Top Travel Leads

Sacred spaces and stunning landscapes! Magnificent temples, mountain passes, snow-capped peaks, nomad camps, pilgrims – this is truly a journey to stir the senses and nourish the soul – of all the destinations in Asia, the most sacred and sublime. The days of travel are long, the roads are dusty and bumpy – and it is a world that will take your breath away.

Buddhists dream about it, for most it is a must, not all can do it, some die while attempting to circumambulate it, above all from altitude sickness. For any adventurer, a journey to the Holy Mount Kailash is an unforgettable experience, the trek around it, a KORA, the highlight of its own. No matter how one can look at this stunning mountain, it belongs to a list of “must see and do” trips at least once in a lifetime.

Of incredible geomantic power Kailash (Sanskrit) or Kang Rinpoche (Tibetan) marks the center of the Earth for Buddhists, Hindus, Jains and Bon. To Buddhists it is the abode of Demchok, the wrathful manifestation of Buddha Sakyamuni. To Hindus it is the dwelling of Shiva, the destroyer and according to the Sanskrit tradition of Vishnu Purana it is a representation of Mount Meru, the cosmic mountain at the center of the universe. It is the place where the founder of Bon descended to Earthand where the founder of the Jain faith was spiritually awakened.

Kailash is also the geographical watershed of South Asia, here its great rivers are born – the Indus, the Sutlej, the Yarlung Tsangpo (Brahmaputra) and the Karnali / Ganges. At its foot lies the most venerated of Tibet’s lakes, Manasarovar, believed by Hindu’s to have been formed in the mind of Brahma.

Trip to Kailash is best combined with a side trip to the region that was once the heartland of Tibet, the ancient kingdom of Guge, flourishing here from the 9th to the 15thcenturies, with strong links to Ladakh and Kashmir, making it an important site in terms of Buddhist art history. The remains of this kingdom stand in a landscape so overwhelming as to defy description.

The 3-day circumambulation of Mount Kailash is challenging due to altitude, but within the capabilities of any healthy person – and timed to coincide with the full moon, it is an incredible experience.

Much of fine info on Kailash available also at Wikipedia.

Fantastic train journeys across some of the most exciting countries with Kuoni

Few places on the Earth remain truly off the beaten path – a pilgrimage trek into the heart of the Salween and Mekong watershed is one of them. At the center of this journey is a 14-day Kora around the snow-capped peak of Mt. Khawakarpo (6,740m), revered throughout the Tibetan realm as far east as Ladakh, the Little Tibet of India.

Associated with Tibetan Buddhism’s saint-magician Padmasambhava, the mountain stands at the watershed region of the Mekong, Salween and Yangtze rivers in the southern tip of the Tibetan plateau in an area with the highest biodiversity in the world. This trip not only provides a rare insight into the life and culture of the Tibetans in southern Kham but above all inspires one wanting to pursue exploring more of this remote region bordering northern Burma, northwestern Yunnan, southern Kham and western Sichuan, as it were the waterways of these mighty rivers that mankind followed in ancient past downstream, to heart of China and south-east Asia, and from there into the Philippine and Indonesian archipelago and elsewhere from there.

Over the months to come I hope to weave a picture blending the cultural diversity and natural riches of remote and lesser-known places of the world that should be on one’s must see list, certainly before it’s too late and they too may vanish under the cloud of globalization and uniformity. On the one hand I hope to inspire one to travel, on the other by possibly alerting one to opportunities one may find in and about in whatever the part of the world in general, one may get roused to reinvent oneself overseas.

Thailand holiday offers

Most tour operators in the United States offer pretty much the same sites following the same routes, and thus most first time visitors to China either book a tour starting from Beijing and ending in Shanghai, or the other way around, which almost always will include Xian and sometimes Guilin. But a more unique option is to pick as a China tour starting point a city other than one of the two eastern seaboard giants. There are convenient flights to China’s west, namely to Chengdu, which other than being a jumping off point for entry into Tibet is a great starting point for numerous cross-China routes any which way one can look. One of those routes to consider is in southeasterly direction, from Chengdu traversing heartland of China and ending in Guilin. In between these two points one can include cruise on the Yangtze River, visit the ancient market towns of Fenghuang and Zhenyuan, the Dong and Yao villages of mountainous southwest Guizhou, then hike the Dragon’s Backbone terraces of Longsheng, before reaching the legendary karst formations of Guilin and Yangshuo.

It has only been open for relatively a short time but the Nujiang Valley is a true gem destination. The valley parallels Myanmar’s border, in extreme northwestern corner of Yunnan in southwestern China. The river that has carved this gorge, the Nu River, becomes the mighty Salween that forms the border between Thailand and Myanmar. If you have inkling for remote corners and may seek the lesser-visited regions of China, Nujiang Valley is your destination.