Flights:
We suggest you take a flight that arrives in Lhasa in the morning. Morning flights are more likely to be on time. Flights take around 2 hours from Chengdu, Xi’an, Chongqing, or Kunming, or around 5 hours from Beijing or Shanghai.
Trains:
We suggest you take a train to Lhasa from Xining or Lanzhou. Then your journey will be a bit shorter and there’ll be a higher likelihood of successful booking since there are more trains per day from these two cities than from more distant places.
It takes about 20 hours from Xining or 23 hours from Lanzhou, and the best scenery begins about 10 hours before arriving in Lhasa.
There are also direct trains to Lhasa from Beijing or Shanghai, which we do not recommend: the journey takes over 40 hours.
If you decide to go to Lhasa by train, it’s better to have a back-up plan; for example, to fly instead and take the train back. It is much easier to book a train ticket from Lhasa. Taking a train to Tibet will not help with adapting to the high altitude. The train to Lhasa is air-tight and supplies sufficient oxygen, so you’ll still need to adapt to the thin air after leaving the train.
Connecting to Tibet via International Flights
- Flying in: Leave no less than 3 hours between flights, if you want to fly first to another city in China and then transfer onto a flight to Tibet. We’ll pass your Tibet Entry Permit on to you as you wait for the onward flight.
- By train: If you transfer to a train for Tibet after an international flight, we will send you your scanned permits in advance. Scanned permit printouts are enough for train travel.
- Generally, we recommend you don’t travel to Tibet directly after an international flight. The combination of jet-lag and tiredness is likely to make you more vulnerable to altitude sickness. We suggest you spend at least 2 days elsewhere in China and then travel on to Tibet.
