Subject: Alive and Well in Pokhara Hi everyone. Unfortunately the Internet connections here are deadly slow, so
I can't answer all your individual emails right now, but I just wanted to
let everyone know that we're here in Pokhara where the air is good, the lake
is beautiful and the peaks of the Annapurna range are very, very big. We'll
be departing tomorrow to begin our walk in among those peaks, and we should
be back by about two weeks from now, give or take a few days. Email to
follow.
Be well,
--
Subject: Back from the Mountains Hi everyone! I'll soon be sending a much more detailed (and no doubt
lengthy) email about our trek in the Himalayas, but I just wanted to let
everyone know that Jenny and I are safe and sound, back in the (relatively)
lowland city of Pokhara. We had a marvelous time, ate much apple crumble —
Nepal is far enough south that they grow apples, apricots and even mangoes
at 10,000 ft/3,000 m — walked up and down a great deal, saw many very large
things, and generally enjoyed ourselves. I will admit, however, that I was
very happy today to leave the icy winds of Jomsom (about 10,000 ft/3,000 m)
and fly back to the warm, thick air of Pokhara. Anyway, more soon!
Hope you're all well,
--
Subject: Trekking I: From the Hungry Eye to the Super View In case you've been imagining that Jenny and I had gone adventuring into
some mysterious Himalayan hinterland, it might be instructive to point out
that we began our trek in a taxi. From Pokhara it's about an hour's drive
to the trailhead at Nayapul, up and down a steep ridge on cliffside roads
that vary at random from pavement to gravel to muddy ruts, and rarely widen
to what one could genuinely call two lanes. During our ride we were treated
to what the driver seemed to think was appropriate music: sitar melodies
over a go-go beat, like some kind of Austin Powers-style parody of 1960s
Indophilia. As we drove, I thought back to the "cultural show" we'd seen the
night before at the Hungry Eye restaurant (next to which one finds the
upstart Tasty Tongue). Mostly it was the sort of second-rate folk singing
and dancing you'd expect, but at one point a dancer emerged dressed as a
trekker — complete with backpack, two trekking poles and a big, fat belly
— and proceeded to clown about, pointing at everything around him.
On this day, I was on a mission to become that clown. For reasons that
remain unclear, Westerners take great pleasure in strapping themselves into
a bunch of fancy equipment — my boots cost more than the Nepali per capita
income, and let's not even get into the cost of the backpack, the down
sleeping bag, the telescoping aluminum trekking pole, the Coolmax shirts,
etc. — and slogging off into the mountains, grunting and heaving and
pointing and photographing the whole way.
For our own such adventure, Jenny and I had chosen the Jomsom trek, which
begins at Nayapul (1050m/3449 ft); climbs up over Poon Hill (3193m/10,476ft)
for a spectacular panoramic view of the Annapurna Massif and towering
Dhaulagiri; descends again to the hot springs of Tatopani (1190m/3904ft);
then climbs again to the high desert of Lower Mustang, at last coming to the
Hindu and Buddhist holy site of Muktinath (3800m/12,467ft).
When it comes to Himalayan trekking, a walk through the Annapurna range —
and particularly along the western side of the enormous Annapurna Massif,
where Jenny and I spent 14 days — is about as cushy as it gets. You sleep
every night in lodges, often of high quality, where friendly Nepali
inkeepers cook you delicious meals and often provide you with hot showers.
You're never all that far from the next village and the next inn, and if you
get hurt, you can be sure that horses will be along sooner or later, and you
can hitch a ride to the nearest medical post, of which there are several
along the route. (Trains of pack horses are so common, in fact, that we
often used their fresh dung as trail identifiers.) That being said, there's
no getting around the fact that the Himalayas are very big and very steep,
and walking through them means walking up and down them. Forgoing porters
and guides, we carried our own belongings on our backs and worked out the
route — generally easy enough to do — using only a couple of guidebooks
and a map.
For most of the way, the trail follows the Kali Gandaki River (known as the
Thak Khola in its upper reaches) through what is said to be the deepest
gorge in the world, along what was once a major trade route with Tibet.
Going back at least as far as the 18th century, the Nepalis produced ample
grain in the terraced fields of the lower mountains, which they carried up
to the Thak Khola region — formerly part of Tibet — and traded for Tibetan
salt. (I have no idea what, if anything, went on along the Kali Gandaki
before then.) By the early 20th century the trade with Tibet went into
decline as Nepalis switched to Indian salt, which was both cheaper and
iodized; previously, goiters were common among Himalayan peoples. In 1959
the Chinese brought about the final collapse of the old trade when they
invaded Tibet and closed its borders.
