Yeti on Lonely Planet!
As most of my blog readers know, I regularly blog about Bigfoot (aka Yeti and Sasquatch)… on various Bigfoot sightings, new-found evidence, Bigfoot sighting locations, documentaries etc. These mysterious creatures, that has managed to escape from human discovery for centuries, has been one of my deep interest since I was a young child.
I have previously heard many times that the Yeti, although fearsome, are very spiritual beings. Within the Tibetan Buddhist community, it is known that Yeti’s have been sighted many times bringing food to monks meditating in the Himalayas. In fact, one of my friends, a highly attained Lama mentioned to one of my students that in my past life, Yeti’s would serve as my messenger while I meditated in the caves within the Himalayan mountains. There’s no reason why a Buddhist lama would lie about this… and I thought, perhaps this is the reason why I am so fascinated by them now.
I came across an article by the Lonely Planet on a guide to find Yeti’s in the Himalayas. It’s a very nice read, and also shows how Yeti’s are spiritual beings and have for a long time been connected with many Lamas within the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. There is even a Yeti relic in one of the monasteries in Nepal! How interesting!
Do take a look and read how some people not only go to these regions for a holiday or a spiritual pilgrimage… but to also hopefully catch a glimpse of the mysterious creature in the mountains.
Tsem Rinpoche
Seeking the yeti, mythical monster of Nepal, Tibet, India and Bhutan
Everyone has heard the stories. The grizzled mountaineer who stumbles from his tent high in the Himalaya to find enormous footprints in the snow. The lone trekker who spots a strange figure, standing upright on two legs, silhouetted against the mist on a remote mountain pass. Welcome to the mysterious world of the yeti…
Yeti fans in South Beach, San Francisco. Image by hillary h / CC BY-SA 2.0
Despite numerous expeditions to track down this elusive creature, evidence for the abominable snowman – the name given to the beast by a journalist for the Calcutta Statesman in 1921 – has always been tantalisingly circumstantial: photographed footprints; strange hairs caught on tree branches; folk stories told by Sherpa yak herders. Even genetic tests on alleged yeti body parts preserved by monks in remote Himalayan monasteries have so far failed to provide evidence to support the yeti legend.
But science is pushing back the boundaries. In a recent study by geneticist Bryan Sykes from Oxford University, yeti hairs collected from Ladakh and Bhutan were found to contain DNA with remarkable similarities to a prehistoric polar bear that became extinct 40,000 years ago. So is the yeti a giant prehistoric bear? Head to the right valleys in the Himalaya and you might be the one to find out.
To help you on your way, here is Lonely Planet’s guide for would-be yeti spotters.
The approach to Mount Everest, Nepal. Image by lampertron / CC BY-ND 2.0
Close encounters in Nepal
Nepal is where most of the high profile yeti encounters have taken place, thanks mainly to the presence of large numbers of intrepid mountaineers, roaming far beyond regions of human habitation on the approach route to Mount Everest. Perhaps the most famous encounter of all came in 1951, when British mountaineer Eric Shipton snapped his now-legendary photographs of yeti footprints on a reconnaissance trek through the Rolwaling Himal.
If you can’t stretch to a full Everest expedition (average price US$48,000), set your sights a little lower on the Buddhist monastery of Tengboche in Solukhumbu, where older monks tell tales of a ferocious yeti attack on the monastery yaks in the years before trekkers came to Nepal. As the most important place of worship for the Sherpas of Solukhumbu, Tengboche is the ideal place to start the search for a beast that is largely known from Sherpa legends.
Tengboche Gompa, Solukhumbu, Nepal. Image by Tim Draper / Getty Images
A similarly gruesome yeti attack is said to have taken place in 1974 in the village of Machhermo, several days northwest of Tengboche on the trekking route to Gokyo, where a local woman numbered amongst the victims. On the trek to Machhermo, you can detour to the monastery at Khumjung, on the plateau above Namche Bazaar, where what is said to be the scalp of a yeti is kept as a sacred relic in a locked box, following high profile thefts of yeti relics from other monasteries.
Alternatively, you could head northeast from Tengboche through glorious rhododendron forests to Pangboche, where famous relics of a yeti hand and skull were stored until 1991, when they were stolen and allegedly passed to a wealthy anonymous collector. In fact, parts of the relic were stolen some years earlier, when Peter Byrne, a member of the 1957 Slick Expedition to Everest, swapped bones from the yeti hand for human bones, and smuggled the original bones back to England for analysis in a convoluted plot involving the actor Jimmy Stewart. The test results were inconclusive.
The Khumjung yeti scalp, Khumjung Gompa, Nepal. Image by John Mock / Getty Images
Hunting the yeti in Tibet-y
Tibet is the ultimate source of all yeti legends, which were transmitted across the Himalaya by wandering Buddhist monks. Ancient Tibetan Buddhist manuscripts tell of a shaggy beast that roams the high passes of the Himalaya, slaughtering livestock, walking upright like a man and making a fearsome whistling sound. Known variously as yeti (‘man-like animal’), metoh-kangmi (‘foul-smelling snowman’) or chemo (‘big bear’), this elusive monster is almost universally accepted as a real creature by mountain communities in Tibet.
