Category Archives: Explorations
Tea Horse Road Chronicles – Fields vs Forests
Blankets and ridges of green stimulant leaf lie in rows near Puerh. Here the leaf is entirely industry. Gorgeous industry, but still industry. Local Hani, Han, Yi, Lahu, and Dai pluckers shimmy through the humid air to pluck, pluck, and … Continue reading
Tea Horse Road Chronicles – Empress of Cloth
Ponzera, or Benzilan as it is now known, is a small valley town in northwestern Yunnan that lies alongside a headwater stream of the Yangtze River. For its size and population, its contributions to the Tea Horse Road spanned vast … Continue reading
Tea Horse Road Chronicles – Way Out, and Out Again
Yeshi and I shared tea with this old memory palace of time. Goat milk and butter were used instead of yak variations. The tea was deadly but his memories as he recounted the days of watching caravans along a portion … Continue reading
Tea Horse Road Chronicles – There Are No Straight Lines Through the Mountains
Not heeding the warnings of Sonam Gelek; I should have known better at this stage of our journey than to plunge onwards without his counsel…but onwards I plunged. Consistently accurate and intuitive, Sonam had warned against our team traversing a … Continue reading
Tea Horse Chronicles – Tea’s Value
“Tea is our everything. I don’t know where it comes from but we take it every day in the morning, afternoon, and night. Our children learn to make it when they are young but we must help them get the … Continue reading
Tea Horse Road Chronicles – Jokhang Boyz
At various times all of these gents were pivotal characters along the journey and in my life. The slim and polite denim-clad Sonam (at far right) belies one of the most ferocious wills and straight up strongmen that I’ve had the pleasure of knowing and journeying with. Amongst this group he was the only one on every one of those 52 days and nights of journeying on the Lhasa portion and he would be a partner on dozens of subsequent mountain journeys. Continue reading
Tea Horse Road Chronicles – A Gathering of Women
Nomadic women of Ganze gather on a grassland to take part in a horse festival. It was through and over such high grasslands that the Tea Horse Road moved towards Dzogong, Chamdo, Lhasa and beyond. Nomads and their lands were … Continue reading