From The Guardian:
Have you got six months off? Do you fancy a long walk? If so, World Expeditions may have just the holiday for you. They have become the only trekking outfit to offer a guided trip along the first completed section of the Great Himalayan Trail (GHT).
Stretching for 1,700km along the length of Nepal, the GHT will take you a mere 157 days to complete. You’ll see eight of the world’s 14 peaks over 8,000m, including Everest, and cross passes reaching up to 6,000m, climbing a total of 150,000m. That’s a Snowdon every day for half a year. Oh, and it will set you back £20,500.
The GHT isn’t the world’s longest long-distance footpath. The Continental Divide Trail in the US is 5,000km and the Trans Canada will be three times that. But this steroidal version of the Pennine Way looks like being the most coveted of all. Eventually, the trail’s originators hope it will stretch from the mighty 8,000m peak Nanga Parbat in Pakistan, considered the westernmost outlier of the Himalaya, to Namche Barwa in Tibet. It will connect five Asian countries – Bhutan, China, India, Nepal and Pakistan. More:
http://www.thegreathimalayatrail.org/
From the Guardian:
A pretty ultramarine blue flower which changes colour in response to temperature, a flying frog and the world’s oldest mushroom preserved in amber are among the 350 new species discovered in the Eastern Himalayas over the past 10 years. But experts warn the new discoveries are under pressure from demand for land and climate change.
A report published today by the WWF, The Eastern Himalayas – Where Worlds Collide, lists 242 new types of plants, 16 amphibians, 16 reptiles, 14 fish, two birds and two mammals and 61 new invertebrates. The cache, quality and diversity of species newly discovered between 1998 and 2008 make the mountainous region one of the world’s most important biological hotspots.
The WWF is asking the governments of Bhutan, India and Nepal to commit to cooperate on conservation efforts in the geographic region that transcends the borders of the three countries to protect the landscape and the livelihoods of people living in the Eastern Himalayas. More:
From Salon:
No aspect of Tibetan Buddhism is as well-known, or seems quite as mythological to outsiders, as the faith’s apparently literalistic belief in reincarnation. Taken as a whole, Buddhism is such a diverse and wide-ranging religion that it very nearly lacks any central doctrines or dogmas. Many Buddhists could be called nontheistic or even atheistic, and the widespread Buddhist belief in reincarnation takes many different forms. To some Zen Buddhists, for example, reincarnation is primarily a metaphor or a folkloric remnant.
But within the Tibetan Buddhist world, as we saw in Martin Scorsese’s powerful drama about the young Dalai Lama, “Kundun” — and as we now see in Israeli filmmaker Nati Baratz’s remarkable, vérité-style documentary “Unmistaken Child” — reincarnation is unmistakably real. That is, belief in reincarnation is unmistakably real. What are we actually seeing in Baratz’s film, when we watch a group of middle-aged monks identify a 2-year-old from a Nepalese mountain village as the “unmistaken child,” a newly reborn version of Geshe Lama Konchog, a world-famous Tibetan teacher who died in 2001? Like most Western, non-Buddhist viewers, I’m not quite sure, although I definitely incline toward a cultural or psychological explanation. More:
Pico Iyer in the New York Times:
“The beat of my heart has grown deeper, more active, and yet more peaceful, and it is as if I were all the time storing up inner riches…My [life] is one long sequence of inner miracles.” The young Dutchwoman Etty Hillesum wrote that in a Nazi transit camp in 1943, on her way to her death at Auschwitz two months later. Towards the end of his life, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen,” though by then he had already lost his father when he was 7, his first wife when she was 20 and his first son, aged 5. In Japan, the late 18th-century poet Issa is celebrated for his delighted, almost child-like celebrations of the natural world. Issa saw four children die in infancy, his wife die in childbirth, and his own body partially paralyzed.
