Nomadic heart of love

It's impossible not to think of all the clichés when talking about how Kate Buckley met and married her husband, Tsedup Karko, so we should get them out of the way now.

It was love at first sight, she says; love across the divide and against the odds. She laughs when she runs through the list. "It sounds really naff, doesn't it?" she says, smiling.

Next month, they will celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary, a milestone that, when they met, only they were confident of reaching. Both had escaped something - Kate her predictably comfortable life in Britain, Tsedup his life in an isolated Tibetan tribe, with no running water or electricity after just a basic education - in the hope of finding something new and exciting. By finding each other their lives were to change dramatically.

They had first met at a party at a hill station in northern India. Kate was travelling, taking time out from her fabric design course in London. She says she first noticed him dancing, eyes closed, long hair swirling.

"He caught me looking at him," she says, "and he came and sat with me, and started talking about his homeland. He spoke of nature with such integrity, as if he was part of the earth." From that moment, they were inseparable.

The weeks that followed were impossibly romantic. They rented a room together, walked through the forest and swam naked in rock pools. When Kate had to return to Middlesex University in the September, she vowed she would go back for him.

She dropped out of her studies, and did temping jobs to earn money for the trip.

Kate's parents, back at their comfortable home in Winchester, were worried that their daughter had been swept away by it all. Her father, a banker, and mother, a psychotherapist, thought she had gone mad.

"They were shocked and really worried. But I never had any doubts. I was young and incredibly idealistic. I really believed in what I was doing. We knew we wanted to be together more than anything; that was the only thing that mattered."

Kate's parents were worried that the two young people - their daughter was 25, Tsedup just 21 - were too different.

Tsedup was born in the remote grasslands of Amdo, on the far east of the Tibetan plateau. He grew up living with his nomadic family - he has seven brothers and sisters - in a large yak-hair tent, where they still live today.

By the time he was four, he rode the family's horses bareback and accompanied his father on hunting trips. When he was 18, he decided he wanted to see the world, and set off on foot, over the mountains.

His life is so wildly exotic it's not hard to see why Kate fell for him - with his physical strength, his ability to survive on so little, and live at one with the elements.

In the December she went back and, three months later and without telling her parents, they were married in a register office in Dharamsala, in northern India, with plastic plants and an official who muttered "visa marriage" as he stamped their certificate.

It was a couple of months before Tsedup got a visa to come to Britain. "The High Commission was doubtful that we were a genuine couple," says Kate. "The officials said he was using me. He was questioned really heavily: they told him he was nothing and that his family were nothing."

When they arrived in Britain, living in a rented flat in Haringey, north London, the practicalities of life hit them hard. Although Tsedup spoke English, he found it difficult to get a job. But he did find occasional work as a model, appearing in adverts and fashion magazines, and as an actor (he worked on Brad Pitt's film Seven Years in Tibet).

He felt out of place, and Kate, who was working as a graphic artist on a glossy magazine, suddenly had to be the responsible one. "Tsedup had no experience of the West or of modern life," she says.

"Things like using the Tube and escalator were so alien to him. He would get car sick, and even using a knife and fork was something to get used to. He had never watched television until he came here.

"I think it was quite lonely for him - where he comes from there is a huge emphasis on community, and he couldn't understand why nobody spoke to each other in London - but he learned very quickly and he found the new experiences exciting. But I knew that in the back of his mind he longed for home."

Their relationship came under a lot of strain. Did they ever doubt that it would work?

"No, but it took a lot of patience and understanding. I recognise the sacrifice he made by coming here. I hadn't anticipated how difficult it would be, this huge absorption of modern culture.

"But we're really close - he's my best friend - and I don't think we could have coped if we hadn't been like that. We have a lot of trust and strength; I'm not going to let him down. When you've sacrificed a lot for a relationship and you've got a lot to lose, it becomes more precious."

