These true stories are based on a lifetime of spiritual exploration following the path of Tibetan Buddhism. My budding career as a literary scholar was suddenly hijacked by a singular seemingly random event. It was 1976 when I tiptoed into a small Buddhist shrine room in a farmhouse nestled into the Black Mountains of Wales and there beheld a Tibetan master sitting on a splendid throne performing a ceremony known as The Black Hat. My busy academic mind came to an immediate stop, suspended, and remained in the dimension his presence had created. I was inside a deep level of mind, very familiar, but lost and forgotten like the secret garden of childhood. The master on the throne was the 16th Karmapa and although I never even spoke to him personally, he had introduced me to the essence, the truth hidden beneath all that busyness. That introduction turned into a quest over the next decades to find the key places on our planet called the Hidden Lands, concealed in the 8th century by the Indian avatar known throughout the Himalayas as Guru Rinpoche. They are very difficult to find and mostly impenetrable when you get there. After 15 years, the timing was right and I penetrated the supreme hidden land of Pemako. These stories took the shape of a chronicle of striking synchronicities. A few years after encountering the great 16th Karmapa, in 1976, I travelled with my partner overland to India, stopping only when we reached the peaceful welcoming village of Kandehar, in Afghanistan! That trip was part of an emotionally intense and circuitous route that led to a meeting of minds with my guru, the Tai Situ Rinpoche. It was because of that synchronous meeting that I sold my natural food shop and showman’s wagon in Hay-on-Wye and returned a year later with my dog Star to live at his monastery for five years. Star had his own very significant dog story to tell about a meeting of minds with his guru and his journey to India and I let him tell it. It was a time when dogs were free, just as we were free. It was there while living in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in the Himalayas that the legend of the Hidden Lands took shape as a reality. I met Tibetans who had been to Pemako while escaping from the Chinese invasion of Tibet and their description was like a Tibetan ‘promised land’ with edible bark on trees and streams flowing with milky water. There were certain plants, it was said, that could induce enlightenment, even for animals. Here the elements were so finely balanced that it supported enlightenment. After one failed attempt at the Tibetan route, I finally succeeded in entering through the Indian side in 2007. It was truly a subtler, more balanced and harmonious dimension. What is remarkable, looking back, is that the 70’s was the last generation to be free. We could get on buses or even drive our own cars and travel overland to the East; we could live on very little money; in many places we didn’t even need visas. We could explore the inner world. Many of the greatest Tibetan and Indian masters were available to pass on sacred teachings. There was still a King in Afghanistan, a Shah in Iran and a Ghandii in India. But all this was on the verge of change as we drove through. The East was crashing behind us like a house on fire, Now we are in the Kali Yuga, or Dark Age prophesied 1200 years ago by Guru Rinpoche, a time when the elements of this planet become so unbalanced that even the minds of the awakened ones will become disturbed. This is the time, he said, to go to the Hidden Lands.