Original subtitles

Himalaya Land of ancient monasteries Land of remote villages

Land of silence and prayer

There is a land in the heart of Asia made of mountains where the air is

barely enough to breathe.

They are watched over by monasteries of stone and by prayer flags, and among

them a faith was born that the whole world is still searching for today.

The landscape surprises you too, with forests, glaciers, turquoise lakes, and

empty highlands.

gathered between the highest mountains on the planet.

This is the Himalaya.

Its name already says everything, and it means a boat of the snow in Sanskrit.

Hema is the snow.

Alaya is the home.

A home, though, far bigger than anyone imagines.

It is not a single mountain, in fact.

and not even a group of mountains.

It is an arc about 2,400 kilometers long, or 1,500 miles, that starts in

Pakistan and reaches all the way to northeastern India, brushing past or

wrapping around Nepal, Bhutan, and Tibet.

Inside this arc, you climb in steps.

First come the outer hills, green and damp.

Then we find the middle mountains where the villages sit and the terraced

fields.

And finally, there is the great Himalaya, the belt of the highest peaks,

the one everybody pictures when they hear this name.

In summer, the winds come in loaded with moisture from the ocean.

They meet the wall of the mountains, they rise and they dump rain in enormous

amounts on the southern side.

Behind the peaks, though, almost nothing arrives.

The rain has already fallen somewhere else.

That is why Tibet Ladakh and certain inner valleys are cold and almost

desert.

Here we find only dry ground, sand-colored rock and clean sky for

weeks at a time.

Then there is the ice and it is not a small detail.

Outside the Arctic and Antarctica,

this is the largest reserve of ice on earth they call it the third pole

the

indus the ganges the brahmaputra and other rivers still are born here and

their water reaches people living thousands of kilometers further down

entire planes harvests and cities everything

depends on what melts up here.

Where all this water is born though, living is not simple at all.

The higher you go, the thinner the air becomes.

And at those elevations, living permanently should not even be possible.

And yet some people were born suited to it.

The Sherpa come from the eastern regions of Tibet, and they settled here, above

all in the high valleys of Nepal.

Their body works differently from ours because they carry a variant of a gene

that keeps the blood from thickening at altitude.

It is not training, it is not habit.

It is simply something written inside their DNA for tens of thousands of

years.

Moving on, it also has to be said that the Himalaya separates two worlds.

To the south, there is Hindu India, while to the north, there is the Tibetan

Buddhist world.

But the passes have always stitched back together, what the mountains divided.

Caravans passed through carrying salt, tea, and wool.

And with them came ideas.

That is why today, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and animist

communities live here side by side with dozens of local traditions.

In the Eastern Himalaya alone, more than 40 languages are spoken and they belong

to completely different families.

One village can easily not understand the one in the next valley over.

At the highest elevations though, everything shrinks down to the essential

and life ends up gathering around a single animal.

And we are talking about the yak.

It gives milk, butter, cheese, meat, wool, leather, and it carries loads

where no vehicle can reach.

Where trees do not even grow, its dried dung becomes fuel.

Nothing it has goes to waste.

And then there are the flags strung across the passes and over the rooftops.

The ones everybody has seen in photographs without maybe knowing what

they are.

They are certainly not decorations.

And the colors are not placed at random.

And when they fade, you do not take them down.

because the color that leaves is exactly the prayer that has gone and has been

taken by the wind so let us

follow it to this wind along the line of flags that runs down from the passes

it carries us into a green bowl at the foot of the mountains

where every journey toward the himalaya has always begun

Kathmandu Valley.

A green bowl, closed in by hills, and inside it, three ancient cities a short

distance from one another.

Kathmandu, Pathan, and Bhaktapur each have their own Durbar Square.

which is the square of the royal palaces, full of carved wooden temples

and pagodas with stacked roofs.

In Bhaktapur, you walk on red brick between courtyards where grain is spread

out in the sun.

Just outside, you climb up to the stupa of Swayambanath.

It is a big white dome that holds sacred relics.

Above it, four pairs of painted eyes watch over the Kathmandu Valley in every

direction.

An even bigger stupa, though, sits on the other side of the city, and that is

Budanath.

In the morning, hundreds of people circle the dome clockwise, murmuring

prayers.

It is from this very valley that every expedition has set out toward the

highest mountain in the world.

Everest.

8 849 meters or 29 032 feet

no point on earth is higher

the nepalese call it forehead

of the sky the tibetans instead mother goddess of the world

Almost nobody reaches the summit but thousands of people every year walk as

far as base camp at 5,300 meters or 17,400 feet in two weeks on the trail

between villages and suspension bridges.

