My wish to go to Lhasa by train came true this summer vacation. I took a magical journey to the sky. Tell me about your feelings.

Wanting to visit Tibet is a long-standing wish buried deep in my heart. I didn’t take my son on a trip during the summer vacation of 2020. He just graduated from elementary school in 2021. I have visited Qinghai, Xinjiang, Yunnan and other places during the summer vacation. Looking at the map, Tibet is the only place in the vast west, so this time I will have a long trip. , challenging!

I heard from a friend before that he had a high-reaction experience when flying to Lhasa, so much so that the two of them flew down again without even taking a look at the Potala Palace. This made me first give up the idea of ??flying directly to Lhasa. Another way is to start from Chengdu and take the Sichuan-Tibet line 318 National Highway into Tibet with a convoy (carpool), and you can enjoy the beautiful Sichuan-Tibet scenery along the way. Even though it takes a long time on the road, the off-road vehicle can actually seat four people in addition to the driver and three people in the back. I still want to set aside more time to visit the real Tibet. Also, most of the people who are worried about carpooling are young people. They must want to meet a group of people of the same age. As a 40-year-old mother with a child, I will not join in the fun.

"The most beautiful train route", "take the train to Lhasa", these keywords have deeply grabbed my attention very early. I have paid attention to train tickets very early, tried to search, almost All without votes. I was able to buy tickets quickly this time, not because I was lucky in grabbing tickets, but because I knew that many tickets were not released and were reserved by travel agencies. I found a travel agency in Lhasa on TB and purchased a sleeper ticket from Zhengzhou to Lhasa with station pick-up and a one-night accommodation package. The total price of the package is more than 800 yuan higher than the total face price of the train ticket. I comfort myself that there is also pick-up service and one-night accommodation. It is already good to be able to buy two opposite middle berths.

I have also made an appointment to grab tickets, but I am not sure about the chances of success, and I can’t tell you whether the ticket is successful or not until 2 hours before driving, even though I changed the setting to notify one day in advance. , I still feel too passive. I communicated online to make sure that I could buy it there, so I canceled my reservation to grab tickets. The system reminded me that the closer to the departure time, the higher the chance of successfully grabbing tickets! Presumably the reserved tickets will be released soon.

The ticket the agent bought for me was the Z265 train, from Guangzhou to Lhasa. I thought that probably because of the epidemic in Guangzhou, people could not come out, so we were able to buy this train. Ticket it. The whole journey from Guangzhou to Lhasa takes 53 hours and 16 minutes. It also takes 37 hours for us to get on the bus from Zhengzhou to Lhasa. A 37-hour train ride, the longest challenge in more than 20 years! The last time I took a long train ride was during the winter vacation when I was 18 years old. During the Spring Festival travel rush, it took a green train from Zhengzhou to Kunming for 51 hours. It was an experience I will never forget.

Due to this ticket buying experience, I didn’t even consider which train to take to enter Tibet with more beautiful scenery. I discovered this problem because the two girls on the upper and lower bunks of the train changed trains in Xining. When buying tickets They bought them separately, and they switched to the Shanghai-Lhasa train for the second half of the journey. It was said that the time of that train was more suitable for sightseeing on the road! Well, I did enough homework and had good luck buying tickets. It is said that I successfully grabbed the tickets online!

Having said all that, let’s start our trip! I boarded the train on time at 3:40 in the morning, climbed onto the middle berth, and started my journey westward.

I came down to wash up at around 7 o'clock in the morning, and then started the first half of the unremarkable train journey. During this period, because the train arrived at Lanzhou Station early, the parking time was long, so I went down to walk around and take the green leather car. took photos.

Then there is Xining Station. When changing trains, there is a big migration of people on the train. They are on the same platform. The carriage doors with the same number are facing the carriage doors. Passengers drag their luggage and walk straight over to swipe their ID cards again. It's ok, and then you can find your own berth based on the original berth number.

At this time, I feel that my son is still very capable, carrying backpacks, dragging suitcases, and doing all this strenuous work!

Xining is the starting point of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway and the Qinghai-Tibet Highway.

The above paragraph is a description of the scenery on the Internet. In fact, after we changed cars in Xining, it was already around 7 o'clock or almost 8 o'clock. If I remember correctly, we passed by the Qinghai Lake shrouded in darkness in the middle of the night. Arriving at Golmud at around two o'clock, a passenger asked the flight attendant, explaining that at around 9 o'clock tomorrow morning, we would cross the Tanggula Mountains, which is the most anticipated scenery along the Qinghai-Tibet Railway.

The most intuitive feeling after changing trains is that the train is more airtight and soundproof, and the clanging sound that night was not that obvious or loud. When I woke up, the scenery outside the window broadened. Compared with the shuttle between cities the day before, the common rural farmland and houses were gone. Today's scenery was completely different.

