The Heart of the World:
A Journey to the Last Secret Place
By Ian Baker
2004
This book is a mountain sports person's version of the Da Vinci Code. It concerns a search for a legendary waterfall in one of the most inaccessible places on the planet, the Tsangpo Gorge of the Brahmaputra River. After several hundred miles on the Tibetan plateau, just to the North of Everest, the river cuts through the Himalaya carving a canyon between 25,000 foot peaks. The area is a political no man's land between India and China, peopled by the most remote fingers of Tibetan culture.
Baker is a Tibet scholar become adventurer. This book is an essay on Tibetan Budhism as it applies to landscape and the exploration of sacred secret places. Baker was in the area at the same time whitewater Kayakers were attempting to paddle the river for the first time, perhaps foolishly. For folks aware of that story this book provides an added dimension - perhaps a bit like the Scott/Amundsen race to the South Pole.
Baker first visited Kathmandu at 19, like him I also visited at that age, just a few years later. My journey was the opposite of his - starting off as a mountain adventurer, but becoming more spiritual along the way - ending up in a similar 'place'.
I too was aware of the Tsangpo gorge, having completed a survey of Chinese Rivers using Army Map Service topos from the University of Oregon map collection during a few spare months in early 1982, shortly after my return from Nepal and India. I shared stories of this discovery, but can't say for sure whether I was the one who first targeted this river for whitewater sport.
