Himalayan Pilgrimage

Description change have always meant a great deal to me. I grew up in Austria, and I am grateful for the things that mountains have taught me – awareness, endurance, and discipline, all of which are so important in life. My interest in exploring the Himalaya was therefore motivated not only by geography and my profession as a photographer but also by a fact that had long intrigued that the highest mountains in the world seemed to have inspired the highest levels of the human spirit. Even during my initial visit to the Himalaya I found myself becoming less and less interested in climbing the highest peaks, and more and more interested in absorbing the wisdom of the people who lived at the top of the world. Symbolic of this dual sensation of height, the external and the internal, is the photograph on the jacket of this book, which shows the Lamas to be even higher than the mountains. Because of Tibet’s isolation from the rest of the world, I had expected the Tibetans to be quaint, or at least strange, and because they had fled from their native soil in 1959, I was also prepared to find them bitter, sullen, and withdrawn. They weren’t that way at all. Like so many Westerners before me, I was surprised and totally captivated by them. They seemed so unspoiled, so unpolluted by the mechanical world. They radiated such deep faith, dignity, tolerance, and gentleness and displayed such a delicious sense of humor that for me it was love at first sight. (from the Introduction)