A Himalayan Monk Saved His Life. 40 Years Later, Will They Meet Again?

As a young traveler, Didi almost died hiking a remote part of the Himalayas. Forty years later, his son takes him on an epic journey to find the monk who saved his life.

🚨 Be sure to turn on CC subtitles! Available in English, German, Russian, Spanish 🚨

So what is this about, what is “Mountains Never Meet”? Short answer: An unseen documentary film I made before the pandemic but never managed to release. It’s not about food, or me (though I’m in it) but I hope you enjoy it! But you want to read the long answer.

Before that, I'd like to say special thanks go out to Palmo Tenzin & her family. Without them this would not have been possible. Thank you Didi for sharing your story, and to Targais and Tsoghspel for keeping us safe on the journey!

Alright so here's the long answer.

The story begins almost 4 years ago, before I even started making food videos on this channel. Eypee (who shoots and edits a lot of videos on this channel!) and I just left a video production company we had co-founded. The short story is that we were not fulfilled as filmmakers in a super commercial environment.

We were both hungry to rediscover our passion for making movies, and with lots of time on our hands we started looking for ideas for a documentary film project. We had many, but none really came to fruition. Until one day that is, when we were randomly talking about Eypee’s dad Dietrich.

You need to understand, Dietrich is truly one of a kind. “Quirky” would be an understatement. While very smart and charming, he simply lacked the ability to stop talking about everything from nutty business ideas to abstract philosophy or futuristic technology. Like, ever. Being high school friends with Eypee, I often got to experience Dietrichs meandering monologues when I slept over, and I actually found them quite fun. That was not the case for Eypee - having to endure his dad’s ramblings on a constant basis, he was anything but amused. He had heard it all many times over.

My highlights were always Dietrich’s tales - growing up as an adventurous youngster in the 70s, he had his fair share of stories from far away travels to share. One of these stories involved him almost dying while hiking solo in the Himalayas. A monk had saved his life. The story in all its details (a princess on a white horse was involved) was so crazy we had never even seriously considered it to be true. But a friend of ours had family nearby and was connected to some people in the region - so Eypee and I decided to for the longest of shots and see if someone has heard of this monk whose name, approximate age and monastery we knew.

To our utter disbelief, a few months later our friend’s family actually managed to track someone down who fit the description. And not just that: He even said he might vaguely remember helping a traveler a few decades ago. But! He lived in a remote area with no internet access and only spoke Ladakhi, so all this information was passed to us through 3 or 4 people.

We could have tried to verify it’s actually him first - but where’s the fun in that? We were hungry for a good story, a good movie and some tension. In the hopes it was actually the monk who saved Eypee’s dad, we went straight to Dietrich to tell him who we had (probably) found and ask him to join us on one more epic adventure. Could it be that his stories were true after all?

To find out what happened you’ll have to watch the film :) But once we had finished editing it, which in between our other projects took about a year, we ended up with a finished movie and no idea what to do with it. One option was to try to submit it to film festivals or get a streaming provider to purchase it. But between the pandemic and other projects, we simply couldn’t find the will to deal with the paperwork or sales process. It’s a grind and in the end, the movie would end up behind a paywall or something.

The whole reason we made this film is because it was a passion project. A personal story that we went through great lengths to turn into a movie that we’re proud of (in spite of many things not quite working out as planned). We had paid for everything out of our own pockets - so there were no producers putting pressure on us. In the meantime, I had built a YouTube channel with a sizeable audience, even though you guys are of course here for other things. But in the end, all we want is to do is share this labor of love. If you watch and enjoy it, that’s all we ever wanted :)

And if you really really you like it, share this video. It will make us very happy :)

SPOILER ALERT. One last note on Didi. What you see at the very very end of the movie actually happened. It didn’t last very long though. Only a few months later, Didi returned to Germany for family reasons.

Видео A Himalayan Monk Saved His Life. 40 Years Later, Will They Meet Again? канала My Name Is Andong