Shangri-La Bus

Along the dirt pathways that scar the mountainside, rickety old buses carry the peace loving passengers to their hidden valley of endless summer nights and fruit trees that touch the earth with branches barely able to hold the harvest that seems to magically manifest every morning. You look out the window, admiring the immaculate view of mountains, occasionally scowling at the deadly cliff that sits just a meter from the wheels of the bus, like a perfect reminder of how delicate life is. Shangri-La is a fictional place described in the 1933 novel Lost Horizon by British author James Hilton. Hilton describes Shangri-La as a mystical, harmonious valley, gently guided from a lamasery, enclosed in the western end of the Kunlun Mountains. Shangri-La has become synonymous with any earthly paradise but particularly a mythical Himalayan utopia, a permanently happy land, isolated from the outside world. The word also evokes the imagery of exoticism of the Orient. In the ancient Tibetan scriptures, existence of seven such places is mentioned as Nghe-Beyul Khimpalung. Khembalung is one of several beyuls ("hidden lands" similar to Shangri-La) believed to have been created by Padmasambhava in the 8th century as idylic, sacred places of refuge for Buddhists during times of strife. The cultural representation of Shangri-La is most often cited to be northwestern Yunnan Province, China, where National Geographic explorer Joseph Rock lived and traveled during the 1920’s and early 1930’s and wrote several articles in National Geographic Magazine that are richly illustrated with superb photography.