I started everything when I was 22. The impetus for the first adventure
(biking through Japan) had to do with a failed relationship, but it was more than just having my heart broken. It was realizing that I hadn`t done anything that I wanted to do for three years but support this person, who was a manic depressive.
When I was a kid and all through high school and even when I went to college, I was the sort of person who initiated projects, but never had the patience to follow through. I guess I was really restless. The one thing I learned from that relationship is perseverance. I realized that if I could do that for three years, live someone else`s life for him, surely I could do what I really wanted to do.
I was always pretty adventurous as a kid, but it`s something that evolved over time, (rather) than something that suddenly struck me on one day. I`ve always been attracted to the outdoors, I love being outside. I am much more at home and peaceful in surroundings that are rustic.
When I first saw National Geographic, I thought that would be the ultimate thing to do, to be a photographer for them. It wasn`t so much the photography. That came later. It was the fact that obviously that was how you got into those cultures and into those bizarre places.
After I had visited Tibet by bus but before I started walking, I met a very respected anthropologist and linguist. He lived in Tibet, and had married a Tibetan. He had taken some trips out along the way I was going. He said,
”You could practically die out there. The nomads won`t have anything to do with you. They won`t want to know who you are. They won`t feed you.” And I just thought, ”That doesn`t sound like the Tibetans I`ve learned anything about.” There were pilgrims coming into Lhasa and there was nothing in their nature that suggested to me that they were going to be inhospitable.
Because I was walking across Tibet, I was more approachable than someone in a car. I mean, there are no roads out there to begin with. It`s not traffic like Chicago`s. You`ve got to figure this place is really desolate. So I was a more approachable entity to start with. I was on my own, and as far as they could understand, I was a pilgrim, and a pilgrim is something that you help along and provide for with good wishes and prayers. At bottom, I didn`t see myself as someone who would incite people to show aggression.
I was right. The incredible thing about those people was I never even had to ask for help. They just knew when I needed help, and they got in there with me. When the nomads I was with would come up to another tribe and say to the next group, ”Oh, she needs to get to such and such a place, would you give her a hand?” they just did it. It was just amazing.
The first nomads I stayed with made an impression that will remain with me forever. I was just walking by and they sort of looked at me as though (to say), ”Come in.” I mean there was no one around, and they sort of sensed me coming for miles and miles. It was really weird just to walk up and find all these people waiting for me outside their tents.
I was always immediately treated to a cup of tea made of rancid yak butter and salt. It`s disgusting at first, but you get kind of addicted to it, although the taste doesn`t last.
I started learning Tibetan as soon as I got out among the people. The language varies from nomad tribe to tribe. It`s a really broken language; you don`t speak in whole sentences. Their whole lives are centered around what you can see-the crops, the flocks, the mountains, the environment. That`s excluding the spiritual language, Sanskrit, which is universal and more descriptive. There was one basic question people asked all the time: ”Where are you going?” You work out what they are saying. What they usually wondered about was how on Earth I was doing it alone. They thought that was a bit weird-not that I was a woman.
When I started the trip, I had this idea I was going to take the southern route. That would have been a snack, a piece of cake. There was a track over land and I wouldn`t have gotten lost. But a week into the journey I discovered the southern route had been cut by floodwaters and I would either have to sit still for a month and wait for them to subside, or go up to the north. I made this detour of 1,500 kilometers.
I also had no idea what I was walking into. I headed up into the Gangdise Range to get back to the southern route, and I presumed I`d just get over the Gangdise and down the other side. If I hadn`t run into nomad camps, I would have been lost. There was no way I could have gotten through the range alone. The first nomads (she encountered) passed me on to the next camp and so on.
Well, we got up into the mountains-we slowly started going up-and there wasn`t much snow at first. After a couple of days we reached another nomad camp. Then we really got up into the Gangdise. We climbed up into these mountains-and rather than going down, they just leveled off into this amazing, daunting sight-more mountains, higher mountains and huge snowfields.
We made camp that night and this huge blizzard came through. We were walking through thigh-deep snow and there were no trails. We had been in the mountains for a few days when the blizzard hit. We couldn`t stay there because there was nothing for the yaks to eat. I mean yaks can go a few days without food, but not long. We were carrying a little food for them and carrying dried yak dung to start our own fires.
