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Posted On Tuesday, September 25, 2012 at
at
2:11 AM
by Alvin
We thoroughly enjoyed our stay in Lhasa - the city was easy going, well-planned, colorful and atmospheric; we bid our fond farewell and boarded our overnight train to the Province of Qinghai (青海). But hey, this was no ordinary railway, it's the Tibet-Qinghai Railway (青藏鐵路), almost 2,000KM all the way to Xining (西寧) ! This mega-railway took almost 100 years from the initial planning stage to the present day mass-transit, run-of-the-mill passengers/cargoes daily routine runs from all over China. The modern Lhasa we saw was to a large extent the results of the closer connections between Tibet and the rest of China.
China's engineers took years to overcome the many problems in building such marvellous railways - problems such as permafrost (凍土), Tibetan wildlife preservation, health problems for construction engineers at high altitude, earthquakes and passengers safety. We took up our "hard seats" in a compartment full of migrant workers, very few tourists and a couple of odd balls - a 30 years-old man from Chengdu sitting opposite to me actually WALKED from Chengdu to Lhasa in 80 days, sometimes walking overnight, yeh, he got a sun tan alright. He collected a mini-ruck-sack full of fist-size rare stones which I presumed he planned to sell the stones when he got back to Chengdu ... This same guy had some intellect (a Finance Graduate) as we discussed the China GDP, Japanese harassment of Diaoyu Island as well as exchanging investment tips - hey you never know who you would meet on an overnight train, eh ?
Our train journey took 24 hours from Lhasa to Xining and we passed through stations with poetic and melodic-sounding names such as 古露, 沱沱河, 那曲- but a close hard look at some of them, we would discover they were a one-street town with one bar, one hostel, one public bath house and one grocery shop. The mountain and high plain scenery was desolate one moment while the sky darkened and glorious another moment when the sun shone. The skies looked big, the lakes took on a different hue at this high altitude and the animals (we saw Tibetan antelopes 藏羚羊, Tibetan foxes 藏狐 as well as yeb Tibetan hares 藏兔 and countless yaks 牦牛) unfazed by our 80-KM-speed train zipping quietly pass. One interesting moment during the train journey was that when we went by the highest mountain pass (唐古拉山口 at 5,072M), the small talks on the train went distinctly quiet, as every passenger felt the lack of oxygen !
Arriving at Xining at around 9A.M. was a mixture of relief as we finally had time to stretch our legs and straighten our necks, and sadness as we had to part ways with the interesting characters we shared the past 24 hours in the "cosy" compartment - a polite and cheeky boy who ate junk foods non-stop (his motto : foods are just yummy toys) and his dotting mother, the famous 80-days hiker I mentioned earlier, city girls showing-off their proud Tibetan shoppings as well as the many hard-working but tired-looking migrant workers. For lunch, we rewarded ourselves with bowls of the famous Xining mutton-soap noodles (羊雜碎/羊腸麵) and spent the next few days relaxing and visiting the sites in Qinghai such as 青海湖二郎劍, 西寧土樓觀, 青海博物館, 東關清真大寺 and 西寧南山公園.
We thoroughly enjoyed our stay in Lhasa - the city was easy going, well-planned, colorful and atmospheric; we bid our fond farewell and boarded our overnight train to the Province of Qinghai (青海). But hey, this was no ordinary railway, it's the Tibet-Qinghai Railway (青藏鐵路), almost 2,000KM all the way to Xining (西寧) ! This mega-railway took almost 100 years from the initial planning stage to the present day mass-transit, run-of-the-mill passengers/cargoes daily routine runs from all over China. The modern Lhasa we saw was to a large extent the results of the closer connections between Tibet and the rest of China.
China's engineers took years to overcome the many problems in building such marvellous railways - problems such as permafrost (凍土), Tibetan wildlife preservation, health problems for construction engineers at high altitude, earthquakes and passengers safety. We took up our "hard seats" in a compartment full of migrant workers, very few tourists and a couple of odd balls - a 30 years-old man from Chengdu sitting opposite to me actually WALKED from Chengdu to Lhasa in 80 days, sometimes walking overnight, yeh, he got a sun tan alright. He collected a mini-ruck-sack full of fist-size rare stones which I presumed he planned to sell the stones when he got back to Chengdu ... This same guy had some intellect (a Finance Graduate) as we discussed the China GDP, Japanese harassment of Diaoyu Island as well as exchanging investment tips - hey you never know who you would meet on an overnight train, eh ?
Our train journey took 24 hours from Lhasa to Xining and we passed through stations with poetic and melodic-sounding names such as 古露, 沱沱河, 那曲- but a close hard look at some of them, we would discover they were a one-street town with one bar, one hostel, one public bath house and one grocery shop. The mountain and high plain scenery was desolate one moment while the sky darkened and glorious another moment when the sun shone. The skies looked big, the lakes took on a different hue at this high altitude and the animals (we saw Tibetan antelopes 藏羚羊, Tibetan foxes 藏狐 as well as yeb Tibetan hares 藏兔 and countless yaks 牦牛) unfazed by our 80-KM-speed train zipping quietly pass. One interesting moment during the train journey was that when we went by the highest mountain pass (唐古拉山口 at 5,072M), the small talks on the train went distinctly quiet, as every passenger felt the lack of oxygen ! 
Arriving at Xining at around 9A.M. was a mixture of relief as we finally had time to stretch our legs and straighten our necks, and sadness as we had to part ways with the interesting characters we shared the past 24 hours in the "cosy" compartment - a polite and cheeky boy who ate junk foods non-stop (his motto : foods are just yummy toys) and his dotting mother, the famous 80-days hiker I mentioned earlier, city girls showing-off their proud Tibetan shoppings as well as the many hard-working but tired-looking migrant workers. For lunch, we rewarded ourselves with bowls of the famous Xining mutton-soap noodles (羊雜碎/羊腸麵) and spent the next few days relaxing and visiting the sites in Qinghai such as 青海湖二郎劍, 西寧土樓觀, 青海博物館, 東關清真大寺 and 西寧南山公園.
