Qinghai Tibet Highway

Scenic road chapters

Waypoint introductions and full write-ups

1. 1. Xining

   Xining stands on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau, at about 2,200 metres, and it is the capital of Qinghai Province, a city of more than seven hundred thousand people in a valley between high, dry hills. It is a meeting point of cultures: Han Chinese, Tibetan, Hui Muslim and Mongol communities all live here, and you can see it in the street food, the mosques and the monasteries. The Dongguan Great Mosque, one of the largest in northwest China, stands near the old centre, and the smell of grilled lamb and baking bread drifts from the Muslim quarter.

   Read the complete Xining write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Xining is where the day begins. Next is Golmud.

2. 2. Golmud

   Golmud is a city built on a salt flat, and it exists because of the road. The name comes from a Mongolian word for river, which sounds optimistic for a place on the edge of the Qaidam Basin, a vast, high desert of salt lakes, gravel plains and oil wells. At about 2,800 metres, with the Kunlun mountains rising to the south, it is a modern, wide-avenued city of several hundred thousand people that grew from almost nothing in the 1950s, when engineers began pushing a highway and later a railway across the Tibetan plateau.

   Read the complete Golmud write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Golmud comes up about 762 km into the recorded legs. Next is Tanggula Pass.

3. 3. Tanggula Pass

   Tanggula Pass is a place of thin air and big silence. At 5,231 metres on the Qinghai-Tibet Highway, it is one of the high points of the road that crosses the plateau from Golmud to Lhasa, and it marks the boundary between Qinghai and the Tibet Autonomous Region. There is little here but a stone marker, a wide view and a landscape of bare brown hills dusted with snow. You will feel the altitude as soon as you step off the bike: a pounding head, short breath and a strange slowness in your limbs.

   Read the complete Tanggula Pass write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   about 1367 km into the recorded legs you reach Tanggula Pass. Nothing on this route is higher. Next is Nagqu, mostly downhill.

4. 4. Nagqu

   Nagqu is the biggest town you will meet on the northern half of the Tibetan plateau, and it feels like a frontier. It sits at roughly 4,500 metres on the open grassland between the Tanggula range and Lhasa, a high, cold country of yak herders, black tents and wide rolling pasture, and the Chinese name for it is Naqu. The Tibetan name means the black river, and the pastures around it have fed nomadic families for centuries.

   Read the complete Nagqu write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Nagqu, late in the day. Next is Lhasa.

5. 5. Lhasa

   Lhasa lies at about 3,650 metres in a wide, dry valley beside the Kyichu River, and almost every rider who arrives there from the east is a little dizzy from the altitude, a little sunburnt and more than a little humbled. The G318, known as the Sichuan-Tibet Highway, runs over two thousand kilometres from Chengdu, crossing a series of passes above 4,000 metres, plunging through gorges and following the great bend of the Yarlung Tsangpo before it finally settles on this plateau. Reaching the city is the culmination of one of the world's classic overland roads.

   Read the complete Lhasa write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Finish at Lhasa. That is the ride.