A wide mountain desert with the Brahmaputra river probably enchants everyone who happens to wander up this high plateau on the other side of the Himalayas, all covered by monasteries rising magnificently above the barley fields.
There are only three ways of transport one can use to get there from the Chinese side: a ride by an off road vehicle, taking a bus or »prohibited« truck hitchhiking. But a traveler with a usual amount of imagination quite quickly gets some other idea of how to travel along these vast areas. If you travel across Tibet on bike the locals will watch you with curiosity and admiration. There are definitely very few people from the West who would travel on bike along the aimless paths, through Tibetan villages and settlements. Wherever you stop, in every place people wish to offer you everything they have, most often it is tea and tsampa of course.
They ask how come you are traveling on bicycle and where you are headed, how many days you have been on the road, how long does it take to get to the holy city of Lhasa on bike… All of a sudden they become straight forward and you get a feeling they really want to help. But unfortunately, the world of huge high mountainous vast areas, cool rivers, barley fields and dark blue sky, the world of simple people where faith is the way of life, is still intolerable terrorized by the Chinese authorities (occupying Tibet in 1950) trying to ruin this, in their opinion, undeveloped culture.
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