Fall
2000
Volume 94,
Number 1
C L O S E - U P
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From Search and Rescue to Shangri-La  |
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| 75From
a Tibetan point of view, Ian A. Baker ’75 may have discovered
the gateway to a lost paradise, what the Western world refers to as
the mythical land of Shangri-La. But when Baker—Himalayan explorer,
Buddhist scholar, photographer and author—stood deep in a Himalayan
gorge in 1998 at the foot of a Niagara-like waterfall sought by explorers
for a century, he felt a heightened sense of reality. “It was a great feeling—the conjunction of a place that had been sought and consigned to myth turning out to be something of such mythic proportions,” he says. “It was like the meeting of two distinct worlds—the world of Tibetan Buddhism and the Victorian era of Western exploration.” Baker was the first explorer to descend into and measure the 110-foot Hidden Falls on Tibet’s mighty Tsangpo River. Journeying through Pemako, an inaccessible region in southeastern Tibet, he had clawed his way down mist-cloaked, nearly sheer 4,000-foot cliffs into a gorge-within-a-gorge so deep it’s always in shadow. Baker began his quest years ago by studying obscure medieval texts under the tutelage of a Tibetan lama. “It was like reading real-life fairy tales. The poetry and subtlety of the vision was what first inspired me,” he says. When the Chinese lifted their ban on travel to the region, Baker began making annual trips to the Tsangpo gorges in 1993. Due to his fluency in the Tibetan language, his use of sacred texts as maps and his respect for local traditions and the environment, he was accepted and aided by the native people. The terrain included intense challenges to physical survival—pit vipers, blood-sucking leeches and adherents of an ancient cult who believe that by poisoning an outsider they inherit that person’s positive karma. “When one enters a world where there is danger, it heightens awareness,” says Baker, who has been designated an “Explorer for the Millennium” by National Geographic. “Knowing about danger would never cause me not to go, nor would it compel me to go.” Adventure has always been part of Baker’s life. He chose PA for its Search and Rescue program and says, “Rock climbing was my greatest passion at Andover.” Following graduation from Middlebury College in 1980, he traveled to India, Sikiim and Nepal. He has lived in Katmandu, Nepal, for most of the past 20 years and says it is home to “a lot of eccentric people pursuing their personal passions.” Baker has written a series of books chronicling Tibetan art, culture and spiritual traditions. Tibet: Reflections from the Wheel of Life (1994), The Tibetan Art of Healing (1997) and The Dalai Lama’s Secret Temple: Tantric Wall Paintings from Tibet (2000) all include forewords by the Dalai Lama. Another book, Celestial Gallery, will be published later this fall, while The Falls of Tsangpo: The Search for Tibet’s Lost Paradise will be published by Random House in 2001. “This discovery wasn’t about finding a waterfall and measuring it, although that was interesting,” concludes Baker. “What was more intriguing was the way the waterfall was perceived, both by Tibetans as well as the larger world.” —Tana
Sherman
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