Dherai Ramro Chha

I have been ‘travelling’ since I was a child… I had already been in Asia, but this time everything was different. You continually ask yourself if what you are feeling is totally free from previous impressions or experiences, negative or positive, but at some point you have to make a choice and decide to just ‘feel’ your emotions, without thinking too much, in order not to forget the most important thing: “to live”…
So I decided not to choose a well-defined, fixed itinerary and, thanks to an ethnologist I met by chance, I discovered that, in a few remote areas of the Himalayan Mountains, there lived an ethnic group belonging to an ancient culture called Bon. They have settled in an almost unknown valley which has only recently been opened to foreigners: ‘The forgotten valley’ of Nar Phu.
I tried to retrieve as much information as possible before arriving at my destination in order to show a dignified awareness, at least on a cultural level, so as to understand and better connect with this ‘ancient diversity’. However, between me and this place, there was a big area to ‘cross’: Nepal. The choice to travel alone was deliberate, taken to avoid sharing my experience with other people ‘similar’ to me. I wanted this experience to be intimate, personal and not potentially affected by worries or fears that could influence me. Knowing my state of interior ’emancipation’, the interference of others would probably have limited my animal instinct which turned out to be very useful, and now I can confirm this, in order to describe my experience in a faithful and sincere way.
I started my journey in October 2013, almost always travelling on foot… from the low valleys to ‘brushing’ the Tibetan border. What I achieved was to discover and to hear a sound never before heard so intensely; the sound of ‘beauty*’ which today, unfortunately, is translated and associated with a principle far from its etymology, shying it away from love.
From this arose my desire to leave a visual account of my experiences, which does not claim to be an anthropological compendium, but a simple stimulus of images and descriptions accessible to anyone who wishes to question once again, our perception of ‘beauty’…
To a stone, a flower, a face… to everything that is created… Dherai Ramro Chha.

Andrea Bernesco

* Beauty is the set of qualities perceived by the five senses, arousing pleasant feelings which we connect to concepts, objects, animals or people in the observed universe, that we feel instantly during the experience, and that develops spontaneously and tends to connect to positive emotions, following a rapid comparison, made consciously or unconsciously, with an interior reference that can be innate or acquired by education or social custom.
In its deepest sense, beauty creates a sense of benevolent reflection on the meaning of our own existence in the natural world. (Source Wikipedia Italy)

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