The friendship highway

the long version

Hoping to reach Tibet after a 20-year obsession, Charlie Carroll travelled to China. Contending with Chinese bureaucracy, unforgiving terrain and sickness-inducing altitude, Charlie experienced 21st-century Tibet in all its heartbreaking beauty. Tibetan-born Lobsang fled the volatile region over the Himalayas, on foot, as a child in 1989. An exile in Nepal, then a student in India, he was called back to Tibet by love. At the end of the road known as the Friendship Highway, he met Charlie and recounted his extraordinary life story, exemplifying the hardship, resilience and hope of modern Tibetan life.