Few places on the Earth remain truly off the beaten path – a pilgrimage trek into the heart of the Salween and Mekong watershed is one of them. At the center of this journey is a 14-day Kora around the snow-capped peak of Mt. Khawakarpo (6,740m), revered throughout the Tibetan realm as far east as Ladakh, the Little Tibet of India.
Associated with Tibetan Buddhism’s saint-magician Padmasambhava, the mountain stands at the watershed region of the Mekong, Salween and Yangtze rivers in the southern tip of the Tibetan plateau in an area with the highest biodiversity in the world. This trip not only provides a rare insight into the life and culture of the Tibetans in southern Kham but above all inspires one wanting to pursue exploring more of this remote region bordering northern Burma, northwestern Yunnan, southern Kham and western Sichuan, as it were the waterways of these mighty rivers that mankind followed in ancient past downstream, to heart of China and south-east Asia, and from there into the Philippine and Indonesian archipelago and elsewhere from there.
Over the months to come I hope to weave a picture blending the cultural diversity and natural riches of remote and lesser-known places of the world that should be on one’s must see list, certainly before it’s too late and they too may vanish under the cloud of globalization and uniformity. On the one hand I hope to inspire one to travel, on the other by possibly alerting one to opportunities one may find in and about in whatever the part of the world in general, one may get roused to reinvent oneself overseas.