THE SIEGE OF SHANGRI-LA

A top-drawer history of recent forays into the controversial and uncompromisingly wild Tsangpo Gorge of Tibet from traveler McRae (Continental Drifter, 1994).

When the Tsangpo River drops off the Tibetan Plateau, it enters a landscape so forbidding—a chaos of high sharp peaks and sheer valleys—it might as well have fallen off the face of the earth. As such, it has quite a reputation as a visionary landscape where inner and outer landscapes meld, a power place with hidden, even paradisiacal elements. To enter such a land is to slip into allegory, writes McRae, who starts his sharp-witted account of Western machinations in the Tsangpo River valley with the 19th-century explorers and collectors who had their eyes on topography, orchids, red pandas, and Tibetan tigers—and only incidentally on ethnography—though they never made it to the inner gorge, the deepest ten miles of canyon where a colossal waterfall was rumored to account for the great drop in the river’s elevation. This piece of the fanciful doesn’t hold a candle to the mythological and cosmological significance of the gorge to the Tantric Buddhists, some of whose ideals and goals are “symbolized by features of the physical landscape,” but only for those who have flushed their karmic residue to access “a clear view of the mystical geography.” McRae does a gratifying job of explaining Tantric practice and how it related to travels through the region in the late-20th century by Ian Baker and Hamid Sardar—karma-fueled geographers from Oxford and Harvard—though spirituality had little to do with subsequent expeditions, which, as chronicled by McRae, ranged from nasty beard-pulling between free-booting adventurers and National Geographic–sanctioned honchos to a cheesy “siege-style, media-driven assault.”

After travel to far places, McRae, a contributing editor for National Geographic Adventure gives his impressions time to mull and mold until they’re properly digested and ready for the telling.