TRUE ADVENTURE

and now your true adventure host bilborough's hi there this is bill burr ed saying welcome to adventure true adventure film does it happen throughout our fascinating world you know there's an automatic sense of excitement attached to some parts of the map we may not know much about them but we do know that they're supposed to mean a high order of color and drama places like Darjeeling or karakorum the question is how well do they live up to their advanced billing let's find out along the borders of Tibet there's excitement in the air this is a land of extravagant contrasts the villages perched 11,000 feet up in the Himalayas of donkey trails cut along the edge of vertical cliffs here you can see everything from the new year's devil dance at a Buddhist monastery to the spectacular beauty of a sunrise over Mount can-can junga here's a part of the world that's been celebrated in fiction for generations but no mere fiction can prepare you for the reality of these legendary places and of course in our day the drama of life there has been given an added note of grimness by the nearness of communist China remember the Red Chinese invaded Tibet in 1959 as we will see the Tibetan borders provide an unforgettable experience in the best tradition of true adventure we're in an ancient land of 420 million people who speak almost 800 different languages and dialects [Music] the subcontinent of India is divided into two nations Pakistan and the Republic of India and this true adventure begins in the Republic's capital city New Delhi this is January 26th and the crowds are out to celebrate Republic Day and its annual tribal dance festival India's incredible population includes many different cultures and most of them send representatives so do many of the several hundred Aboriginal tribes which include tree dwellers headhunters desert nomads and pygmies so the capital and Republic Day presents a noisy colorful cross-section of Indian life bewildering at times but always exciting girls from Rajasthan go in for elaborate hairstyles three girl from Assam in the Northeast's these boys are from Kashmir in the northwest and there are many others ancient peoples with proud traditions getting to know each other as citizens of a modern Democratic Republic that was born August 15 1947 [Music] just about every visitor to India calls it a place of paradoxes and it is modern Jets pass overhead while the crowds and costumes arced back to ancient times but India has determined that have the new enriched the old instead of just pushing an aside [Music] here is a young nation welding together many old civilizations each of which has something unique to contribute to the richness of Indian life the pageant of India something to see [Music] [Music] [Music] but the parade is only the starting point of this true adventure from here in New Delhi our cameramen are starting off on a 2,500 mile trek they'll be following the Tibetan border a border that stretches like a flimsy partition between the free world and Red China to the north this is the Vale of Kashmir it's an India's northernmost state a place of enchantment you have to see to believe Kashmir's capital is the 1400 year old city of Srinagar the lake gets built on the river flowing through it many adjoining canals make it a kind of placid eastern Venice [Music] Kashmere shares a long border with Red China another with Tibet at one point Kashmir is only 20 miles from Russia itself luckily for the Kashmir eat people the north and eastern parts of their state include the towering natural barricades of the Karakoram mountains and the Himalayas the caravan route to Tibet goes through the Kulu Valley in the Indian state of Punjab at around 6,000 feet the climate is the same as New England the houses resemble those in the Austrian Alps but everything else is strictly Central Asia conditions are primitive living is at a bare subsistence level no frills hear nothing but necessities and not too many of those [Music] here's how Kulu villagers separate wheat from the chaff [Music] a Kulu Valley refinement in the preparation of wheat it's heated to make a pleasant sort of breakfast food is served with milk and honey [Music] melting glaciers high in the Himalayas feed the river that runs through the Coulomb Valley but the mule trains that stopped at Mali often came across the Himalayas this was one of the last caravans from Tibetan come to barter items like Tibetan wool for oil and small manufactured articles just after these films were shot tibetan mule train stopped showing up red chinese and clapped down in tibet they disapproved of contact with the outside world even more than they disapproved of free enterprise from the Kulu Valley our cameras in a goatherd finally take Rohtang pass to the north it's over 13,000 feet high higher than most mountains in the United States [Music] the name Rohtang pass means the pass of the Dead [Music] there are Tibetan prayers written on those flags every flutter sends a prayer heavenward for the protection of the herdsmen and travelers legend and imagination have filled this remote part of the world with a host of evil spirits but the human spirit is hard to conquer a Tibetan proverb says if the heart be stout a mouse can lift an elephant and whether you interpret that to mean faith positive thinking or simple courage the shepherds and mule tears of the high Himalayas have their full share of it [Music] from Rohtang pass the trail winds down in the Lahaul Valley this is the monastry @k line at over ten thousand three hundred feet here the language is Tibetan but the Tibetan culture has been diluted by Indian influences and the result is a mixture the people of Tibet proper looked down on still the people on both sides of the border are united by their common religion Buddhism and the holy places here belonged to all Buddhists wherever they come from [Music] this dance is part of the New Year celebration which is in February in this part of the world the dancers are llamas from the monastery and the whole performance is actually a religious service just as the old European morality plays were many centuries ago [Music] the grotesque mask convinced the first Europeans who saw one of these performances that they were watching a devil dance so that's what they called them in the name stuck in English at any rate actually both good and evil are represented and each dance tells a story with a moral or it dramatizes a chapter from Buddhist history [Music] these are the followers of an ancient faith 500 years older than Christianity offering a lesson on the struggle between good and evil here at the edge of the bamboo curtain in the distant Himalayas they're caught up in a real and very modern version of that struggle the outcome hangs in the balance of history but the drama of life in these border lands gives a very special meaning to the idea of true adventure [Music] this is one of them remotest inhabited valleys in the world the hunza river valley in the Karakoram rain poomsae is a narrow canyon a hundred miles long a desert set in the second highest mountain complex in the