After walking 4,000 miles down the Nile, Levison Wood (Walking the Nile) was enjoying life in London and not thinking about another lengthy trek. But the wilderness called: when the chance came to walk 1,700 miles through the Himalayas, Wood took off on another six-month adventure. Beginning in Afghanistan and ending in Bhutan, Wood and his guides faced scorching heat, monsoon rains, treacherous mountain roads, landslides, tigers, crocodiles, armed military men and political disputes that made crossing borders as dangerous as the natural world. Despite the hazards, Wood bonded with his guides and the various peoples of Kashmir, India and Nepal as they shared roasted meats and milky tea in huts, yurts and hovels on the mountain slopes and valleys of the Himalayas.
Wood skillfully intersperses cultural, political, religious and historical information about the region he trekked through with beautiful, detailed descriptions of the people and countryside. He writes, "Rice paddies gave the valley floor a bright and verdant shimmer and spiraling plumes of smoke curled out from wood-fires in the villages below.... Beyond this rose something wild and untamed. Something so sublime in its proportions, and gargantuan in its raw, unwieldy beauty as to give the impression that it was floating in mid-air, somehow unattached from the green and brown hills and valleys below." Despite private audiences with the Dalai Lama, a swami, and a cannibal, all of whom gave him important advice, the most significant revelations come as Wood stands at the end of his quest. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer