My name is Franz J. Marty.

But this is not important.

As one wise man once said „names are for tombstones“ and he was right.

This is not about me anyway. This is about the places I go. So I try to keep my ego out of the equation.

Accordingly, you won’t find a picture of me here – just my shadow on the endless dunes on the edge of the Rub’ al-Khali, the Empty Quarter, this ocean of sand that covers a good part of the Arabian Peninsula.

In fact, I like to think of myself as some kind of pundit. For those of you who don’t know, pundits were the indigenous surveyors, trained by the British to disguisedly explore regions to the north of then British India in the second half of the 19th century – forbidden places where the British could not go themselves. The pundits’ names were either lost in the sands of times or are not remembered anymore by anyone, but scholars. However, they went to some of the most remote places of the world – and, more importantly, made it back to report.

This said, it would be presumptuous to claim that I am an actual pundit. But the idea of a faceless explorer appeals to me, so I dare to use the word.

At least, most people indeed tell me that I go to places, where virtually no one else goes.

I have no illusions though. I am neither exceptional nor brave. Where I go, everyone can go; what I do, everyone can do – most people simply don’t, probably because of the hardship and uncertainty that usually comes with it.

Why Shangri-La? This fictional place, loosely based on the mythical Buddhist kingdom of Shambhala, displayed in James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon as an earthly paradise located in the Kunlun mountains on the Tibetan plateau, isolated from the outside world?

I am neither spiritual, nor looking for paradise.

The first time, I have been confronted with the idea of Shangri-La was when I have reached Zor Kul, a lake high up in the Pamirs on the Afghan-Tajik border that is – according to some accounts – the source of the legendary Oxus, a river nowadays referred to as Panj and further downstream Amu Darya. This very lake is supposed by some to be the place described by a Buddhist monk in ancient times as the Shangri-La like source of the Four Great Rivers – the Ganges, the Indus, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya. I don’t remember the translation of the Buddhist text exactly, but it was depicted as a paradise with a lake with clear water and bright golden sands at its shore, where the Ganges flows out of a silver ox’s, the Indus out of a golden elephant’s, the Amu Darya out of an emerald horse’s and the Syr Darya out of a crystal lion’s mouth.

The actual place was nothing like this.

To the contrary, it looked quite like Marco Polo’s account of a nearby high plateau, where you find

„(…) nothing but a desert without habitations or any green thing, so that travellers are obliged to carry with them whatever they have need of. The region is so lofty and cold that you do not even see any birds flying. And I must notice also that because of this great cold, fire does not burn so brightly, nor give out so much heat as usual (…).“

But this was not a disappointment.

I am not looking for paradise.

For me, Shangri-La is not about paradise, but about a place forgotten by the world; a place at the world’s very end, where the earth meets the skies.

What I am looking for is this „glow of satisfaction that there were such places still left on earth, distant, inaccessible, as yet unhumanized“ and, ultimately, this „deeper sensation (…) of having reached at last some place that was an end, a finality“ to quote Lost Horizon.

While the Great Pamir at the shore of Zor Kul, that is in ancient Persian referred to as Bom-i Duniyo, the Roof of the World, came close to my idea of Shangri-La, it still wasn’t it.

So – and although my idea of Shangri-La is most probably sheer nonsense to use again the words of Lost Horizon – I have decided to start looking for it.

This is my quest for my Shangri-La…