Here are 10 surprising facts that Jack Ma revealed about his life at the forum.

Date : 29-01-2015

China's wealthiest man reveals some facts about his life

Speaking at a seminar named "An Insight, An Idea with Jack Ma" at Davos, the wealthiest man in China, gave a wide-ranging interview, sharing his childhood experiences, Alibaba's growth process and his view on working with the government.

Here are 10 surprising facts that Jack Ma revealed about his life at the forum.

1. Jack Ma's applications were rejected by Harvard University 10 times

The billionaire revealed that he applied to Harvard University 10 times and was turned down each time. "I told myself, some day I will go and teach there."

Speaking about his early rejections, Jack explained that the turndowns only strengthened his resolve to succeed. He failed the college entrance exam three times and was snubbed 30 times in job hunting, including one at KFC.

2. Jack Ma practised English by giving tourist free tours every morning for nine years

With limited resources, Jack Ma learned English by giving foreign tourists free guides around his hometown Hangzhou. He said that those nine years opened his mind, as he leant things so different to what he had been taught at school and by his parents.

His name "Jack" was given by a tourist from Tennessee who later became his pen friend.

3. No search result about China during his first encounter with Internet gave him business idea

Back in 1995, Jack Ma made his first trip to the US and tried Internet for the first time. He entered "beer" and found no result about beer in China, and he then realised there was no data about China then on the Internet.

"So, we made a very ugly page about China," said Ma, adding that he received emails immediately after the launch as they told him "it was the first time we saw a Chinese website".

4. Jack Ma named his company Alibaba because it's a world famous story

Jack Ma simply wanted a global and interesting name for his company and checked for test with passersby during his stay in the US. He concluded that because the name begins with A, his company would also appear on the top of lists.

Alibaba now has over 100 million buyers visiting and shopping at its websites every day, and has created 40 million jobs, directly or indirectly, in China.

5. Jack Ma feels proud for building the trust system

Jack Ma said building trust is most important for e-commerce. It makes it possible for Alibaba to finish 60 million transactions every day.

"I'm so proud today." He recalled that some of his friends were strongly against his idea of setting up Alipay, Alibaba's online payment arm, saying it was "the stupidest idea".

6. "Be in love with the government, but don't marry them"

Jack Ma said he has never taken any money from the Chinese government, and his relationship with the authorities is "very interesting".

"Be in love with the government, but don't marry them." He gave an example of when Alibaba worked together with the government to upgrade 12306.cn, the official online train ticket booking platform, to help millions of Chinese migrant workers buy tickets to return home for the upcoming Spring Festival.

7. More pressure comes after the IPO

Jack Ma said spending the capital raised in the initial public offering efficiently is a question for Alibaba. "It adds more pressure," he said, adding that the money reflects the trust of global investors who want the company to do a better job.

"In 10 years, we will be bigger than Walmart." Jack Ma said his goal is to serve 2 billion consumers and to help 10 million small businesses outside China sell their products through the Internet.

8. Jack Ma loves Forrest Gump

Jack Ma said he has been particularly inspired by the character of Forrest Gump. "I love Forrest Gump. (He is) simple, and never gives up."

"People think he's dumb, but he knows what he's doing." He also quoted the line in the movie "Life is like a box of chocolates because you never know what you're going to get."

9. Jack Ma said he's worried that young people lose hope

Jack Ma said he's worried that "young people lose hope and start to complain," and he proposed a way to help them, that is movie.

He said Hollywood content has inspired him, while in Chinese films all heroes die in the end, which is why Chinese people don't aspire to be one of them.

"Movie is the best product that can help Chinese young people," said Ma, adding that he enjoys writing kung fu stories.

10. Taichi can be a business philosophy

Jack Ma said Taichi is a philosophy about calming down and keeping oneself balanced, which can be applied to business.

After the death of King Abdullah, Saudi Arabia quickly announced that one of his younger brothers, Crown Prince Salman, was succeeding him.

The man taking control of the world's top oil exporter is well established in the Gulf kingdom's corridors of power.

Salman, 79, is "a stalwart of the royal family" who is "viewed as a pragmatic and cautious reformer, much like his predecessor," says CNN's Becky Anderson in Abu Dhabi.

He has served as defense minister and deputy prime minister of Saudi Arabia, a vital U.S. ally in the Middle East, for years. Like Abdullah, he's one of the dozens of sons of Saudi Arabia's founder, King Abdulaziz.

Here are some of the key points about the new ruler.

He's an experienced leader

Salman was governor of the Saudi capital, Riyadh, for nearly five decades during a period of significant change.

"When he became governor in 1963, Riyadh had 200,000 inhabitants — today it has more than seven million," Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution's Center for Middle East Policy, said in a commentary. "Salman presided over this remarkable transformation with a record for good governance and a lack of corruption."

Salman bin Abdulaziz al Saud, who is succeeding his older brother as king of Saudi Arabia, speaking at an event in May 2014.

"He had to be a combination ... of a reformer, of a judge, a jury in some cases, and deal with dissent, as well as dealing with economic issues," Robert Jordan, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, told CNN. "So I think he's well prepared for the task at hand."

Salman's experience running Riyadh also involved keeping many of the numerous members of the Saudi royal family in line.

"Since most of the royal princes and princesses live in Riyadh, he was also the family sheriff, ensuring any transgressions were dealt with smoothly and quietly, with no publicity," said Riedel, who worked for the CIA for 30 years.

His national roles have since brought him wider responsibility.

Salman "has been chairing cabinet meetings for several months and handling almost all foreign travel responsibilities for the monarchy since he became the heir in 2012," Riedel said.

He's unlikely to rock the boat

Salman's ascension to the throne is in line with the appointments put in place by Abdullah before his death.

"I think that you'll see a continuation -- very similar policies, very similar dynamics unfolding," said James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute. "The kingdom is modernizing; it's changing, it's reforming and it will continue to do so over the next several decades."

Riedel says the royal family "values family collegiality and harmony highly."

"The two previous Saudi kingdoms in the 18th and 19th centuries were wracked by internal family squabbles, which their foreign enemies exploited," he explains. "With the Arab world facing its worst crisis in decades, the royals will want to present an image of stability and strength."

There are concerns about his health

Salman is one of Abdullah's younger brothers. But at 79, he's not particularly young.

There are unconfirmed reports that he may have various health problems. But with Saudi Arabian media tightly controlled by the state, nobody's really sure what his condition is.

Riedel says Salman has had a stroke, Simon Henderson of the Washington Institute says the new king's brain is "ravaged by dementia," and The Economist reports he's believed to be suffering from Alzheimer's.

"Reports do differ sharply over just how ill Prince Salman really is -- and medical reports on the illnesses of the Saudi royal family can be grossly inaccurate," cautioned Anthony H. Cordesman, a Middle East expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Salman's schedule of official meetings suggests a degree of health. But Henderson isn't convinced it proves he's highly capable.

"The fact that Salman appears in public at all is attributed to his determination to become king -- or, more likely, the ambition of his closest relatives that he should do so," he wrote last month.

He has a successor waiting in the wings

Salman's first order after assuming the throne was to appoint his youngest brother, Prince Muqrin, as the new crown prince.

Analysts see that appointment as an effort to ensure future stability. Abdullah had named Muqrin as deputy crown prince in March.

At 69 years old, Muqrin is relatively youthful. A former head of intelligence for the kingdom, he is also reportedly well-liked by world leaders.

