From a Novel to a Trekking Agency
Lost Horizon — the name — comes from a 1933 best-seller in which author James Hilton describes a utopia set in a Tibetan lamasery hidden in a fertile valley deep in the mountains: Shangri-La. Today, several towns in Tibetan areas claim to be "the real Shangri-La" — Zhongdian in northern Yunnan even changed its official name to Shangri-La to boost tourism, while the Yading reserve in Sichuan, with its three sacred peaks brushing 6,000m, makes its own case. We make no claim to have found the "real" Shangri-La — but it's exactly these places, and the sense of myth and possibility they carry, that we want to share.
Our trekking agency was founded in Kunming, in the southwest of China, in 2015, by a French team that has now lived, guided and travelled across West China for well over a decade. From the Yunnan hills to the deserts of Inner Mongolia, by way of the high passes of Sichuan and the Tibetan plateau in Gansu and Qinghai, we've built our routes on the ground, one trek at a time.