We thought we were going to get across in one day. As it happened, these nomads really didn`t have a clue where we were. They hadn`t ever gone up that high. Why`d they go up? View, I guess. No, they went up just to help me. They weren`t making that trip for any other reason than to get me across.
After the blizzard, we found that we had walked in a circle for three days. That`s how I got snow blindness, because on the fourth day, the sun came out and then it was so obvious the way we should have gone. I had lost my sunglasses somewhere. With the sun beaming down on the snow and it taking (us) so long to get through, I just got snow blindness.
I got up one morning and couldn`t see. My eyes had been getting really sore the day before, and by the time morning came around again I was blind. I was also nursing three broken fingers; I was incredibly exhausted and my face was just a mess with frostbite. My skin was coming off in big hunks and it was really itchy. I was covered with flea bites. That was pretty low. The nomads cared for me for three days until I could see again.
At the end of the Gangdise Range, I was holding onto a horse`s tail, walking along, and I had my hat down over my face, because I didn`t want to get blinded again. I was peeking through the knitting. We reached this point at the tip of the pass and one of the nomads with me said, ”Have a look.”
And I saw land without snow on it and was absolutely delighted, because we had completely run out of everything. We camped on the way down the slope. We`d run out of yak dung to start fires and we didn`t have paper.
At that point, I said to myself, ”Well, I`m not going to need my map anymore,” because I thought this was it, this was the end of the detour, and that down below was the southern route. I was so high, so incredibly happy, that I used half the map to get the fire started. (At this time, she was accompanied by two nomads who had left their camp to help her get across.)
Well, the next day comes around and we start heading down the mountain and we see that there`s no road down below. I thought, ”Where the hell are we?” We walked across this plain, and finally we saw a nomad camp in the distance. The nomads were about a half mile ahead, and as I approached, I noticed something strange-that they hadn`t been invited into the nomad camp.
So I walk up to the camp and there`s this nomad screaming and yelling and carrying on and throwing my packs off the horse. He wanted no part of my being in this place. He was saying (in effect), ”No way, I am not going to show her anything.”
Meanwhile, the two nomads I`d been with had to turn back. There were snowclouds coming, and these two guys quite understandably had to get back to their families (on the other side of the mountains); otherwise they would have been stuck there for the whole of winter. So while this new guy was saying,
”I won`t have anything to do with her,” and I was without a map and not knowing where I was-these two jumped on their horses and disappeared over the hills.
I didn`t know which way to turn, left or right. So I just lay down and cried. I banged my head into the ground for two hours. Then at the end of that I said, ”Well, I`m still here; nothing`s changed.” The nomad had walked off and left me there.
I pitched my tent near (the nomads`) camp in the end. And I finally did find my way to the road. There were a lot of women in the nomad camp, and almost no men. All the men from the camp had gone to trade, and left this one man in charge, and he didn`t want to have to go running off for a day. But he came around. He rode with me to the road. To finally see the track was incredible.
I never turned back for the very reason I was there. I was there to walk across Tibet and not to just give up.
And I was so far in. Tibet`s not the sort of country where you can just stand there and hail a cab and say, ”Get me out of here.” I also hate it when people come up to you after such a thing and say ”See, I told you so; I told you wouldn`t make it.” I had to prove those suckers wrong. There were a few who said I was crazy. But anything that`s worthwhile is usually pretty crazy, isn`t it?
I picked up some of the Tibetan spirituality on the journey and combined it with mine. While I walked, I relied on a sort of trinity: God, Buddha and me. I also realized that it wasn`t just Buddha and God controlling where I was going, looking after me; it was myself as well. That`s my philosophy: I have control over my own destiny.
Faith is the key word. You have to have faith, particularly when you`re in a situation that`s just so extreme and bizarre and isolated. If you don`t have faith that you will get through to the end, you`re in trouble. If you don`t have faith that you will get through to the end, you`re in trouble. It`s faith in an energy, maybe. That energy for me came from the God I understood, the Tibetan Buddha that I understood through the kindness of the Tibetan people, and the energy that I knew I had in myself. It was that trinity.