Muqrin "has been closely linked to Abdullah and his policies of modernization and reform," according to Cordesman.

But the succession plan isn't without its critics. Muqrin's mother does not have royal blood, which is a sticking point for some people in Saudi Arabia.

His sons include an astronaut and a fighter pilot

Several of Salman's sons also hold prominent positions.

They include Prince Sultan, who in the 1980s became the first Muslim astronaut and is now the president of Saudi Arabia's tourism authority; Prince Abdulaziz, the deputy oil minister; and Prince Faisal, the governor of the Medina region.

Another son, Prince Khaled, was reportedly among the pilots who carried out the first airstrikes on ISIS positions in Syria last year.

Details about Salman's earlier life and upbringing weren't immediately available Friday. But an official biography contained one nugget about his youth: he had apparently memorized the Quran by the age of 10, it said.

King Abdullah's legacy: 5 things to know

CNN's Dana Ford contributed to this report.

Jellyfish 'can sense ocean currents'

By Victoria Gill Science reporter, BBC News

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The swimming jellyfish were tagged with data loggers fitted to their bodies with cable ties.

Jellyfish can sense the ocean current and actively swim against it, according to a study that involved tagging and tracking the creatures.

The research, by an international team, could help scientists work out how jellyfish form "blooms".
These blooms may comprise between hundreds and millions of jellyfish, and can persist in a given area for months.
It remains unclear just how the jellyfish sense changes in water, the paper in Current Biology journal says.
The scientists, including researchers from Swansea University and Deakin University in Warnambool, Australia, tagged 18 large barrel jellyfish (Rhizostoma octopus) in the Bay of Biscay, off the coast of France.
The team caught the jellyfish and fitted them with loggers that measured acceleration and body orientation.
Lead researcher Prof Graeme Hays from Deakin University said it was "really easy" to attach the tags. "We loop a cable tie around the peduncle that joins the swimming bell to the trailing arms," he explained.
"It takes seconds, and the tag stays on indefinitely."
At the same time, the researchers used floating sensors to monitor and measure the ocean currents.

Continue reading the main story

Jellyfish facts

• The scientific name for the barrel species is Rhizostoma, which means "root pores"
• Jellyfish are the staple diet of the critically endangered leatherback turtle
• The blue jellyfish is a common visitor to our coasts from May to October. Its sting is less severe than a nettle sting
• The compass jellyfish is prevalent off the south and west coasts of England. It has a saucer-shaped bell, with 32 semi-circular lobes around the fringe
• While the Portuguese Man o' War resembles a jellyfish, it is in fact a floating, compound marine animal. It is made up of a colony of four kinds of polyps

Source: Marine Conservation Society

This showed that the jellyfish were able actively to swim against the current, apparently in response to feeling themselves drift.

In a second part of the study, the researchers used their data to create a realistic simulation of the movement of a bloom of jellyfish in the ocean.
This showed, said Prof Hays, that "active and directed swimming helps maintain blooms", by keeping jellyfish in a particular area rather than allowing them to be dispersed or washed ashore by the currents.
"With this knowledge of their behaviour we can start to have some predictive capability for bloom dynamics," the scientist told BBC News.
What is not yet clear is how exactly the jellyfish work out which way to travel.
The scientists think the animals might sense the current across the surface of their bodies. They also speculate that the jellyfish might use the Earth's magnetic field to navigate - an ability seen in some other migrating marine species, including sea turtles.
One ultimate aim of studying and tracking swimming jellyfish is to improve the forecasting of jellyfish blooms, which have increased in frequency over the past decade, disrupting fisheries and stinging swimmers.
Perhaps troublingly, these results show that swimming against the current helps hold blooms together, even in areas when currents are strong.
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The oldest fragment of a New Testament gospel

Media outlets have been abuzz this week with the news that the oldest fragment of a New Testament gospel -- and thus the earliest witness of Jesus' life and ministry -- had been discovered hidden inside an Egyptian mummy mask and was going to be published.

The announcement of the papyrus' discovery and impending publication was made by Craig Evans, professor of New Testament at Acadia Divinity College in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. Evans described the papyrus as a fragment of the Gospel of Mark.

He added that a combination of handwriting analysis (paleography) and carbon dating led him and his team of researchers to conclude that the fragment was written before 90 A.D. This would make it at least a decade older than other early fragments of the New Testament and, thus, an invaluable resource for biblical scholars and object of considerable interest for Christians the world over.

The fragment, according to Evans, was discovered when an Egyptian mummy mask -- known as cartonnage -- was dismantled in a hunt for ancient documents. Mummy masks were an important part of ancient Egyptian burial practice, but only the very wealthy could afford examples made of gold.

The majority of mummy masks were made from scraps of linen and papyrus, which were glued together into a kind of ancient papier-maché. Dismantling these masks yields a trove of ancient documents. Evans claims that in addition to Christian texts, hundreds of classical Greek texts, records of business transactions, and personal letters have been acquired. In the process, the mask itself is destroyed.

Though it may be making headlines now, the claim that the "oldest known gospel" has been discovered is not new.

News of the fragment first came to light in 2012 when its existence was (perhaps inadvertently) announced by Daniel Wallace, founder of the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts at Dallas Theological Seminary.

No one saw the text then, and no one has seen it now; though it has been mentioned repeatedly by a select group of people who evidently have been given access to it, its planned date of publication has been consistently pushed back, from an original plan of 2013 to 2015 and now, just this week, all the way to 2017.

Despite the seemingly explosive quality of the news, therefore, it is important to take a step back and consider what is actually being revealed here.

Some people are saying they have this really old and important thing, and they will show it to all the rest of us in a few years. (Essentially, this papyrus is the scholarly equivalent of "my girlfriend who lives in Canada.")

It is unclear why anyone would start talking about a text like this, a year, indeed now at least two years, in advance. The most important established fact about this papyrus, at this point, is that it has not yet been published—which is to say, only a small handful of individuals have seen the text and are able to say anything at all about it.

As Roberta Mazza, an ancient historian and papyrologist from the University of Manchester in England, told us, the academic community has not "been given access to firm information and images on the basis of which could eventually say something."

In other words, this sort of notice really serves mostly to remind us of just how little we know about this purported discovery. Here, for example, are five key, unanswered questions.

1. What is the actual text on the papyrus?

We are told that it is from Mark, but, after all, no one has seen it. Which part of Mark?

2. Is the handwriting consistent with the supposed dating?

Brice Jones, a papyrologist at Concordia University, told us that dating a text by handwriting, or paleography, "is not a precise science, and I know of no papyrologist who would date a literary papryus to within a decade on the basis of paleography alone."

3. Is the ink or papyrus itself consistent with the supposed dating?

According to Jones, if paleography is inexact, "radiocarbon dating is equally (and perhaps more) problematic, since one must allow for a time gap of a century or more."

They say that these lab tests have all been done, but as no one has actually seen the reports, they are less than confirmatory.

4. Who owns the papyrus, or the mask from which it was taken, and from whom was it purchased, and when?

The time and place of a text's discovery, known as its provenance, are crucial for verifying its authenticity, especially in a period of extensive looting of archaeological sites and museum theft.

According to international law, if the mask was taken out of Egypt after 1970, it is officially "unprovenanced," and is effectively prohibited from being sold or published. Evans told us "I do not know the specifics" about the provenance of this mask.

