Word: himalayan
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ALTITUDE ADJUSTMENT You don't have to strap on hiking boots to get up close and personal with the mountains. Departing from Kathmandu, many local airlines offer early morning mountain flybys along the Himalayan ridge. Buddha Air sends out two 16-seaters every morning, weather permitting. Each passenger sits beside a window, and as the plane nears Mount Everest, the friendly flight attendant brings each flyer up to the cockpit for a direct prospect. Not that Everest's neighbors are anything to sniff at: the hour-long flight takes in no less than five of the world's tallest peaks...
Bhutan's only highway is three-and-a-half meters wide. Meandering at a rate of 17 curves per kilometer through the valleys and mountains of the tiny Himalayan kingdom, the road may be better acquainted with cattle than automobiles. At dawn and long after dusk, its rutted asphalt rings with the chatter of schoolchildren traveling hours by foot for their daily lessons. By noon, the highway is a playground for rambunctious monkeys, a drying rack for chilies, and?by the grace of an occasional car or truck?an ingenious tool for flattening bamboo. Waters from holy streams course alongside...
...most directors, shooting a film is a chance to be treated like a deity. For Khyentse Norbu, better known as Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche, the reincarnation of a 19th century Tibetan saint and one of Himalayan Buddhism's most revered lamas, it's just the opposite. "Mostly when I come to Bhutan I'm supposed to play God," explains the youthful 41-year-old, "which has been such a frustration for me for so many years." What he craves, he says, is the chance to "climb down from my throne and speak to ordinary people. I wish I could...
...Khyentse Norbu's provocative take on Himalayan Buddhist convention is also evident in the way he interacts with his cast and crew. On set, he's the least formal of lamas, sipping water out of a Sesame Street cup and expertly indulging his typically Bhutanese penchant for obscenely dirty jokes. "Most so-called rinpoches like myself are too perfect," he says, sitting outside the bamboo shack that has served as his home for the final month of shooting. "And when you have someone who's perfect up there, when you're looking at a so-called perfect being, it doesn...
...have ever seen footage of Buddhist monks sitting in the Himalayan snow, warming cold towels draped over their shoulders and back with body heat generated by meditation, you have seen at work the power of the mind over the body. The monks can manipulate their metabolism to redirect the body's energy from warming its core to heating its surface; the drop in internal metabolic rate is well documented. Similar results have been observed in studies of patients having surgery; patients who meditated experienced less operative bleeding than controls given placebos...