I’ll readily admit that I had this whole fantasy built around the idea of Tibet, the way so many liberal-leaning Westerners seem to. I had also been living in China for nearly a year before I went to Tibet, so I had a pretty realistic view of the Chinese position on the Tibet question and how they treated Tibetans who crossed the line in the rocks.

Even with this, I was still a bit disappointed by what it turned out to be. Had this been just any other city, it would have been an awesome experience and somewhere I recommended highly. But because it was Tibet, and Lhasa, there were so many strings tied around the place itself and the idea of what Lhasa is ‘supposed’ to represent that I have trouble heartily recommending it to others. This idea of the “Noble Savage” or this pure “Shangri-La” is so ingrained in our minds that it would be nearly impossible to live up to even in the best of circumstances.

In the rest of China, the only time I recall regularly seeing guns was on armed cars as they took cash out of banks every week In Lhasa, every major street corner has one guy with a rifle and one with a shotgun. Some of the police force looked to be culturally Tibetan, but very little of the street corner-military did. There are rules against photographing these guys, so this is the best I’ve got, from just by the Potala Palace:

Everywhere else I’ve been in China, including similarly-disputed Xinjiang Province, tourist attractions and indeed daily life and independent walk-around type affairs. In Tibet, our guide was with Matt and I nearly the entire time we were in the province. They picked us up at the train station, accompanied us to our hotel, and carted us around each day in private transport. Our guide was a really nice Tibetan guy, but basically the only Tibetan I got to talk to the whole time we were there. Every temple, every monastery, every ‘site’ we went to our guide had to sign us in and show that mythical “Tibetan Tourist Permit.”

Which is my main problem with traveling in Tibet. The Chinese government demands that foreign tourists go on an organized tour and get a Tibetan Tourist Permit before they buy as much as a train ticket. All of these just seems like a way to gouge money from foreigners who have this special idea of ‘Holy Tibet’ and all of that. After our couple of days on an organized tour, I tried to pull together another trip to leave China to Nepal and head to Everest Base Camp on the way . The prices I was quoted for this 5 or 6 day trip were absurd, over $1000. My average daily budget for China is around $40, by comparison.

Anybody looking for Tibetan culture has plenty of places to go in China. Sichuan, Yunnan, Gansu, and Qinghai provinces are stuffed with all sorts of villages and nomads and Tibetan Cultural Areas. No permits, free roaming allowed, and also-beautiful scenic mountains and lakes and natural surroundings.

Never in Lhasa did I even come close to the conversation I had in Sichuan’s Zoige, where a Tibetan monk tried to marry me off to the waitress at a tea shop. Skip political Tibet, and stick with the Tibetan cultural areas instead.