Arriving to a new camp and homestead, Omu sets about going through an unending list of ‘musts’. One of the musts is securing tent ‘fly’...

It was upon the months' long journeys along the Tea Horse Road that the big-leafed 'assamica' material and eternal panacea, tea, would...

The mind wanders back to a pass, a blizzard, and that wonderful thing that exists still: instinct. On a day of few words along a portion...

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...

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...

Poignant in this years' end and the arrival of a new time and space. A last vestige of travel across the glacier-fed waterways of the...

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

Always, it seems that it was the mountain mornings and its still clear cold that would offer up moments and characters along our journey....

Upon the Tea Horse Road’s pathways (and there were many), traders, pilgrims, and muleteers alike would refer to the ‘middle route’ as...

The coming weeks' posts will delve back into the memory palace of moments from our 7.5 month expedition along the Tea Horse Road, to...