He is made a salaried employee of the government and ultimately becomes a tutor of the Dalai Lama himself. Things start becoming easy for him after he reaches Lhasa, and with his apt of making people endearing towards him, he makes friends and finds a family to host him.īy then he is fluent in Tibetan, and starts getting attention of the government due to his Western school training, and he is consulted on various matters where he contributes tremendously. He walks for over 70 days before he reaches Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, and it is a marvel reading his description of his first sight of it.

At this point of his tale, you really begin respecting his intellect and negotiating tactics, he tricks and deceives his way past doubting Tibetan officials and finds a way of gaining favours from them, and once, in a rather hair-raising section of the book, he out-swindles a bunch of robbers famed for killing, at their plan to rob and probably murder him.

He crosses the Tsang Chok-La pass and begins walking through the Tibetan Kingdom. He does walk for days on end and one must admire his courage and tenacity as he does all he can to avoid capture, whilst having no change of clothes or access to good food so that within no time he is all rags and thin to the bone but an expert at hiding and running. Finally he does manage to escape and head off to Tibet (Tibet held a fascination for him because it was the last “mystery” of the world for no outsiders were allowed inside). Never one to accept fate, he tries severally to escape and reading his attempts at that is horrifyingly fascinating.

Let us take ourselves back to 1939, at the start of the Second World War and make yourself a companion to Heinrich Harrer, a passionate mountain climber who managed to scale the Eiger North Face wall as well as participate in many skiing Championships.Īs he travels on his mountain-climbing expedition, he finds himself in India, and it being a British protectorate at the time and with Britain and Germany being at war, he taken to a detention camp in Bombay. It seems as if there is nothing you can tell someone without them giving you that ‘been there, done that, so tell me something I haven’t heard/googled’ look.

Book seven years in tibet