5. Who has seen the text, who has verified it, and who has studied it?

Evans is not a trained papyrologist, but is rather a scholar of the New Testament. To this point, none of the papyrologists, text critics or other highly specialized experts, who must have worked on this text before these claims could be made about it, have been identified or spoken publicly about it.

These questions are not necessarily challenges to the authenticity of the text. They are, rather, a recognition that, until the scholarly world has been granted access to this papyrus, the public statements made about it are no more revelatory than if we announced that we had found Moses' private copy of Genesis in a hummus container, and we'll show it to you later.

There is, however, one bit of information about this text and its discovery that can be discussed now, without having even seen it: the fact that it was uncovered by destroying an ancient Egyptian mummy mask.

Evans said the cartonnage destruction was acceptable because "we're not talking about the destruction of any museum-quality piece."

We are, however, talking about the destruction of 2,000-year-old Egyptian antiquities: funeral masks, painted with representations of people who lived and died and were commemorated by their families.

We might wonder, at the very least, who it is that gets to determine which masks are worth preserving and which aren't. Evans told us that such decisions "are based on expert opinion," but as to who exactly makes that determination, he said, "I do not know specifically."

Evans has said, "We dug underneath somebody's face, and there it was."

He has since clarified that he was not personally involved in the destruction of the mask. But it is unclear precisely which individuals did the dirty work.

Evans' language of "digging" makes the dissolving of mummy masks sound like archaeology, but some would characterize it, and some have, as cultural vandalism.

There is an implicit sense that the discovery of a rare Christian piece outweighs the preservation of a relatively common Egyptian artifact. And this may be so, but surely the optics would be better if this were announced by someone from, say, the Egyptian Ministry of State for Antiquities.

"The destruction of mummy masks, though legal, falls into an ethically gray area right now because of the difficult choices scientists have to make in the lab when working with them," said Douglas Boin, a professor of history at St. Louis University.

"We have to ask ourselves, do we value the cultural heritage of Egypt as something worth preserving in itself, or do we see it simply as vehicle for harvesting Christian texts?"

Even if one agrees that these masks can be taken apart — archaeology is, by its very nature, a destructive process — it should be remembered that the process is a crapshoot: If a mask contains no texts, then the equation changes, and even a relatively unimportant cultural piece has been destroyed for nothing.

Mazza also reminded us that "you do not need to completely destroy masks for getting out texts if you use methods developed and improved by papyrologists since 1980."

If a mask is to be destroyed, surely that process should be documented thoroughly, with constant photography and annotation, rather than undertaken as a classroom project with undergraduates using a bottle of Palmolive and a little elbow grease.

It is possible that the earliest text of the Gospel of Mark has been discovered. But until the world is given access to the papyrus through its publication, there is no story here, except that ancient Egyptian mummy masks are being destroyed in the ongoing search for Christian relics.

Ashin Wirathu: Myanmar and its vitriolic monk

Myanmar's most radical Buddhist monk is famed for his angry speeches, stoking fears that the Muslim minority will one day overrun the country.

Now Ashin Wirathu has drawn the ire of the UN by calling its special envoy to Myanmar (formerly known as Burma), Yanghee Lee, a "bitch" and a "whore".
BBC Burmese explains his rise, how other monks in Myanmar view him, why the government tolerates him and the anger women's groups feel.

Who is Ashin Wirathu? Ten years ago the radical monk from Mandalay was virtually unheard of. Born in 1968, he left school at the age of 14 and entered the monkhood.
He became well known only after he was involved with the nationalist and anti-Muslim 969 group in 2001 - an organisation described as extremist, though that is a term the group's supporters reject.
In 2003 he was sentenced to 25 years in prison but was released in 2010 along with other political prisoners.

How did he come to public attention? As government rules relaxed so he became more active on social media. He spread his message by posting his sermons on YouTube and on Facebook where he currently has more than 37,000 followers.

In 2012, when deadly violence broke out in Rakhine state between Muslims, mainly Rohingya, and Buddhists, he was catapulted into public view with his firebrand speeches.
A typical sermon begins: "Whatever you do, do it as a nationalist." They are all posted online and circulated widely.
His rhetoric has more than a whiff of political theatre. When asked if he was the "Burmese Bin Laden", he said he would not deny it. Other reports have quoted him as saying he works for peace.

What does he want? On 1 July 2013, Time Magazine put him on their front cover with the headline: The Face of Buddhist Terror?

His sermons preach animosity and his target is the Muslim community, mainly the Rohingya. He led rallies supporting relocating Rohingya Muslims to a third country.
He has also blamed Muslims for the clashes and repeats unsubstantiated claims about reproduction rates. Analysts say such sentiments stoked an already febrile situation in areas where violence unfolded.
He also claims that Buddhist women are being converted by force and is leading a campaign for legislation to prevent Burmese Buddhist women from marrying other faiths without official permission.

So who speaks out against him in Myanmar? The fear among many is that violent vigilantes support his views, which means that anyone who speaks out against him runs the risk of becoming a target.
This partly explains the ambiguous relationship various sectors of society have with him.
It is also complicated by the fact that on some issues, such as his opposition to Rohingya Muslims being granted citizenship, Wirathu has widespread support.

What do other Buddhist monks say? Many will remember that Buddhist monks led the 2007 "saffron" uprising against Myanmar's military junta. Wirathu's message does not attract support anywhere near that.
But many monks in Myanmar have remained tight-lipped in the face of his rhetorical onslaught. Part of it could be fear of reprisals.

Some monks have supported proposals for a nationality law restricting marriages

It was when Yanghee Lee criticised these nationality laws that he insulted her

He presides over 2,500 monks at his monastery in Mandalay and some policies are supported - a conference aimed at "safeguarding women" was well attended by monks.
It is almost impossible to say how far he is supported by the Buddhist community of monks at large - but the tension is palpable.
Some have spoken out to criticise him. Burmese monk U Ottara told BBC Burmese of his shock in the wake of the recent comments.
"I feel very sad. I can say that those are not the kind of words for a monk to use. Even if a layman said that in public, people would criticise the person."
The fear is that Wirathu is fast becoming the image of Burmese Buddhism to the outside world - one that is surely unrepresentative.

Why doesn't the government stop him? A nominally civilian government now runs Myanmar after nearly half a century of military rule. But deadly religious clashes have marred the image of a state on a slow road to reform.
However, many believe that Wirathu is tolerated by the government because he gives voice to popular views, particularly about Rohingya Muslims, which they could not voice themselves for diplomatic reasons.

Thousands of Rohingya have been displaced by violence in Rakhine

The Ministry of Religious Affairs has confirmed it will not act against him until they receive a complaint. The government has so far failed to condemn the latest comments about Ms Lee.

How do women feel? This is one group that voices consistent opposition. Women's activists have condemned his latest comments and opposed his campaign vociferously.
General Secretary of the Women's League of Burma Tin Tin Nyo said of his comments that: "He gives our country a bad reputation... He damages the robes that he is wearing. "
She also said that his campaign to introduce a law to limit Buddhist women marrying other faiths is not a form of protection but of control: "Women can decide who to marry and what religion to be".
She says many ordinary women and young activists, who would oppose him more vociferously, face reluctance from their parents, an older generation which has an inbuilt reverence for the clergy.
BBC Burmese' Soe Win Than and Ko Ko Aung contributed to this report.

