Train to Lhasa
4 Jul
The recent completion of the infamous Golmud-Lhasa line, home to some of the most treacherous terrain in the world, really does “open up some travel options”:http://info.tibet.cn/en/newfeature/qtrailway/photo/t20060629_127685.htm. Instead of taking the 48 hour bus journey from Golmud, Qinghai, getting to Tibet is now a breeze.. as far as trains go anyway. The interiors of the train, whose “1,200 miles of tracks traverse 342 miles of permafrost, much of it at altitudes exceeding 13,000 feet” (citing “Wired”:http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.07/chinarail.html), look very “nice”:http://info.tibet.cn/en/newfeature/qtrailway/photo/t20060629_127685.htm.
Guess where I’m planning to go this December? (Plotting to put my family on the train to Tibet.) This is the moment every trainiac has been waiting for, a historical moment (I know, Save Tibet and all that, even though I’m a member of those oppressive Han Chinese). Anticipating an increase in tourist numbers, there is news that the Potala Palace will impose a limit on its number of vistors so as to not place too much strain on the site.
Chairman Mao said he couldn’t sleep until it was completed. I hope he’s sleeping well now in his grave.
Dec 2006: Reclaiming Chineseness.
