In January 2000, two Ambassador taxis twisted their way up the narrow road leading towards Dharamsala in the Himalayan foothills of northern India - the home-in-exile of the Dalai Lama. In one taxi was a fourteen year old boy, the 17th Karmapa, one of the most important figures in Tibetan Buddhism. The boy's arrival in Dharamsala was the culmination of an extraordinary escape which had brought him 900 miles across the Himalayas, in conditions of high danger, from the Monastery in Tibet where he had lived since he was seven years old.