The final destination along the Tea Horse Road, both for our own expedition and for the great journeys of the past, was Kalimpong, in...

A simple tea room in Weishan, Yunnan, and one of the only tea rooms in my life that I failed to actually have tea in. Weishan was another...

Over the course of years since meeting Dorjè I’ve written and pondered much about him. “Part goat and a little part human” was how he was...

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...

On foot our team of four puttered and wandered west (often faintly lost) through the Nyanqen Tanghla mountains in Tibet towards Lhasa....

It was here at the ‘first bend of the Yangtze’, at Shigu, in Yunnan province that the Mongolian armies of the Yuan Dynasty crossed the...

Not all stories of the Tea Horse Road were ones of grand expanses, snow caps, or buzzing tea sessions. A friend from the Yi minority...

Ponzera, or Benzilan as it is now known, is a small valley town in northwestern Yunnan that lies alongside a headwater stream of the...

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...

Not heeding the warnings of Sonam Gelek; I should have known better at this stage of our journey than to plunge onwards without his...

It was from this patch of grassland near Napa Lake, just north of my home in Dukezong (old town of 'Shangrila') that our expedition...

“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...

A nomadic hostess (nemo) offers up a smile to our sun and grime battered crew near Ala Jagung, Tibet. The smile that comes from living so...

After 52 days of trekking from my then home in Zhongdian (aka: Shangrila/Jiantang/Gyalthang) in northwestern Yunnan, a small celebration...

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...

Immersed in a hotspring that is tucked within a mountain cave, sitting beside the venerable and irrepressible Dorjè Kandro. Just days...

Dakpa and I had been rolling around tea forests, tea houses, and tea characters for months at this point along portions and strands of...

This ‘moment’ was more accurately a series of moments and most of an afternoon, with an old muleteer and his wife. We interviewed the...

Legend, guardian of caravans, and hunter of ‘tea thieves’, Tenzin. We had heard of this legend but worried we wouldn’t track him down...

We are engulfed in the ancient tea forest. Damp earth and mushroom smells hit us as Napu walks out in front of us through an entire world...