"In this vivid memoir, Heinrich Harrer recounts his adventures as one of the first Europeans ever to enter Tibet. After escaping from a British internment camp in India during World War II, Harrer trekked across Asia, ending up in the Forbidden City of Lhasa, penniless, and without proper permission to be in the area. But tibetan hospitality and his own curious appearance worked in Harrer's favor, allowing him unprecedented acceptance among the tibetan...

At a time when a woman's world wasn't much wider than her own home, Isabella Bird (1831-1904) earned a reputation as one of the Victorian era's most intrepid explorers and writers. Among the Tibetans recounts her rugged passage through the Himalayas by horseback and her four-month sojourn amid "the pleasantest of people." Bird's evocative accounts of Tibetan ceremonies, decorations, costumes, and music, along with her vivid descriptions of palaces,...

The amazing accomplishments of five early women explorers.

"Yes, it's about Tibet, but not the mystical wonderland of Western imagination. There is magic, to be sure - saints who pass invisibly among prison guards, ceremonies that stop torrential rain, and a ferocious landscape that inspires uneasy reverence. But the country described in these pages is incontestably real, harsh, and shocking.". "What the Lotus Said is the story of Eric Swanson's journey through East Tibet in the company of a Tibetan lama...

Photograhic essay of ancient and modern Tibet.

"Born in Paris in 1868, Alexandra David-Neel spent some thirteen years traveling though China and Tibet, walking unknown routes, discovering and photographing new cultures and people, and exploring their traditions and religious beliefs. "The land of the gentleman brigands" was the name she gave to an area in the far west of China, populated by fierce and dangerous tribes, through which she traveled several times in her attempts to reach Lhasa, the...

"A new collection of essays exploring the nature of time and place in a shrinking world, from the award-winning author of Sightlines"-- "In this remarkable collection, part travelogue, part cultural and personal history, poet and author Kathleen Jamie touches points on a timeline spanning millennia, and considers what surfaces and what reconnects us to our past. From the thawing tundra linking a Yup'ik village in Alaska to its hunter-gatherer past...

In 1963, Dervla Murphy worked in Tibetan refugee camps in Northern India, while travelling there. Here Dervla describes day-to-day life in the camps where hundreds of children are living in squalor while a handful of dedicated vounteers do their best to feed and care for them.