Rongmi Drango, 2004

In the morning an old woman hurried past us turning her prayer wheel anticlockwise: a follower of Bön, not an ordinary Buddhist grandmother. Before we could think how to approach her, she evaporated. A few Gelug monks pretended to be plants and did not give away the monastery either. So we asked the all-knowing taxi drivers. For ten yuan one of them drove us to the foot of the mountain and swore the monastery would open to our eyes at the top.

A thousand metres of climbing through bushes. At the top: an ancient abandoned monastery whose only inhabitant was a very old and very ugly hen, and a tree with an ordinary rubber hose stuck into it, water gushing out, no spring anywhere near. Kirill concluded that Bön monasteries hide in the mountains and confuse chance travellers by every means available.