"The plan was to follow the trails of the Swedish Tibet explorer, Sven Hedin who explored these remote areas at the beginning of the 20th century and the Austrian mountaineer, Heinrich Harrer (Seven Years in Tibet) who fled in the 1940s from the British Prisoner-of-War Camp in Dehradun in India to Tibet and stayed there until 1950. When Sven Hedin visited western Tibet in 1908, this area was so marginalised as to almost disappear from the history and geography books. The legend of a holy mountain (Mount Kailash) and a lake (Lake Manasarovar) from which four of Asia's mightiest rivers flowed was largely ridiculed by western cartographers. When Hedin returned from his arduous journey he was able to prove that there was indeed such a holy mountain and such a lake, and that the remote western part of Tibet was in fact the source of the Tsangpo/Brahmaputra, Indus, Sutlej and Ganges (Karnali) rivers.
When in 1990 I was elected as Member of the first independent Parliament of the Republic of Namibia and appointed as a Minister of the Namibian government I was able to start working to make this plan to become a reality. In the mean time I had been to many trekking and mountaineering expeditions in many parts of the Himalaya and Karakoram and to the central and eastern parts of Tibet. Due to the fact that for many decades there was a very close relationship between SWAPO of Namibia and the Peoples Republic of Namibia, a special permit with authorisation of the Chinese Prime Minister was granted that I was able to visit as an individual tourist these areas and some still closed areas in northwestern Tibet in 1998 (from April to June 1998)."
http://www.klausdierks.com/Himalaya/photo_documentation-1998.htm
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