Houseboat on the Ganges

Today, when K-K-K-Katmandu has been on the travel itinerary of a million trekkers and climbers, and the Dalai Lama, Dharamsala and Buddhism are on every traveler’s consciousness, it’s wonderful to remember an era when even an overseas flight was something to be planned, talked about, and anticipated for months in advance, a trip could easily stretch from weeks to months to years and everything was a total surprise. —Tony Wheeler, co-founder of Lonely Planet Publications
“My ideal way to travel is to lessen as much as possible the barriers that separate me from the local people,” writes Marilyn Stablein in her stunning book of letters, Houseboat on the Ganges & A Room in Kathmandu. “. . . In other words, I gladly sacrifice comforts and customs in order to learn another way of life. Person to person, culture to culture—I learn by living.” And “learn by living” she does. This wondrous book is more than a travelogue detailing her years in India and Nepal; through letters Stablein writes to her family in California, we also encounter the astonishing independence of a courageous young woman at the forefront of the spiritual revolution of the 1960s. Stablein left her studies in Berkeley in 1966 as a teenager to live in the Far East for seven years prior to the heft of the counter-culture’s spiritual land rush to India at a time when—with few exceptions—most accounts were written by the occasional male pilgrim. Stablein’s mother lovingly saved these letters, her daughter interweaving spiritual unfoldment, day-to-day cooking and boiling of water, and her pursuit of poetry and art—all with a wisdom that belies her youth. Through the intimacy of a young woman writing an elder, this remarkable book unleashes a compelling narrative, all the more relevant today, as we continue to grapple with gender equality. I am sure it will take its place among the best narratives of the time of spiritual pursuit in the East. —George Kalamaras, Poet Laureate of Indiana (2014-2016) and author of The Theory and Function of Mangoes
“Marilyn Stablein is an intrepid adventurer and humorous chronicler.” — Peter Lamborn Wilson, author of T.A.Z.