Travel Tips for Tibet
by Brandon Horn and Wendy Yu

Traveling in Tibet can be your greatest dream or worst nightmare...depending on your travel agent. The single most important thing when traveling through Tibet is to have a good travel agent due to the rapidly changing bureaucratic issues inherent to this region of China. We had three different travel agents in three different countries, all claiming to be able to arrange our Tibet travels. Two of them got us into trouble and caused a number of unpleasant experiences and 1 of them saved us each time.

If you want to have a worry-free and enjoyable experience in Tibet, make sure your travel agent knows what he/she is doing. After much internet research, we we were fortunate to find a Lhasa-based travel agent online named James Zhao of Great Tibet Tours. He's extremely knowledgeable, reliable and trustworthy. He saved us many times from other travel agents' mistakes. Initially we were uncomfortable with the fact that we had to wire his company money from the US without having spoken to or met him but we lucked out in this case. We probably e-mailed him over 50 times before departing for China, each time in a panic, but he was always very punctual and thorough when responding. His English is fantastic, which is a huge plus because a large majority of the Tibetan and Chinese residents in Tibet speak little to no English.

James was able to arrange a customized 3 day tour of the Lhasa area for us and provided us with a very comfortable car, a great driver and a trilingual local tour guide who knew everything there was to know about Tibetan culture. After reading the Lonely Planet Tibet book, we knew there were certain things we weren't interested in and other places we definitely wanted to see so James accommodated us without a problem. He even arranged special visits for us at the Tibetan Traditional Hospital and the Tibetan Traditional College to observe what types of healing modalities and herbs are native to the region.

Other miscellaneous tips for travel to Tibet:

1. Food: Don't eat anything raw!
2. Drink: Only drink bottled water or water boiled longer than 10 minutes. If you're not sure it has been boiled long enough, put 5 drops of grapefruit seed extract per 8 oz cup. Grapefruit seed extract is highly contaminated with chemicals so only use the organic liquid form.
3. Language: Bring a small, quick-reference Chinese phrasebook with both Pinyin and Chinese character translations. The language barrier is substantial throughout Tibet and even the airports where you will have connecting flights. It is extremely hard to find people who speak English.
4. Most food will be tainted with MSG. Ask for no MSG (wei jing), no soy sauce and no Chicken flavor (ji jing).
5. Supplements: A food-borne illness or bad cold can ruin your vacation. We recommend you consider taking things preventatively.

• To prevent food related illness, we recommend taking 1 - 2 betaine HCl with or before meals.
• After meals take 1 dropperful of an antimicrobial herbal decoction. We use Yellow Dock #2 and find it very effective.
• If, despite the above measures, you do get a stomach illness (which you shouldn't if you have been careful), then take 2 squirts of Herbalroom's Travel Brew. We learned the hard way about the length of water boiling time, but fortunately, we had this with us and it worked like magic. It also worked on people in our group who had severe symptoms.
• Cold: We developed a cold formula that we travelled with. It worked very well. However, if you are staying in Lhasa, they have traditional doctors that could also write a good formula for you, so if you are going to skimp on something, you could skimp on that.
• Altitude: Take 500mg of Vitamin C per day. Also take an herbal formula that contains adaptogenic herbs such as reishi mushrooms, rhodiola and a number of others. You are likely to experience some form of altitude sickness in Lhasa if you don't have a good formula to take. We developed a formula that we tested on many people at altitudes up to 19,000 feet. They will help you breathe, help prevent headaches, nausea, fatigue, etc. that you are likely to experience otherwise. In our group, our altitude formula worked even for people that Diamox didn't work for.
• Sunscreen: Use the highest SPF you can find. We used UV Naturals 30 SPF, which has the least amount of toxic chemicals of all the sunscreens we looked at. This brand is a bit greasy but the benefits are worth it. We also used a very high quality aloe vera gel from Forever Living and applied it when we knew we had substantial sun exposure. Don't forget your lips! We kept a natural 15 SPF lipbalm on our person at all times. The climate is really harsh in Tibet.
• Check your airline for weight restrictions when it comes to luggage. Flights into Lhasa have a weight limit of 20 kg per person.
• Sunglasses: Get polarized lenses. Make sure you have full UV protection. This is extremely important.

Special needs for trekking:

1. Hand warmers
2. Dehydrated food
3. Water filter
4. Good quality energy bars (not soy protein)
5. Oxygen canister (just in case). You can buy them all over in Tibet.
6. Don't skimp on waterproof hiking boots.