The greatest Trade Route that the world has never heard about: The Tea Horse Road

Canadian award-winning Himalayan explorer Jeff Fuchs has spent the last 13 years documenting and tracking Himalayan trade routes. Obsessed with documenting the oral narratives of the heights and locals’ views on the environment and culture. Fuchs sees the two as being inextricably linked. Author of the Ancient Tea Horse Road and most recently the subject of the film documentary, The Tea Explorer, Fuchs lived in the eastern Himalayas for over a decade. Fluent in Mandarin and Tibetan, he is the first documented westerner to travel by foot the Tea Horse Road, the Pashmina Route through Ladakh (Hor’lam), and the nomadic route of Salt (Tsa’lam) through Qinghai province. He has led and been a part of over 30 Himalayan expeditions.

This stunning and daunting route, so vital to so many of the remote Himalayan peoples, somehow remained a virtual mystery to the west for almost 13 centuries – it is now hopefully getting its due and some of the acclaim it deserves, as one of the globes’s most daunting and incredible journeys.

Fuchs is co-founder of the Keep Center, a Nature School on the Big Island of Hawaii and spend is either in Hawaii or in the Himalayan regions. He goes nowhere without a huge stash of tea.