As you know, visiting the unopened area only with the TTB permit is not enough. Military Permit is additional needed if your itinerary included some military sensitive places, including Ngari (Mt. Kailash, Lake Manasarovar, etc), Nyingchi (Pomi, Rawu, etc.) and some remote places in Shannan area. For Tholing and Tsaparang in western Tibet you will also need a permit from the local Cultural Antiquities Department.
Please note that if you are planning to visit some military sensitive areas or Tibet border such as Mt Kailash and eastern Tibet also require a military permit and a foreign-affairs permit. Besides the places such as Nagri, Nyingchi or some ares in Shannan, there are some overland tours to Lhasa from Chengdu or Yunnan or Xining or Xinjiang Province, also the Military permits are needed, most importantly, you are going to need the military permit before you start your overland tour, not upon your arrival in Lhasa.
The Military permit is applied through travel agency before you entering Tibet and issued by the Military office in Lhasa. It is absolutely needed for travel to Ngari, Nyingchi (outside Nyingchi township) and Nagqu prefecture which are regarded as military sensitive areas.
For visiting sites like Yarlung Tsangpo Gorges at Nyingchi area or Lamo Latso Lake at Shannam area, please note that the permit for visiting there usually would not be granted. Most of the time those places are closed to foreign foreigners. But for other places in Tibet, even Nagri area, no problem at all.
So any of those places mentioned above included in your tour package, we will arrange all the necessary permits for you.
The Military permit arrangement procedures takes about 2 weeks, so if and of those sites included in your travel itinerary, you are highly suggested to plan the trip at least 30 days prior the departure date.
The military permit itself is free of charge but the whole arrangement procedures takes a long time and the travel agency needs to do a lot of errands to get it. Although it would lead to some running cost, but as long as you confirmed one of those tour with them, the tour package should already included the permit arrangement, so it is part of our job to get it for you. :P
Areas Require Military Permit
Note: If you take a flight to Ngari from Lhasa, Urumqi or Kashgar, you will have to have Tibet Military Permit. Overlanding trip from Sichuan, Yunnan, Xinjiang or Qinghai to Tibet also require Tibet Military Permit.
What does a Military permit look like:
Note: The permit situation is subject to rapid and unpredictable change. Contact us directly to get the current situation at once.
