Book: To a Mountain in Tibet by Colin Thubron

The mountain is Mt. Kailas. It is 22,000 feet high, and has never been climbed. It is in western Tibet just east of India and just north of Nepal. If one looks on a map, it is where the borders of these three countries converge. Mt. Kailas is "sacred to one-fifth of humankind...both Buddhists and Hindu." To not have known this amazing fact is humbling. Complicating his trek are concerns about whether the Chinese will allow them into Tibet. Mr. Thubron is a strong and sturdy traveler. While he does hire a couple of guides and carriers, he makes the journey on foot.

All through my reading of this book and increasingly so as both the book and the actual trek progressed, I was struck with how un-American it was, not in a bad way, but in a way that brought into focus another culture and people who live without technology, roads, electricity, medical care, comfort as we define comfort, ease of mobility.... Many books do this, but NOTHING seemed familiar to me, and the author seemed not bothered with the lack of modernity, which to my mind is the mark of a true wanderer. He accepted this world and was respectful of it. He struggles to understand and learn about the mystery of Mt. Kailas and why it has become symbolic and sacred.

He walks through a world of wild beauty, of dangerous beauty, often harsh, with raging rivers and precipitous trails on talus slopes, enduring cold, wind, snow and oxygen depletion, through a landscape of prayer flags and prayer wheels and other pilgrims. He is intrepid and continues with his goal of walking around Mt. Kailas; this circling journey is a kora. He seeks a connection with all that has happened before in this place and also with his personal familial history. His sister died on a mountain when she was young; his aged mother recently has died.

"...for long minutes I am slumped on rocks, gasping, my legs gone...Then my trekking pole snaps in the shale. I think: if things are like this at 11,000 feet, how will they be over 18,500, where I am going?...Suddenly...I feel the air too thin to sustain me. Nothing remains but this thread of oxygen It is not enough. Barely enough. Faint, I am lying on stones. The air is receding from me, everything depleted. My breath is rasping sobs."

He learns from those along the way, from the monks, the other pilgrims, from the villagers and from his sherpas. He recalls what he has read and recounts histories we are never taught, stories and myths of which we are not aware, and in this narrative I learned of a mountain whose name I never had heard before.

The book is part adventure, part history, part world religion, part anthropology and geography, part modern geopolitics....

"They are all Bhotias and local Tibetans now, swarthy, wild-faced men whose backs are sheathed in fleeces and yak pelts and foreheads rumpled by headbands to steady their toppling loads."

As I said, this book was filled with new images and stories, the physical adventure vicariously enjoyed, offering glimpses into other realities, never a bad thing for any of us.