Christa Larwood, BBC Travel Show Presenter
Photo Joe Windsor-Williams
BBC Travel Show presenter Christa Larwood went in search of a fictional paradise, but after many days driving on treacherous Tibetan mountain passes, she thinks she found it. No wonder her quest to find Shangri La is Christa’s Favourite Detour.
“We would be driving into places where people would come out of their houses and just look at us as if to say: “What are these people doing here?” ”
“Lost Horizons is a story of a group of airmen whose plane came down in this mysterious Eastern paradise with a conical, snow-capped mountain and valley and these very specific geographical features. And it was called Shangri La. It was a mountain utopia where people lived to 200 years.
The funny thing is, even though it was completely fictional, and the author James Hilton never went to China, people started thinking it was real. There’d actually been expeditions to go and find Shangri La, despite the fact that it was pretty obvious that it's a fictional place.
It turns out that James Hilton, though he hadn't been to that part of the East, had read the expedition reports of an explorer called Joseph Rock, whose adventures would be reported on in National Geographic. And so it's believed that Hilton read through Rock’s adventures and then use that as inspiration..
If I could trace the journey of this Joseph Rock, I could find, if not Shangri La, but the inspiration for Shangri La. And that involved going to some quite out of the way places. I started in Lijang, which is a popular tourist destination. If Disney did a traditional Chinese town, it would be this beautiful, with hanging lanterns everywhere, and these lovely canals.
So the idea was that I would drive from there to a place called Zhongdian. It's a town that the powers-that-be decided, for reasons of attracting domestic and international tourists, would be renamed Shangri La. And when I turned up there the whole place was a construction site, because, insanely, they were busy tearing down beautiful decorative lintels from the houses and putting up new, slightly slicker versions of the same thing. So the whole town was getting a facelift to be more like the fictional Shangri La.
Photo Sifan Liu / Unsplash
I headed out from from Zhongdian and into just the most astonishing scenery I think I've ever seen – the Himalayan peaks going off into the distance, mountain lakes the colour of jewels. At one point I was going through the Hongla pass, it's a very high pass, above 15,000 feet, and I was standing at the top, looking out at this place that was all just ridiculously gorgeous. I realised I had kind of vista fatigue. I had been driving up unbelievably beautiful mountain roads and having these incredible views for so many hours that I just I felt f overwhelmed and almost dulled by it all. This felt like a strange existential shock because it was just so glorious.
In terms of the roads and driving it was all you'd want from a very remote Chinese mountain adventure up into the Himalayas. You know, narrow roads, good rocky bits, deep snow and ice, passing eye-watering traffic accidents, where half the walls would have collapsed onto a truck or somebody tumbled down the hill. There were not many guardrails and the roads were very tight. I mean, that could have all changed by now but at the time was pretty rough and ready. But luckily my guide used to be a truck driver, so he was very confident. In fact I had to learn the Chinese for “easy tiger” to get him to slow down a bit.
Photo Shutterstock
From the time I left Zhongdian I didn't see any other Westerners. We would be driving into places where people would come out of their houses and just look at us as if to say: “What are these people doing here?”
My destination that I’d worked out by following the footsteps of this old explorer was a place which is now known as Yading National Park. There are lots of places throughout Asia that will claim to be Shangri La for different reasons, but when I arrived in Yading, it was pretty clear to me that if it wasn't what inspired Lost Horizon and Shangri La it was still an incredibly special place.
There were Buddhists on pilgrimage, so it had all of the spirituality that you'd want from Shangri La, it had a pointy mountain that matched, had all the the prayer flags and the valleys, this incredible open plain with a little stream that was just meandering through the landscape of this golden field, and it honestly just looked like something out of a Pixar Animation.
I met a monk in a cowboy hat who told me: “Lots of people say this is Shangri La. I have heard of this British book, but I think Shangri La is just another word for Shambhala.” Shambhala, he told me, is a mystical kingdom that Buddhist teachings say is located somewhere in the northern Himalayas. “Shambhala doesn’t exist on Earth,” he continued. “It’s on another plane.” So, is it possible to ever find this paradise, I wondered. “‘No,’” he replied, “but it’s possible to get an idea of it. And this is the closest I’ve found.”
Looking back I think it's probably the most remarkable journey I've ever taken in my life.”