On the road from the airport, we had a glimpse of what was to come. We flew from Kathmandu over the Himalayas, obscured by late-monsoon clouds except for the crest of Everest, and landed in the giddying air of Lhasa. My wife was keen to see the monastic treasures of Lhasa, and to experience the vast Tibetan plateau, whose average elevation exceeds 14,700ft. I wanted to see how things had changed since then. Recently, I returned to Tibet on one of those tours, 23 years after my previous visit, when I’d spent six weeks travelling along dirt roads into the far west: to Mount Kailash, a holy place for Buddhists, Hindus and Jains, and to the ruins of the ancient Buddhist kingdom of Guge. You see what the authorities want you to see. The itinerary is fixed before you arrive, no straying permitted. Unnerved by the Tibetan population’s continuing resistance to Chinese rule (the region was incorporated into China in the 1950s), Beijing requires Western tourists to obtain group visas and special permits, and to join an officially sanctioned tour.
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Once in, you were largely free to explore the culture, and to take any road you pleased out of Lhasa across the high plains or south to the Himalayas, though speaking to Tibetans about their religion or politics was fraught with risk (mainly for them). A quarter of a century ago, to enter Tibet all you had to do was buy a plane ticket from Kathmandu, or from Chengdu in China, or hitch a ride on a truck, and endure some rigorous bag-searching and questioning when you got there.