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RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) — Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, the powerful U.S. ally who fought against al-Qaida and sought to modernize the ultraconservative Muslim kingdom, including by nudging open greater opportunities for women, has died. He was 90.

More than his guarded and hidebound predecessors, Abdullah assertively threw his oil-rich nation's weight behind trying to shape the Middle East. His priority was to counter the influence of rival, mainly Shiite Iran wherever it tried to make advances. He and fellow Sunni Arab monarchs also staunchly opposed the Middle East's wave of pro-democracy uprisings, seeing them as a threat to stability and their own rule.

He backed Sunni Muslim factions against Tehran's allies in several countries, but in Lebanon for example, the policy failed to stop Iranian-backed Hezbollah from gaining the upper hand. And Tehran and Riyadh's colliding ambitions stoked proxy conflicts around the region that enflamed Sunni-Shiite hatreds — most horrifically in Syria's civil war, where the two countries backed opposing sides. Those conflicts in turn hiked Sunni militancy that returned to threaten Saudi Arabia.
And while the king maintained the historically close alliance with Washington, there were frictions as he sought to put those relations on Saudi Arabia's terms. He was constantly frustrated by Washington's failure to broker a settlement to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. He also pushed the Obama administration to take a tougher stand against Iran and to more strongly back the mainly Sunni rebels fighting to overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad.
A royal court statement said the king died at 1 a.m. on Friday. His successor was announced as 79-year-old half-brother, Prince Salman, according to the statement carried on the Saudi Press Agency. Salman was Abdullah's crown prince and had recently taken on some of the ailing king's responsibilities.
President Barack Obama expressed condolences and offered sympathy to the people of Saudi Arabia.
"As a leader, he was always candid and had the courage of his convictions," Obama said. "One of those convictions was his steadfast and passionate belief in the importance of the U.S.-Saudi relationship as a force for stability and security in the Middle East and beyond."

Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz arrives at Heathrow Airport in west London, in this O …

Abdullah was born in Riyadh in 1924, one of the dozens of sons of Saudi Arabia's founder, King Abdul-Aziz Al Saud. Like all Abdul-Aziz's sons, Abdullah had only rudimentary education. Tall and heavyset, he felt more at home in the Nejd, the kingdom's desert heartland, riding stallions and hunting with falcons. His strict upbringing was exemplified by three days he spent in prison as a young man as punishment by his father for failing to give his seat to a visitor, a violation of Bedouin hospitality.
Abdullah was selected as crown prince in 1982 on the day his half-brother Fahd ascended to the throne. The decision was challenged by a full brother of Fahd, Prince Sultan, who wanted the title for himself. But the family eventually closed ranks behind Abdullah to prevent splits.

Abdullah became de facto ruler in 1995 when a stroke incapacitated Fahd. Abdullah was believed to have long rankled at the closeness of the alliance with the United States, and as regent he pressed Washington to withdraw the troops it had deployed in the kingdom since the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The U.S. finally did so in 2003.

When President George W. Bush came to office, Abdullah again showed his readiness to push against his U.S. allies.

In 2000, Abdullah convinced the Arab League to approve an unprecedented offer that all Arab states would agree to peace with Israel if it withdrew from lands it captured in 1967. The next year, he sent his ambassador in Washington to tell the Bush administration that it was too unquestioningly biased in favor of Israel and that the kingdom would from now on pursue its own interests apart from Washington's. Alarmed by the prospect of a rift, Bush soon after advocated for the first time the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

The next month, the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks took place in the United States, and Abdullah had to steer the alliance through the resulting criticism. The kingdom was home to 15 of the 19 hijackers, and many pointed out that the baseline ideology for al-Qaida and other groups stemmed from Saudi Arabia's Wahhabi interpretation of Islam.

Saudi Arabian King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz attending a horse racing event in Riyadh on March 13, 199 …

When al-Qaida militants in 2003 began a wave of violence in the kingdom aimed at toppling the monarchy, Abdullah cracked down hard. For the next three years, security forces battled militants, finally forcing them to flee to neighboring Yemen. There, they created a new al-Qaida branch, and Saudi Arabia has played a behind-the-scenes role in fighting it.

The tougher line helped affirm Abdullah's commitment to fighting al-Qaida. He paid two visits to Bush — in 2002 and 2005 — at his ranch in Crawford, Texas.

When Fahd died in 2005, Abdullah officially rose to the throne. He then began to more openly push his agenda.
His aim at home was to modernize the kingdom to face the future. One of the world's largest oil exporters, Saudi Arabia is fabulously wealthy, but there are deep disparities in wealth and a burgeoning youth population in need of jobs, housing and education. More than half the current population of 20 million is under the age of 25. For Abdullah, that meant building a more skilled workforce and opening up greater room for women to participate. He was a strong supporter of education, building universities at home and increasing scholarships abroad for Saudi students.
Abdullah for the first time gave women seats on the Shura Council, an unelected body that advises the king and government. He promised women would be able to vote and run in 2015 elections for municipal councils, the only elections held in the country. He appointed the first female deputy minister in a 2009. Two Saudi female athletes competed in the Olympics for the first time in 2012, and a small handful of women were granted licenses to work as lawyers during his rule.

One of his most ambitious projects was a Western-style university that bears his name, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, which opened in 2009. Men and women share classrooms and study together inside the campus, a major departure in a country where even small talk between the sexes in public can bring a warning from the morality police.

Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah and Britain's Queen Elizabeth arrive for a State Banquet at Buc …

The changes seemed small from the outside but had a powerful resonance. Small splashes of variety opened in the kingdom — color and flash crept into the all-black abayas women must wear in public; state-run TV started playing music, forbidden for decades; book fairs opened their doors to women writers and some banned books.

But he treaded carefully in the face of the ultraconservative Wahhabi clerics who hold near total sway over society and, in return, give the Al Saud family's rule religious legitimacy.
Senior cleric Sheik Saleh al-Lihedan warned against changes that could snap the "thread between a leader and his people." In some cases, Abdullah pushed back: He fired one prominent government cleric who criticized the mixed-gender university. But the king balked at going too far too fast. For example, beyond allowing debate in newspapers, Abdullah did nothing to respond to demands to allow women to drive.
"He has presided over a country that has inched forward, either on its own or with his leadership," said Karen Elliot House, author of "On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines."
"I don't think he's had as much impact as one would hope on trying to create a more moderate version of Islam," she said. "To me, it has not taken inside the country as much as one would hope."
And any change was strictly on the royal family's terms. After the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings in particular, Saudi Arabia clamped down on any dissent. Riot police crushed street demonstrations by Saudi Arabia's Shiite minority. Dozens of activists were detained, many of them tried under a sweeping counterterrorism law by an anti-terrorism court Abdullah created. Authorities more closely monitored social media, where anger over corruption and unemployment — and jokes about the aging monarchy — are rife.
Regionally, perhaps Abdullah's biggest priority was to confront Iran, the Shiite powerhouse across the Gulf.
Worried about Tehran's nuclear program, Abdullah told the United States in 2008 to consider military action to "cut off the head of the snake" and prevent Iran from producing a nuclear weapon, according to a leaked U.S. diplomatic memo.
In Lebanon, Abdullah backed Sunni allies against the Iranian-backed Shiite guerrilla group Hezbollah in a proxy conflict that flared repeatedly into potentially destabilizing violence. Saudi Arabia was also deeply opposed to longtime Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whom it considered a tool of Iran oppressing Iraq's Sunni Muslim minority.
In Syria, Abdullah stepped indirectly indirectly into the civil war that emerged after 2011. He supported and armed rebels battling to overthrow President Bashar Assad, Iran's top Arab ally, and pressed the Obama administration to do the same. Iran's allies Hezbollah and Iraqi Shiite militias rushed to back Assad, and the resulting conflict has left hundreds of thousands dead and driven millions of Syrians from their homes.