I’m not sure I knew the details of all these lives when I was 29, but I did begin to guess that happiness lies less in our circumstances than in what we make of them, in every sense. “There is nothing either good or bad,” I had heard in high school, from Hamlet, “but thinking makes it so.” I had been lucky enough at that point to stumble into the life I might have dreamed of as a boy: a great job writing on world affairs for Time magazine, an apartment (officially at least) on Park Avenue, enough time and money to take vacations in Burma, Morocco, El Salvador. But every time I went to one of those places, I noticed that the people I met there, mired in difficulty and often warfare, seemed to have more energy and even optimism than the friends I’d grown up with in privileged, peaceful Santa Barbara, Calif., many of whom were on their fourth marriages and seeing a therapist every day. Though I knew that poverty certainly didn’t buy happiness, I wasn’t convinced that money did either. More:
From CNN / Travel+Leisure
It’s 10:45 a.m. on a cloudy day, and the crew of Druk Air flight KB205 is preparing to land at their home airport of Paro, Bhutan. Suddenly, ominous warnings start blaring, alerting them that their flight angle is all wrong and their rate of descent is far too fast. They fly a series of unconventional right-and-left banks through a narrow channel of hillsides before centering the swaying jet and putting it on the tarmac.
An emergency situation? Not quite. In fact, this is a completely normal — however nail-biting — landing at Paro Airport, set 7,300 feet above sea level. Because of the airport’s tightly cropped valley, surrounded by 16,000-foot-high serrated Himalayan peaks, this drama replays itself on every flight.
Paro Airport, Bhutan
Who Flies There: Druk Air, the national carrier.
Why It’s Harrowing: Tucked into a tightly cropped valley and surrounded by 16,000-foot-high serrated Himalayan peaks, this is arguably the world’s most forbidding airport to fly into. It requires specially trained pilots to maneuver into this stomach-dropping aerie by employing visual flying rules and then approaching and landing through a narrow channel of vertiginous tree-covered hillsides.
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A California professor recreates Asia’s most magnificent mountains via computer. From Asia Sentinel:
Seemingly real enough for digital Tomb Raider Lara Croft to scamper around in, this is the Himalaya Atlas of Aerial Panoramas, a unique digital collection of more than 700 images, depicting the world’s most spectacular mountain range, from Arunachal Pradesh in the east to Uttar Pradesh in the west .
Dr William Bowen, a California State University, Northridge geographer and the project’s creator, said he initially began making digital photo maps to give his students a visual of the material they covered in class.
More here and here:
Himal looks at the region and asks whether the concept of South Asia is even useful.
Image by Adam J West in Himal
Has it been overtaken by ‘globalised’ time, or can it be an additional identity-marker that helps us to achieve political stability and progress? Is there any use for nostalgia about the pre-1947 ‘India’, and how would we have evolved differently in the aftermath of Partition and nation-statism? Can regionalism be a tool for economic growth and social justice in the poorest, most populated and adjacent parts of Pakistan, North India, Bangladesh and Nepal? Some say that the real divide is not that between India-Pakistan-Bangladesh, but rather between North Southasia and South Southasia.
Click here to read the views of 75 eminent Southasian thinkers in the latest issue of Himal:
While the bulk of Failed States are located in Africa, South Asia doesn’t fare much better with Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Burma, at #7, 9 and 12 (Bangladesh and Burma tied at #12) respectively, making the grade. Sri Lanka weighs in the annual list at #20, while Nepal figures at #23 and Bhutan, which just embarked on its road to democracy registering at 51 of the List’s 60 Failed States.
Both Pakistan and Bangladesh registered a fall from last year’s status, with Bangladesh featuring the worst fall of all Failed States, set off by postponed elections, deadlocked government and the continuance of emergency rule that has dragged on for 18 months (not to mention November’s devastating cyclone which left 1.5 million people homeless). Nearby Pakistan didn’t do much better with the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.
For the complete list and the whole story in Foreign Policy click here.
