Above it all, Mount Kawagebo rises out of the mist like a monster, its summit ominously loaded with cornices of snow hundreds of feet deep. Seventeen Japanese and Chinese climbers died in an avalanche there in 1991. The moun- tain is now closed for climbing, not because of the danger but in deference to its religious sig- nificance. Kawagebo is one of the most sacred peaks in Tibetan folklore. Every year thousands of Buddhist pilgrims circle the massif on foot on a two-week kora, or circular path, the pur- pose of which is to seek purification and thereby ensure a more propitious reincarnation. But times are changing. We can hear one group of pilgrims-all Tibetan youths, singing and giggling-before we see them. They pass us like a circus troupe. No solemn, somber affair for these kids, a pilgrimage is a big party. One of them is waving a Chinese MP3 player, the volume turned up to a tinny blare. Dropping continuously, the trail becomes so steep it starts to switchback every 20 feet, the path a two-foot-deep trough worn into the soft rock. Snow gives way to talus, then to trees, then to dense forest. At an overlook I peek down through a hole in the strands of gray lichen as if into another world. Thou- sands of feet below us, wedged in the crook of a valley beside a steep, old-growth forest, is a tiny square of brilliant green-another vision of Shangri-La. It takes hours, descending hundreds of switchbacks, to reach the enchanted place. A man with a load of wood on his back is waiting. He leads the way beneath a giant walnut tree, down through skittish pigs and oblivious goats, over a stone fence, along a neon barley field, to a whitewashed, fortress-like Tibetan home. Up a dirt ramp, we pull the leather thong, a little door opens, and we step into the 15th century. A shrunken woman in a red head wrap greets us with both hands, pours two cups of boiling yak butter tea, then disappears. The floor plan is traditional Tibetan: In the center is a large, open-to-the-sky atrium, warm sunlight dropping inside. A wooden railing- set with planters of various herbs-boxes in the atrium on the main floor, keeping crawl- ing kids from falling to the ground floor, where pigs and chickens live in splendid squalor. Up a hand-hewn ladder is the roof, a flat mud sur- face with the atrium cut from the middle. The roof is covered with stores of food and fodder: pine cones piled like pineapples, two varieties of corn, chestnuts spread across a plastic tarp, walnuts on another tarp, three varieties of chil- ies in various stages of drying, green apples in a basket, sacks of rice, slabs of pork air-drying, the carcass of what appears to be a marmot. Grandparents, parents, kids, and an uncle all share the farmhouse. All have their tasks: the scrawny uncle carrying sacks of corn and sorting horseshoes; the young mother, baby on back, tending the stove and preparing dinner; the patriarch slowly writing something in a led- ger in shaky Tibetan script. The sinewy woman who served us tea is the matriarch. She slops the hogs with a kitchen pail, dumping the con- tents over the railing, then goes outside, where she milks the cows and feeds the horses and churns the yak butter. Through pantomime she explains that she has pain behind her eyes and asks us for medicine. All I have is ibuprofen. At nightfall it is pitch-dark and frosty inside the house. A terrific screeching cuts the still- ness. The patriarch is turning a metal crank mounted on the wall, winding up a cable. As he locks the crank arm in place, compact fluo- rescent lightbulbs dangling around the house burst to life. The metal cable, it turns out, extends to a creek 400 yards from the farm- house. There it attaches to a trough carved from a log. Turning the crank pulls the cable, which lifts the trough, sending a flow of creek water into a large wooden cask. Plugged into the base of the cask is a blue plastic pipe that carries water down to a Chinese-made micro- hydropower generator the size of a five-gallon drum. Dinner is served. Rice with assorted dishes-pork fat in garlic sauce, yak meat with peppers, fried vegetables, glasses of home- made, throat-scalding barley wine, apples for dessert. And then the patriarch opens a carved cabinet door and clicks the remote. There's soccer match on TV he doesn't want to miss. The women of the household are up for hours before dawn, hauling water and wood, milking and feeding the animals. The young mother pours us yak butter tea. Her name is Snaw. She is wearing a black baseball cap embroidered with a skull and crossbones, a tattered purple sweater through which you can see her bony body, a thin, fake-fur scarf, tight jeans, and green Chinese army sneakers. Her baby