Hi
My friend and i are planning a trip to Tibet next week. We will be trying to get train tickets to Lhasa from Chengdu with one day stopover in Xining, but as it is the peak season now, is it very difficult to get tickets at the moment?
From what i've checked, trains to Lhasa will arrive earliest at 5.25pm, with many others from Xining arriving around 7 or 8pm. At such a late hour, can we still get accomodation in the popular hostels such as the Banak Shol or the Snowland? Can we make reservations in these accomodations in advance? However, we are unsure when we'll actually be arriving in Lhasa as it depends on the earliest train tickets we can get, so making reservations might be a problem..
Lastly, any good recommendation on other good value-for-money hostels which we can try out? Our budget is not too much... probably up to 40 yuan per night, per bed.
Our first trip to tibet!! thanks for your help!!
You can book the Phuntsok Khasang Youth Hostel online, the 8-bed dorm is RMB 20 if you have a Utels membership card (pay Y30 to apply immediately), or RMB 30 if you are non-member.
Or contact MSN: yihang_w@hotmail.com
You may find that when you book the train, you'll pay for not only the permit but also part of the first nights accommodation somewhere. Check when you arrange your tickets.<BR>Any agent in Chengdu ( we used Sims) will tell you they cant guarantee getting train tickets from Chengdu. We had difficulty in April.<BR>
i'm probably going to use sim's as well. how many days did it take before you managed to get your train tickets?
I made sure I sent Sims the copies of our passports and Chinese visas 10 days prior to the date we hoped to travel. Emails then flew back and forth, me telling them what we wanted and the date we wanted to travel, them saying there was no guarantee and did we want them to book the plane if they couldnt get tickets. We had to give them alternative dates as the train only goes every 2nd day, plus we told them to take any tickets they could get. We were flying out from our home city on a thursday and on to Chengdu the next day. It wasnt till we got to Chengdu on the friday that we knew they had managed to get tickets. If they had failed, we were going to fly in and train out.<BR>We paid about 1500Y ( more or less) and that included the permit, 30Y of food from their menu to take ( didnt eat it all as the food from the train trolley was really nice) and 20Y towards the first nights accommodation in Lhasa. That turned out to be the International Youth Hostel situated between Banok Shol and Hotel Kirey. We moved to Hotel Kirey after the first night but when we returned from EBC, we went back to the International Youth Hostel as the rooms were nicer even though the staff were really unfriendly. Oh, it also included transfers each end.<BR>Our contacts at Sims were Ashley and Yangmin.
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