Purple haze. You've probably heard of it, might even have smoked some, trippy stuff.

Hendrix loved it, helped spearhead the hippie counterculture of the 1960s,

Summer of Love, Grateful Dead, Flowers in Rifle Barrels, you know it.

That stuff came from Nepal.

More specifically, growing wild on the slopes of the Himalayan foothills, rolled bare hand and

smuggled into Europe in the US on planes, boats, or just plain old stereotype VW

campers, following paths beaten out by ancient Silk Road traders.

This stuff didn't need VCs, no greenhouses, no hydroponics, just a lush valley in Everest shadow, burning

hot by day, wet and foggy by night, and a keen-eyed Nepali farmer keeping watch over the whole thing.

Thousands of years ago, Tibetans fleeing persecution flooded across stick-thin

mountain passes to grow it. They discovered valleys

so bucolic and virile they chalked it up to divine luck. These were sacred

hidden places visible only to believers.

You could stand smack-bang in the middle of one of these things and you could never even know it existed.

Centuries later, when West... never even know it existed.

Centuries later, when Western hippies flocked to Nepal,

they called the Valley Shang Rilah.

But that was a phrase, some British writer had actually conjured up in the 1930s. The locals knew the sacred valleys as something else altogether, Bayall.

Now if you imagine taking a three day trip into a bail in the heart of the Himalayan mountains,

searching for some of the world's rarest strains of marijuana in a beat-up Indian all-roder with two of Nepal's of

a beat-up Indian all-roder with two of Nepal's best-known weed activists.

You might imagine a soundtrack of wind chimes and sitar strum by bow-legged yogis,

...