After twenty-two hours on the highest railway in the world, I arrive in Lhasa at about 3,600 metres and discover something rather pleasant: I can walk.
No headache, no drama, no negotiations with my lungs. Apparently the railway has done its job and I have acclimatised somewhere between the oxygen masks, railway toilets and endless Tibetan landscape.
So I go for my first walk through the centre of Lhasa.
The shops are full of souvenirs, most of which, on closer inspection, seem to have been made in Nepal. This does not bother me at all. Nepal has been making things for tourists and pilgrims for centuries, and if a Tibetan-looking object has travelled a few hundred kilometres north before landing on a shelf in Lhasa, I consider that a perfectly respectable career for an object.
I wander past shop windows, prayer wheels, statues, jewellery and things whose religious meaning I do not understand but which look sufficiently mysterious to make me want to buy them.
Eventually, hunger wins.
It is time for my first Tibetan dinner.
And there is one more thing I immediately begin to enjoy about Lhasa: the evenings.
The sun stays in the sky surprisingly late, partly because we are high on the plateau, but also because China has decided that the entire country should live by the same clock. Lhasa and Beijing are separated by more than three thousand kilometres, yet the hands of the clock show exactly the same time.
China officially has one time zone - China Standard Time, UTC+8 - from the Pacific coast to the Tibetan plateau.
Which means that at an hour when people in Beijing are already finishing their dinner, in Lhasa there can still be plenty of daylight left.
I like this.
EPISODE 8 First walk through the centre of Lhasa. Here’s a curious fact about Tibet: despite the enormous distance from Beijing, China uses the same official time zone everywhere. So Lhasa and Beijing are on exactly the same clock. The result? At this latitude, Lhasa gets surprisingly long, bright evenings and the city stays alive well into the evening. #Lhasa #China #TibetTravel #TravelDocumentary #Himalayas
— Leonard Szuszkiewicz (@Tribudragon) October 4, 2026
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