Scenery at the Tanggula Pass, elevation 5231 meters.  That’s 3¼ miles, half a mile higher than the highest point in the continental United States, half the cruising altitude of a commercial jetliner.  Welcome to Tibet.  Earth behaves a little strangely at this altitude; when storm clouds pass over, they’re so low that the landscape turns black.  A July afternoon is cold up here; these clouds snowed on us a bit further down the road.

Even this statue on the pass looks cold, despite the hundreds of prayer flags wrapped around it.  Climbing out of Qinghai Province up the Tanggula Mountains to the pass and into Tibet was a chore: with the air up here only half as rich as at sea level, the engines of our vehicles were wheezing as much as the passengers.  That problem would affect our vehicles even more the following day, as the road we drove to Lhasa went up and down many steep hills; maintaining even a modest speed was difficult.

A Tibetan family, dirty and disheveled, walks past our fleet of vehicles on the Tanggula Pass; a storm had passed a short time earlier, and with no trees at this altitude came no shelter.  By this point of the day’s trip, after driving for so many hours at such a high altitude, our large crew was feeling uncomfortable.  Everyone had a headache, some more severe than others; the passengers of my SUV were basically passed out in the back seat.  My headache was mild by comparison, and I was excited to be driving around up here, so I gave it as little thought as possible.  We would be stopping for the night in an hour or so anyway.  But not at a hotel.  Not even close.

A final look at the Tanggula Pass, along the crest of the Tanggula mountain range separating Qinghai Province from Tibet.  We spent this night on a Chinese military base near Amdo, Tibet - the only place big enough to accomodate our 170 people.  A vacated barracks with four bunk beds per room awaited us, each bed with a standard issue of sheet, blanket, musty comforter, and beanbag pillow.  It brought back memories of basic training long ago.  With no running water, the bathroom smell was as close to unbearable as I have ever experienced, and I felt sorry for the soldiers who would have to clean it after our stay.

No complaints, though; everyone was tired and uncomfortable, and we had been warned well in advance that a night on a military base awaited us.  So it was off to the nearby mess hall for dinner, and back to the barracks for lights-out.  The three-mile altitude continued to cause headaches for many though, leaving them tired but awake during the night.  I was fortunate: a full night’s sleep and no headache next morning.  This is the landscape we crossed later that morning; the endless line of utility poles was paralleled by our road on one side and the Qinghai-Tibet Railway on the other.

Now our final day of driving would begin; Lhasa was just hours away.  Some of the landscape along the road in Tibet was similar to that in Qinghai Province the previous day: treeless plains, distant mountains, and the ever-present railway nearby.  The sky was a stunning blue, as it had been since days earlier when we left all that pollution behind and headed into western China.  More commonly seen this day, however, was mountainside: we chugged our vehicles up and down the curving road, hugging the side of one steep mountain after another, hoping a truck wasn’t blazing around the blind curve just ahead.

Occasionally we would pass through a village, usually very small, always very poor.  This is a doorway to the ranch of a yak herder in one of those villages.

A gorged plain with a village in the distance.  No water was at the bottom of the gorge this day; just very healthy grass.  In the far distance near the base of the mountains miles away are small black dots of yak herds in the pastures.

And just like that, it was over; the driving was done.  Ten days earlier, almost to the minute, our fifty vehicles departed from an opening ceremony at a hotel in Beijing to head onto the highway.  Now, more than 2500 miles later, we left the highway for the last time to arrive at a welcoming ceremony at our surprisingly nice hotel in Lhasa, seen here.  The journey was over; I had driven across China.  And we still had more to see.