The train was traveling among the green stretches, and we two middle-berth passengers sat on the seats by the window, quietly looking at the scenery outside the window. By the way, did you see the mobile phone and charging cable reflected on the glass? To popularize it, each sleeper car on the train to Tibet has three rechargeable sockets. These three sockets are very popular. Due to the long journey, most passengers need to charge their mobile phones or power banks. Therefore, the seats with sockets are packed, and even at night, when people are asleep, the sockets are charged with various devices.

The scenery seen from the windows on both sides of the train is sometimes very different. For example, on one side there are lush grasslands and gurgling water, while on the other side there are barren slopes and bald mountains. The above pictures were taken from the other side of the window. At that time, I thought it was interesting to see the shadow of the train reflected on the red hillside.

Several large vehicles appear from time to time on the Qinghai-Tibet Highway that runs parallel to the train track.

Okay, I admit that the photo above of reading a book was staged. The journey was long, so I thought about bringing him a book, but I didn’t expect that the color of tree bark, my son’s shirt, and the train curtains were all purple. It was such a coincidence that I just posed for a photo.

In the vast world, under the undulating mountains, large trucks are traveling on the road.

The above paragraph was what I saw after I returned. In fact, I can’t quite match the scenery I saw on the road. It would have been nice if there was an explanation on the train. This was also what the passengers on the train asked me at the time. The conductor, why did he take a "dumb car"?

Around 10 a.m., the train passed through the Tanggula Pass. Geladandong, the main peak of Tanggula Mountain, is more than 6,000 meters above sea level and is the source of the Yangtze River. Tanggula Mountain Pass, with an altitude of 5,231 meters by road and 5,072 meters by railway, is the highest railway station in the world and the natural dividing line between Qinghai and Tibet provinces.

This area is a piece of frozen soil, and the water in the soil layer has been frozen for many years. It is said that the weather at the mountain pass is extremely unstable. Even in summer, the road is often blocked by heavy snow, and hail, frost and snow are common phenomena. The oxygen content of the air here is only 60% of that at sea level, so ordinary passengers will have obvious altitude sickness when passing through Tanggula Pass.

The Tanggula Pass that the train passes through is not as tall and precipitous as we imagined, nor is it like climbing over mountains and valleys as we imagined. It is the top of a relatively flat plateau. Due to the high terrain, The view is wide, and you can see the mountains and snow peaks in the distance. The so-called crossing the Tanggula Pass is just passing by the Tanggula Railway Station, which does not stop.

The Qinghai-Tibet Highway and the railway have always been parallel. Due to the orientation of the terrain, they branched off at the Tanggula Pass. The altitude of the highway pass is 159 meters higher than the railway. I don’t know what the terrain is like there.

The scenery of the snow-capped mountains outside the window gradually disappeared, proving that the Tanggula Pass had been crossed, and we had entered Tibet. It was past 11 o'clock. I checked and found that the food I had brought was almost consumed, and there was still a bucket of instant noodles. Eat it, after this meal, your next meal will be Tibetan food in Lhasa! The view outside the window instantly improves the dining environment, and it even feels like the value of the instant noodles has increased.

After eating instant noodles, we arrived at Nagqu, which is rich in cordyceps, at about 12:20. The parking time was 20 minutes. Many passengers got off the car to take photos of the Nagqu platform check-in, and also stopped by to feel whether the altitude of 4500 was high. My feeling when I came out was that the air was fresher than inside the car, and there was even more oxygen.

While walking along the lake, I was chatting about the mountains with my two neighboring berths. After dozens of hours of companionship along the way, the passengers on the upper and lower berths were all familiar with each other. They were from Hunan, Jiangxi, and so on. The trains from Jiangsu and us from Henan are about to arrive at the station, and our fate is about to end.

After a 37-hour drive, we finally arrived in Lhasa. On the train, we were asked to search for the mini program "Tibet Yitong" in advance, fill in the relevant content, and turn the health code into a Tibetan one. , you have to show your itinerary code when leaving the station. Everything is normal, and you can leave the station one after another.

In addition to the train station, under the blue sky and white clouds, the chef who picked us up near this billboard was already waiting here.

Next, our trip to Tibet officially begins!

Postscript: My feeling is that if you want to experience the Qinghai-Tibet Railway, you can start from Xining in the second half of the journey. The first half of the journey takes too long. If you don’t rest well, it will be more likely to induce high reflexes. If you are taking Xining to Lhasa as a sightseeing train because of the scenery along the railway described on the Internet, be mentally prepared. If there is obvious high-reflection on the train, many passengers will sit on the bunk and not move. of. Even if you can move around easily and take photos freely, you have to do enough homework in advance to see where the scenery is.