Tag Archives: tea and mountains
Tea Horse Road Chronicles – Choices, No Choices, and some Courage
Ascending up to the Sho La Pass in northwestern Yunnan in May there would always be a chance of weather issues, but it would still be a surprise when, even at the relatively kind altitudes of 3000 metres, the skies … Continue reading
Tea Horse Road Chronicles – Tea and Bloodlines
On foot our team of four puttered and wandered west (often faintly lost) through the Nyanqen Tanghla mountains in Tibet towards Lhasa. Highlights seemed on some days to be every single breath and moment. On other days, the grind of … 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
Tea Horse Road Chronicles – The Crossing
One of the gems of old world Himalayan transport and the Tea Horse Road in particular was the yak hide ‘ferry’ that would take tea, salt, mules and journeyers across waterways where there were no bridges. It still does operate … Continue reading
New Website – New Platform – Same Mountains, Tea, and Characters
After many years of slight technological delinquency, I’ve spruced up my existing website and brought it into something resembling a 21st Century site. Still the images and characters and tea embed every post; now though there is more written content on … Continue reading