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The Mountain Will Decide
Paperback
Travel GeneralTravel WritingChina
Publisher Price: $22.99
ISBN13: 9781637772560
Publisher: Red Penguin Books
Published: Dec 15 2022
Pages: 600
Weight: 1.91
Height: 1.33 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Where will you go when I die? Swenson's elderly aunt asked, triggering her first journey to Tibet. But what began as a trip in memoriam expanded to a fascination with a country with a deeply Buddhist culture, dominated and exploited by its wealthy neighbor China. The fascination in turn enlarged to an obsession whose essence became a mountain.
Over a couple of decades Swenson traveled every year or two back to Tibet to places that enchanted her, that fascinated her, that she needed to see again-Lhasa, Gyantze, Shigatze, Tholing, Tsaparang. She became friends with a Tibetan woman of her own age. She traveled sometimes with friends, sometimes only with a guide. But the sacred mountain, Mount Kailash, and the thirty-three mile walk, the khora, around the mountain became a path she yearned to return to. Here, in the rain-shadow of the Himalayas in a landscape dry and ascetic, sere in its stone-boned beauty at 18,600 feet she experienced an illumination of her life.
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