Tibet's Saga Dawa: Everest and Kailash Circuit
Duration
14 Days
Difficulty
Challenging
Location Overview
Where Asia's Rivers Begin
Tibet rides the highest and largest plateau on earth, roughly 2.5 million square kilometres thrown up by the collision of India with Asia and still rising, its crust thickened to around 70 kilometres and its average elevation above 4,500 metres. Tens of thousands of glaciers here form the Third Pole, the largest store of ice outside the Arctic and Antarctic, feeding ten of Asia's great rivers and the 1.9 billion people who live in their basins. Wild yak, kiang and the Tibetan antelope graze the Changtang steppe. And in Lhasa, at 3,650 metres, pilgrims have been walking the same circuit around the Jokhang since the seventh century.
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Where Asia's Rivers Begin
Chapter 01 / 03
The Tibetan Plateau is the largest and highest landform on the planet and it is not finished. Around fifty million years ago the Indian subcontinent drove into Eurasia, and the collision continues today at a rate instruments can measure. The crust beneath Tibet has been thickened to roughly seventy kilometres, close to double the continental average, and pushed upward into some 2.5 million square kilometres of high ground averaging over 4,500 metres.
The plateau is walled by the Himalaya to the south, the Kunlun to the north and the Karakoram to the west. Along its southern rim stands Everest, Chomolungma to Tibetans, remeasured jointly by China and Nepal in 2020 at 8,848.86 metres. The uplift rewrote the climate of a continent, driving the monsoon and casting the rain shadow that made the interior the cold arid steppe it is today. Standing on the Changtang, you are on some of the youngest high ground on earth.
Tibetan Buddhism is visible across the landscape before it is explained. Samye, the first monastery, was founded around 775 CE by King Trisong Detsen with the Indian masters Padmasambhava and Shantarakshita, and laid out as a mandala of the Buddhist universe. The seventh-century Jokhang in Lhasa remains the holiest temple in Tibet, its threshold worn smooth by centuries of prostrating pilgrims.
The great Gelug institutions came later: Ganden in 1409, Drepung in 1416, Sera in 1419, each once housing thousands of monks. Above the city rises the Potala Palace, begun in 1645 under the Fifth Dalai Lama on a hill fortified since Songtsen Gampo's time, with over a thousand rooms and some two hundred thousand statues. It served as the seat of Tibetan government until 1959. The Potala, the Jokhang and the Norbulingka together form a UNESCO World Heritage Site, inscribed in 1994 and extended twice since.
No landscape matters more to Asia's water. The plateau holds the greatest concentration of glaciers outside the poles and feeds ten major river systems, among them the Yangtze, the Yellow, the Mekong, the Brahmaputra and the Indus. Around 1.9 billion people live in those basins, roughly a fifth of humanity.
The Third Pole is warming faster than almost anywhere. Ice-core work published in Nature puts the rate at about 0.3 degrees Celsius per decade over the past half century, two to three times the global average, and found that roughly 82 percent of the plateau's glaciers have retreated over fifty years. Satellite analysis published in 2025 estimates around 340 gigatonnes of glacial mass lost between 2000 and 2018. Black carbon settling on the snow darkens it and speeds the melt. ICIMOD projects that even holding warming to 1.5 degrees would still cost the wider region about a third of its ice by 2100.
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Plan Your Journey
Thin air, hard light, and a monsoon that mostly falls at night
The driest and clearest of the travel months, and the best window for Everest. Days warm steadily, the plateau greens, and wildflowers open across the valleys before the summer crowds arrive. Nights stay cold at altitude, so pack for both. Kailash becomes walkable from May.
The warmest and greenest season, and the busiest with domestic travellers. Most rain falls overnight and many days stay bright, but road washouts and flight delays become more likely and the Himalaya can disappear behind cloud for days. Book early and build in slack.
Arguably the best time to come. The monsoon retreats, visibility becomes exceptional, and temperatures stay comfortable through the day. Autumn colour sets off the monasteries, Everest views are reliably sharp, and the crowds thin noticeably after the first week of October.
Cold, bright and almost empty. Days are crisp and clear with excellent light, prices fall, and Lhasa fills with Tibetan pilgrims rather than tourists. Nights are severe, some high passes and remote sites close, and March has historically carried a risk of the region closing to foreigners at short notice.
Annual Overview
Lhasa has a high-altitude semi-arid climate with over 3,000 hours of sunshine a year and large swings between day and night. More than ninety percent of the roughly 450mm of annual rain falls between June and September, and most of it falls after dark, so summer days stay largely clear.
| Jan Shoulder | Feb Shoulder | Mar Shoulder | Apr Peak | May Peak | Jun Peak | Jul Good | Aug Good | Sep Peak | Oct Peak | Nov Shoulder | Dec Shoulder |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 45° | 48° | 54° | 61° | 67° | 73° | 72° | 71° | 68° | 61° | 53° | 46° |
Locations
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Shanghai, China
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