I've finally arrived in Lhasa after 5 days travelling across the Himalayas. The first day we travelled by bus to the Nepal/China border and from there we travelled by Land Cruiser, along the 920km "Friendship Highway".

Inside Tibet, there are a lot of police check points, which slowed down the journey considerably. Unfortunately, having built a world class police state, not enough money was left over for basic infrastructure, so much of the journey was spent bumping along dirt tracks from police check point to police check point.

The Tibetan plateau, at 3,500m (11,500ft), is as flat as a pancake and interspersed with rows of mountains that rise up a further 1,500m. We'd drive for an hour on a completely flat straight road, then go over a mountain pass and go back to another plain which would take another hour to cross. And the scenery is spectacular: lakes, mountains, sand dunes, scrubland, grassland, farmland, meadows, monasteries, nomads, villages, cities - much more variety than I expected.

I've finally arrived in Lhasa, where I'll spend 2 days seeing various Buddhist sites, before taking the world's highest railway to Beijing.