Qinghai-Tibet Railway Tickets Odyessy
As a foreigner, arranging a trip on the new Qinghai-Tibet railway is not easy. One Canadian we met had a much easier time getting his ticket by paying someone that sought out and solicited him. Because there is not supposed to be foreigner pricing or mark-ups, this is illegal. However, the legitimate route, which we took, is incredibly difficult and frustrating. It seems like China doesn't want foreigners on the train so they create these Catch22 scenarios to stymie your every attempt.
First of all, you still need a permit to enter Tibet. We paid 350RMB for ours. It should officially be 200, but we didn't meet anyone else that paid less than 400RMB, although we did meet a Dutch couple in Tibet that hitched in without a permit...brave souls. Because the railway is so new, opened in July 2006, the travel agencies do not know how to issue those permits. Instead they repeatedly tried to convince us to take a plane instead. No thanks. One place said it would definitely issue us permits for the train to Tibet on Tuesday, and retracted this statement on Wednesday. Timing is everything.
Permits are the first thing you need, however (and this is a BIG however) you need to know your date of travel. That is, you need to have train tickets which are by no means easy to get even as a Chinese citizen. Here's the Catch22, you need to have a permit to buy the tickets. No permit, no tickets. No tickets, no permit. You've got to be kidding me.
We went to the train station three days in a row and were told all tickets were sold out. It turns out, this is just what the ticket agents at the station say to everyone later in the day because even though they're technically open all day, they only sell tickets in the morning.
We got a permit for 6 days in Tibet...doesn't sound like much, but you don't need a permit once you're in Tibet, so this is really 6 days to get into Tibet. With permits in hand we went to the train station an hour before the ticket window would open. Not soon enough. There were already 30 people waiting in line and dozens more sneaking into the front of the line. I spent the next couple of hours policing the line and stubbornly insisting that cutters move to the back. I befriended and enlisted the help of an actual police officer and we kept back 90% of the cutters. If nothing else we prevented the line from disintegrating into a mob. Two hours later we were at the front of the line and the police officer helped us get the exact ticket we wanted on the exact day we needed. Easy, right? So why did they say for days before that those tickets were sold out? Well, I explained that already, but it was a frustrating realization.
We still had another week in Chengdu to prepare for our ride on the famous Qinghai-Tibet railway!
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