Overland travel from China via Nepal to India - will a month be enough?

I am going on my gap year with a Round The World ticket but I am planning to travel overland as much as I can. I am starting in Beijing and going by train and bus via Kathmandu to Delhi in what seems to me a fairly straight-forward path, taking in sights on the way but also going past less touristy places. Has anyone travelled from China to India and do you think a month is long enough for this journey without rushing things?

I think a month is enough, but it would be a little bit troublesome to travel to Nepal from Tibet.

Oh, I can only envy you that you can travel around the world at what must be a young age.

First, right now Tibet is mostly closed to tourists. You cannot be sure that you can get permission to enter Tibet, and even with the right papers you may get turned away, or not allowed to go overland on the roads you want to go on.

When you travel you should keep in mind that just moving is not an end in itself, you want to get to know the people and the cultures. One can experience the beauty and culture of the Tibetan people in Sichuan province in the west, and then drop down into Yunnan. I think you would enjoy bicycling through Yunnan and into Laos, stopping along the way. Yunnan has some beautiful scenery and fascinating people and culture that you should see while you are there, and you could spend a month or two enjoying that before going to southeast Asia. See Laos and Vietnam and Thailand and Malaysia and Indonesia, all by bicycle.

Theoretically your proposition is not infeasible, but there are practical difficulties.

The journey from Lhasa to Kathmandu is very tiring and you cannot make it in one go. You will need several stoppages in between. Definitely eats up lot of your time and you keep rushing up without seeing the tourist attractions.

Second most important point is that as a foreigner you cannot travel within Tibet on your own. You have to be part of a group and the tour has to be conducted by a travel agency approved by Chinese government. That means you cannot decide the places you want to visit in Tibet, they will decide your travel plan. You cannot decide to dump the group mid-way and carry on with your own plan for travel to Kathmandu.

Next is whether Tibet will be open to foreigners or not? They keep imposing restrictions to the entry of foreigners. Right now the entry is restricted.

Without all these hurdles I would say one month is just so so. Most of your time will be taken between the journey from Lhasa to Kathmandu as the roads are not great and its a hilly region. There are frequent landslides particularly in rainy season which force the traffic to stop for several hours at a stretch. Keep that in mind.

Watch out with Tibet,I just got back from India and heard travellers saying that not only have they got to be in a group,they had to be the same nationality as well at the moment.One guy couldn't get in cos he was travelling with a bunch of German people.
That time with that distance.......by land....hmmmm,you'll be exhausted from the travelling a lot of the time.I personally wouldn't recommend it.Even one month in India is no where near enough,you'd really see nothing in that time.Why not just stick to one country?.

[miniwalk]

Great Trip.