Ngari (Western Tibet)

At last, I arrived in Tibet. The journey from Khargilik is actually illegal for foreigners. I first attempted to hitchhike a truck to take me from Khargilik to Ngari (250 Y) but the truck driver was not so sure whether he can take foreigners. At last I took the sleeper bus by paying chinese price (350 Y), while other foreigners paid 600 Y. The bus owner knows exactly that this is illegal to take foreigners in his bus, so he secured us (5 foreigners in total) in two private cars crossing the first checkpoint.

Apparently in the first checkpoint, the Chinese police only checks the buses and trucks as they didnt stop the small private cars. So we passed the first checkpoint without any problem. The second checkpoint is checking the border permits of chinese citizens, so foreign passports just can pass without problems.

The journey to Ngari is not an easy journey, in fact, it is the most difficult among the other entrances to Tibet. But here the checks against foreigners are quite minimum. The bus went thru high passes of the highland, the highest elevation of this trip is 6700m. I got quite severe high altitude sickness, but I recovered the second day.

I broke the long journey to Ngari in a lake called Bangongtso. This is a 150 km long lake, 100 km in chinese side, the other 50 km in Indian side. In Indian side the lake turns to be salt water lake.

I hitch hiked my way from the lake to Rotog, a bizzare Chinese Tibetan city, then down again to Ngari. Today is my birthday, I wished I could be in the sacred mountains of Kailash. But on the way I met some travellers heading to Guge Kingdom, and I decided to join them. In Namru, a land of nowhere between Ngari and Kailash, we waited the whole day for any vehicles willing to take us to Zanda (180 km away), but this is indeed a land of nobody and there were even no single cars heading this way.

So I gave up the idea of going to the Guge Kingdom, instead I came back again to Ngari.