What comes across the path...

There are very few moments each day that I will allow myself a moment of silence.

During some specific short minutes every day—when driving from home to the office, when waiting for the computer to restart or while in an empty elevator—my mind is of somewhere else and I start talking to myself. These brief conversations with me really stress me out. I reprehend myself frequently about the things I should be doing instead of having this ordinary life.

However, it's the complete opposite when I travel for long periods of time.

I was on a trekking trip in Nepal in early January 2014 and came across a unique opportunity to go on a road trip from Kathmandu to Tibet, China. During this time of the year there is almost no tourism in the Tibetan region due to the strikingly cold weather and the high possibility of finding closed roads due to snowfall blocking your way to your destination.

Either way, I took my chances and headed north with a small tour to the Chinese boarder. Our visas were arranged before the journey but the schedule was uncertain due to the weather.

With a few other tourists I entered rural southern Tibet, driving on a lonesome road on our way to Lhasa, Tibet's capital city, home to the Potala Palace and the former home of the Dalai Lama. I was certainly excited about visiting this famous place but I knew little about what to expect from the journey.

It took us five days to reach our destination traveling through the Shigatse region, visiting small Tibetan communities in the middle of an unmoving desert. We drove up and down desolated hills reaching over 7,200m of altitude along the way. On one of the first days, with perfect clear skies, we got a glimpse of Mt. Everest in the distance and then drove near the border with Bhutan.

We would stop at every opportunity, we contemplated the hypnotising Yamdrok Lake and a crystallised Namtso Lake. We stopped in the Kharola Glacier and watched the skyline formed only by snowy mountains around us...

Reaching our destination was important but these brief stops along the way in such an unreal countryside became the most memorable part of this expedition.

It was in those moments—while waiting for the others to head back to the car after taking some pictures or going to the toilet—that I would stop on the edge of the road looking at these magical landscapes that my mind would go of... but in that place there were no conversations with myself, neither stress or impatience, there was only silence.