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Landing in Tibet was a little like travelling to New Zealand when I was a teenager. Both were faraway places that had occupied a quasi-mythical space in my imagination. Tibet was at the roof of the world to the north while New Zealand was a Pacific paradise to the south. My mother, a New Zealander, had regaled me and my sister with stories of her childhood on New Zealand’s North Island when we were young. As a result, my head was filled with a magical, hazy sense of what New Zealand was like (a little like The Lord of the Rings minus the hobbits and elves).

This came screeching to a halt when my grandmother passed away and my family made the lengthy trek down under. We flew from Edmonton to LA, LA to Tahiti, and finally, over to Auckland. When we got to New Zealand, I was a little let down. It was just a beautiful, green place with rolling hills and regular people with strong accents and a lot of long, winding roads that made me feel carsick. And there were a lot of cousins. This doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth seeing. It was. Still, I was confronted with the realization that New Zealand was a real place with real people. It was no longer dancing in fairy dust. Spending time with my relatives sped up that process.

Travelling to Tibet was somewhat similar. A dreamy image of Tibet played in the back of my mind as I practiced Buddhism and studied it at university. The image fluttered about as I learnt about masters like Guru Padmasambhava and the history of Buddhism in India, Tibet, and East Asia and it flitted behind the accounts of the invasion of Tibet and the flight of the Dalai Lama and other teachers. When I arrived in Tibet, however, the fairy dust of Tibet didn’t fade. It deepened and this surprised me.