09NOV06 Day Two - The Tibetan Plateau.
When I awoke on the second morning and I was in awe of the landscape: Outside was a startlingly different world, a landscape of stark beauty and ruggedness. In the early hours of the morning we had crossed the Kunlun Mountains and arrived on the Tibetan plateau, the highest major land mass on the planet.

Departing Beijing through the countryside, the sky had been hazy and yellow, the light flat and dull. Now the sky was an almost painfully deep blue, the landscape was sharp, bright and deeply etched. Jagged white peaks where crowned in gold as the first light of dawn spread across their ridges.


The plains were treeless and gently rolling with a million colors, all of them variations of brown: coffee, tan, taupe, chestnut, khaki, chocolate, terra cotta, beige, sand. From the mountains and rock outcroppings hung long strings of tattered, sun-bleached prayer flags, fluttering in the winds. When we passed our first yak, I fumbled for my camera, and the waiter in the dining car watched me and grinned: Yaks in Tibet are as rare and exotic as cows are in Alberta. By the time we pulled into Lhasa, I'd seen thousands, perhaps tens of thousands.

Extra oxygen on board

The highest point on the rail line, the Tangu La pass, is usually listed as 16,640-feet. But the map in my Lonely Planet guide places it at 16,994.75 feet, which means passengers -- especially those in the upper bunks -- poke their heads above 17,000 feet. The actual Tangu La railway station, at 5,068 m in elevation, is the world's highest, surpassing Cóndor station, at 4,786 m, on the Rio Mulatos-Potosí line in Bolivia, and La Galera station at 4,781 m in Peru.

One thing is certain about the Tibetan Plateau: The human body was never designed to rocket up to an elevation this rarefied this quickly. The atmosphere here holds between 40 and 50 percent less oxygen than at sea level. Extra oxygen is pumped into the unpressurized rail cars as they roll across the Tibetan plateau, but wasn't clear that id did that much good. All around me in the dining car, passengers were suffering the hangover-like symptoms of altitude sickness: throbbing headaches and severe nausea. One by one they staggered off to the bathroom.

I was feeling relatively chipper due to Diamox, a prescription drug that prevents altitude sickness. Even so, I was lightheaded and a little dizzy, and found that I'd been reading the same sentence in my paperback over and over. For just a second I couldn't remember my wife's name (JUST for a second!). However, I never did feel quite uncomfortable enough to use the oxygen hose which had been distributed to each passenger cabin. I knew that while it would clear my mind temporarily, the effect would last only as long as I breathed oxygen from the hose; the moment I stopped, my lightheadedness would return, and would only prevent my acclimatization to the altitude.

The surrealness was heightened by what looked like hundreds of enormous golf tees lining the tracks. These are a cleverly designed engineering attempt to solve the railroad's most challenging problem, and one that may ultimately prove to be its undoing.

Over 650 km of track lie atop a particularly unstable form of permafrost that thaws during the day and freezes at night, causing the tundra above it to rise and fall by 5 to 10 cm. To try to prevent sections of track from buckling and cracking, Chinese engineers elevated more than 175 km of it and installed the giant "golf tees" along other stretches. These are cooling pipes that use solar energy to turn liquid ammonia into gas, chilling the ground and preventing the permafrost from melting.

Some Chinese engineers have worried publicly that if the climate continues to warm, the railroad could be unusable in less than 50 years. The Swiss engineers may have been right after all!

By the end of the second day, the train had descended into the Lhasa Valley and the more manageable altitude of 12,000 feet (3,650 m). At around 10 pm we arrived at the end of the line and the Lhasa Railway Station, a symbolically imposing and modern structure visible from almost any point in the valley.




A quick bartering session with the locals, a fistful of Yuan and 20 minutes later, our small group of foreign trekkers had been delivered to our respective lodging, ready to re-group later for a celebratory feast of Yak Soup and Lhasa beer!