A British artist has produced what she calls a “photo-fit” of the Yeti based on “potentially explosive” new evidence of the elusive creature’s existence. From The Telegraph:
Wildlife painter Polyanna Pickering was shown what is believed to be a 100-year-old yeti scalp at a remote monastery in the Himalayas.
At least one expert believe it could be the most important proof yet that the giant apelike beast is more than mere folklore.
Ms Pickering was gathering material for a new exhibition in the remote Bhutan region of the Himalayas when she made her chance discovery – with a little help from David Beckham.
She said: “I was told this was from a Migoi – their name for the yeti. All I know is, it was bigger than any human or ape scalp I have ever seen.”
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The best way to see one of the world’s most beautiful countries is on foot. The four-day Druk Path trek isn’t for everyone, but the rewards are great. Bruce Einhorn in BusinessWeek:
It was quite an entourage. A dozen mules, lugging the tents, sleeping bags, backpacks, gas stoves, and enough food for both humans and animals for four days. Managing the animals were three pony men. The group also included two cooks, two campground managers, and one guide in charge of keeping everything in order. Oh yes, and two guests: my wife and me.
We were gathered on the edge of Paro, a small town in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, as we were about to embark on the Druk Path, a four-day trek that would take us through forests of blue pine, past monasteries of whitewashed stone that look a bit like Swiss chalets, above the tree line to yak-herder shelters, along snowy ridges with stunning views of the high peaks, and finally down to the valley of Thimpu, a bustling town of government ministries, international aid-agency offices, small museums, and tourist shops, which is the closest Bhutan has to a city.
[Photo: Uma, a traditional-style hotel in the hills above the Paro Valley in Bhutan.]
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Guided by a novel idea, the tiny Buddhist kingdom tries to join the modern world without losing its soul, writes Brook Larmer in National Geographic
First come the high clear notes of the ceremonial trumpet. Then the Buddhist pilgrims, gravitating toward the sound. The sun has slid behind the mountains looming over Thimphu, capital of the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, and the day’s final ritual is set to begin. Along the edge of the crowd, in pageboy haircuts and tattered robes, stand peasants who have traveled three days from their remote villages on their first visit to the big city, likely the only capital in the world without a traffic light. Near the center of the plaza clusters a group of Buddhist monks, arms linked, their betel-nut-stained teeth matching their burgundy robes. Together the monks and peasants and townspeople press forward to catch a glimpse of the main attraction: a small boy standing in the center of the circle, his bright orange shirt hanging down to his knees.
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As the last Himalayan Buddhist kingdom cautiously opens itself to the world, traditionalists fear for its unique culture. Arthur Lubow in the Smithsonian Magazine.
On rural highways in Bhutan, trucks hauling huge pine logs rush past women bowed beneath bundles of firewood strapped to their backs. In the capital of Thimphu, teenagers in jeans and hooded sweat shirts hang out smoking cigarettes in a downtown square, while less than a mile away, other adolescents perform a sacred Buddhist act of devotion. Archery, the national sport, remains a fervent pursuit, but American fiberglass bows have increasingly replaced those made of traditional bamboo. While it seems that every fast-flowing stream has been harnessed to turn a prayer drum inside a shrine, on large rivers, hydroelectric projects generate electricity for sale to India, accounting for almost half the country’s gross national product.
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Global warming could cause catastrophic emptying of lakes in Nepal and Bhutan, writes Tod Crowell on Asia Sentinel.
The upper Himalaya lakes in Nepal and Bhutan that were formed by retreating glaciers are getting bigger as global warming causes glaciers to recede, with possibly ruinous consequences, a development that Japanese scientists have been monitoring with concern.
It is not a new phenomenon, but it is a growing and dangerous one. The International Center for Integrated Mountain Development in Katmandu estimates that 15 glacial lakes have burst in recent years, an average of one every two to five years. The center figures another 20 or so are candidates for Glacial Lake Outburst Flooding, or Glof.
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