From the multiple conflicts, Sunni-Shiite hatreds around the region took on a life of their own, fueling Sunni militancy. Syria's war helped give birth to the Islamic State group, which burst out to take over large parts of Syria and Iraq. Fears of the growing militancy prompted Abdullah to commit Saudi airpower to a U.S.-led coalition fighting the extremists.

Toby Matthiesen, author of "Sectarian Gulf: Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the Arab Spring That Wasn't," said Abdullah was not "particularly sectarian in a way that he hated Shiites for religious reasons. ... There are other senior members of the ruling family much more sectarian." But, he said, "Saudi Arabia plays a huge role in fueling sectarian conflict."
Abdullah had more than 30 children from around a dozen wives.
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Batrawy reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

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MANILA, Philippines (AP) — Pope Francis flew home Monday after a weeklong trip to Asia, where he called for unity in Sri Lanka after a civil war and asked Filipinos to be "missionaries of the faith" in the world's most populous continent after a record crowd joined his final Mass in the Philippine capital.

President Benigno Aquino III, Catholic church leaders and about 400 street children yelling "Pope Francis we love you" saw him off at a Manila air base, where the pontiff, carrying a black travel bag, boarded a Philippine Airlines plane for Rome. Standing at the top of the stairs, the pope waved, slightly bowed his head before the crowd and then walked into the plane.

Hundreds of thousands of flag-waving Filipinos lined Manila's streets to get a final glimpse of 78-year-old Francis aboard an open-sided, white popemobile. As he passed, many shrieked, called his name and wept in joy.

"He's my No. 1 world leader," said Rita Fernandez, a 63-year-old mother of four who stood on a street near the Apostolic Nunciature in Manila where Francis stayed during his four-day visit.

"He rides on a bus. He flew to Tacloban to visit the typhoon survivors despite the storm and he stops to talk to the poor. He's a living saint," said Fernandez, who readied a cellphone with a camera and wore a yellow shirt with the pope's picture.

Amid the thick crowds, a man climbed up a tall ladder and unfurled a poster with a handwritten farewell message: "Dear Pope Francis, We love you! We pray for you. Pls pray for us all."

Pope Francis gestures before boarding his plane as he departs Manila, Philippines on Monday, Jan. 19 …

Such passion and devotion visibly energized the leader of a 1.2 billion-strong Roman Catholic church confronted by secularism, clergy sex abuse scandals and other daunting problems.

"He was very happy with the hospitality," Aquino told reporters. "He said he really felt the warmth."

Francis dedicated his four-day trip to the Philippines to the poor, marginalized and victims of injustice. He denounced the corruption that has robbed them of a dignified life, visited with street children and traveled to the eastern city of Tacloban to offer prayers for survivors of Typhoon Haiyan, the deadly 2013 storm that devastated one of the country's poorest regions.

Officials considered canceling the pope's flight to Tacloban on Saturday due to stormy weather, Marciano Paynor Jr. , who helped oversee government preparations for the papal visit, told ABS-CBN TV. The trip went ahead but had to be cut short because of the weather.

A crowd estimated by officials at a record 6 million poured into Manila's rain-soaked streets and its biggest park Sunday as Francis ended his Asian pilgrimage with an appeal for Filipinos to protect their young from sin and vice so they can become missionaries of the faith.

Pope Francis waves to the faithful on his last drive through the city before leaving Manila, Philipp …

 

"Filipinos are called to be outstanding missionaries of the faith in Asia," he said.

The crowd estimate, which could not be independently verified, included people who attended the pope's final Mass in Rizal Park and surrounding areas, and lined his motorcade route, said the chairman of the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority, Francis Tolentino.
The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said the Vatican had received the figure officially from local authorities and that it surpassed the 5 million who turned out for St. John Paul II's final Mass in the same park in 1995.
Francis dedicated the final homily of his Asia trip to children, given that the Mass fell on an important feast day honoring the infant Jesus. His focus was a reflection of the importance the Vatican places on Asia as the future of the church since it is one of the few places where Catholic numbers are growing — and on the Philippines as the largest Catholic nation in the region.

"We need to care for our young people, not allowing them to be robbed of hope and condemned to a life on the streets," Francis said.

Pope Francis waves to the faithful on his last drive through the city before leaving Manila, Philipp …

 

Francis made a triumphant entry into Rizal Park on a popemobile designed like the jeepney, the modified U.S. Army World War II jeep that is now an iconic minibus used by the Filipino everyman. He wore the same cheap, plastic yellow rain poncho handed out to the masses during his visit to Tacloban a day earlier.

The crowd in Manila — a sea of humanity in colorful rain ponchos spread out across the 60 hectares (148 acres) of parkland and boulevards surrounding it — erupted in shrieks of joy when he drove by, a reflection of the incredible resonance Francis' message about caring for society's most marginal has had in a country where about a quarter of its 100 million people lives in poverty.

In Sri Lanka, the first leg of his Asian trip, Francis pressed his call for national reconciliation by canonizing the country's first saint, the Rev. Joseph Vaz, and visiting the war-ravaged north to pray at a shrine revered by both Sinhalese and Tamil faithful.

Vaz was a 17th century Indian missionary who revived the faith in Sri Lanka during a time of anti-Catholic persecution by Dutch colonists, who were Protestant Calvinists.
Francis said the Sri Lankan church today wants to continue Vaz's legacy of service to all, asking only for the freedom to preach in return. "Religious freedom is a fundamental human right," he said.

Pope Francis smiles as he chats with Philippine President Benigno Aquino III to board his Philippine …

 

Underscoring that point, Francis gave Sri Lanka's bishops a replica of a 17th century decree from the then-king of Kandy allowing Catholic conversions of Buddhists — a somewhat provocative message given the recent upswing in violence by Buddhist extremists who want Sri Lankan exclusively Buddhist.

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Associated Press writers Teresa Cerojano, Oliver Teves and Ken Moritsugu contributed to this report.

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Follow Nicole Winfield on Twitter at twitter.com/nwinfield

Glyzelle Palomar, 12, asks Pope why street children face drug abuse and prostitution

The Pope holds mass for huge crowds in the Philippines 02:46

Story highlights

• Glyzelle Palomar, 12, asks Pope why street children face drug abuse and prostitution
• "She is the only one who has put a question for which there is no answer," Pope says
• He hugs Glyzelle and Jun Chura, a boy who recounted foraging for food in garbage

(CNN)A few years ago, Glyzelle Palomar was begging for food on the streets of northern Manila. This week, the 12-year-old girl was on a stage in front of tens of thousands of people, asking Pope Francis why God lets children suffer.

"There are many children neglected by their own parents," Glyzelle said Sunday at a ceremony at a 400-year-old Catholic university in Manila. "There are also many who became victims and many terrible things happened to them like drugs or prostitution."

"Why is God allowing such things to happen, even if it is not the fault of the children?" she asked the Pope, breaking down into tears as she spoke.

Living off 'what I can find in the garbage'

Another former street child, Jun Chura, told Pope Francis about his struggle to survive without a home.