From there, the summit is barely visible, hidden by the mountains in

front of it.

the best place to look at it is the hill of kala patar a little higher up where

you climb before dawn with a cold that cuts right through you

here nobody climbs alone because

ahead of every expedition there are always the sherpa who live in the

valleys around this mountain

Nanhamshay Bazaar A

town built inside a horseshoe-shaped bowl with the houses stepped one above

the other at 3,400 meters or 11,200 feet

It is the capital

of the Sherpa and the mandatory stop for anyone heading up toward Everest

Here the body gets used to the altitude and whoever is in a hurry gets sick

Saturday morning the market comes in with the

goods carried on backs or by mules and everything is sold from rice to trekking

boots In the alleys you

find bakeries gear shops and tea houses full of people

From the meadows above town, if the sky is clear, you can even see Everest

poking up.

Before climbing any higher, almost everyone stops at a monastery a little

further up to be blessed by the monks.

Tengboche Monastery.

It sits on a spur of meadow at almost 4,000 meters or 13,000 feet with the

mountains all around like an amphitheater.

Inside the air smells of yak butter burning in the lamps and the walls are

covered in paintings.

Whoever passes through here before going up toward Everest receives their

blessing, and it is a tradition that has lasted for generations.

In the fall, the courtyard fills up for Mani Rimdu, which is a three-day

festival where the monks dance wearing enormous masks.

But the thing that stays with you is what you see stepping out of the

courtyard.

A mountain with its flanks thrown open right in front of you.

It is the most photographed mountain in all of Nepal, but it is not the tallest.

It is 6,812 meters, or 22,349 feet, and it has a

shape that looks drawn on purpose with a narrow point in the middle and two

ridges dropping away on either side.

Below the summit, a block of ice hangs there.

That is the da blem, the small reliquary that Sherpa women wear around their

neck.

Climbers go up a narrow, steep ridge, and they consider it one of the finest

routes in the world, hard but on solid rock.

For trekkers instead, It is the companion of the whole walk because it

stays right there in front of you for days while you climb between meadows,

villages and prayer flags.

Behind those peaks, though, Tibet begins and the mountains give way to a plateau

that never seems to end.

Potala and Jokhang

Lhasa

is the capital of Tibet and it announces itself from far away with a white and

red palace set on top of a hill That

is the Potala palace it has around a thousand rooms and 13 floors

and for centuries it was the home of the Dalai Lamas.

Further down, in the old center, there is the Jokhang, the most sacred temple

in Tibet.

In front of the door, the pilgrims stretch out flat on the ground, the full

length of their body.

Then they get back up and start again, for hours.

Around the temple runs the Barkhor, the street where you walk clockwise between

market stalls and the smell of burning juniper.

Outside Lhasa, the road climbs.

And within a few hours, the city disappears behind a pass.

Yamdrak Lake.

You cross a pass at 4,800 meters, or 15,750 feet.

And below appears a water so turquoise it looks fake.

Yamdrak is one of the four sacred lakes of Tibet, long and thin, with many arms

slipping in between the bare mountains.

The water is salty and you cannot drink it.

and on the shores graze long-haired yaks, often decorated for photographs.

Tibetans believe it is the home of protective deities, and that if one day

it dried up, Tibet would have no life left.

Along the shores, monks perform the Kora, The ritual circuit walked

clockwise.

Further north there's another sacred lake, and there the water no longer

reaches into the mountains.

It opens out like a sea.

Namsa Lake.

At 4,700 meters, or 15,400 feet, an immense sheet of water opens up,

closed in by snowy mountains.

Its name means Heavenly Lake, and it is the highest salt lake in the world.

with the color of the water changing with the light from deep blue to

turquoise.

On the southern shore, a tongue of land reaches out into the water, capped by

two great rocks.

There you find the caves used by hermits, and the stone is covered in

prayer flags.

On this side, people ask the mountain for sky and for protection.

On the other side of the range instead, they ask it for food, and the name of

the most famous peak says it already.

Annapurna Circuit.

A two-week circuit around an 8,000-meter massif, and it's considered one of the

finest treks in the world.

You start out among the rice paddies, You climb through rhododendron forests

and in two weeks you end up walking between rocks and snow.

The highest point is the Tarong La, a pass at 5,400 meters or 17,700

feet, which you take on setting out in the dark before the wind picks up.

Every evening you stop in lodges that give you a bed and dinner and almost

always it is rice and lentils.

