Day 23-25: Preparing for Tibet - 108 Days Across Eurasia by Martins Ate



Soo... After long vodka tours in Russia and resting in Tianjin I feel ready to move forward and leave the cosy apartment of my friend Ingus where I stayed almost 10 days and had a great vacation in China with everything I needed to continue my ascetic expedition.


I'm planning to leave on Sunday. and now I understand that the Russia was the easiest part. Like a level I; with a level II following in China since the very beginning. I just had a good luck that I'm here in Tianjin only thanks to Alexander, Zabaikalsk train station director in Russia.


The local hitchhikers taught me everything I need to know about going inside a Tibet without a special permission. It might sound bad - but I'm going there illegal as the only way to et there legally is to buy a travel package through some travel agency who only then is legitimate to issue a travel pass to Tibet. The average of such a package costs a lot of money which I do not have.. :)


I will use train to get until Tibet, Lhasa, from where I will need to hitchhike like invisible through the police checkpoints more than a thousand kilometers in a mountains with altitude from 3000 to 4500 meters to get till the Mt. Kailash which is one of the ten most beautiful mountains in China according to Chinese National Geography.


Actually, Mt. Kailash is considered a divine mountain universally by people from all over the world. Its shape is very much like the pyramids in Egypt with four nearly symmetrical sides. There are a few temples around it and many wide-spread legends shroud these temples with mystery.


I'm still preparing morally. To be ready to handle some situations I can't imagine now and definitely have never experienced before. I'm not scared of it.. It's more than a one way thinking of that I need to get there no matter what - so I just need to prepare and to be ready for a lot of things, such as I can be deported from China with a huge fee, I can be dropped in some prison, I can get cold or just simple starving as there are no many places to get a food as it was in Russia... So I'm preparing. Mentally. Just a few last days and then I'll be off to Lhasa and Kailash.


The blue dot is where I'm now and The red - Green - Lhasa: from the blue till the green I'm taking a train. But still I need to manage somehow my fake Tibetan Permit as I'll need to show it in a train towards Lhasa...:) So it's gonna be a adventure starting on Sunday!:)


And the red one - is a city about 200 km after Mt. Kailas.. Somehow I need to get from there to India at the end. And I have only 20 days left to do this as my Chinese visa expires after that.