For some years the region languished in economic decline, and the once
important villages of the Thak Khola began to crumble away. The villagers
became subsistence farmers, or else they moved to more prosperous regions of
Nepal, such as the Kathmandu and Pokhara valleys. By the late 1970s,
however, a new kind of traveler began to arrive: the Western tourist.
Calling on their long experience as innkeepers and traders, the local people
caught on quickly to the new industry, and lodges sprang up everywhere along
the trail, their menus becoming ever more elaborate and inventive. The new
prosperity brought with it serious environmental damage from deforestation
(for fuel), litter, and unchecked development, but in the last decade or so,
even these problems have become much better managed. The regional Annapurna
Conservation Area Project (ACAP) has been quite successful in educating both
trekkers and lodge owners about environmental issues, providing clean water
stations along the route (to reduce the trash from mineral water bottles),
encouraging the use of solar power, and starting reforestation programs.
Meanwhile, local people — usually with the help of foreign aid — have
taken advantage of the region's ample hydroelectric potential to create
several small-scale power plants, which bring intermittent electricity to
many of the remotest villages. These days, the western Annapurna region is
probably one of the more prosperous districts in Nepal — which is a bit
like saying it's one of the more mountainous counties in Kansas, but still.
The people are fed and clothed and housed, and there is even some access to
basic medical care. The foreign cash allows for the purchase of occasional
luxuries and for investment in local improvements, and you can decide for
yourself which category the TVs and satellite dishes fall into. When I asked
the local people what improvements they most hoped for in their region, the
answer was unanimous: better education, both so that they could better
develop their own region, and because it made it easier to find work when
they slipped into Japan, Germany or the US, legally or otherwise.
*
The trail begins at Nayapul, a dismal collection of corrugated shacks by the
side of the road. After a brief, muddy slalom down to the banks of a small
river, however, Nayapul comes to an end, and from there the uphill begins.
For the first two days, the trail climbed steadily; we were sore and
exhausted when we collapsed at our lodge in Tikhedunga at the end of Day 1, and it wasn't even 4
o'clock yet! The next day began with an extended slog up the Endless
Staircase to Ulleri — various counts put the number of steps at around
3,200. From there the trail flattens out considerably, though it continues to
climb, but by now we were facing the added difficulty of trekking at
elevation. In the afternoon we walked through spectacular forests of
rhododendron and oak, but I'll admit that we were both very glad when we
reached the mountain pass town of Ghorepani, where we would spend the night.
The thing to do when you're in Ghorepani is to wake up at 5 a.m. and climb
the hour up to Poon Hill for a sunrise view of the Annapurnas. I remember
standing blearily up there five years ago with a shockingly large crowd of
other trekkers, admiring the dawn briefly, and hurrying down again to warmth
and coffee. This time we had the good sense to tell the hotel owner we'd be
sleeping in. In the predawn, sure enough, we heard the thumping and chatter
of other travelers getting up; from the next room a mournful voice cried out
its protests: "No! I'll see it later ... I don't know ... Later ... I'll see
it later ... No!" Grateful as I was not to be getting up, I still sneaked a
look out the window, where the snowcapped peaks were lit up by the moonlight
and crowned with a sky full of stars. (Our hotel, the Super View, was aptly
named.) When at last we did get up at a slothful 7 a.m., and once we'd had
our breakfast, we decided to head for Poon Hill despite the late hour. The
sky was immaculately clear, and we had the viewing platform to ourselves.
The mountains looked close and freshly frosted, as if we could reach out our
fingers and take a scoop of vanilla icing off the top.
*
Like trekking, writing about trekking takes time, and so we'll let the story
unfold over a few emails. Stay tuned: next time there'll be tattooed
Israelis in bikinis and chocolate merengue cake.
Sin (tune in next time for Cere and Ly — put them all together and win a
Secret Decoder Ring!),
--
Subject: Trekking II: Bikinis, Goat’s Blood and Apple Pie From Ghorepani and Poon Hill (3193m/10,476ft), it’s a long, knee-torturing
descent to the hot springs and French chocolate cakes of Tatopani
(1190m/3904ft). But just because you’re losing 6,500 feet of elevation in
two days, that doesn’t mean you don’t have to climb uphill plenty as well.
