I DROPPED OFF THE TRAIN before Gorakhpur, walked over the border into Nepal, and paid my respects to Lord Buddha at his birthplace in Lumbini. According to Manlungpa, the 13th-century lama, the next stop was to visit "the Queen of Khom Khom," a reference to a ninth-century ruler in what is now Bhaktapur, just across a broad, polluted valley from modern-day Kathmandu. Unless one of Nepal's new Indian-style traffic jams is in force, it's a 25-minute ride out to Bhaktapur, and I knocked off the queen's stomping grounds on my first, rainy morning in the capital.

The next day, the Irish photographer Seamus Murphy flew in from Kabul. Seamus is strong as an ox, my partner on many expeditions, but he immediately collapsed in bed from heatstroke. Pale, sweating, he vomited up his food and spent the day moaning, wrapped in a blanket in a dark room. He sipped the electrolyte cocktails I mixed him and pleaded for time.

There is no sweeter place to be stranded than Kathmandu. For days I wandered the city, awash in temples mixing Hindu and Buddhist images, a porous culture capable of transmitting prophecies in any direction. Yet Shambhala was almost forgotten here. The city's swankest hotel, the Shangri-La, is named instead for the imaginary paradise, invented by English author James Hilton in his 1933 novel, Lost Horizon, that has supplanted and confused the identity of Shambhala. The hotel did have a Shambhala Garden Café, and its Lost Horizon bar served a frothy pineapple-and-rum drink called the Shambhala, which research demonstrated was yummy.

The waiter screwed up his eyes when I asked where Shambhala was. "It means ‘garden,'" he said at last. "Beautiful garden in mountains. Shambhala is secret place for kings and lamas. Is a Tibet word."

A clerk at the city's biggest bookstore fared less well. "Shambhala," he said, and started flipping through CDs. "This is Brazilian dance?"

I bought $45 worth of dehydrated soup, Snickers bars, cheese, peanut butter, honey, tuna, sugar, Nescafé, orzo, party balloons, books, cashews, burgundy, and Diamox for altitude, and we were ready to go. At dawn on the fourth day in Kathmandu, I hiked up to the Monkey Temple, Swayambhunath, a forested hilltop shrine shared by Hindus and Buddhists. The trinket vendors hadn't even arrived, nor had the smog of traffic jams. Off in the woods, I noticed a body swinging from a tree.

Some Nepalis stood around, looking at the corpse. Lots of people kill themselves at the Monkey Temple, a man told me, because it was holy, and the closest forest to downtown. "There was a woman yesterday," he explained. Everyone tried to hide their emotions, in the Nepali way.

While alive, the suicide had been poor, desperate, and apparently shoeless. Now a rope was cutting into his throat. Suffering, Buddha taught, is the nature of this world. Maybe this man would be reborn in Shambhala someday; according to Tibetan practice, the "long path" of earning merit over many lifetimes was the surest way to reach the kingdom.

The next morning, Seamus and I continued our journey by more conventional means, rolling out of Kathmandu in a tourist-agency 4x4. It was late July. The drive to the Tibetan border should have taken two hours, but there were six roadblocks, most of them just lines of rocks laid over the road by absentee protesters. These we moved aside; we joined a busload of Indian pilgrims in hauling away two tree trunks and, twice, leaped over burning tires, carrying our luggage through polite mobs demanding government jobs. On the far side of each roadblock, a new economy of taxis had sprung up; at one point we swapped drivers and cars with some Swiss tourists coming downhill.

Fending off demons took time, however, and it was six hours before we reached the frontier of China, in a narrow canyon the Tibetans call Hell's Gate, the abrupt dropping-off point into the fiery lowlands. Our elaborately obtained group tourist visas were scrutinized in detail by the Chinese police. We couldn't tell them the truth, that we were journalists; reporters are required to travel on short, heavily restricted itineraries with government minders. We couldn't tell them that we planned to ditch our mandatory "guide," that we'd be photographing Chinese military deployments in sensitive border regions, or that we would exit the Tibet Autonomous Region to the north, violating our visa by crossing Xinjiang Uygur province to Kazakhstan. Being turned back, or forcibly expelled, was always a possibility.

Good citizens, we stood in line, mute. Just before nightfall, we got our passport stamps and walked over a bridge, into the real journey. In a dismal hotel, we shared a celebratory bottle of wine with two Spaniards. It was a decent Chinese red called Great Wall (the 1999 and 2000 vintages are best). We were in Tibet.

It was cold, 11,000 feet, and I slept poorly. I kept seeing the body, swinging very slightly in the breeze. Don't go, the corpse whispered. It's really more of an idea.