Tashi delay,

We bring to you a Train With A View :-)

The landscape from the train was absolutely stupendous there was literally hours of wilderness. Naturally ones photo digits were busy for the duration, so now we bring to you thousands of pictures from the train :-)

...actually we have cut it right down to forty or so :-) ENJOY!

(The small size of these photos does not do them any justice, for those of you who are technically adept you may want to use properties to get the source of the image and go view in Photobucket... Don't worry if this does not make any sense to you - it will to others :-)

As you can see there was not much room in the cabin (Its not that K's feet are BIG :-)


The cabins were not a pretty sight after the first 12 hours, can you imagine after 36 hours had passed by? :-)


If one needed to take a break from the can for a cabin, one could take a window seat in the narrow corridor.


The first day of the journey - we passed mainly cultivated agricultural land as well as towns and cities that were adjacent to the railway. This was the green phase and as we climbed higher the view gradually became dominated by shades of brown.


We saw a few hundred military trucks heading along a parallel highway towards Tibet. Some of them had red banners on the front with Chinese characters in yellow - we do not know what they said but it would have been interesting to find out.



In this photo the small dots are the convoy, the trucks were evenly spaced as they drove along. The train was faster yet we seemed to keep overtaking the trucks for kilometres.


The road paralleled the railway for most of the way, sometimes the road was dirt, sometimes the road was paved.


The terrain was forever changing, we encountered desert complete with sand dunes. On the top of this dune there were some rocks poking through the top.


They had set up these rock patterns and wind breaks to protect the soil from wind erosion - we saw the rock patterns lining the tracks on both sides for many kilometers.


We even saw this tundra type surface...

We passed a large lake, surrounded by high mountains. This was the Blue phase :-)



A motorcyclist heading towards his tent - seemingly in the middle of nowhere.


We awoke on our first morning to a breathtaking snow covered terrain :-) Ahh the white phase :-)


...and the train was still snaking it's way up and up.


The snow was pretty thick at the higher elevations - the train tops 5000 metres!



As we hooked our way south again from Qinghai region, the snow became less abundant and the views even more spectacular.



White Stupas amongst the snow.



Astounding mountain views from midday on the second day...




It was hard to take your eyes away from the windows lest you missed the ever changing landscape.



En route there were plenty of tunnels.


There were many grazing wild yaks.



We saw some working yaks, too.



Various dwellings some as simple as these tents but all were dwarfed by mountains.






As we got closer to Lhasa there was so much exposed rock faces, showing a variety of colours, patterns and shapes. We can see the frontside of the vertical rock formation in the last photo from Lhasa city.






Then we arrived!!! This is Lhasa's new and very modern train station.