Australian writer Rose Lane was 3 years old the first time she decided to leave home.
“I was outside playing in the backyard while my mother hung the washing on the clothesline when I made the decision,” she writes. “It didn’t occur to me to make any preparations, nor to let anyone know; I just went. When she realised I was missing, my mother mounted a search party comprising my sisters and some neighbours. I was found a couple of blocks away.
“‘Where do you think you’re going,’ one of my sisters asked. ‘I’m going off to see the world,’ was my reply.”
Born and raised in the small New South Wales, Australia country town of Bellingen, leaving home became a recurring theme in Lane’s life, which she chronicles in her memoir, “The Last Tibetan Kingdom: A Journey In Search of Home.”
The youngest of eight children — two of whom had died before she was born — Lane felt she was “born into a mess of grief.”
Her mother, a tireless worker who ran the household and her husband’s veterinary practice, kept herself constantly moving.
“Cleaning, cooking, washing, ironing, sewing, shopping… and, at the end of the day, when forced to stop, she drank whisky — only one or two — enough to hold off that dark thing always lurking in the shadows, waiting to drag her down,” Lane writes.
It was a grief Lane felt she wasn’t privy to.
“It was as though I had shown up to a party ready to join in the fun, not realising something terrible had happened,” she writes. “I was the excited one who arrives raring to go, but whom everyone stares at and turns away.”
Even though she’d spent her life running, years later, when her mother decided to sell the family home, Lane was devastated:
It was as though I’d woken to find the sky had gone or the ground underneath me. If it all turned to shit where was I to go, if I couldn’t go home? Where was my safe place?
Having lost the anchor of home, Lane set her sights on something else — something far away and enduring.
That something was the walled city of Lo Manthang in Nepal:
I set my sights on a walled city in the Himalayas — because if I didn’t find something permanent to hold onto, I might disappear.
As a pediatric nurse, Lane first fell in love with Nepal in 2010 when she and her husband travelled there with their three sons to volunteer with disabled children.
“It had to be somewhere difficult but not dangerous,” according to Lane. “I’d always wanted to see the Himalayas so we settled on Nepal. It was during my research about this country that I read about a walled city on the Tibetan plateau in a remote part of Nepal that had been there for seven hundred years, largely untouched, the inhabitants still living much the same way they had for those seven centuries.”
Planning the trip, Lane would check Google Earth to see how many photos had been uploaded – “none was a good sign.”
Her urgency came from the sense that this ancient kingdom was vanishing fast:
A real mediaeval walled city was in danger of becoming a Disneyfied tourist attraction where the centuries-old rituals, rooted in deep belief about keeping bad spirits at bay, bad influences that would threaten their crops, bring disease or destroy the Kingdom itself, would become entertainment for those threatening influences.
In 2015, Lane finally made the two-week, arduous horseback trek to Lo Manthang at an altitude of over 3,000 meters/9,843 feet, a seemingly impossible feat for someone who “tires after a short walk,” but determination won out.
“It was hard to believe that we were still on the same planet,” she writes. “Apart from the cairn, there was nothing man-made in sight. The whole world spread out around us, empty. We lay under a piercing sun, merciless at that altitude. My hands were burnt red raw on the first day, despite sunscreen, so I’d had to add my woollen gloves; a great look that added to the helmet and hat. Out of the corner of my eye I caught movement and looked to see a small lizard, its sand-yellow skin with faded green patches merging seamlessly with the ground. Its yellow cat’s eyes regarded me with contempt; it seemed to say, ‘I’ve been here for millions of years. Who are you to come to this place?’”
As Lane journeyed through a landscape steeped in history and spiritual mystery, she witnessed a fading world, ancient monasteries crumbling, traditions eroding, climate and politics reshaping lives.
“The Last Tibetan Kingdom” is a story of physical and emotional endurance, of confronting loss and of discovering that home isn’t something you keep, but something you carry. And sometimes, something you must learn to let go of.
The book is available on Amazon as well as Ingram Spark and Draft2Digital.
