Golmud

The same night we caught a northbound bus from Damshung town on the paved Qinghai-Tibet highway, which is currently the main supply route from China proper to Tibet. While waiting for the bus we chatted with two tallish, fierce looking Tibetan men from Nagchu in northern Tibet. They were dressed in full nomad regalia complete with neat red tassles tying their braided hair. We managed to exchange candies even though they spoke almost no Chinese. Riding the bus I saw many railway construction camps along the entire route to Golmud; it seems the crews are on schedule to extend China's railway to Lhasa in the middle of this decade. The trip to Golmud, the current rail terminus in Qinghai province, took a full 24 hours to travel nearly 1000 km. Our bus took many construction-forced detours, and at one time was stuck in a traffic pile-up.
Right after leaving Damshung we are treated with views of a large snow-capped peak close to the highway. This is Samdain Kangsang (6590 m./21,621 ft.) belonging to the Nyainchen Tanglha range. The next morning we were on very large plains covered by thin grasses, crossing occasional large shallow rivers full of sandbars, and seeing long chains of snow-capped ranges constantly on the horizon. The same mountains seemed to accompany us for several hours at a time. By early afternoon we crossed Kunlun Range, a massive mountain chain whose crestline was covered with snow and glaciers for many miles. The form of the Kunlun mountains are rounded and lack signs of serious erosion, its peaks are fairly indistinct from each other. The last leg before Golmud was a landscape of pure dusty desert with no vegetation whatsoever in a valley surrounded by forbidding, craggy foothills of the Kunlun.