"I was feeding myself with what I can find in the garbage," said Jun, 14. "I did not know where to go, and I was sleeping on the sidewalk."

Pope Francis huging two former street children at a ceremony in Manila, Philippines, on Sunday.

"When I was in the street, I witness also things I don't like, terrible things that happened to my companions in the street," Jun said. "I saw that they were taught how to steal, to kill also, and they have no respect anymore for the adults."

Pope Francis responded to Glyzelle's question and Jun's testimony by giving the two children a big hug.

"She is the only one who has put a question for which there is no answer and she wasn't even able to express it in words but in tears," the 78-year-old Pope told the crowd.

'The terrible things that can happen in the street'

Glyzelle and Jun are both in the care of Tulay ng Kabataan Foundation, a non-governmental organization that looks after Manila's street children.

The foundation came across Glyzelle and her older sister a few years ago, said Alexandra Chapeleau, the group's communication manager.

EXPAND GALLERY

The girls had left home -- where their impoverished parents were unable to support them or get them an education -- and were fending for themselves on the street, she said.

They first attended one of the foundation's drop-in centers before moving into a residential facility and starting to attend school. In November, their younger brother joined them at the foundation.

Glyzelle is still in touch with her mother and goes home to see her at Christmas, Chapeleau said.

The foundation's center where Glyzelle lives is home to about 40 other former street children.

"Most of them are victims of the terrible things that can happen in the street," including physical and sexual abuse, Chapeleau said.

'We need to see each child as a gift'

But Glyzelle's tears in front of the Pope on Sunday were apparently prompted by the intensity of the moment, not because of her own experiences.

She asked the question "on behalf of all the children we take care of," not because of "something personal regarding her own story," Chapeleau said.

The Pope touched on the street children theme again later Sunday when he celebrated Mass in a Manila park with millions of people, despite the soaking rain.

"We need to see each child as a gift to be welcomed, cherished and protected," he told the enormous crowd. "And we need to care for our young, not allowing them to be condemned to a life on the streets."

'I realized that not all people have no heart'

The Pope had visited the center where Glyzelle and others live on Friday after celebrating Mass at Manila Cathedral, and reportedly said he was "very moved" by what he saw.

There are estimated to be more than 1.5 million street children in the Philippines, about 70,000 of them in the Manila metropolitan area, according to the He Cares Foundation, another group that cares for them.

In his account, Jun described seeing some of his friends sniffing glue and taking other drugs. He said he learned to be wary of adults offering money or help because it was often a trap to exploit the children.

He initially declined an offer of support from Tulay ng Kabataan Foundation but later found out that the organization was genuinely trying to help him.

"I realized that not all people have no heart," he said.

Storm shortens Tacloban visit

The Pope left the Philippines on Monday, waving as he boarded his plane at the end of an Asia trip that also included time in Sri Lanka.

In the first visit by a Pope to the predominantly Catholic Philippines in 20 years, Francis paid a visit to Tacloban, the city ravaged by Super Typhoon Haiyan in November 2013.

Francis had to cut short his time there at the weekend because of the approach of another typhoon.

But it didn't stop him from donning a slicker to celebrate Mass in Tacloban on Saturday for hundreds of thousands who gathered despite the stormy weather.

Five Reasons Why the Dawn Wall First Free Ascent Has Pushed Climbing Forward

on January 14, 2015

Tommy Caldwell and partner Kevin Jorgeson tackled an unprecedented amount of sustained, difficult climbing up 3,000 feet to  complete the first free ascent of the  Dawn Wall route onYosemite’s El Capitan; Photograph by Brett Lowell, BigUp Productions

To take climbing to the next level, you have to innovate, which is just what Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson did to complete one of the most significant ascents in climbing history. The achievement represents the realization of Caldwell’s vision to find a way to free climb the Dawn Wall—widely considered too steep and too difficult for free climbing.
Here are five reasons why a the Dawn Wall has been cutting-edge from the beginning and has pushed the sport of climbing to the next level.

It’s Not a Crack Climb
Climbers call the vertical cracks in any cliff “lines of weakness” due to the fact that they are relatively easier to climb than a seemingly featureless vertical rock face that appears as smooth as glass to an untrained eye.
The glacier-polished granite of Yosemite is blessed with thousands of vertical cracks on all its major formations, which is how it became the rock climbing crucible that it is today. With good climbing technique, cracks are relatively straightforward to climb. You simply jam your hands and feet into the crack and follow it upward.
Cracks also have the benefit of being visible from the ground. A climber, using a pair of binoculars, can inspect the wall and easily see the route from the ground—just follow that vertical crack line from the bottom to the top.
Until now, all 13 of the free climbs on El Cap have been mostly crack climbs. The southwest face of El Capitan contains the most prominent collection of vertical cracks.
The Dawn Wall is the first El Cap free climb to really depart from this tradition of following the “lines of weakness” to the summit. You might say that the Dawn Wall is a “line of strength.”
It took a lot of vision on Caldwell’s part to find a stretch of free-climbable rock, which isn’t a crack climb, and on this scale. He spent two years drilling dozens of bolts by hand, a process that takes 45 minutes per bolt, in order to add protection points on a rock face devoid of cracks. He had to scrub dirt off the tiny hand- and footholds and remember their sequences perfectly in order to link the moves.
Thanks to Caldwell and Jorgeson, and their vision for what a free climb on El Capitan could look like, future climbers looking for a good challenge will certainly be turning their attention to the seemingly blank faces located between the cracks.
Coldest Winter Nights
Yosemite is America’s most crowded National Park, with a busy tourist season during the summer months. Even climbers tend to flock to Yosemite in greater numbers during the warmest months of the year. Prime climbing months in Yosemite are typically believed to be in May and October.
When Caldwell and Jorgeson first started working on the Dawn Wall together about six years ago, they would typically try to climb in November. Soon they realized that this wall was simply just too hot for the high-end free climbing. Because the route is not a crack climb, the style of climbing involved grabbing some of the tiniest, most frictionless holds imaginable.
Climbers prefer cold conditions because they believe friction is better between their skin and the rock. Hands sweat less and the rock feels “stickier.” On the southeast-facing Dawn Wall, which collects sunlight for most of the day, Caldwell and Jorgeson discovered that in order to use these holds they needed to climb in January at night.
What Caldwell and Jorgeson have inadvertently done over these past two weeks is pioneer an entirely new season (and time of day) for free climbing on El Capitan. Climbing in January at night by headlamp is an out-of-the-box idea for free climbers, but Caldwell and Jorgeson have shown that this is what it takes to succeed in free climbing at the upper limit of the climbing scale.
Redefining “Team Free”
Over the years, big-wall free climbers on El Cap have debated over the various “styles” of ascent. The method employed by Caldwell and Jorgeson over the past 19 days has left many in the climbing community scratching their heads about what to make of their style.
The goal for Caldwell and Jorgeson was simply for both climbers to free climb every pitch. At least one person had to lead every pitch, and once that pitch was led, then it was OK for the second person to free climb that pitch on top-rope.
It became confusing because, once the two climbers hit the block of really hard pitches, from pitch 14 through 20, they each free-climbed these pitches out of order from each other. Jorgeson battled to complete pitch 15, while Caldwell continued leading every pitch up to pitch 20. After Jorgeson led pitch 15, and pitch 16, then he top-roped pitches 17-20 while catching up to Caldwell.
This style really stretches the definition of “team free” to its limit due to the fact that both climbers ascended each pitch of the Dawn Wall in succession to their own high point, but out of order in relation to each other.
Regardless of what you call their style of ascent, the fact remains that for Caldwell and Jorgeson, this was a hard-won effort and the result of seven years of work and dedication.
Tweeting El Cap
The Dawn Wall has stood right at the cutting edge of adventure media since Caldwell and Jorgeson first set foot onto this 3,000-foot rock climb. The fact that El Cap gets perfect cell-phone coverage has allowed the climbers to communicate the details of their ascent to an engaged audience. They’ve posted daily Instagrams and Facebook updates. Jorgeson has held live Q&A sessions on Twitter using the #askdawnwall hashtag.
Unlike all major sporting events, which have stadiums that are designed as much as television studios as they are playing fields for athletes, big-wall climbing areas present numerous challenges for capturing the media assets that depict the incredible performances take place on the side of the wall.
Jorgeson and Caldwell were originally criticized for maintaining such a strong social media presence during their climbing days due to the fact that being on Facebook seemed to be at odds with having a true climbing adventure. What’s so fascinating is how this perspective now seems incredibly outdated by today’s standards. It speaks to the fact that cameras, cell phones and being constantly interconnected on social media have grown to become so much a part of all our lives, that it would seem odd without it.
“I almost feel obligated at this point to continue posting,” said Caldwell on day 10. “It’s been a tough balance. It was something I was uncomfortable with at first. But I feel such overwhelming support and such feedback that I feel obligated to continue posting to Instagram and Facebook. It’s become such an integral part of this climb.”
So Much Hard Climbing
The bottom line is that the Dawn Wall is significant because it contains more hard pitches of rock climbing than any other big-wall free climb yet established. There are 17 pitches—half the route—rated 5.13 or harder. The fact that Yosemite’s two hardest pitches, pitches 14 and 15, are located right in the middle of the Dawn Wall is what makes this route so challenging.

