Arriving in a place like Bhutan, the tiny Buddhist kingdom in the eastern Himalayas, requires a series of physical actions that happen all at once, writes Jamie Zeppa. A plane touches down, a passenger disembarks. Luggage lurches from a hole in the wall. But entering takes longer: “You cross over slowly, in bits and pieces. You begin to despair: will you ever get over?… And then one morning, you open your eyes and you are finally here, really and truly here. You are just beginning to know where you are.”

Zeppa, who spent three years in Bhutan as an English teacher for the now-defunct World University Service of Canada, recounts her entry into the distant land known as the last Shangri-La on Earth with grace and self-deprecating humour. When she arrives her life is demarcated by hard edges and sharp distinctions that separate her carefully boiled water from the rainwater collected by the locals, her antibiotics from their superstitious cures, her disciplinary techniques from their beatings, her sense of individualism from their sense of community. But as the edges fall away, Zeppa relinquishes her North American sense of self and begins an exploration of Bhutanese culture and Buddhist philosophy that ultimately becomes a love affair, both figuratively and literally.

Zeppa’s depictions of life in remote Pema Gatshel and later, at the more comfortable Kanglung College, teem with exquisite physical details that reflect her growing Buddhist mindfulness: we taste the impossible sweetness of the withered apples her students bring her, see the thousand shades of green (“lime, olive, pea, apple, grass, pine, moss, malachite, emerald”) that monsoon rains paint her valley, feel the pulsing touch of a student’s hand on her forearm. If Zeppa leaves anything unsatisfied it’s the reader’s desire to know what happens next: after arrival and entry comes ongoing involvement, yet she gives only a scant seven-page account of her life after her posting ends – a life that begins with her marriage in Bhutan to Tshewang, one of her college students, and the birth of their child. And what of her subsequent return to Canada? “[We] found some of the cultural differences between us to be even greater than we had expected,” is the sort of explanation readers will accept only upon promise of a sequel. We’re waiting.