Despite finding it difficult, Tsedup adapted remarkably quickly. "My friends adored him and he quickly became a member of my family. Any reservations my parents may have had vanished the moment they met him."

But Kate still hadn't met Tsedup's family. Finally, after four years, he was given a British passport and he could take his wife home. It was Kate's turn to cross the cultural gap.

In June 1998, she left behind her magazine job, home comforts and a bulging wardrobe to spend six months living as a nomad with Tsedup's family, whom he hadn't seen for nine years. He had written to them, but they had never received the letters, and had no idea if he was alive or dead.

Kate's parents went with them. From the airport, it was a 10-hour drive across the plains and through the mountains to the tribe's encampment, 20 tents arranged in a large circle, their yaks and sheep grazing nearby. It was an emotional reunion. When they arrived, Tsedup's mother ran to meet them, sobbing.

Kate was relieved that Tsedup's family were so welcoming and didn't seem to mind that their son had married a Western woman, but getting used to her new life was to prove a challenge.

Her parents stayed for a week but she would be there for six months. With no running water, they had to go to the river to fill huge buckets.

"The women are incredibly strong. They would carry these big containers on their backs and I would struggle with a little one. I did feel quite pathetic." There was electricity at night, powered by a solar panel, but there the modern comforts ended.

Kate had to learn how to milk the yaks, ride horses, make butter, cook and clean and, within days, her hands were dirty and cracked, "like a true nomad woman's".

She was given traditional clothes to wear and was known by the name Namma, meaning "bride". "I found it very liberating," she says. "They don't worry about material possessions. They are so generous and hospitable, and I loved the sense of family and community. There were people around all the time."

Kate also had to get used to her place as a woman in the tribe. "If I was just with women, they could get quite boisterous, but if there were men, or older family members, I had to remember to be quite demure and obedient.

"But I was immediately made to feel like one of them, even though, for most of them, I was still a curiosity, the first Western woman they had seen."

Back in London, Kate wore her tsarer (traditional Tibetan costume) for a week, "until I became conscious of all the strange looks I was getting in the street," she laughs.

It took a week to wash the dirt from under her nails and even longer before her cracked hands healed, but the trip brought Kate and Tsedup closer together.

"When he talked about his country and his people, I understood his passion and was able to share it with him. It had always been hard to live with him, knowing he wanted to be somewhere else, but now I wanted to be somewhere else as well."

In the spring of 1999, Kate fell pregnant, and that summer they returned to Tibet. "I took the picture from my scan and they were amazed, they'd never seen anything like it," she says.

When their son Gonbochab, meaning "blessed by the Saviour", was born back home in London, Tsedup was by Kate's side, defying one of the greatest taboos of his culture.

The family now spend six months of every year in Tsedup's homeland and the rest in Haringey.

"It can be unsettling and it's hard to return to London and start working again, but it's important that our son understands where he comes from. There's so much freedom for him. He gets dirty, like all the children, and it doesn't matter, and I love watching him running through the grass.

"Tsedup's family love Gonbochab - they think he's special because he's mixed race. He started speaking Tibetan first because he learned to talk while we were there.

"We came back and my parents couldn't understand him. We hope he will inherit the best of both worlds, East and West."

This year, though, will be the last time they spend such a long time in Tibet, and life will become more conventional for the family.

"Gonbochab starts school in September, and Tsedup is determined his son will have the education he never had," says Kate, who now works as a writer (she has nearly finished a children's novel about an Anglo-Tibetan boy). Tsedup works in a shop selling travel equipment ("Well, he is a nomad," says Kate, laughing) but has made a couple of documentaries and wants to become a full-time film-maker.

"He finds it hard because he's ambitious to learn but because I've been a stay-at-home mother, he has had to bring some money home and do quite menial jobs that aren't as challenging as he might like.

"It does make me value my relationship more, knowing that he's given up so much. There were people who thought it would never last, but I know we'll always be together."

Kate Karko's book, Namma, is published by Hodder & Stoughton £7.99). >/i>