The Xinjiang-Tibet Highway

The Xinjiang-Tibet Highway is the only road that links Tibet to Xinjiang, the province directly north of Tibet and the final destination of our itinerary. For days we had been hearing rumors that the road was being shut down for construction and they were not letting anyone through.

As we were leaving Guge Kingdom, we got confirmation from a group of tourists that had just come from the north that the road was indeed closed for construction at the border. They were only letting pedestrian traffic through on the 1st, the 11th, and the 21st of each month. Otherwise they were just letting military vehicles and oil rigs through. If we continued onward, it would take another two days of driving to reach the border, and we would be getting there on the 14th.

Waiting in Tibet until the 21st was not an option, as two of our group members had to leave the country before then.

Naturally we were quite upset, as we had paid an extra $400 each for the last leg of this trip and delivery into Xinjiang, and our tour agency didn't have the slightest clue as to what was going on.

I wanted to go back to Lhasa and just write it off as a sunk cost. There weren't any major attractions on the final leg of the journey and I could just fly to Xinjiang from Lhasa. Plus the thought of spending another two days in the Land Cruiser, being turned back, then having to spend another four days driving back to Lhasa was unbearable to me.

The other members of our group wanted to continue onward. We had already paid for the car and the driver anyway. Just go to the border and figure something out from there! What could possibly go wrong!

And so we drove on. After another full day of driving, we reached Ali, the last major city in Tibet. The government officials there told us the same thing, that we would be turned back at the border and that we would have to wait til the 21st if we wanted to pass by car. Let's keep going!

We set off early the next morning and drove all day before reaching the provincial border town of Duoma. As we had been told, the border was closed. Our tour guide talked with the border patrol there, but to no avail.

My backpacker friend, the organizer of the trip, got out and tried to reason with them. She went over every possible solution she could think of. At one point, we thought we would be cramming ourselves into the back of an oil rig to cross the border before that plan was eventually shot down.

Having no luck with the border patrol, she went to talk to the military police. As she left to go talk with them, our tour guide confided in me that we should get ready to start heading back to Lhasa. But after what seemed like forever, she came back with the good news that they were letting us drive through. I'm not sure if it had anything to do with it, but my backpacker friend is an attractive young Taiwanese girl, while the military police are all 20 year old Chinese dudes.

We jumped into the back of the Land Cruiser and set off before they could change their minds.

That evening we drove until nightfall, stopping for the night at a trucker dorm in the middle of nowhere. I went to sleep on a huge communal bed and awoke the next morning with a Chinese trucker sleeping right next to me.


We hit the road again. The road was, as advertised, in poor condition and undergoing massive construction. We were held up for three hours at one point, as construction crews repeatedly dynamited debris off the side of a mountain and then cleared it from the road. At other points, Tibetan laborers built fortifications along the side of the road.


Looking back, some of the scenery we saw was quite amazing, though I was in no mood to appreciate it at the time. We drove past salt lakes, deserts, snow flurries, frozen rivers, mountain ranges... you name it. We saw Tibetan antelopes running wild.


That evening, we spent the night in a small town called Hongliutan, where we saw wild camels feeding in the town garbage dump.


The next day, after another full day of driving through the Kunlun Mountains, we would be arriving in Xinjiang, which in Chinese means "The New Frontier".