As we descended, the forests grew more lush, and then gave way to village
after stone-walled village, each lined with terraced fields that had been
recently harvested. Also, it got hotter. After you finally reach the river
at the bottom of the gorge, crossing a tributary and then the Kali Gandaki
herself on swaying steel suspension bridges, you think that you must be
nearly there. Indeed, there are even a couple of lodges with "Tatopani" on
their signboards. But before you reach the fabled hot springs, you face a
very nasty climb over a very dusty landslide, with no shade at all as you
plod up the trail of slippery mica dust and gravel. But at last, that final
barrier crossed, you come into the flagstone streets — well, street — of
Tatopani.
Tatopani is a curious beast. Most of the tourists there have come all the
way around the Annapurnas, crossing the Thorung La pass (5416m/17,900ft);
for them, Tatopani comes at the end of a long and difficult journey. Other
tourists come in from Annapurna Base Camp, or at least they’ve gone over the
pass at Ghorepani, like we did. But despite all the effort that trekkers put
into reaching it, Tatopani is actually just one day’s level hike from the
nearest road, and consequently full of surprising luxuries — not least, its
tropical climate and relatively thick air. Citrus trees are everywhere, and
also poinsettias the size of small trees.
And then, of course, there are the hot springs. Tatopani is perched on a
cliff above the river, and the climb down a steep, uneven staircase to the
pools below was nearly too much for our aching legs, but it was worth it. In
the afternoons especially, the pools fill up with trekkers as well as Nepali
families down for a bath, and the place takes on a kind of beach resort
feel, complete with tattooed Israeli girls in very small bikinis and
Canadians handing around joints. We ended up staying in Tatopani for two
rest days, partly because Jenny was fighting off a cold, but also partly
because it was nice.
*
On day 7, Jenny and I were on the move again, heading upward. The first half
of the day was fine, but by lunchtime we’d picked up an unfortunate
follower: a sickly black dog, one ear largely eaten away, clumps of fur
missing, and with worms crawling out of his anus like rats abandoning a
sinking ship. We had absolutely no desire to come near this unfortunate
beast, but he seemed to think we were his friends, and he followed us for a
good long time, growling at every passing dog and plenty of passing
trekkers. At last we managed to drive him off, but only by waving sticks at
him, and then by throwing rocks at his feet. And once the dog was gone, we
faced a grueling climb up a steep, dusty landslide. To make matters worse,
train after train of ponies stumbled past, churning up the dust. The wind
was rising too in the narrow canyon. By the time we reached the top, we were
exhausted, so we fell into the first inn we could.
The town of Pairothapla (which I later learned just means "landslide") is
not in any of the guidebooks or on any of the maps. Likewise, the Bimala
Hilton is not, so far as I know, associated with the international chain of
five-star hotels. It is, however, the only Hilton I’ve stayed at that had
handprints of goat’s blood on the doors to all the rooms — a remnant of the
Dassain festival a few weeks earlier and certainly intended as a blessing,
but a bit disconcerting nontheless. The walls and floor of our room were
made of mud, and a certain faint scent suggested dung as another possible
ingredient. There was an outhouse around the back, just past the goat. Our
room did have electric lighting of a sort, which would glow brightly for a
few minutes, then gradually fade to almost nothing, only to come back again
at the last possible moment. For all that, it was a decent enough place, run
by a friendly family who could fix a passable chowmein. The dining room,
like those of most of the trekking lodges, was decorated with pictures of
Swiss mountains and maudlin posters of little children and country houses,
with slogans like "God made the first garden, and the first city Cain." (And
never mind that a joint with goat’s blood on the doors shouldn’t toss Cain’s
name around.)
After Pairothapla, the trail continues to climb, but more gently, and soon
you come to Ghasa, the first Thakali village. The Thakali people are
Buddhists of Tibetan descent, although with their own languages and customs,
and their slate-built villages are quite distinct from the Hindu towns lower
down. In Ghasa we saw a few relics of the old trade route: elaborately
carved wooden windows on the houses that used to belong to the wealthiest
merchants. From Ghasa the trail passes through more forest before opening
out onto a sort of plateau, the wide valley of the Thak Khola (the Thakali
name of the Kali Gandaki river). Here you are surrounded by vast,
snow-capped peaks and ridges to the west, north and east; Dhaulagiri looms
especially large.