Annapurna is also the name of the goddess of this mountain and that is no

accident because it is her that people ask for the harvest.

At the end of the circuit, though, you arrive at a temple where people ask not

for food, but for forgiveness.

Muktanath Temple

a temple where you arrive soaking wet even when it is not raining.

Here behind the sanctuary runs a wall with 108 fountains, shaped like a bull's

head, and the pilgrims pass under them, one by one, with the freezing water on

their back.

It is meant to wash away the sins of an entire lifetime.

muktanath is sacred both to hindus and to buddhists because the first see the

house of vishnu in it and the others the place where padmasambhava stopped

the road that brings the pilgrims up here was once

traveled by the salt caravans and it climbed toward an ancient kingdom sealed

off among the mountains

Upper Mustang.

Beyond the mountains, the rain no longer arrives, and the landscape turns into a

desert of red and yellow earth, carved out by the wind.

This is Upper Mustang, which sits in Nepal but is Tibetan in everything, from

the language to the religion.

And for centuries it was a kingdom of its own.

The capital is Lomantang, a town closed in by mud walls with a royal palace,

three monasteries and alleys barely wider than a loaded mule.

In the walls of the valleys, thousands of hand-dug caves open up, some of them

dozens of meters off the ground, used as homes and as tombs.

Until 1992, no foreigner could enter, and even today a special permit is

required.

A few hours to the south instead, is the city where everybody arrives.

colorful boats and behind them a wall of snowy mountains mirrored in the water.

Pokhara is the second city of Nepal, grown up on the shore of Piwa Lake, and

it is the place where people rest, before or after a trek.

On the lake you go out in rowboats.

as far as the temple on the island and in the morning the water is so still

that the mountains look drawn on top of it

toward evening people rent the boats to

sit out in the middle and the lake turns orange with the sun dropping behind the

mountains

In the city, there are old Tibetan refugee camps from people who arrived

after 1950, where carpets are still woven.

But there is a valley to the north where the Tibetans had arrived many centuries

earlier.

Lingtang Valley.

It is the valley closest to Kathmandu and you reach it after a day on the road

toward the Tibetan border.

You climb through a narrow gorge between bamboo forests and you come out all at

once onto open meadows under the glaciers.

Up top, there are a handful of houses and a cheese dairy, where you buy yak

cheese.

Here live the Tamang, descendants of Tibetans who arrived centuries ago, and

who have kept their language in their monasteries.

In 2015,

An earthquake tore a landslide off the mountain that wiped out the village of

Langtang, which today has been rebuilt anyway, a little further along.

After that day for weeks, the only way to get here was the sky.

Lukla

A runway of 500 meters or 1600 feet running uphill that ends against the

wall of a mountain and begins over a ravine.

The airport of Lukla is considered the most dangerous in the world and the

planes that land there carry 20 people at a time.

There is no radar and no second chance you land by eye.

And if the clouds cover the valley, nobody flies.

Everyone who wants to go up to Everest passes through here.

And the town lives on exactly this.

Early in the morning, it is a constant coming and going of propellers.

Then toward midday, the wind picks up and everything stops.

At the other end of the Himalaya, though, there is a mountain that no

plane can go near.

K2 It

does not have a real name only a code put on it by a

surveyor and it is k as in caracorum and the number two

it is

8611 meters high or 28 251 feet it is the

second mountain on earth but the hardest one to reach

It is steep on every side with no easy routes, and the good weather lasts only

a few days a year.

Far fewer people climb it than Everest, and almost one climber out of four does

not come home.

There are no villages, base camp sits on a sea of rubble, and to see it you need

six days of walking.

on the Baltoro Glacier.

Let us move now toward the most feared mountain in Pakistan, which lies further

south.

a mountain on its own with no other peaks around it that rises 7,000 meters

or 23,000 feet from the valley floor in the biggest vertical jump on the planet.

Nanga Parbat means naked mountain, and the rupal face at southern side is the

highest wall in the world.

They also call it the Killer Mountain because before it was conquered, it

killed 31 climbers.

The first to reach the top was Herman Boole in 1953 in a climb that lasted

more than 40 hours.

But the finest view is from the meadows on the northern side.

where German climbers arrived first.

Fairy Meadows A

green meadow at 3 000

meters or 10 000 feet with pines all around and the glacier ending right

there in front of you you

get there with an hour by jeep on a track cut into the rock

and then three hours on foot

at

the top there are wooden huts and tents Without electricity, though, for most of

the day.

In the evening, the mountain turns orange, then pink, and once it is dark,

the fires are lit.

