LHASA - It was the loud man with the megaphone, herding us relentlessly onto the buses, who symbolized the worst of our escorted tour of Tibet.

The official press tour is one of the rituals of Communist China, as time-honored as the ceremony to raise the Chinese flag at Tiananmen Square every morning. It's far from the ideal way to gather news.

But with Tibet still tightly sealed off from the outside world, I accepted an invitation to join a government-sponsored press tour to Lhasa this weekend, realizing it was the only way to get even a limited glimpse into this locked-down region.

It was only the second time that foreign journalists have been permitted to enter Tibet since the wave of sometimes-bloody protests that began on March 10, so I was keen to get a first-hand look into the forbidden territory.

But an official press tour can be a humiliating experience. Our itinerary was filled with weirdly irrelevant events, including a handicrafts exhibition, a visit to a tourist village, and a press conference to announce a performance of traditional dance. The man with the megaphone was constantly barking at us, hectoring us to move faster. The schedule was packed with activity from 7:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m., to keep us busy and distracted from the real news.

Every moment was pre-programmed. To ensure that we didn't miss anything, we were given unsolicited wake-up calls at 6:15 a.m., urging us out of bed and into the program.

We were lodged in a government hotel, far from the historic centre of Lhasa, to make it even harder for us to have any independent contact with monks or other malcontents.

At the allocated time for dinner on Friday, I managed to slip away from the hotel and hail a taxi to the old town, where I was able to see the massive security presence, including thousands of paramilitary police in camouflage uniforms, in advance of the Olympic torch relay the next day. There were paramilitary troops and regular police on every corner.

A few other journalists also slipped away from the hotel. The next day, we were reprimanded by a government minder, who claimed to be worried about our personal safety. “This is Lhasa,” she warned ominously. “You could get lost, you could be detained. It could happen anywhere, particularly Lhasa. When you're out, we're really concerned. Anything could happen.”

When I protested that Lhasa seemed perfectly safe – especially with police stationed on every street corner – the minder made a vague reference to “intelligence” reports about possible attacks.

(The official minders were a constant source of disinformation. When asked why all the shops near the Olympic torch route were shuttered on Saturday, one minder claimed that Lhasa's shops are always closed on Saturdays.)

The truth is, of course, that the Chinese authorities don't want the foreign media to talk to Tibetans who are unhappy with Chinese rule. The monks, who led the March protests, were kept far out of sight during the press tour. One journalist found a monk in a back corner of the Sera monastery. He said nothing, but burst quietly into tears.

I talked to a few Tibetan shopkeepers near the Jokhang temple, the holiest Tibetan temple at the heart of Lhasa's old town. They were too wary to say much – but they made it clear they were suffering greatly from China's decision to prohibit foreign tourists from entering Tibet.

After I filed my first story on Friday, I took a quick look at the Globe's website. China's censors had blocked my story. The first few paragraphs were visible on my screen, but then it ended in mid-sentence and the website crashed. It was a strange irony: I was invited, but censored.

It's interesting to recall that China promised full press freedom as one of its pledges to the International Olympic Committee when it was awarded the 2008 Olympics. With more and more of China effectively barred to journalists – including Tibet, the ethnically Tibetan regions of western China, and now even some parts of the Sichuan earthquake zone – the pledge of press freedom seems to be fading every day.

A footnote on the press tour: the Chinese state media have claimed that 29 foreign media organizations were invited to Lhasa for the torch relay. What they didn't mention was the peculiar composition of the press contingent.

Not a single newspaper from the United States or Britain was invited. The group was heavily weighted towards TV crews. Geography was apparently the main criteria, with one media organization invited from each major country. The U.S. was represented only by an NBC crew, while the New York Times and Washington Post were excluded. Britain was represented by a BBC crew, while nobody was allowed from the Times, the Telegraph or the Guardian. Almost half of the invited journalists were from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau.