BY DAY NINE OF NEAR-TOTAL togetherness, I'm worn out by a few of my compadres' complaints over the lack of electrical outlets for their blow dryers, the insufficient speed of their hotel Internet connections, and the monotony of our buffet lunches, which usually consist of rice topped by ginger beef, cheesy potatoes, and hot chiles.

To cap it off, last night while I was sitting in a restaurant having a glass of wine and asking the guides a few questions, Lily—who'd just returned from a shopping spree in the village and was wearing new multicolored yak-herder boots to accompany her Cartier dragon pendant—told me I was acting too inquisitive and instead should just "be." This was somewhat ironic coming from her; earlier in the afternoon, she'd gone wandering off by herself again, earning one of Olson's rare reprimands.

"I came here to dance with God!" she told me afterwards. "I didn't come here to have a chain around my neck!"

Since today's itinerary includes a relatively straightforward trek to a luxe campsite just beyond the village of Ngalhakhang, I decide to pull a Lily. So I hang back at the trailhead until the last hikers round the farthest bend.

My solitary trek turns out to be the perfect antidote to group-dynamic overload. The Bumthang Valley is thick with forests that eventually give way to jagged peaks, and the mighty Bumthang River roars in my ears like a natural chant. I stop on a footbridge for a while to watch the thunderous swirl and wonder at the way water flows into water. As if to underscore the cosmic abundance around me, I soon discover that the dirt trail is lined with wild marijuana. (Lighting up is forbidden, but some farmers reputedly feed it to their pigs, who fatten up nicely on the weed.)

After two hours of trekking and finding nothing that resembles a village, I'm tracked down by Tshering, one of the locals who's helping with the trip. Sweating and out of breath, he's not pleased. "Ma'am," he scolds me, "you are way off track."

Chagrined, I follow him up a rutted trail, making stupid gestures and apologizing in English as we walk. He smiles and accepts my apology, but still looks stressed out.

When we finally reconvene with the others at our camp (complete with his-and-hers outdoor showers, roomy tents, and a bar stocked with rum-infused Dragon Warmer cocktails), I expect to be chastised, but instead I'm greeted with the offer of a granola bar and a stick of beef jerky. The generosity heightens my guilt. A true bodhisattva, a person destined to achieve enlightenment, would feel only love and compassion for her fellow psychonauts—not try to flee from them.

But then I remember what Thurman told me over lunch a few days ago about his own escapist past. A native of Manhattan, Thurman is the son of a stage actress and a journalist, and his first epic quest came in 1958, at age 16, when he ran away from Exeter to join the Cuban revolution. He made it as far as Miami before recruiters for Fidel's army rejected him because he was too young. Expelled from the tony boarding school, Thurman decided to spend a year in Mexico. Soon after, he was accepted into Harvard and allowed to enter as a sophomore, based on his off-the-charts test scores. Thurman stayed there long enough to become a senior (he would return to the school and graduate six years later), marry a Houston oil heiress, father a child, "behave badly," and lose his eye. During his post-op anesthesia haze, he decided to head to India.

"I wanted to put my life on the line to find out what I wanted to find out," he explains.

The heiress promptly filed for divorce, and in 1961 Thurman took a nearly yearlong journey through Europe and the Middle East to India. When he returned, he moved to New Jersey to learn Tibetan and study with a guru, Geshe Wangyal, who, as part of his teachings, traveled back to India with Thurman and introduced his pupil to the then-29-year-old Dalai Lama. "I was 23 when we met," Thurman recalls. "I thought he was a little juvenile."

The Dalai Lama was supposed to be monitoring Thurman's progress. "But I was only the second person he knew who could explain things to him about the West in Tibetan," Thurman says. "We would have these great gabfests. Then, against the wishes of my guru, he ordained me."

The monastic life didn't suit Thurman, however, and a year and a half later, in 1966, he resigned. "I was a failed experiment," he says. By 1967, he had earned his diploma from Harvard, embarked on his Ph.D., and married a Swedish model named Nena Von Schlebrugge, the ex-wife of LSD pitchman Timothy Leary.

Thurman and the Dalai Lama met on occasion during Thurman's travels to Asia, but it wasn't until 1979, when he returned there with Von Schlebrugge and the first two of their four children—11-year-old Ganden and nine-year-old Uma—that Thurman felt an overwhelming connection to Tibet's spiritual leader in exile.

"When I saw him this time," says Thurman, "I was bowled over by his charisma and spiritual power." The two have since collaborated on projects like Tibet House, the cause célèbre of glitterati like Christy Turlington, David Bowie, Iman, and, of course, Uma.

Anyone who's seen the younger Thurman's hit portrayal of an avenging samurai badass might think her interest in Buddhism is a little contradictory. But Tenzin Bob disagrees. "My take on Kill Bill?" he says. "I hated the violence, but Uma is like a subliminal Kali icon," a symbol of the Hindu goddess of destruction. "That's why she's so popular in Asia."