Travel to Tibet

[roddy]

Got an unexpected phone call from a friend this morning asking me if I wanted to take a tour to Tibet. Looks like it's not actually feasible as she wants to join a Chinese tour group, and there's an Abominable Snowball's chance in hell of me getting on one of those (she phoned the travel agency to check, they laughed) and a quick scout of the Lonely Planet's Thorntree makes it look like foreigners can't get in without an organized tour and a guide, and it seems now (as opposed to when I went in 99 and 03) you actually get the tour and the guide, rather than just paying for them.

So I'm not going to TIbet. But I was wondering if anyone had been recently, and how they'd found it - are you actually limited to what's on the tour, or do you have much degree of freedom, etc?

[bigtops]

Yeah, Thorntree's info made me nix a trip to Tibet this week as well. When I went in Tibetan/Chinese new year 2007 it was easy as pie and we were completely unescorted, taking buses all over the countryside when we weren't hanging out in Lhasa. I can't offer much but a friend spoke of there being a heavy and unpleasant police presence this winter. Also, according to one of the threads on Thorntree, you can ditch your guide with no trouble in Lhasa unless you want to see the Potala, Norbulingka, or Jokhang. Other than that you're free to wander alone unless you desire to leave city limits... In which case the guide is necessary.

[Meng Lelan]

Do you find Thorntree a reliable guide to Tibet as well as other places in China? Lonely Planet still publishes travel guides to China but everything in Tibet and China as well changes so fast that I wonder if travellers rely more on Thorntree than the Lonely Planet guides?

[Lugubert]

When I went in Tibetan/Chinese new year 2007 it was easy as pie and we were completely unescorted, ... you can ditch your guide with no trouble in Lhasa unless you want to see the Potala, Norbulingka, or Jokhang.

My experience as well in Nov 2008.

[bigtops]

To Meng Lelan... I only have looked at Thorntree twice, and found it useful when thinking about Xinjiang and Tibet. Books and friends have served me just fine the rest of time. Things don't change allllll that quickly in China but one thing changes all the time for sure: the reliability of internet connections when you're in the middle of nowhere. You're gonna want that well-thumbed travel guide, whoever put it out and even if it's five years old, when you're sitting lord-knows-where and you can't get a single webpage to load.