From the meadows in a single morning, you reach base camp.

You walk the same road as the porters.

meaning the men who carry the climbers gear on their shoulders.

And the strongest men in this trade all come from a valley nearby.

Hunza Valley

Apricot terraces hanging above a gray river, an all-around peaks of 7,000

meters or 23,000 feet.

The Hunza Valley is known for the long lives of the people here, even if those

numbers could never be verified.

Above the town of Karimabad stand two stone forts centuries old where the

local princes used to live

In

spring the valley turns white and pink with blossom while in the fall

it is yellow and red

A gray river fed by glacier meltwater splits the valley, and it's crossed on

wooden bridges that sway.

But further east too, in another valley, there's glacier water, and it has been

used to build gardens.

Srinagar and Dal Lake.

A city built around a lake where you sleep inside floating houses of carved

wood.

On Dal Lake, you get around in shikaras, which are narrow boats with a cloth roof

and red cushions. And you do your shopping at the floating market at dawn.

On the hills around it stand the Mughal gardens with terraces, fountains, and

plane trees.

They were built 400 years ago by the emperors who came here to spend the

summer.

In the city, carved wood is everywhere, both in the mosques and in the shops.

And from the looms here comes Pashmina.

which is the finest shawl that exists, woven by hand.

The wool for this shawl, though, is not born here, but on the highlands to the

east.

A desert of sand-colored mountains, and in the middle of it, a city with a nine

-story palace that looks like a small patala.

Leh is the gateway to Ladakh, the Indian region where everything is Tibetan,

including the monasteries, the language, and the faces.

Above the villages stand the white stepped monasteries where at dawn the

monks blow horns from the rooftops All

around the goats of the plateau give the ultra

fine wool that then gets woven somewhere else In

the center the market is full of dried apricots

scarves and travelers who rode up from the plains on motorcycles.

A few hours from all this noise, though, there is a lake where you cannot hear

anything anymore.

Punggong Lake.

A lake 134 kilometers long or 83 miles that starts in

India and ends in China.

Punggong changes color several times a day depending on the sun going light

blue Deep blue green and almost purple

The water is

salty there are no fish and on the shores almost nothing grows

It

is cold even in summer and in

winter the lake freezes completely

so much that you can walk on top of it.

You get there by crossing the Chang Le Pass and you sleep in permanent tents

right beside the shore.

A little further south, beyond the mountains, there is another land that

speaks Tibetan, even though it is in India.

Spiti Valley

A valley of bare rock, where it rains very little, and the villages are green

patches of barley in the middle of the gray.

Speedy means middle land, because it sits between India and Tibet.

On top of a knoll, there is the monastery of Kigampa.

made of rooms wedged one on top of the other that looks like a white anthill.

Not far away there is Kiber, one of the highest inhabited villages ever reached

by a road, while in Tabo there is a monastery over a thousand years old with

painted walls.

in winter the valley stays sealed off by the snow and to get out people walk on

the frozen river

to

get in during the summer instead you have to cross a pass that is almost

always blocked by snow

Manali and Rohtang Pass.

Cedar forest, a river running fast, and a small town full of hotels at the foot

of the mountains.

Manali is the place where Indians go to see snow, often for the first time, and

also to go on their honeymoon.

In the old village, there is the temple of Hadimba with its multi-tiered roof in

the middle of a cedar forest.

Above the town, you climb up to the Rotang, a pass at 3,900 meters or 12,800

feet, which for six months a year used to stay closed by the snow until they

dug a tunnel under the mountain.

The name of the town comes from Manu, the man who, according to the Indian

story, survives the flood and makes humanity start over.

If we move further east instead, there is the place where the story of men

ends.

Katernath and Badgernath A

temple of grey stone at the far end of a valley with a glacier at its back

and nothing else around.

Katernath can only be reached on foot or on horseback covering 16 kilometers or

10 miles of climbing in 2013

a flood swept away the whole town but the temple stayed standing protected by

an enormous boulder that came to rest right behind it

further east there is

badranath another colorful and crowded temple with a hot spring in front of the

entrance

Both of them close in winter when the snow cuts off the valleys, and the

statues are carried down to the valley as well.

Gangatri

The Ganges, the most sacred river in India, is born up here under the tongue

of a glacier.

Gangotri is the village where the temple dedicated to the goddess of the river

stands, at 3,100 meters, or 10,200 feet.

The river that flows in front of the temple is still called Bhagirathi and it

becomes the Ganges further downstream.

