7-Day Tibet Travel Itinerary

There is no such thing as independent travel in Tibet, and any itinerary that doesn’t lead with that fact is misleading you. Foreign travelers cannot enter the Tibet Autonomous Region without a Tibet Travel Permit, and that permit can only be obtained by a licensed local agency on your behalf, tied to a fixed itinerary, a private vehicle, a driver and a guide who stays with you for the entire trip. You cannot book a hotel and wander off on your own even within Lhasa. Sort the agency and permit first; everything else in this itinerary assumes that’s already arranged, since a Chinese visa alone gets you nowhere near the region.

Day 1: Arrival in Lhasa

Lhasa Gonggar Airport sits about 85 kilometers outside the city, and the drive in takes 40 to 60 minutes, costing 200 to 300 yuan by taxi or as little as 30 yuan on the shuttle bus that runs every 15 minutes from mid-morning. Your guide will typically meet you at arrivals since the permit has to be shown at a checkpoint on the way in. The airport itself sits at roughly 3,570 metres, and Lhasa proper is a touch lower at around 3,650 metres, still high enough that a real number of visitors get a pounding headache or shortness of breath on day one. Do nothing strenuous. Drink more water than feels necessary, skip alcohol, and treat a slow wander around Barkhor Street, the circular pilgrim circuit around Jokhang Temple, as the day’s full itinerary. Most people improve noticeably within one to two days; pushing through a bad headache instead of resting is the single most common way first-timers ruin the rest of the trip.

Day 2: Potala Palace and Jokhang Temple

The Potala Palace, the Dalai Lama’s former winter residence until 1959, requires a timed entry ticket that your agency books in advance, since daily visitor numbers are capped and walk-up entry doesn’t exist. Budget under an hour inside; the palace limits visit duration strictly because of the altitude and the fragility of the interior murals. Jokhang Temple, generally regarded as the most sacred site in Tibetan Buddhism and older than the Potala itself, is a better place to slow down, since pilgrims prostrating on the flagstones outside are doing so as a genuine daily practice, not a photo opportunity. Cover your shoulders and knees at both sites, remove hats, and expect to remove your shoes at some interior halls. Photography rules vary by chapel and are enforced, so check with your guide before raising a camera inside either building.

Day 3: Sera Monastery and Drepung Monastery

Sera Monastery’s monk debates, held most afternoons in a walled courtyard, are the single best free show in Lhasa: younger monks stand and clap sharply to punctuate philosophical challenges while seated monks defend their answers, and you can watch from the courtyard’s edge without disturbing anything. Drepung, once among the largest monasteries in the world by population, sits on a hillside a short drive away and rewards an unhurried morning walk up through its whitewashed halls more than a rushed loop. Taxis and your assigned vehicle handle the transport between the two easily in a single day, and I’d put the Sera debate ahead of Drepung’s halls if you have to choose, since it’s a livelier, more memorable hour than another set of chapel interiors.

Day 4: Yamdrok Lake and Karola Glacier to Gyantse

The drive to Gyantse climbs over the Kamba La pass at over 4,700 metres, and the first view of Yamdrok Lake from the pass, a turquoise, glacier-fed body of water considered one of Tibet’s four holy lakes, is worth the climb on its own. Karola Glacier further along the road hangs visibly close to the highway, close enough that you can walk toward its base in twenty minutes if the weather cooperates. In Gyantse itself, the Pelkor Chode Monastery compound houses the Kumbum Stupa, a nine-tiered structure with dozens of individual chapels stacked inside it, genuinely unlike anything else on this route and worth more time than most tour buses give it. Road conditions on this stretch are good by regional standards now, paved and maintained, but altitude sickness risk actually rises here rather than falls, since you’re gaining elevation rather than staying put, so keep pacing yourself even if Lhasa went fine.

Day 5: Gyantse to Shigatse

Tashilhunpo Monastery in Shigatse, seat of the Panchen Lama since the 17th century, still functions as an active teaching monastery with several hundred monks in residence, and its main hall houses a Maitreya Buddha statue that stands close to 26 metres tall, among the largest gilded copper statues anywhere. The monastery’s own market street outside the gates does better momos and thukpa than most of the formal restaurants nearby, and it’s the spot I’d actually recommend for lunch over anywhere your itinerary sheet lists by default. Shigatse itself, Tibet’s second largest city, is worth an evening walk if your legs have adjusted; it has a noticeably different pace than Lhasa, quieter and much less touristed.

Day 6: Return to Lhasa or Everest Base Camp

This is the day your agency will have pre-agreed with you, since the two routes genuinely don’t combine. Returning to Lhasa retraces the Yamdrok Lake road and gives you a second, calmer look at the lake without the first-day awe wearing off entirely. Pushing on to Everest Base Camp instead means several more hours of driving on rougher roads at higher elevation, arriving at Rongbuk, the highest monastery in the world at around 5,000 metres, with a direct, unobstructed view of the north face of Everest if the sky stays clear, which it often doesn’t in cloudier months. I’d only recommend the Base Camp extension for travelers who are already acclimatizing well and have built slack into the schedule; going there wiped out and hoping for the best is how people end up needing supplemental oxygen partway through. Warm layers are not optional even in summer, since nights at that elevation drop well below freezing.

Day 7: Departure

Your guide and driver take you back to Lhasa Gonggar for the flight out, and it’s worth building in the same 40 to 60 minute buffer for the return trip that you used on arrival, since checkpoints along the airport road run in both directions. Keep a printed or digital copy of your Tibet Travel Permit accessible until you’ve cleared the final checkpoint before departures; agencies collect the paperwork afterward, but losing track of it mid-transfer is a genuinely common last-day headache that’s easy to avoid by just keeping it in an outer pocket rather than buried in checked luggage.