Dear Grapevine

On top of the world
Several months ago, while traveling through Tibet with my mother, I ate some bad yak at a small lakeside restaurant about 150 miles from Mt. Everest. I hadn’t been to a meeting in a week, and I had another four days of driving before I left China and got to Kathmandu, where I knew I could find English-speaking meetings again. I was angry, sick, hungry and exhausted by 500-mile-a-day drives through windy mountain roads in the most remote regions of China. I’d run out of peace and serenity about 1,000 miles ago. I couldn’t even find internet access to communicate with my friends at my home group in California, and most of the websites I would have used were restricted or blocked by China.