Yes … a touch melodramatic, because the Tsum Valley in Nepal is only unknown to those who have yet to explore it. But the idea of the ‘unknown region’ is a symbol for adventurous travel, and maybe for deeper exploration, since Toward the Unknown Region is the title of a poem by Walt Whitman, and also of a piece, with the same name, for chorus and orchestra, by Ralph Vaughan Williams (1906), who also used Whitman’s poetry from Leaves of Grass for his epic A Sea Symphony (1909). The poem has some wonderful phrases, and though I might demur that Time and Space in themselves are worthy of such exalted praise, there is no doubt that Whitman’s words carry us vibrantly along in a mystical, ecstatic trance. https://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1891/poems/245
The Tsum Valley is a Buddhist enclave. The inhabitants are of Tibetan origin and speak a dialect of the Tibetan language; there are a number of monasteries, called Gompas, whose inhabitants in this area are nuns. At the head of the valley are at least two entries by high passes into Tibet, still used for seasonal trade, and through which, no doubt, the valley had been populated in earlier times, by explorers from the high plateau beyond. There is also a famous cave where the great saint of Tibet, Milarepa, is said to have been in retreat. The valley is liberally supplied with chortens, stupas, and prayer walls, and omnipresent prayer flags. It is an independent branch of the Manaslu circuit, and those trekkers who come up to the top of the Tsum Valley, will be acclimatised for the higher regions ahead on the main circuit.
Gradually the idea formed of a winter trek in December, by poring over maps, and reading Trekking around Manaslu and the Tsum Valley (Pritchard-Jones and Gibbons – Himalayan Travel Guides). You could see that after quite a steep day of climbing at one point, the land broadened out into a high, level valley, before narrowing again in its ascent towards the border. And I began, also, to speculate about an approach to the Ganesh Himal base camp, which should allow a viewpoint of the high, massive snowfields of these mountains, as yet unthreatened by the climate-induced melting going on in other places, due to their aspect facing north. We would have to stay at Gumba Lundang at 3200m, one of the monasteries, if it were open at this time of year, when people come down to spend a couple of months in Kathmandu and escape the cold.
So while journeying deeper into the mountains, I started to consider how
little I knew about Buddhism. Why was the religion so prominent and persistent in these remote valleys? Why were there so many nuns in the Tsum Valley? Even though Buddhism expresses some of my deepest beliefs, such as the ultimate illusion of our sensory life and our repetitive reappearance here on the earth planet, with only small incremental evidence of progress, I knew that my understanding of its traditions and current realities was superficial. As it happened, after the trek, I found some books in Kathmandu to add to those I had already read, that gave some further understanding, such as the following:
1. Thomas Shor: A Step Away from Paradise
https://www.thomasshor.com/a-step-away-from-paradise
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20220830-the-himalayas-hidden-paradise-valleys
2. Lama Yeshe Losal Rinpoche: From a Mountain in Tibet - A Monk's Journey
3. Alexandra David-Neel: Magic and Mystery in Tibet
4. Mick Brown: The Dance of the 17 Lives - the incredible true story of Tibet`s 17th Karmapa.
And I decided to re-read Lost Horizon, the 1933 novel by James Hilton, that immortalised the name, Shangri-La. Yes, fiction, but it also captured the public imagination, that somewhere on earth, there could be a rarefied place where the normal dissolutions that characterise human life, might at least be delayed, and where a conflict between temporal love and higher aspiration is brought keenly into contention.
The journey toward the unknown region would be both an inner and outer experience.
