They say Tibet is not for everyone. This is perhaps why its mirage has been living on for thousands of years, and we continue to wonder what it may be more important: to come to this land of legend for the first time, or to rediscover, after years form the first visit, a Tibet that hasn’t changed? On the salt and wool road, you can cross Tibet from east to west, following the route Lhasa-Gyantse-Shigatse-Tingri-lats-Nyala-Zangmu.
Regardless of the season you get here, you’re stepping into an absolute silence, perhaps because of thin air, as you’re at over 16,000 ft altitude, the highest plateau on earth. With a population of two million inhabitants and an area of 471,700 square miles, Tibet is a space that you can only compare to, maybe, Bolivia, called the Tibet of South America.
It’s here where you can find the Himalayan mountains with impressive peaks over 24,000 feet, among them the famous Chooyu, Chomolugma, Kanchengzonga, which, even from Tibet’s height, look down to you, from a distant place. The Tibetan Plateau is arid and, as you get closer to the center of the country (Tibet is an autonomous part of China), the landscape becomes a strange, almost unearthly: mountains that are rapidly eroding, torrents with rocks and sediments that roll thundering in the valley, moraines of glaciers that are melting incredibly fast, forts that were full of guards in the past to control the trade in this area, villages with mud brick houses, with unusually beautiful gates wood carved and stained in nice colors.
At 12,000 ft above sea level, you can stop near the grotto where a Sangha monk retired to meditate, after he spent the initiating stage at the Pangpoche monaster. Every day for four years, as their friendship lasted, a Yeti brought him berries in his austere refuge. When the snow man died of old age, the monk kept his mummified hand and scalp for the next generations.