After ten days spent travelling around Xinjiang, my colleagues Julien, Fred and I boarded a day train for an eight hours' journey to the northern part of the Tibetan plateau in Qinghai. We started from the inner depression city of Turpan at sea level, passed through vast expanses of desert, steppes, croplands, grasslands and mountains to alight 2 500 m higher in the altitude city of Xining.
The feature that struck me most on the Tibetan plateau was the intense blue colour of the sky. There was no dust or smog to dim its hue. The sun shone particularly strong, burning our eyes and skin.
On our last day, we trekked between 3 500 and 4 000 m elevation. I got the confirmation that I am prone to altitude sickness above 3 200 m : although the hike up was not particularly steep, I was panting throughout the way up, lungs and hamstrings in pain for lack of oxygen, aching back of head and neck. Despite the beautiful landscape, the hike was not pleasant for me in these high-altitude conditions. Meanwhile, my two travel companions were still prancing up the mountain, unaffected by the lack of oxygen.
The grasslands were filled with cattle, sheep, yak and horses. Surprisingly for such large areas of land, there were many fences criss-crossing the plateau to limit the herds of each livestock owner to their individual plots. Although our guide told us some shared and communal grazing did exist, these were always organised on private plots.
We kept eating lots of mutton-based dishes. Vegetables were even scarcer in the Tibetan diet than in the Uyghur fare. We discovered the very filling barley-and-yak butter-flatbread tsampa.
I mentioned the Qinghai skies were blue. But when clouds did form over the mountains and were swept by altitude winds across the skies, they formed incredibly distinct masses of suspended cotton floss.
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