Forgive me if there is another thread about this, I tried to find what but was unsuccessful.

I am going to visit a friend of mine who is currently living in China and can speak Chinese. While I am there we would live to visit Tibet. However we would like to avoid going on a standard group tour in favor of doing it on our own.

I have read a lot of conflicting information online about what you can and can't do. A lot of it looks like it was from the Olympics last year.

My first question, is it possible to get a permit to travel without a guide/group? If so can someone please provide some advise on a possible itnerary?

thanks

sims cozy guesthouse chengdu
has an amazing pdf about this very issue.

http://gogosc.com/enly_tibet_explanation.asp

I was to be in Tibet next week,
but the permit stuff was so intimidating, uncertain, my travel friends
ended up paying a tour operator $4K to go, included permit. .

I stayed home.

thanks for the details. There is no way I will shell out $4k for a group, I would rather go on my won anyway.

ygpm ..

If Tibet won't work out you might consider going to Deqin (NW corner of Yunnan on Tibet border). You can go there with no permits and there is some good trekking in the area, spectacular scenery (especially if the weather is right), and friendly people. And it is very Tibetan if that is what you are after. One of the main treks in the area is the Kawa Gebo pilgrimage.

There is a guy (British I think) who has set up a trekking lodge up there and has gathered a great deal of relevant info. I visited his lodge the last time I was up there.

http://www.deqinlodge.com/page/page/6855278.htm

That looks gorgeous. Unfortunately it's now closed because the road crew damaged their water supply

I'm also interested in any information/suggested guidebooks/guides

Wirelessly posted (HTC WM6: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7A341 Safari/528.16)

Death wish

yeah, I just heard that, too bad really was a nice spot with a wealth of trekking info. The guy that set it up really put a lot of work into it.

Five years ago three of us flew into Xining and onward to Golmud by train. Absolutely no issues with visas at any point, ie we had 30-day normal Chinese visas.

In Golmud we booked bus transportation, visa extensions and hostel in Lhasa. Once there we booked transport to Everest Base Camp (Tibet) and on to the Nepal border.

Coming up through China to Golmud over about a week allowed us to acclimatize and none of us had altitude issues.

Things may have changed - but I'd bet that Golmud still has TAs specializing in transport into and visas for Tibet. And I suspect getting train seats back from Lhasa is fairly simple.

Happy wandering

Fred

You really need to go to the Lonely Planet Thorn Tree forums on Tibet - they always have the most up-to-date reports on this topic.

Thanks for the helpful info about backpacking in Tibet.

My experience from October 2008 is that only with a guide can you tour Tibet. We got one through our travel agent in Xiamen, Fujian,China. It was a private Tibetan guide but his driver had to be Chinese who were were told did not speak english. We ( 4 of us) never did believe that. On the road between cities there are Chinese check points all along and the driver had to buy passes that are timed to ensure we got to the next check point no earlier or later than what was on the permit. ( There is only scenery between check points and nothing to stop for). Our guide was wonderful and we were able to arrange our own times and destinations and we were allowed to vary it a bit. Base camp to Everest is 9 hours from Lhasha and very poor accommodations. Scenery in Lhasha is extra ordinary. Amazing trip -flew in from Xiamen and trained out - no altitude problems