Tea and travel with a modern day explorer

Tea and travel with a modern day explorer

I MET OTTAWA-BORN explorer Jeff Fuchs several years ago at a tea shop in Toronto where he was giving a talk about Puerh tea from China and promoting his book, The Ancient Tea Horse Road. I was instantly smitten. The event combined my favourite beverage (tea), my favourite part of the world (the Himalayas) and an adventurous travel tale told by a charismatic explorer. It just doesn't get any better, for me.

Jeff has been awarded explorer grants and he is part of the Kensington Tours Explorers-in-Residence series. He has lived for most of the past decade in Shangrila, northwestern Yunnan, upon the eastern extension of the Himalayan range where tea and mountains abound.

More recently, Jeff completed an expedition called The Route of Wind and Wool. This route traced one of the ancient world's long lost trade routes, through some of the planet's most daunting and stunning geographies - the desolate magnificence of the India Himalaya. The team was searching for the remains of the route - and the memories along it - in an odyssey by foot and mule through ice, over stone, and back into time on a 33-day journey by foot. It was the fourth such exploration in Fuchs' series to revisit the lost Himalayan trade routes. You can read more about his journey on the Tea and Mountain Journals site.

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