This
site best viewed with
| China
| Korea
| Thailand
| Mongolia
| HTF
Updates | Nepal The view from a temple window in the hills overlooking Mae Sot, Thailand |
|||||||||
Welcome to Asian Nomads ... a journal of my travels in Asia with fellow wanderers I've
been 'knocking around' in |
What
inspires the world's wanderers?
I
wrote my Master's Thesis in 1991 on a subject related to this web-site
-- Appropriate Development (Tourism) for the Central Himalaya.
I have since lived more than 10 years in this part of Asia.
What makes a tourist want to travel? What do we
learn from travel? Why ever leave home if you can visit
places all around the world? There is nowadays a software
program one can purchase and install on a home computer to receive more
than 2000 television channels, from virtually every country in the
world. My thesis focused on identifying the kinds of tourism
that were in place in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh and in
the kingdom of Nepal. In India, tourism in U.P. is primarily
domestic and focused on the religious pilgrimage. In Nepal,
tourism is primarily international and focused on trekking in the
Himalaya. What are the differences between these two styles
of tourism -- the religious pilgrimage and trekking in the mountains?
Surprisingly, not much. Both invoke a state of mind
in awe of nature and its beauty in the traveler but do it in slightly
different styles. Whether the traveler is a devout Hindu
pilgrim or an international trekker, their experiences remain the same.
It is the journey into and search for both an inner and outer
experience of 'Sacred
Nature".
|
||||||||
A
15-year labor of love ...
This
'Buddha' is located in a beautiful temple on a hillside just east of
Mae Sot in Tak Province, Thailand. Nestled among a lush and
green forest, it is surrounded by teaching halls and other buildings
used for meditation retreat weekends by local and visiting Buddhists.
As part of my teacher's orientation to Thai culture, I
visited this remarkable spot and met the Buddhist nun who teaches
there. The temple is worth a visit just to admire the
handiwork of a young Buddhist artist from Myanmar. He has
spent more than 15 years of his life creating the wood carvings and
engravings that decorate this temple. Painstakingly applying
gold leaf by hand, carving elegant filigrees in wood, and polishing
solid teak floors, he has helped construct a local masterpiece of art.
Although I have reservations about a Buddhist community's use
of funds for this purpose -- instead of for community development -- I
understand how inspiring this kind of work of art can be.
Both Thailand and Myanmar have many beautiful temples as does
China and Korea. I have visited many of them -- on mountains,
above lakes, beside the sea, in mountain hamlets. They all
represent a community's efforts to build a retreat and place of
spiritual replenishment within 'Sacred Nature'. We as a human
race should be building more and more such gardens of the heart as
opposed to the blight of urban sprawl we often choose. Is it
any wonder that people who choose to live in the 'Satanic' temples of
modern city-states suffer compared to the rest of us?
|
Where I'ved lived in Asia ...
|
||||||||
