Before this trip across China, I read some rather disparaging remarks about the small city of Golmud, in central Qinghai Province - among them, “drab,” “strange,” “a blot on the wild and gloomy landscape,” and ”one of the most depressing places in China.”  So imagine my surprise to find this nice, sleek, three-floor department store, with an excellent supermarket downstairs that included plenty of Western food, right in the middle of downtown Golmud.

A nearby fruit stand, with wonderful grapes from Xinjiang Province, far northwest of Golmud.  Purchases made here and at that supermarket left our vehicle well stocked for the coming two-day drive to Lhasa.

A rider retrieving his bicycle pays a parking attendant, a common scene throughout China.  Golmud (pronounced go-er-mu) is a new city, just twenty years old, but it’s already more populous than Lhasa.  Built to take advantage of the area’s abundance of natural resources, particularly salt and natural gas, it has some of the widest city streets I’ve seen in China; Golmud was clearly designed with vehicles in mind.

Minority couple at an outdoor restaurant.  Golmud isn’t a tourist city, but that will likely change soon: a railway line connecting the city with Lhasa was under construction at the time of this visit and completed a year later.  All those railroad tourists coming from the east of China will need somewhere to stay - and this is the last city of any size before the long ride to Lhasa.

Truck driver at a local restaurant.  Under normal circumstances, our group would have stayed in Golmud for one night, as we did in a number of earlier cities.  However, we needed time to acclimate to the 1¾-mile altitude here before our drive across the even-higher Tibetan Plateau, so we stayed an extra night.  No visits or events were scheduled for this day; our only task, other than to attend a meeting warning of the dangers of altitude sickness, was to take it easy.

A game of billiards, along a tree-lined street where a number of these tables were set up.  The playing surface, a bit sloped and contoured by weather exposure, probably made the game more interesting. 

A girl and her grandma at Kunlun Park in the center of town.  No, Golmud is not a tourist destination, but it’s better than guidebooks would lead you to believe, and better than one would expect for a Chinese city this remote.  How remote?  From here, China continues southwestward, westward, and northwestward for more than a thousand miles, and in all of that, the only large city is Urumqi, a thousand-mile drive northwest into Xinjiang Province.

The following morning, our fleet of fifty vehicles left Golmud heading southwest toward Lhasa, and almost immediately started climbing up and over the Kunlun mountain range to get onto the Tibetan Plateau.  That meant climbing to an elevation of three miles to cross through the Kunlun Pass before dropping back down to 2½ miles; we would travel no lower than that until late the following day when we would drop down just a bit into Lhasa.  Now the headaches from the high altitude would begin; after a number of hours, one of our vehicles had to turn back because of that.  Here, a glacier spills down a mountainside in the Kunlun mountains.

For many hours we drove across landscape looking much like this - wide, wide plains, pond-sized puddles of standing rainwater, pastures of thin mats of grass clinging to rocky soil, and snow-capped mountains on the very distant horizon.

This may not look like much, but it’s a special place - as special a place as one can find in southwestern Qinghai Province, anyway.  This is the first bridge crossing the Yangzi River; the sign marks the spot in Tibetan and Chinese.  The headwaters of three major rivers are in Qinghai Province: the Yangzi, the Yellow, and the Mekong.

The Great Experiment: the Qinghai-Tibet Railway.  Billions of dollars went into creating this long, long line linking Lhasa with Golmud and the rest of the country.  It’s China’s version of America’s first transcontinental railroad: both resulted from decades of dreaming and planning, received massive financing from the government, required highly advanced engineering and unprecedented technology to traverse the vast plains and high mountains of the west, crossed the lands of indigenous peoples, used lots of Chinese labor, and opened to great fanfare and national pride in their respective countries.  At this time it was still under construction, a year away from opening, but much of what we saw appeared complete.  The railway parallels much of the road we traveled from Golmud to Lhasa.

Working on the railroad.  The railway is the highest in the world, and half of it is built atop long stretches of permafrost, a very unstable soil.  Much of the track lies on causeways, as in the previous photograph; track sections crossing more troublesome permafrost regions are raised onto bridges like these.  Both the causeways and bridge supports required a lot of new technology to make sure they stay in place through freezes and thaws.

A common occurrence driving across western China: swerving to avoid herds crossing the road.  Sometimes they were sheep, sometimes they were yaks; given their size, I tended to pay more attention to the yaks (and didn’t dare try taking photographs of them while driving).  Often our vehicle’s radio would crackle with animal-in-the-road warnings from the lead SUV; when that happened, those in my vehicle would yell out in unison a word we made up: “Yakalert!”

A shaggy sheep along the road.  Soon we would start climbing again, this time up the Tanggula mountain range.  On top, we would reach the highest elevation of the trip, emerge from Qinghai Province for the first time in five days, and start our descent into Tibet.  And an hour or so later, we would stop for the night in a very unusual place.