Tibet has always fascinated me as a place that cannot be reached. Any serious traveller you met in China wanted to go there. Almost everyone I met at the time failed. I'll tell you right here in the beginning that the first time I tried I failed too. I did not make it to Lhasa, only to Zhongdian, the Northwestern edge of Yunnan province.

It was the winter of 1987 and I had been traveling in Southern China for a whole month. The winter up North was cold and boring, the array of bright autumn colors blending into a gray mass that covered Beijing with depressing uniformity. All foreign students headed South, mostly to the sunny island of Hainan where you could lie on the warm sand of the beach and drink coconut juice right out of the coconuts all day long.

The second most favored destination was Yunnan province, the land of eternal Spring. If I recall correctly, Kunming, the capital of the province, was the highest city in the world with a population over 4 million. South of Kunming, a couple days of exhausting bus ride away, at the Northern tip of the Golden Triangle, lay the region of Xishuangbanna (Hsi-shuang-banna). The place was amazing: tropical forests on the upper Mekong River, pineapple plantations and water buffalos everywhere. The best part of the scenery, however, was that the peoples of these areas, the Bai, the Dai, the Tai, the Wa etc all wore their traditional national dresses. This was in sharp contrast with the rest of China where a population of over one billion managed to squeeze themselves into half a dozen of "designs" -- mainly gray or green military uniforms. The other nice thing was that nobody around here spoke good Mandarin anymore and we, after having studied in Beijing for 6 months, felt rather impressed with how good our Chinese was in comparison to these Chinese citizens.

I spent about two weeks in tropical Xishuangbanna, traveling from village to village, sleeping on 50-cent mattresses and consuming large quantities of fresh pineapples on wooden sticks. Then, I took the same exhausting bus ride up to Kunming and boarded an all night bus up North to the city of Dali. The seats in the supposedly high-class Hungarian bus were incredibly uncomfortable which prevented anyone from sleeping. So after watching the pitch-black night outside the window for ten something hours, we finally arrived and were allowed to get out.

Dali was an amazing city. On the Western side of it stood a set of high mountains that separated China from Burma. On the Eastern side there was a huge lake called Erhai (Ear Sea) which received its name from its shape. At one point Dali was an important cultural and political center, capital of the Southern kingdom of Nanzhao. In 1987, this was one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

I stayed in Dali for a few days, visiting the places one must visit, cycling around the 70 mile perimeter of the lake, eating good Bai food, and meeting new friends. During this time, I ran into a very friendly German girl who studied Chinese in the same school in Northern China as I did. It was during our talks with her that the idea of hitchhiking to Tibet came up.