The Heart of the World: A Journey to the Last Secret Place
Sunday, December 5, 2004
By: Rachel Glickman

Former Academic Director and Study Abroad Alum Authors Book

Ian Baker, an SIT Study Abroad alum from 1977 and former Academic Director of SIT's Nepal program from 1982-1990, recently authored The Heart of the World: A Journey to the Last Secret Place. 

According to ancient Tibetan Buddhist belieft, remote corners of the earth conceal beyul, sacred "hidden lands" that reveal themselves to devout pilgrims in times of crisis.  The most storied and powerful of all beyul is Pemako, located in the Himalayas in the depths of the Tsangpo gorge, the world's deepest and most forbidding canyon.  For over a century, Western explorers have sought to reach the innermost sections of the gorge, hoping to discover there a colossal waterfall considered to be the portal to an earthly paradise and the origin of James Hilton's mythic Shangri-La.  But the heart of the Tsangpo gorge remained a blank spot on the map of world exploration until Ian Baker, mountain climber and Buddhist scholar set out on a series of extraordinary expeditions.

The Heart of the World: A Journey to the Last Secret Place, with an introduction by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, is Baker's long-awaited memoir of this quest to reach the legendary hiddens falls of Pemako, one of the last wild places on earth.

While based in Kathmandu as SIT's Academic Director, Baker found himself drawn to the legends of the beyul and employed his climbing skills as well his deep knowledge of both the landscapes of the Himalaya and Tibetan Buddhism to seek them out.  After researching ancient Buddhist texts, being granted a series of audiences with the Dalai Lama, and consulting a revered Tibetan lama who put him through a series of trials before helping him to decipher the sacred writings, Baker was determined to explore an unchartered five-mile section of the Tsangpo gorge.  After eight attempts and several years of encountering sheer cliffs, impassable white water, dense, leech-infested jungles, and other expedition teams who had met failure and tradegy in their own quests, Baker and his National Geographic-sponsored team finally reached the depths of the Tsangpo gorge in November, 1998.  There they made news worldwide by finding and measuring a 108-foot-high waterfall, the legendary grail of Western explorers and Tibetans seekers alike.

Ian has lived in Kathmandu, Nepal and has been a student of Tibetan Buddhism for over twenty years.  He studied fine arts, literature, and camparative religion at Middlebury College, Oxford University, and Columbia University.  The Heart of the World: A Journey to the Last Secret Place can be ordered from The Penguin Press, ISBN 1-59420-027-0