It all began with an encounter with an old book* : "Tarap, a valley in the Himalayas", which portrays a small isolated community and its spiritual leader, Lama Kagar Rimpoche, who lives at the heart of the Nepalese Dolpo, a culturally Tibetan region. At the time, the author and ethnologist was wondering what would become of the Dolpo men and women in a generation or two, as he believed in their inevitable "cultural death".