The source is 18 kilometers or 11 miles further up where the glacier opens into

a cave of ice that they call the cow's mouth.

Many pilgrims make that walk on foot to see the source, and they come back with

a bottle of that water.

The story goes that the river came down from the sky and that Shiva caught it in

his hair to soften the fall.

Further east, too, in Bhutan, there is a place where something arrived from the

sky, but it was not water.

Tiger's Nest

A

monastery stuck to a vertical wall as if it were glued to the rock.

Tak Sang, or the Tiger's Nest, is the most famous place in Bhutan.

You can only get there walking with two or three hours of climbing through a

pine forest and there is a bridge and a waterfall just before you arrive.

The story says that the master who brought Buddhism here arrived flying on

the back of a tigress and meditated in a cave.

around that cave everything was born

you

go inside barefoot and without taking photographs among butter lamps

whoever

wants to understand where this country comes from though has to go down into a

warmer valley where the man who united it rests

Punakha Dzong

Two

rivers meet here and on the tongue of land in between there is a white

fortress 200 meters long or 650 feet.

A building like this in Bhutan is called a Dzong and it is monastery, fortress,

and seat of the local government all at the same time.

Punakadzong is the most beautiful one in Bhutan.

You go in by a terribly steep wooden staircase that once was pulled up at

night.

Inside there are three courtyards.

a jacaranda tree that covers itself in purple flowers in spring and halls with

gilded columns

here are kept

the remains of the monk who in the 1600s pulled the valleys together and gave

birth to bhutan

it

was the center of the country until the middle of the last century when the

capital then moved to another valley.

Thimphu It

is the only capital in the world without traffic lights.

At the main intersection, an officer directs the traffic with his hands.

Thimphu is small and the houses are built by law in the style of the country

with painted wooden windows.

Above the city sits a gilded bronze Buddha 50 meters high or 165 feet

watching over the valley

downtown

there is the weekend market with the red chilis laid out to dry

in

the fields at the edge of the city people shoot with the bow which in

Bhutan is the national sport.

Heading out to the east, the road climbs to a pass where 108 small domes remember

soldiers.

Dochula Pass.

From here on a clear day, you can see the whole snowy chain that divides

Bhutan from Tibet.

On the meadow stand 108 small white domes, and they are monuments that hold

offerings and prayers.

The royal family had them built in memory of the Bhutanese soldiers who

died in a military operation in 2003.

All around the wind moves thousands of prayer flags and the fog rises from the

rhododendron forests.

That is why early in the morning there is a better chance of seeing the peaks.

Those same mountains followed westward leave Bhutan and continue into another

small Buddhist land.

Sikkim and Gangtok

A

small Indian state that until 1975 was a kingdom of its own, wedged between

Nepal, Tibet, and Bhutan.

Sikkim is green everywhere, and there are orchids, forests, terraced rice

paddies, and higher up the monasteries of Rumtek and Pimayangsi with their

golden roofs.

The capital, Gangtok, sits along a ridge and the main street is closed to cars.

In the evening, people stroll among the shops.

and you easily spot the famous steamed dumplings filled with meat or

vegetables.

Every year in winter, the monks dance wearing wooden masks at the foot of

Kanchenjunga to thank the mountain for protecting the region.

Almost two centuries ago, A piece of this territory passed to the English,

and on those hills the most famous tea in the world was born.

Darjeeling

hills covered with green shrubs and neat rows, and women picking the leaves with

a basket on their back.

Darjeeling produces the most famous tea in the world, light and pale, which the

English began growing here in the middle of the 1800s.

you can also get there on the little steam train that climbs at walking pace

with the tracks running down the middle of the road

in

town there is also a tibetan monastery a

spice market and a mountaineering school founded after everest was conquered

Here, many Tibetans in flight stopped, and further east is the place that

welcomed the most famous one of them all,

Ta

Wang.

the last corner of the indian himalaya is reached by crossing a pass at 4 600

meters or 15 100 feet with frozen lakes on either side of the road

here there

is the largest buddhist monastery in india founded in the 1600s

it is a yellow and white block on a spur where hundreds of monks live and where a

statue of the buddha eight meters tall or 26 feet is kept

around

it there are wooden villages waterfalls and meadows where the yaks graze

In 1959, the Dalai Lama fleeing Tibet entered India right here, after days of

walking through the mountains.

Since then, this valley has remained the end of the line.

Beyond the ridge, another country begins.

New peaks, new villages, new stories carry on, past the border.

But this is no longer part of our story.

A new journey is waiting for us somewhere else.

Thanks for watching.