Flying to Tibet

I visited India and Nepal for the first time on a Buddhist pilgrimage led by Shantum Seth in 2007. The following is from my 2008 trip to India, Nepal, and Tibet.

View from a temple roof in Tibet

From Kathmandu to Lhasa

I wrote in my journal on the flight to Lhasa. The guy next to me watched, so I added a plethora of gratuitously long words, in hopes that his English wasn’t fluent. That’s when I wasn’t gawking out the window at the Himalayas. I wished I could open the window to take good quality pictures of the Himalayas, but there would be a gust of cold wind that would sweep up my journal and send it out the window. A falcon would catch it and carry it away but eventually give up and drop it onto the head of an ill-tempered yeti that would tear the journal to shreds. So I dismissed the idea of opening the window.

Actually, I made all that nonsense up — I wasn’t writing in my journal on the one-hour flight. I was gawking out the window at the Himalayas!

Flying toward and above Tibet, I saw tippy-top peaks of snow-capped mountains peaked out of the clouds. Cloud formations included what looked like a panda bear sticking its tongue out. People associate pandas with China, but they’re also in eastern Tibet. Another cloud resembled someone resting, perhaps a reclining Buddha, and another cloud was too reminiscent of a mushroom cloud. I must have seen the top of Mount Everest…