It’s safe to say that it’ll be a long time before anyone repeats this rock climb.
Caldwell is one of our 2015 Adventurers of the Year. Vote for the People’s Choice daily until January 31.

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A Winter’s Tale: China’s Altay Mountains

Posted by Intelligent Travel in Travel with Heart on January 13, 2015

(Photograph by Mark Jenkins)

By Mark Jenkins
It’s 35 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and our horses don’t give a damn.
Large heads bowed, snow coating their thick hides, plumes of steam swirling from their frosted nostrils, they’re primordial beasts genetically inured to intense cold. A wooden sleigh called a chana is attached to each horse by long pine poles and a curved yoke. The design of the sleigh—the width of a horse’s ass, the length of a human body, with two curl-tipped runners—has not changed for centuries.
Our chana driver, Norbek, a rough-cut Kazakh as impervious to the cold as his horses, adjusts the leather straps with bare hands. He has loaded the two sleighs with our backpacks, cross-country skis, and sacks of hay for the horses. Bundled in down parkas, mittens, and insulated pants and boots, we are about to sled into the Altay Mountains of central Asia.
The Altay, an obscure range that is buried in snow all winter, rises at the converging borders of China, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and Russia. It may well be the last place on Earth where horse-and-sleigh, an ancient form of travel, remains the primary means of winter transportation.
Four of us are on this expedition: Norbek and I on one chana, Nils Larsen and Ayiken on the other. Larsen is an American ski historian who has traveled to the Altay nine times to research the origins of skiing. Shaggy-haired, soft-spoken, and a master skier, he lives in a century-old cabin outside of rustic Curlew, Washington, and owns a small ski company. Ayiken (pronounced I-kin) is our factotum, a rosy-cheeked Kazakh fluent in five languages who is as at ease with pinched-faced Chinese bureaucrats as with broad-smiling nomads.

Skiing on boards, here covered with animal skin, may have originated in the Altay region millennia ago. (Photograph by Mark Jenkins)

Our goal is Hemu, a village deep in China’s northwestern province of Xinjiang, where Larsen is hoping to interview the last living members of a ski culture thousands of years old. To get there by chana, we must cross a mountain pass, then parallel the icebound Hemu-Kanas River. In summer, Hemu is a one-day journey by horseback. Now, in February, it will take much longer.
As we’re about to set off from a settlement named Jaldungwe, a horseman gallops up to warn us that avalanches have closed the chana track to Hemu.
“He says it is impassable,” translates Ayiken.
Norbek nods, his eyes squinting, his face snow-burned to leather from so many years of living in the elements. When the horseman departs, Norbek flicks the reins of his horse and we glide off over the snow. He knows these mountains and knows his horses, which quite possibly descend from Genghis Khan’s own steeds, with coats dense as fur and tails so long, they drag at the hooves. The shaggy creatures pull our chanas in single file with muscled resolution, and considerable flatulence.
What first strikes me riding a chana is the lack of speed. The horses are having to plod through deep snow, so we move just a little faster than a human walks. This allows plenty of time to take in the landscape.
Beyond Jaldungwe we wind through groves of black-armed birch trees. As the trail steepens and the snow deepens, the horses begin to bog down. Then they stop. Norbek rolls off the lead chana into the waist-deep powder, struggles to slog to the front of his horse, flips its reins over one of his own shoulders, and starts to pull the 800-pound animal. Eager to please, the horse lunges forward like a wildebeest in deep water. Ayiken takes the reins of the second horse and plows ahead, his short legs lost in the drifts.
Larsen and I push the 300-pound sleighs from behind. This is not easy. We flounder even worse than the horses, slipping and falling. Soon we’re covered with snow and sweating profusely. Nonetheless, with Norbek and Ayiken stomping forward yanking the reins as Larsen and I push, we manage to reach the top of the pass.
I’m getting a firsthand glimpse of winter life in this remote region without roads and automobiles. Only a few hours into our journey, my dashing-through-the-snow Doctor Zhivago illusions about chana riding have vanished.
Horses here were the original automobiles, tamed, then bred—so, in a way, built—as beasts of burden by Norbek’s ancestors. Archaeologists in fact believe one of the few places where wild horses survived the freeze of the last ice age was here on the Eurasian steppe, an expanse of grassland and taiga stretching for more than 3,000 miles, from the Altay Mountains to the Transylvanian Alps in Romania. In addition, recent evidence is suggesting the wild horse was domesticated approximately 6,000 years ago in this same region.
As our horses gulp down snow, Larsen and I unpack our skis, clip in, and slide off the back side of the pass, whooping away. Norbek and Ayiken follow on the chanas. Though our skis are modern, as Larsen and I cut turns down through the trees, we echo the experience of the Altay Mountains’ original skiers, faced as they were with months of powder.
The deeper we go into the landscape, the deeper the snow gets. Once again the horses begin to flounder. Norbek remains insouciant, as does Larsen—they have shared many a chana journey—but I begin to fear for our animals. Ayiken relays my concern to Norbek.
“He’s afraid we may kill the horses.”
Norbek, standing waist-deep in snow as he rocks a chana to unstick it, looks at me, shaking his head. Onward. Larsen and I forge forward on our skis, stopping at each swath of avalanche debris to dig a route for the horses. At dusk the animals become so mired in a snowbank that Norbek has to unhitch the chanas and let the horses make their way through—which leaves him, with our pitiful help, dragging the sleighs.
The temperature has plunged below minus 40 degrees, the horses are encased in ice, and Norbek is utterly unperturbed. Larsen had bragged about Norbek’s skills as a chana driver, but I quietly decide he’s insane and our horses probably will die.
Norbek rehitches the chanas to the horses and we trudge onward into the gloaming. Night stars appear, illuminating the mountains in a pale, phosphorescent blue. Slipping along on my skis, I notice my fingers and feet have become cold but my core is warm. Surprisingly, that’s good enough, just as it has been for Norbek and his ancestors for millennia.