The north face of Everest, Tibet. Image by Göran Höglund (Kartläsarn) / CC BY 2.0
The mountaineer Reinhold Messner – not the most likely person to fabricate stories of supernatural encounters – had his own face-off with a yeti while trekking alone on a Sherpa trail from Dege to Lhasa in 1986. This fleeting encounter with a shaggy creature that stood upright and made a terrifying whistling noise inspired a 12-year quest to uncover the truth about the yeti, recorded in his book My Quest for the Yeti. After more than a decade of searching, Messner concluded that the yeti was some hitherto unknown species of bear, transformed into a supernatural being in local myths and legends.
Asiatic black bear in the Himalaya. Image by flowcomm / CC BY 2.0
Even the Nazis took an interest in the yeti, backing a scientific expedition to Tibet by the zoologist Ernst Schäfer in 1939 in the misguided hope that the yeti might prove to be the origin of the Aryan race. Encounters are still being reported. Russian scientist Professor Arkady Tishkov recorded a yeti sighting in 1991 while on a glaciological survey mission on the slopes of Mount Shishapangma on the Nepal-Tibet border. For your own Tibetan encounter, try your luck on the Tibetan flank of Everest or the remote valleys of Kham on the border with Sichuan in China.
Meeting the migoi in Bhutan
Bhutan has the unusual distinction of being the only country with a national park dedicated to the preservation of the yeti, known locally as migoi or migyur (‘wild man’), and one of the two yeti hair samples used in the Sykes study was collected in this region. Sakteng Wildlife Sanctuary, a remote 740-square-mile sanctuary in the east of the country, is home to many endangered species, including red pandas, snow leopards and tigers, so there’s plenty to watch out for, even if the migoi fails to put in an appearance. According to an official report from park wardens, migoi were also spotted in Thrumshingla National Park in central Bhutan in 2012.
Mount Khangchendzonga, Sikkim. Image by teckky / CC BY-SA 2.0
India’s yeti encounters
Like its Himalayan neighbours, India has its share of yeti legends. Mountaineer Peter Bryne, who colluded in the theft of bones from the Pangboche yeti hand, found yeti footprints in Sikkim in 1948. Other encounters are even older. In the first century AD, Roman traveller Pliny the Elder wrote of a man-like creature that walks on two legs in the mountains of India. Then there is B.H. Hodgeson’s encounter with a mysterious ‘mountain ape’ in Bengal in 1832, which kicked off the whole Western love affair with the yeti. Start your own quest in the mountains of Ladakh, where the second hair sample that identified the yeti as a prehistoric bear was collected by a French hunter in the 1970s.
Joe Bindloss is Lonely Planet’s South Asia Destination Editor. You can follow him on Twitter @joe_planet.
Source: http://www.lonelyplanet.com/asia/travel-tips-and-articles/seeking-the-yeti-mythical-monster-of-nepal-tibet-india-and-bhutan#ixzz3II9qDN00
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Curious about the legendary Yeti? Not sure what to believe? Here is an article that explores a range of sources, from folktales to newspaper reports, detailing sightings and encounters with the elusive creature, who has been a part of the very fabric of various Himalayan communities for thousands of years. Read about religious beliefs, myths, fables and stories by scholars and travellers alike, and realise that there is more to the Yeti than you previously thought.
Imagining-the-Wild-Man-Yeti-Sightings-in-Folktales-and-Newspapers.pdf
This is a real awesome documentary on bigfoot. One of the best – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cp5eV9nIEjk&feature=youtu.be
In 1967, Bob Gimlin and Roger Patterson stumbled across an incredible sight whilst out in Bluff Creek, in the California wilderness. At a creek which had been freshly washed-out by recent floods, they witnessed a female Bigfoot swiftly traverse the rugged landscape. Since their filmed encounter with the Bigfoot, who has since been nicknamed Patty, many have disputed the authenticity of their recording but no one has been able to successfully prove that it is a fake.
Credits for this video goes to entirely to windvale for the original footage. ?
The Himalayan region is the home to the Yeti legend, where expeditions from around the world congrue for an up-close encounter with the elusive creature! Tales and witnesses from the monasteries and local villages around the region have kept the legend alive for many decades. I hope there will be more interesting documentary about Yeti or Snowman and the mystery can finally be unveiled. Thank you for this sharing.
Earth is a big planet with many still to be explored places. Some of these places are probably better left unexplored and uncontaminated by human civilization. Hence, it is not surprising there are probably numerous living species that have eluded us.
Do I think bigfoot exist? Why not? Believing bigfoot exist can be as real as believing man landed on the moon. We like to say seeing is believing but yet we “believed” so many things we didn’t see with our own eyes.
It’s fascinating reading about these mysterious mystical creatures. And if the monasteries are saying they exist and with relics and such, I think they exist. Why would any monastery want to lie? With so many claims they have seen it, I am certain it exist. But it is quite interesting how smart these creatures are in hiding themselves though they are so big? How is it that they have been able to hide from us humans for all these years, no doubt it is very good for their safety as humans always tend to exploit, abuse and experiment on others and then destroy them. I hope they will always be safe and well.
Wow incredible! The Yeti has fascinated so many people over the years and there is so much about the Yeti ingrained in Himalayan culture. Not only that but similar stories of Yeti-like creatures such as Bigfoot that are found all over the world are prevalent too. Even travel websites such as Lonely Planet cover the stories of Yeti and places where there have been Yeti sightings or relics.