Postcard from nowhere inside the Tibetan Autonomous Region (permits denied!)

After hanging around Zhongdian for three extra days (way too long, even if this is Shangri-la), waiting and hoping to board a direct flight to Lhasa, the powers that be in the Land of Snows finally got around to looking at our month-old permit applications. And apparently, they didn’t like what they saw.

Stuck inside of Shangri-la with them Lhasa blues again

We’re in northern Yunnan’s Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, which these days is infamously billed (and officially renamed) by the local government as the ‘true’ Shangri-la of fictional fame. We’re hoping to catch a flight from here to the next phase of our trip: Lhasa, in the now strictly controlled Tibetan Autonomous Region to the northwest. Since June 20th, the TAR is officially re-open to most of us nasty foreigners (with certain conditions, and excluding a few particularly sinister nationalities, like the Dutch). But our permit applications have still not been approved (or rejected!), so now we wait.