7 Days: Lhasa and Tibet

Seven days gets you the one thing a shorter trip can’t: room to go past the city limits without gambling on your acclimatization, ending at Shigatse’s Tashilhunpo Monastery with a spare morning to spare. This is the full version of our 6-day plan ; a valid Chinese visa gets you nowhere here on its own, so the paperwork below matters as much as the route.

Book these before you go

Day Focus Distance from Lhasa
Day 1 Arrival, permit logistics, Barkhor kora In city
Day 2 Potala Palace, Jokhang Temple In city
Day 3 Ganden Monastery day trip ~90 min each way
Day 4 Sera Monastery, Drepung Monastery (recovery day) In city
Day 5 Yamdrok Lake day trip 3-4 hours each way
Day 6 Shigatse, Tashilhunpo Monastery ~half-day drive
Day 7 Barkhor farewell morning, departure In city

Day 1: Arrival, and Lhasa’s two faces

You need a Tibet Travel Permit, arranged only through a licensed agency, and a guide attached to your itinerary for the entire stay, no independent travel allowed at any point, standard processing runs 8-10 working days so send documents 20-30 days out. Fly into Lhasa Gonggar Airport, about an hour from downtown, or take the Qinghai-Tibet Railway, oxygen fed into the cabin as it crosses the Tanggula Pass above 5,000 meters. Both flights and trains check your permit before you’re allowed to board, so keep it clipped to your passport.

The city itself will surprise you. Step into the newer districts and it’s wide boulevards, malls, Han-run businesses, glass hotel towers. Walk a short distance toward the Barkhor and it flips entirely: whitewashed old-town buildings, prayer flags strung overhead, incense smoke, pilgrims prostrating on worn stone. Keep the pace gentle today, altitude sickness at 3,656 meters is common in the first 24-48 hours, so hydrate, skip alcohol, and stick to something light like the Barkhor kora. Get your VPN running tonight and make sure you’ve got cash or Alipay sorted.

Day 2: Potala Palace and Jokhang Temple

The Potala Palace runs a capped, real-name reservation system, roughly 2,300 tickets a day, no same-day sales at the gate, sold out routinely in peak season, so your agency needs this locked in well before you’ve even packed. Inside, expect a strict window of about an hour through the Red and White Palaces, once the seat of the Dalai Lamas, dense with chapels and burial stupas. Jokhang Temple in the afternoon is the spiritual center of Tibetan Buddhism, pilgrims prostrating outside, mantras murmured inside, and a firm no-photos rule on the chapel interiors and Buddha images.

Day 3: Ganden Monastery

By day three you’ve banked two full days of city-level acclimatization, exactly the buffer needed before pushing higher to Ganden Monastery , around 4,300 meters and 90 minutes out. The ridge-top kora and views down the valley up there are worth every extra meter of altitude.

Day 4: Sera Monastery and Drepung Monastery, a recovery day

Time Sera Monastery for the afternoon monk debating session, running most days Monday through Saturday, monks slapping their palms together to punctuate philosophical points in a dusty courtyard. Drepung Monastery, once the largest monastery on the planet with more than 10,000 monks at its peak, deserves a slow climb through its whitewashed colleges. Both stay at city altitude, deliberately, before tomorrow’s bigger push.

Day 5: Yamdrok Lake

Yamdrok Lake , turquoise and glacier-fed, reached via the Kamba La pass at nearly 4,800 meters, is roughly 3-4 hours each way through some of the most striking scenery you’ll see in Tibet. Give it the full day; rushing back early defeats the point of coming this far.

Day 6: Shigatse and Tashilhunpo Monastery

This is the day the extra time buys you. Shigatse, roughly a half-day’s drive, is the classic use of an Aliens’ Travel Permit beyond your standard Tibet Travel Permit, though the requirement is genuinely unsettled right now: some sources describe a June 2025 exemption for the Shigatse route, others as recent as March 2026 still list it as required, so confirm current status with your agency rather than assuming. Tashilhunpo Monastery there, seat of the Panchen Lama, has its own scale and atmosphere distinct from anything in Lhasa, and getting there without the crush of a rushed single day makes a real difference.

Don’t let anyone talk you into stretching this trip further out to Everest Base Camp on the Tibet side. It sits above 5,200 meters, needs its own extra permit paperwork and multiple additional days, and doing it as a bolt-on to a seven-day trip without proper acclimatization time is the single most common way travelers wreck the last stretch of an otherwise great week. Shigatse gives you the “beyond Lhasa” experience without that gamble.

Day 7: Barkhor farewell morning, then departure

Spend the morning shopping the Barkhor for souvenirs (bargaining is expected and half the fun) and one last stop at a sweet tea house, a tian cha guan, where locals sit over a thermos of sweet milky tea playing cards, a different scene entirely from the salty yak butter tea you tried earlier in the week. Head to the airport or station with real buffer time built in. Your Tibet Travel Permit gets checked again before boarding on the way out, exactly as it was on the way in, so keep it out and accessible rather than digging through a packed bag at the counter.

Worth knowing

A Tibet Travel Permit and a guide for the entire trip are mandatory for every foreign passport except Hong Kong and Macau, arranged through a licensed agency 20-30 days ahead, more like 25-30+ in the April-October peak. Carry cash, since Alipay and WeChat dominate and foreign cards rarely work outside the biggest hotels, and set up a VPN before you land. If you’d rather spend all seven days inside the city instead of chasing altitude, our 7-day Lhasa itinerary covers that version of the trip.