So we left Beijing around noon on June 18, 2014 for our trip to Xining (in Qinghai, China), Tibet (including Mt. Everest), and Chengdu (in Sichuan, China). The thing I most want to see on this trip is Mt. Everest, but everything else we will see is all pretty cool too. We even get to do a little hike up there so we can say we did some hiking in the Himalayas 
So we are mostly taking trains throughout this trip. The train from Xining to Lhasa goes up over 17,000 feet and is the highest train in the world, and the train is not pressurized. We have been told that that route has exceptionally beautiful scenery!
But our first stop is Xining on the Qinghai plateau. Xining is at about 8,000 feet and will help us start to acclimate to the higher altitudes we will be at. Also there is a lot of beautiful scenery to see here, but we haven’t seen any yet so first I will share all about the train ride!
So the first leg of our journey was a 22-hour train ride. It left at around noon yesterday and we made it into Xining around 10 am this morning. We got hard sleepers, which are just beds with a thin cushion on them. They are stacked three bunks high with six bunks in a given section.
We had got a top one and a bottom one, I graciously (or so I thought) gave Ziqin the bottom bunk and I climbed up to the top one (which was above even my head, luckily they had a ladder). Ziqin’s neighbor decided to put her feet on Ziqin’s bed and they were very smelly feet! Her neighbor was a middle-aged woman. Ziqin asked her not to put them there, so the lady put them on the ground, but Ziqin said the smell didn’t go away…oh in addition if you are on the bottom bunk random people will think it is a free seat and sit there as they wish without asking…..that happened several times throughout the ride.
That lady swapped spots with another lady who took off her shoes and kept rubbing her feet! Luckily an elderly woman needed a bottom bunk and so Ziqin’s neighbor got swapped out again….this time we were lucky.
This lady was a bit talkative, but she was nice. She was from northeastern China, on her way to Tibet with a tour group (which is what almost all of the passengers in our car were part of). She actually asked me a direct question before I had spoken a word of Chinese, which is unusual here. She wasn’t the first either; maybe the fact that I was one of two foreigners on the entire train (I think there were only two of us at least, I didn’t realize there were any others until I saw a blonde lady after we got off the train) made people assume I must speak Chinese.
Anyhow, Ziqin and I had brought lots of snacks, so we spent a lot of time snacking, and playing cards. We also both had our Kindles so we read a lot too.
The bathrooms on the train consisted of squat toilets that flushed out onto the tracks (kind of flushed at least, really it went straight to the tracks but you could run the water to clean it off a bit better). So that was interesting.
The scenery was quite pretty, I’ll add pictures to this post later, but I have a lot of them up on My World to Go (you’d have to register and add me as a friend to see the pictures…) since getting them on Facebook is complicated from here…
I know this post will be posted to my Facebook account, but that is automatic, I don’t actually log in to Facebook to do it, my Facebook account is linked to this blog. We don’t have a VPN so getting on Facebook can be a hassle.
Anyhow, they cut out the lights on the train around 10 pm; I had gone up to my bed around 9 or 9:30. When laying up in my bunk I couldn’t sit up since the ceiling was so close, I also had my backpack up there since it had the laptop and other electronics and I didn’t want to leave it unattended. So my legs were on top of my backpack and the bunk was about as wide as my shoulders, luckily it had a rail so I wouldn’t fall off.
Also, every time I leaned over to talk to my wife I hit my head on the corner of the TV that was hanging right there! I never did see that TV turn on, I wonder if it even works…
I read until I finished my book, so it was quite late when I fell asleep; I had to use the restroom again first and as I was walking back to my bunk I realized I really should have counted how many bunks it was to the bathroom! I walked back and forth trying to figure out which bunk was mine since I couldn’t read the numbers in the dark…I found a couple bunks with no feet at the end, so they were either empty or had someone short in them, then I saw my bag and so I had found my bunk!
I went to sleep a midst the sound of snoring from nearly every bunk! That’s okay I guess since I probably just added to the cacophony once I fell asleep Now the train stops at stations often, and it often times does not stop softly, so every once in a while it feels like the train just ran into something, but don’t be alarmed, it’s just the brakes.
We must have traveled through a lot of areas that weren’t well-settled because we lost cell reception for about eight hours of the journey. But the scenery was very pretty, there were rivers, farms, mountains, a building carved into the side of a cliff, it was pretty amazing; I can’t wait until our ride to Tibet!
Oh, so this morning when we woke up we pretty much just gathered our stuff and sat on Ziqin’s bunk waiting to get into Xining, and we eventually did! The next post should be more interesting, but I will add pictures to this one later….
We are now in the hostel we’re staying at, which is really just an apartment turned into a hostel. It is up on the thirtieth floor, but it is nice and cheap! Tomorrow we start our four-day tour of this area, but for today we’ll just go check out the city!