A horse hauls a chana up an incline. (Photograph by Jonas Bendiksen, Magnum Photos)

The four of us are traveling through a land using a method that belongs to a distant past. If we want to survive out here, we must keep moving. The realization bemuses me. Our situation is elemental, irreducible. No thinking is needed, only doing. I enter Norbek’s mind, Norbek’s reality. I must ski into the looming darkness without thinking. Nothing more. Acceptance of this soon will liberate me.
As if in return for my newfound sanguinity, we spot a tiny yellow light on the black horizon. It seems a mirage in the inky vastness, appearing and disappearing as we traverse dunes of snow. Drawing near, we see the light is emanating from a cabin. We’re saved!
A dog howls as a man in quilted pants appears in the blackness. We park our chanas and shake his hand. Inside the cabin, beyond the blanket-draped door, sit the man’s bewildered wife and son. We stare at each other in mutual surprise. We can’t believe our good fortune, and they can’t imagine what the hell we’re doing out here at night in the dead of winter.
Ayiken makes introductions. The man of the house, Womir Uzak—Ayiken explains this means “long life”—is short and wiry, with a crooked nose that looks like the result of a hoof to the face. His wife, Meir Gul, is a round-faced beauty. Their son, Janat, wide-eyed, with an even wider smile, looks to be 12 years old. Ayiken asks politely if we might spend the night.
“Boladi, boladi. Sender bizdeng honahtar!” Uzak says. “Of course, of course. You are our guests!”
It’s past 10 p.m., but Meir Gul stokes the fire, sets a giant pot on the woodstove, fills it with meaty bones, and begins making noodles from scratch.
Outside, Uzak and Norbek unharness our horses. There is no horse barn; the animals are neither watered nor fed. They just stand, behemoths of stoicism. I want to invite them into the deliciously warm cabin.
Our hosts, Ayiken learns, are caretakers of a herd of horses in the valley; all winter they shovel snow off the haystacks to feed them. Ayiken explains we’re on our way to Hemu. Uzak nods and says, incidentally, “That route is closed because of avalanches.” His manner is indifferent; because it’s closed doesn’t mean it’s impassable. All here is a matter of muscle and perspective.
Exactly an hour after our arrival, Norbek goes out and feeds the horses hay.
“If I give them water before I feed them after a hard day,” he explains through Ayiken in a rare break from taciturnity, “they will bloat themselves and not eat.”
Around midnight, we all sit down to bowls of mare’s yogurt, beef stew mixed with noodles, bread and jam. As I dig into the stew, Norbek heads out to give the horses water. He doesn’t sweet-talk them or pet them or even break off the chunks of ice plating their shivering flanks. When I ask him if he shouldn’t put a blanket on the horses, he shakes his head no.
Our bellies full, bodies exhausted, minds scrubbed clean of thoughts by a day in deep snow, we climb onto the wall-to-wall sleeping platform carpeted with rugs, which has more than enough space for our three hosts plus the four of us. I scooch down into my sleeping bag and sleep a dreamless sleep.
When my eyelids lift in the morning, Meir Gul already has the fire blazing and cups of milk tea steaming on the table. I step outside, fully expecting to find our horses frozen solid, iced sentinels that will stand before this cabin until the spring thaw. But the beasts still breathe; Norbek is slipping their halters back on and reattaching the chanas.
Uzak said that to reach Hemu we’d have to dig our way through this winter wonderland, so we hire him to help. He’ll trot ahead, tromping out a track. Back into the wilderness we sleigh, away from our cabin of salvation. Meir Gul waves.

Altay skiers pole their way along a ridge in Xinjiang Province; wrapping their skis in skins provides traction for uphill climbs. (Photograph by Jonas Bendiksen, Magnum Photos)

Larsen and I, eager to lighten the load of our horses, choose to ski; Ayiken and Norbek will drive the chanas. Wolverine tracks are everywhere; among the most elusive of animals, their presence here, Larsen says, suggests a fairly intact ecosystem.
We continue on, and soon the valley narrows. We know our way is about to be impeded. Sure enough, an avalanche has obliterated a section of the old chana track. Our horses pull up at the slide as at the banks of a raging river. Uzak unsheathes his shovel and goes to work. The four of us deploy our skis, chopping out snow on the high side to fashion a sort of platform. It’s slow business. I calculate it’ll take days to trench a path across this avalanche.
Methodically digging and shoveling snow, it dawns on me this is what the locals have been doing for centuries. I’m certain Norbek, Ayiken, and Uzak don’t give it a second thought. If they want to get somewhere in winter—for supplies, for help, for conversation—they and their horse-drawn chanas are it. It doesn’t matter how hard the work is or how long it takes. They have no choice.
Again, I find a gratifying freedom in this lack of options. We can’t go up, down, over, under, or around, so we have to go through. Well then, dig. Not in frustration, not impatiently or angrily. Not with any emotion at all. I give my mind a rest and let my muscles do the work.
If we were stuck somewhere in my home state of Wyoming, an obstacle such as an avalanche would be identified by the older generation as an opportunity to “build character” and by the younger as “like, really unfair.” Not to the Kazakhs of the Altay. They don’t weigh obstacles down with emotional freight. Avalanches and other impediments are part of the rhythm of the day. Altay people expect them without dwelling on them, take whatever effort and time is required to get through them, and move along.
To my surprise, within two hours we have shelved out a track through the avalanche debris. Naturally, around the bend, we find another avalanche, but by now I don’t care. I’m getting the hang of this. The Zen of traveling by chana.
It is midafternoon when we reach another cabin and are invited in by the owners, a Kazakh family, for milk tea and fried dough. Outside the cabin, a solar panel is set in the snow. We are told it can power a cellphone, two light bulbs for a few hours, and the toy electric crane I see on the floor.
As we eat, the family’s matriarch, seated by the woodstove, operates the controls of the small crane while a three-year-old boy with a traditional haircut—head shaved but for a tuft—tries to break the jerking toy. We are back in civilization.
The final leg of our journey to Hemu will be along a well-used chana track. If Larsen and I stay on skis, we won’t be able to keep up with the chanas, so we join Norbek and Ayiken on the hay bales. When we set off, the horses, now free of deep snow, practically gallop.
The sun is slanting across the snow, and soon the chanas are gliding along as if on ice. Enchanting as this is after our labors, I’m finding it disappointingly uneventful. In Hemu there will be skiers using traditional wooden skis, but there also will be SUVs, even a plowed road—and I’m not ready. I want to remain in ancient Altay.
As the low cabins of Hemu come into view, blanketed with a flat gray cloud of woodsmoke, I find myself wishing we had another snow-covered pass to make our way across. I find myself yearning for more nights out in the unknown, for more miles of deep snow to traverse by horse and chana. And I find myself envying what Norbek and Ayiken have in their rugged homeland.

National Geographic contributing writer Mark Jenkins skied Yellowstone and climbed Devil’s Tower for Traveler in “America’s Cathedrals.” 

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