Wendy Teasdill |
Walking to the
Mountain
"Wendy Teasdill provides
a vivid personal account of how she was drawn to Mount Kailash. With
the resolution characteristic of a pilgrim she walked, and forded
rivers. Inspired by the beauty of the landscape and her admiration for
the Tibetan people she met, she reached her goal."
The Dalai
Lama "The first woman to have
trekked alone to the "navel of the world" is no Tenzing Norgay. She is
a frail but unstoppable English backpacker: with fire in her belly,
iron in her soul, nerves of steel, and a vision charged by dreams of
the impossible."
Vernon Ram
The Week (Kerala)
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| Wendy Teasdill
was brought up in the English countryside along with two younger
siblings by mathematical parents. Toys were expertly home made and
holidays were always camping holidays, as far removed from the
maddening crowd as possible. They brought her up to believe that the
highest bliss is to lie in a flower-riddled summer meadow by running
water under blue skies. Failing that, any snow or rainstorm was better
than city streets. She obtained a degree in
English at Leeds University but, instead of settling into the English
groove, immediately set off East, becoming one of the very last to
travel overland through Afghanistan to India and Nepal before that
country's dark destiny with war. Back in
England with the customary hepatitis obtained on such expeditions, she
cured herself with yoga and studied to teach English as a Foreign
Language. These two skills have sustained her ever since.
She has travelled throughout the Americas, around
Europe and back to India many times. The study and practice of yoga
increased, and she became a student of BKS Iyengar in India. She
taught English from Mexico City to Tokyo to sustain herself, which
required living in cities, but her free time would find her walking
alone in the mountains, from the Andes to Andorra.
The great dream, however, was always to travel to
Tibet, which must have the greatest mountain walking of all. For five
years she was based in Hong Kong, where she taught English and yoga;
this acted as a springboard for travels to China and, finally, Tibet.
Interest in Hinduism and Tibetan Buddhism, coupled with a love of
walking in remote places, especially places of inherently natural
power, led her to walk across western Tibet to Mount Kailash. It was a
wild idea which paid off, due, she implicitly believes, to the grace
of the mountain.
Wendy Teasdill is now married with two children, and
based in England, where she is working on a pregnancy yoga book and
writings based on her subsequent travels without children and with, in
India, China and Tibet.
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