India
Gue Village
A five-hundred-year-old naturally mummified monk sits uncorrupted in a glass box near the Tibetan border.
The monk has been sitting for five hundred years — skin preserved, teeth intact, posture perfect, upright with hands folded. The earthquake that revealed him in 1975 broke the stupa but left the body untouched. Nobody in Gue knew he was there.
Gue, in Himachal Pradesh's Spiti district, keeps the naturally mummified remains of a Buddhist monk believed to be around 500 years old. An earthquake in 1975 cracked open the stupa that had sealed him and revealed a body preserved in meditation posture; science credits the dry cold of 3,800 metres and, possibly, the self-mummification practice in which monks gradually reduced food toward death. He now sits in a glass case in a purpose-built monastery shrine, and the gravel detour off the Spiti circuit ends at the village and goes no further.
Solo
Fold Gue into the Spiti circuit as the day's quiet detour — the shrine asks for stillness, and the road's end supplies it.
Friends
Detour together off the Spiti road and stand in front of five hundred years of stillness — then argue about it for the rest of the drive.
- The monk sits in his glass case in the village shrine — naturally mummified, teeth intact, skin preserved.
- He was found by accident in 1975, when an earthquake broke the stupa above him.
- At 3,800 metres near the Tibetan border, the air that preserved the monk also preserves the silence.
- The road in is a dead-end detour off the Spiti circuit — you come here on purpose or not at all.
Thukpa comes filled with root vegetables grown in the short, intense Himalayan summer.
Yak cheese is dried rock-hard, made to be sucked slowly at altitude.
Arenal & La Fortuna
Costa Rica
Hot springs steaming through jungle beneath a volcano's perfect cone at dusk.
Drakensberg
South Africa
Basalt walls rise above sandstone caves painted across thousands of years.
Parque Nacional Volcán Isluga
Chile
Volcanic horizons and high wetlands surround living Aymara settlements in the altiplano.
Sani Pass
South Africa
A switchback road climbs from green foothills to a high border above the clouds.
Unakoti
India
Massive stone faces of Hindu deities carved into a jungle cliff-face swallowed by vines.
Kaziranga
India
Two-thirds of the world's one-horned rhinos hiding in grass taller than your jeep.
Varanasi
India
Funeral pyres burning beside a sacred river where thousands bathe in the dawn fog.
Hampi
India
A ruined empire scattered across a landscape of balancing granite boulders and banana plantations.