AWCH The Tibetan Dream

It took me approximately five years to earn enough money and free time to put my dream adventure into motion and explore Asia. At the start there were five wild-west women, setting off to see what was on the other side of the world. We began in Beijing, China and followed the Great Wall to the west, headed into Pakistan, with a few excursions from the path along the way. At this point we were four women traveling alone, and, by the time we crossed the border by foot into India during the monsoon, our patience was wearing thin.

We thought that India would be easier than Pakistan but this was untrue. We headed north to Dharamsala where we could finally rest in the Buddhist community which supports saving Tibetan traditional arts. There we managed to have an audience with the Dalai Lama. The meeting was brief but intense and, at that moment, three of us were determined to head for Tibet. The Buddhists we had met in this community were open-hearted and kind. We wanted to see where they had come from.

In order to organize our trip to Tibet we had to start from Kathmandu in Nepal. The most important point when arranging one of these trips is to find a reputable tour agency. It is better to spend a little more money to ensure a higher quality standard of travel. Naturally, since we were only half way through our trip we wanted to save money. One agency offered fifty dollars less than the others so we jumped for it. This turned out to be a big mistake. And then that tour group was reduced by illness from 10 to just the three of us. Somehow we convinced the tour guide to take us along anyway, and so we began our journey on the friendship highway to Lhasa.

At first it seemed a piece of cake: the roads were in good condition and the weather was pleasant. But the moment we started to get comfortable with our surroundings was the moment things started to get a lot more stressful. The rains had washed out the road in several places. Each traveler was forced to leave his or her bus to cross treacherous landslides and waterfalls and then continue by foot. If you were lucky, you found another vehicle waiting.

It was at one of these crossings that I would meet my future husband. We had just crossed a river and were loaded on to a bus which would take us a little further. I ended up sitting next to Frank Schaefer, who was in a very bad mood. My mood was quite different. This adventure had made me excited and exhilarated. Out of curiosity and half expecting that he would complain about the weather or his feet, I asked what was wrong. He was upset that the Chinese government had cancelled his double entry visa and that he would have to buy another one. This of course made me laugh, which upset him even more, until I showed him my passport, “They do it to everybody; you’re not special.” In the end he laughed too, especially when I offered him one of my soggy croissants from Kathmandu.

We continued to meet along the way, but since he paid his extra fifty dollars, he slept in the best hotels. My hotels ranged from a carpet factory where the outhouse was a pit built on stilts to a Chinese army cement block hotel. The landscape which we traveled through was magnificent. The vast horizons and beauty of this land are hard to surpass. It is austere but impressive. As for Tibetans, despite their oppression from the Chinese government, they were warm hearted, kind and friendly to the travelers passing through their homeland. It was devastating to see how much of the Tibetan culture had been destroyed and is continuously disintegrating.

One thing became clear to me: as I traveled, I was going through some changes of my own. From the beginning of this journey from Kathmandu to Lhasa, I kept meeting this strange German man. I was getting all warm inside which seemed strange because Tibet is not a warm country at all. Perhaps it was the thin air or perhaps it was just fate, but I soon came to realize I had strong feelings for this guy. So the last night in Tibet, I found the courage to declare my feelings. I was shocked that he felt the same. I told him that since I was flying back to Kathmandu in the morning and he was traveling to the Mt. Everest base camp first, we would have ten days to think all this over.

After arriving back at my hotel in Bota, I began to have the strangest dreams. Since my hotel was situated between four monasteries, I woke up every morning at 4:30 to the monks chanting. Each night I went to bed thinking I needed to get my head clear and forget this guy. Logic told me that this was crazy. Here I was in Asia falling in love with a man from Germany. Where was this relationship going to go? Each morning the monks’ chanting would wake me up from these strange, unforgettable dreams.

Ten days later Frank arrived and called me. We agreed to meet in front of his hotel where I thought the story would come to a crashing end. But the moment I saw him, I realized that he was the one for me. Eight months later we were married. And now, six years later, we are still living happily together in Germany with our little boy, Adrian, and I have never regretted that decision to follow my heart.