Hitting the road

I've been hanging out in Xining for about five days now, and in an hour and a half I am about to board an overnight sleeper bus to Yushu, in far western Qinghai where the province meets Tibet and Sichuan. Long-time readers of the blog may remember a disastrous sleeper bus trip from Lijiang to Kunming back in 2005, after which I swore off sleepers forever. But this is the only way out there short of flying and or breaking the trip into two days staying at a boring nothing town in between (where I don't even know if there's anywhere to stay). Anyway, I got my ticket two days in advance which means I have a solid berth near the front. Hopefully it won't be too bad, and when it comes down to it, I will have survived.

It's taken a bit of effort to get out of Xining. I stayed at a hostel and met a number of really nice people hanging out waiting to go to Tibet and/or Nepal. Hanging out with other travellers is much nicer than travelling alone. I took a one-night trip out to a nearby town called Tongren, and found myself incredibly bored/lonely at times. There's always the potential to meet other people on the road, but the way I'm travelling is pretty barren of tourists so I imagine I'll probably be alone most of the time. By and large it's fine; I can do a lot of reading and maybe a bit of self-discovery (this is Tibet, after all), but I think by the time I make it to Chengdu I'll be worn out of being alone. But we'll see how things go.

Anyway, to quickly recap the planned trip, I'll be heading from Yushu over in Sichuan to a town called Serxu, then hop through a couple of places whose exact names escape me, but include Maningango, Garzi, Kangding and others. All Tibet and all at very high altitudes (3000-4000 meters). It'll probably be a week before I make it back to civilization in Chengdu. Hopefully there'll be internet along the way and I'll put up another post before then.