Japanese backpacker was coming, our last hope for finding a fifth person today.
He arrived. He was young, laid-back, with almost a perpetual puzzled expression, good-looking, wore his emotions on his face. He spoke no English. I didn't catch his name, so let me call him The Kid. Aska talked to him a bit, and then announced that he had agreed. We were now five people, and we could leave today!
But there was a problem. He did not have the Chinese money for the fare; he would have to go to the bank, and they did not open until 3:00, and that would not give him time to get his ticket at CITS and get to the bus by 3:30. I offered to change yen into yuan for him. But we didn't know the rate. No problem, I said. We can approximate, and in Lhasa I'll return the yen to him when he returns the yuan. He was confused by this until Aska explained: ``Deposito.'' Then he was insulted. I had questioned his honesty. He announced he could not join us after all.
I backtracked and said I would just advance him the yuan. But it was too late.
He went upstairs to get the other three Japanese, and the seven of them sat in the lobby for fifteen minutes discussing the situation. I had no idea what was going on. Finally Yumi announced that they had arrived at a solution. She would exchange yen for yuan with me. Then she would advance The Kid the money until Lhasa.
I had retained my room til three, for half price, and offered to let The Kid shower there. He took me up on it. To show I trusted him, I left him in the room with my luggage. When I got back, he was gone, but his luggage was there, to show he trusted me.
Aska, Yoshi, Yumi, and I went to a nearby noodle shop for lunch, and a grocery for food for the trip. Aska was the first of a type I met quite a few of later on in Tibet and Xinjiang. Young, slight Japanese women in their twenties traveling alone in absolutely wild places, with minimal Chinese, with a backpack the size of a large handbag, insouciantly taking broken-down old buses across the deserts and disembarking at utterly desolate intersections in the hopes that a truck would come along in a day or two to take them to their next destination. Aska had been traveling around Xinjiang for a month, visiting obscure places along both branches of the Silk Road, getting to know tiny towns while waiting days for the bus to arrive. She was cute and soft-spoken but tough as nails.
We boarded the bus at 3:30 at the Tibet Bus Station. It had three rows of double berths, one along each side of the bus and one down the middle. I was fortunate to get a window berth. The berths were about three fourths body length and curved like a lawn chair. During the day you could sit up slightly and during the night you could almost lie down.
We made two stops before leaving Golmud. At the second, Nicholas and Heather boarded. They had worked out a deal with the bus driver and the conductoress for half our price. Aska was furious with them, feeling they had taken advantage of our being on the bus. I told her not to ``begrudge other people's good fortune.'' Later she told them that she did not like Western travellers in general, and them in particular, although she liked me.
The bus headed south across a black gravel desert, and then followed a river flanked by 100-foot sandstone cliffs into the fabled Kunlun Mountains, a metaphor for desolation in Chinese poety, red, jagged, and barren with sanddrift skirts. Around six we turned west and around eight we stopped at an isolated truck stop. I didn't eat there, and neither did Nicholas and Heather.
After this it was dark. The outline of the horizon was flat for the first half of the night, rounded hills the second half as we crossed the Qilom Mountains. We stopped a couple of times during the night, and I got out to stand once. I was amazed at the brightness of the stars before the three-quarters moon rose.
But I did not sleep well. Each berth came with a huge, bulky blanket, but who knew its history. I put it under my berth. But when night hit, it became bitterly cold, and I no longer cared who else had used it. Even my sweater, my jacket, and the blanket were not enough. My window did not latch, and the jarring of the bus jiggled it open an inch or so every fifteen minutes, a stiff wind slashing my face. Add to this that in front of me were a Chinese married couple whose baby threw up almost immediately. The woman spit on the floor, and the man chain smoked and talked with his wife in piercing tones all night. I had a few moments of drowsiness during the night.
The next morning we crossed Tanggula Pass, 17,000 feet. We drove past the beautiful town of Amdo on a hillside--I was frustrated that we couldn't stop and take pictures--and we stopped two miles on, out of sight of the town, at a garbage-strewn roadside restaurant where the driver had a deal with the restaurant owner. But we saw our first herd of yaks there.
The terrain all day was grassland from the edge of the road to the edge of the snow-capped mountains, which reached up to 23,000 or 24,000 feet. A rare town, and frequent Tibetan walled encampments with separate herds of sheep and of yak, and a small group of horses as well.
Lonely Planet has called this bus ride a nightmare, but in fact the road, though, gravel, was quite good. After all, if the Tibetans revolt, this is the route the Chinese Army will have to take. However, there had been heavy flooding in the spring, and all the bridges were out. Every few hours we would have to take a long, slow, bumpy detour to ford a river.
We stopped for dinner in Damxung, a larger town with a well-to-do Chinese class and a poor Tibetan class. After dark, the road became worse as we descended into Lhasa, only 12,000 feet in altitude.
At the Lhasa bus station, the bus conductress pushed Nicholas and Heather into a taxi to get them out of view of the CITS agent, and I jumped in with them. We went to the Yak Hotel and got rooms there.