world it has more Peaks over 20,000 feet than the Alps have over 10,000 this is bleak rugged country with red China's Sinkiang province just across the border according to legend the Hunza are descended from three soldiers of Alexander the Great who took Persian wives and settled here over two thousand years ago they're often called the healthiest people in the world but are they well our true adventure expedition discovered that they're desperately poor there is never enough food to last the winter the soil is rocky most of their farming has to be done on steep mountain slopes often in artificial terraces built a rock and filled with soil carried in baskets from a riverbed thousands of feet below [Music] no matter how hard they work it their land just can't support the population of only 23,000 with the closing of the Chinese border by the Reds their opportunities for trading were cut off too so the average pusseh family has a cash income of no more than five dollars a year and the people suffer from chronic malnutrition and everything that can lead to it [Music] but they're still a tough people in the old days they were famous Raiders if they had to they could hold their own narrow mountain passes against invaders from the north for a long long time there are scenes like this all along the southern slopes of the units there's little wasted space in this crowded country just as the landscape is dominated by the Himalayas the lives of the people are largely ruled by their religious faith we're backtracked southward into India again where most people belong to the Hindu religion here in the north though many are Buddhists and Tibet just across the border has been Buddhism spiritual center for centuries but in 1959 this hillside town of masoorie became the headquarters of one of the world's most important refugees a fugitive from Chinese aggression quiet man by the name of the Dalai Lama the spiritual leader of millions of Buddhists when the Red Chinese learned that they could never subdue the Tibetan population without first controlling a Buddhist church they planned a ship the Dalai Lama to China in disguise and on foot he escaped in the middle of violent fighting and took refuge in India tell the world what the red liberation of his country really meant eastward now beyond the kingdom of Nepal [Music] this is Colin Fong the Indian terminus of the great caravan route to Lhasa the capital of Tibet [Music] it's a crowded bustling place or was when our cameramen were there mule and Jack caravans from Lhasa came in every day with hides and must news from Tibet but immediately after these pictures were taken the last wool train arrived and the border was closed without knowing our true adventure cameras were recording the end of an era what's happened to many of the people who crowded the marketplace that day there's no way of knowing [Music] perched on the Tibetan border between Nepal and Bhutan is the smallest of the border states cecum measuring just 65 by 35 miles it's an independent kingdom under Indian protection scholars from all over the world flock to Gangtok the capital to study at the recently opened Institute of Tibet ology here the student can pour over an extraordinary collection of ancient manuscripts and art objects from Tibet many of them holy writings brought across the border just in time each of those sheets of paper was printed from a single hand-carved plate many are centuries old see Kim is often called the land of the Dragon it's also the land of the big masks another stage on which ancient battles between good and evil is dramatized in the traditional dances of the Buddhist monks [Music] just south of cecum with a fantastic view of the himalayas the mountain city of Darjeeling it's probably the most cosmopolitan small town in the world it's home to about 20,000 people but they represent so many different racial and national groups that a resident needs to know five or six different languages just to get around even the weather is paradoxical although darjeeling is perched 7,000 feet above sea level there's no snow in the winter day but during just two months of the year during the monsoon season they get 80 inches of rain the rest of the year the temperature hovers around a comfortable 63 degrees [Music] as in so many parts of India entire families have to work in the fields and plantations to get enough to eat still in one way at least these people are lucky they have one stable industry with a worldwide market darjeeling tea delicate job of actually plucking the tea leaves is done by the women this is the boom monastery nearly as old as Darjeeling itself [Music] these are prayer wheels each contains thousands of strips of paper with prayers written on them as the wheels revolve the prayers spin up to heaven [Music] [Laughter] [Music] the population is so mixed in this nook of the Himalayas that there are no less than seven different new year's festivals this is just one of them celebrated in the groom monastery in the middle of February [Music] [Music] [Music] meanwhile in the nearby Buddha Bootsy monastery there's another celebration being ready for a little over 2,500 years ago in 560 BC Lord Buddha was born and they pal across the valley the great procession honoring the anniversary of his birth is about to begin [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] by the way the deep notes of those large trumpets are supposed to resemble the voices of the legendary elephants that stand watch the corners of the world the trumpets are so large it's impossible to sustain a note for more than a few seconds India is sometimes called the most spiritual country in the world perhaps it is or perhaps life is just so hard for most of its teeming millions that they turn to non worldly concerns and sheer desperation one thing certainly there's no easy road ahead for India or Pakistan before the border states that touched the bamboo curtain but if the heart be strong a mouse can lift an elephant the old Tibetan proverb is a call to the future and true adventure [Music] the lands around the frontiers of Tibet are really something to see aren't they I think we've proved that at least some of those faraway places are every bit as exciting and colorful as we've always heard they were if not more so but even more than that I think we've discovered that the people who live in the subcontinent of India and its neighboring states are more than just figures in the population explosion our true adventure cameraman shot film among people whose cultures were all before anyone in the West had ever heard of them much less started to record them in fact they date back in an unbroken line to before the start of the Christian era and that's quite a while of course many of their ideas are strange to most of us but not their tradition of determined independence that's woven into the fabric of their lives and it's the stuff history is made of the highest kind of true adventure I hope you've enjoyed sharing this one with us until we meet once again this is Bill bird saying may all your adventures be happy one [Music] [Applause] [Music]