In 2009, I undertook what was to be the most memorable journey of my life. I have made other momentous journeys, but none of them stand out so unmistakably as this trip to western Tibet by air, road and foot. It is undertaken mainly by pilgrims, to a place considered sacred by hundreds of millions of Buddhists, Hindus and Bon-pos (followers of the pre-Buddhist Tibetan shamanistic faith). When it ended, I understood why so many sought to come to this place.
The trip was motivated solely by the fascination for Manasarovar and Kailash – the sacred lake and peak at the culmination of the journey – on the part of our team leader, my dear friend Madhu Sarin, for whom this was the fifth pilgrimage to the area in nine years. Her intense descriptions and photographs had kindled my interest, and although I knew I would accompany her someday, the declining health of my parents had previously made it impossible to fix a date. As their only child, I had responsibilities that made it unthinkable for me to undertake a dangerous journey to places out of reach by telephone, from which it was impossible to return at short notice. And after my mother passed away in 2004, I was preoccupied with looking after my father, who died in 2007. It was all very painful, but with both of them gone the pilgrimage became possible. As it turned out, it also acquired a transcendent meaning for me, because I took along some relics of my parents.
At 15,000 feet, Manasarovar is one of the highest freshwater lakes in the world. It has a circumference of nearly 90 km, while the circumambulation of Mount Kailash, which lies to the north of Manasarovar, traverses about 52 km of mountain trails. It is located in a remote part of Tibet beneath the trans-Himalaya, a range much older than the Himalaya. Many Indian pilgrims take the Indian government's sponsored tours, which began during the late 1970s after Beijing began to permit them. However ours was a privately organised one – this meant both that it was more expensive and that we could proceed at our own pace.
No one has climbed Kailash, although legend has it that the Tibetan mystic Milarepa's ascent during the 11th century marked the victory of Buddhism in Tibet. China reportedly permitted some Spanish mountaineers to climb in 2001, but this was resisted by the Tibetans and the report was later denied by the Chinese government. German climber Reinhold Messner, who declined a Chinese offer to attempt an ascent of Mount Kailash in the mid-1980s, criticised the aborted Spanish attempt with the words, 'If we conquer this mountain, then we conquer something in people's souls.'