in one arm, she is simultaneously breast-feeding, loading firewood into the stove, checking the rice, stirring the yak but- ter tea, tossing potato peels over the railing to the pigs, washing dishes, sorting peppers, and talking. Snaw is 17. Her baby is three months old and has some indiscernible medical problem. her dream is to leave this place-the She says Shangri-La of my imagination-and go to the real town of Shangri-La. She's heard that women her age go to school there and on Sat- urday go shopping, walking arm in arm along the mall. Some young women's dreams have already come true. Yang Jifang, a tall, striking 22-year- old Naxi woman, graduated from the Eastern Tibet Training Institute (ETTI) in downtown Shangri-La. There she learned English and computer skills; she now works as a guide at the Khampa Caravan, an adventure-travel firm. She has her own apartment and goes back to her rural village every month, bring- ing money and medicine to her parents. "Life for my parents in the village is very hard," she says. "There is no business, just farming." The training institute was founded in 2004 by Ben Hillman, a professor at the Australian National University who specializes in devel- an intensive 16-week, live-in, fully funded vocational school designed to help students from rural areas bridge the gap to urban job opment in western China. The institute hosts opportunities. "Culture is something that's constantly evolving," says Hillman, who warns me not to apply a Western sense of authenticity to the modern Shangri-La. We're sitting at the Raven caf in the old town, listening to Dylan and drinking Dali beer. The Raven, a rebuilt cob- bler's shop, is the kind of funky coffee bar you find in Kathmandu-carrot cake on the menu, a poster of John Coltrane on the wall. Owned by a Seattleite and a Londoner, it's operated by two independent Tibetan women. "Economic development can rekindle inter- est in cultural heritage, which is inevitably reinterpreted," Hillman says. "I don't think we can judge that without reverting to some kind of elitism, where wealthy and fortunate people who can travel to remote parts of this planet want to keep things locked in a cultural zoo." The real challenge for Shangri-La's ethnic minorities, Hillman says, is to develop skills for the modern world. "They are traditionally agro- pastoralists, experts at subsistence farming-growing barley, raising yaks and pigs. But these aren't the skills that most youth need today" His students hail from disparate ethnicities-Tibetan, Bai, Lisu, Naxi, Han Yi-but most come from dirt-poor farming households. All had to beg their parents to them attend this school, a place of clean- scrubbed classrooms, dorm rooms, and a homey kitchen. None intend to return to hardscrabble farm life. The training institute is the kind of place Snaw dreams about while milking yaks in freezing snowstorm. Late in the afternoon several graduates of the institute sit together on a couch in the teachers' lounge, so excited to tell their stories that they can hardly contain themselves. The last to speak is Tashi Tsering, a lanky, vibrant 21-year-old with a shock of jet black hair in his face. A Tibetan, he too learned English and service industry skills at ETTI and now works as a guide, taking tourists to Tibetan towns and villages as far away as Lhasa. Conscious that he has escaped a life of drudgery, he wishes his friends back in the village could have the same opportunity he has enjoyed. "Now I can play an important role in the future!" he says. Tsering looks over at his fellow alums with pride, then out the window at bustling Shangri-La, the construction cranes swing- ing over stone farmhouses, the taxis swerving around horse-drawn carts, tourist trinkets on sale next to great slabs of yak meat. His eyes follow a plane descending into the Shangri-La airport. We can't see it from here, but in the center of the first intersection leaving the airport stands a large white stupa, a sacred Tibetan monu- ment that Buddhists walk around clockwise, the same direction a prayer wheel spins. But cars negotiating the intersection must circle the stupa counterclockwise. Consequently, Buddhist tradition sends women bent beneath giant loads of cornstalks, heading home to feed their pigs, and men herding yaks as they have for centuries, straight into the paths of oncoming busloads of tourists. There have been collisions, but somehow it's working.

Please answer this Question.

The author seeks s "truer Shangri-La" in the Tibetan countryside outside of the city. A young woman he meets white staying in a Tibetan farmhouse imagines her "Shangri-La" within the city limits. Discuss the different meanings of paradise.