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 document and chart that magic route through the sky. Throughout that journey there were definitive moments that can never disappear; moments of impact, huge impressions, insidious stress, or simply wonder. Woven in though, there were many more understated milliseconds and characters that didn't get into the book nor film...but they remain fixed in the primal memory clearly.
This then, is a tribute to some of those understated moments and mortals who have of late been reemerging out of that vacuum of time.
Our expedition was blessed to take place in a time where permits and visas could still be had to traipse through the Tibetan Plateau and to wander along the mountain corridors, and through many many worlds and versions of tea. Perhaps these coming posts are also then, a kind of appreciation for having been able to embark into some of those spaces and moments.
Off we go then, back into that journey and some of the embedded images.
The Little One
We started our journey in the dark near the village of Nyalam on the Tibet-Nepal border on a morning of driving snow and wind. As pale morning light took over from dark, all of the winds and snows stopped as though flipped by a switch. This little one was bouncing around with other children running around in the heights near one of our tea break points. She fixed our entire team with those eyes and she moved my entire world in a second. Months into the Tea Horse Road journey, this was one of those moments that marked time. For my own journey at that point, she marked a transition point as we made our way off of the Tibetan Plateau and would soon begin the long coiling route to Kathmandu. If felt like she knew everything in a moment by sheer intuition…it feels like she still does looking at her even now.