Tibet with a Chinese Tour Group
This April and May, my husband and I toured China for a month as
independent travelers. However we did book a 6 day trip to Tibet from
Chengdu with a Chinese tour group ($700 per person). Travel to Tibet
requires extra permits so we thought we would let someone else do all
the paper work.
Our guide met us at the airport in Tibet and informed us that we were
the only 'foreign guests', a Chinese term for foreigners, in the tour
group of 60. At that moment, we thought we had made a grave mistake.
The group was broken into three groups as the specially designed high
altitude buses could only accommodate smaller groups. We traveled
over 15,000 foot passes on crumbling gravel roads over mountain sides
of scree.
We ate, traveled with the same people the whole trip. We communicated
with our Barron Mandarin Phrase Book, and with help from Angela, a
young Chinese woman from Chengdu who managed a Yamaha piano store and
who spoke some English. "Angela" was the English name given to her in
her English class.
By the end of the trip, we were sad to part with our traveling
companions. We had bonded with them all. We had laughed at jokes,
given sympathy to each other when one felt badly from altitude
sickness, inspected each others market purchases, photographed each
other, searched for the lost, shared all our meals, "oohed" and
"aahed" at the scary roads and awesome mountains.
There were many things we couldn't discuss because of language
limitations but my husband and I felt we had made new friends in this
country high in the Himalayas.
Elaine
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