Tibet was an after-thought after I arrived in Nepal and completed my trek in the Annapurnas. Well, maybe not quite… Actually, there was a funny incident when I tried to apply for visa for Tibet. As preparation for the trip to Nepal, I had originally tried to apply for a visa into Tibet by going directly to the Chinese embassy right there in Canberra. It was rejected. Instead, I was asked to obtain a ‘letter of invitation’ from the Tibetan Cultural Society (or some such name) first, which as I found out later was located at Lhasa, the capital of Tibet! I can’t really understand the logic but maybe you can?? After all, it’s quite difficult to request for an invitation if I was not already there?
Getting back to the story, I went back to the embassy on the same morning and easily got a visa to go into China anyway – this time citing that I wanted to go to Hong Kong. By the way, it was the same person at the reception. :-) As a result, I had more or less given up on going to Tibet. However, as it turned out, I did not need a visa for Tibet anyway.
To be continued…