Flights operate daily from Chengdu and cost ¥1200. At the time of writing, you could not buy a flight without being booked onto a tour. The tour operators around the Traffic Hotel in Chengdu run a price-hiking cartel. Their cheapest tour, which includes your flight, four days in a budget hotel, and a bus to Golmud, is ¥3000. A week-long tour with a flight back to Chengdu is ¥4400. Independent operators in Chengdu who offer cheaper deals have been beaten up or threatened, and have asked not to be listed here for their own safety. The tour operators will greatly exaggerate the difficulty of independent travel in Tibet; don't believe anything they say and talk to other travellers instead. The most painless way to get in is simply to take their cheapest tour and miss your return. Once you're actually in Tibet, you are fairly independent.

Flights from Kathmandu leave twice weekly (Tues & Sat), but you'll be able to buy an airline ticket in Kathmandu for Lhasa only if you're booked on a tour through a travel agent there (upwards of US$300 for seven days, with flight costs on top). If you don't already have a Chinese visa, you'll be issued a group visa. You can change this to an individual visa in Lhasa but the process is complex, expensive (around ¥300) and depends on how well connected your travel agent is.

There are five weekly flights from Beijing , involving a change in Chengdu, but at the time of writing these could only be booked if you are on one of the very pricey tours arranged with the Tibet Tourism Bureau, obscurely located in the basement of the Poly Plaza. You are better off going to Chengdu and arranging your trip from there. A flight route has just opened between Xining and Lhasa. It remains to be seen whether this will prove useful to travellers, but it's worth checking out - there's little tourist traffic around here and the authorities might be a little slacker. Ring CITS and CAAC to check.

By far the best way to get into Tibet is to buy your Chengdu to Lhasa ticket outside China - there are rumoured to be Internet sites that sell them. You will pay the standard price and won't even have to buy a permit.

Overland routes are well established, although they can be physically taxing. From within China, Golmud to Lhasa (1160km) is the only officially permitted land route. CITS are the baddies here, charging an outrageous ¥1080 for a ticket. Some travellers have got around this by standing on the road outside Golmud, waiting for the bus, and then making a deal with the driver; others make shady deals with characters who hang around the bus station. It's worth trying, if only to put one over on CITS.

The overland routes from Sichuan (over 2000km from Chengdu to Lhasa), Yunnan (around 2400km from Kunming) and Kashgar (1100km to Ali) are strictly closed to foreigners, although a few intrepid travellers manage to get through. If you're caught by the authorities you may well be imprisoned, fined and/or deported and drivers caught transporting you face at the least large fines and maybe more serious trouble - some drivers have been given very severe beatings.

Overland from Kathmandu via Kodari on the Nepal side and Zhangmu on the Tibetan side is a popular option, but travellers are vulnerable to snap policy changes, and also to landslides in summer and snow-blocked passes in winter. Under no circumstances apply for a Chinese visa in Kathmandu if you want to travel independently to Tibet - the Chinese embassy will not issue these unless you are booked on an organized tour through a Kathmandu travel agent (expect to pay around US$380 for an organized seven-day tour going overland to Lhasa, plus US$190 for the Lhasa-Kathmandu flight), and even then you will only get a group visa, which doesn't allow you to travel independently. Independent travellers must have their Chinese visa before arrival in Kathmandu, and even then it's not straightforward; in 1998, regulations were tightened and Aliens' Travel Permits for the route to Lhasa (US$30) were being issued only if an organized tour through to the capital was booked. An agency that will group individual travellers together is Royal Mountain Trekking at Durbar Marg in Kathmandu (tel 241452), which charges US$260 for a five-day overland "tour" to Lhasa. They will tell you that a ticket out of Tibet is necessary, but some people who don't have one still get in. The best advice is to spend some time in Kathmandu to get a feel for the current situation and check out your options.

At the time of writing, cyclists on this route were unable to persuade the authorities to issue a permit without a tour, but this might change. If you're going to attempt it, bear in mind that most of the road between Zhangmu and Shigatse is unpaved and very rough. The altitude gain from Kodari to Zhangmu is 530m in about 9km, then 1450m in the 33km to Nyalam followed by a tough 1300m in the 57-kilometre climb to the Lalung Pass at 5050m. Allow around twenty days to cycle from Kathmandu to Lhasa. You'll need camping equipment, food (plus stove) and adequate warm-weather gear. Dogs are a particular hazard near villages.