We took the next few days slowly, lingering in the charming towns of the
Thak Khola, their whitewashed, flat-roofed slate houses huddled together in
mountain folds to avoid the fierce wind that blows north up the valley each
afternoon. The oak forests give way to pine, and then to desert, but the
snowmelt provides enough water to irrigate orchards of apple and apricot and
peach, as well as fields of vegetables and grain. In Tukuche we visited both
the gompa (Buddhist monastery) and the distillery, where we tasted various
brandies and walked away with a small bottle of peach. Tukuche was once the
village where the Tibetans with their salt met the Nepalis with their grain
and traded; along the western side of the city, you can see the old
warehouses crumbling away. The next major village is Marpha, whose
horticultural center, founded some years ago by a Sherpa, has helped to
introduce many of the newer crops to the region, including the fruit trees.
Apple products are everywhere, and over the course of a few days we managed
to drink tremendous quantities of apple juice and eat a good many pieces of
apple crumble and apple pie. Finally, the last Thakali town is Jomsom, a
sprawling entity that includes both the airstrip and the Nepali army’s high
mountain warfare training center.
And after Jomsom? The desert.
Tune in next time for a great deal of dust, minor altitude sickness and the
rich smell of the Middle Ages on the bottom of your boot. And yaks.
Cere,
--
Subject: Trekking III: How Many Manutes to a Dhaulagiri? When you look out at the peaks of the Himalayas, there is simply nothing to
compare them against. How big are they? Big. Bigger than anything. But what
does that mean? The scale is incomprehensible; the only visible measure is
the trees, and they disappear below the snowline. I found myself trying to
connect the mountains to other objects as a reference. From Jomsom, at
nearly 10,000 feet, you could stack a dozen Empire State Buildings on each
other and still fall short of the top of Dhaulagiri. Yosemite's looming El
Capitan would be a footnote here, a spur or a crag on the way up. Most of
the peaks here are about 3,000 Manutes high (one Manute equalling 7'7", the
height of Manute Bol, the tallest man ever to play basketball in the NBA).
If you were to hollow out Nilgiri and fill it with blue whales, that would
be a whole lot of blue whales.
Past Jomsom, the landscape quickly turns to desert: sagebrush and scrubby
little pine trees cling to the looming brown mountains on either side of the
broad gravel riverbed. The high peaks drift out of view and the landscape
becomes smaller, but that merely serves to bring the scale down to the
(barely) comprehensible. Still, it's easy to be fooled. Looking out across
the river bed — mostly dry this time of year, although the meandering Kali
Gandaki is still too deep to cross — I would sometimes think that the far
side of the valley was fairly close, but then I would spot a horseman or a
flock of sheep looking tiny and distant, and I would have to revise my
estimate. At one point we passed a boulder on which were carved and painted
the Tibetan letters for the Buddhist mantra, "Om Mani Padme Hum." I decided
to go stand next to it so Jenny could take a picture; when I reached it,
just five minutes off the trail, I was startled to discover that the letters
were actually as tall as me. It's a little like getting out of your car on
the freeway: suddenly the signs look much bigger than they did when you were
going past at 70 miles an hour.
Because of pressure changes in Tibet and Nepal as the sun heats the air, the
Thak Khola valley is daily subjected to fierce winds that begin around 11
a.m. and gradually intensify until they taper off after sunset. The wind was
at our backs, but it was still hard going. The force of the gusts was
actually enough to blow us off course, and the cold whorls of dust
spattering us were no pleasure either, so we were quite glad to reach our
destination of Kagbeni.
To paraphrase Monty Python, you can tell that Kagbeni is medieval because
it's got shit all over it. The village seems to have been built in and
around and under and through (and several other prepositions) the old mud
fort, bits of which are still crumbling away in the wind. It doesn't have
streets so much as tunnels and passageways and canyons; these afford some
protection from the wind for its residents, which include a great many yaks,
cows, chickens, ponies, burros and dogs, all of whom shit everywhere. And
despite the desert landscape surrounding, Kagbeni is surprisingly damp.
Water is drawn up from the river, used, and then dumped in the streets,
where it mingles with the effluent to create a rich, muddy murk.
That being said, Kagbeni is fabulous. Its tumbledown whitewashed houses with
their dugout-log ladders and drying yak skins, its strange mud folk
sculptures of gods and demons, its collapsing fort walls, its big red gompa
(monastery) are all heartbreakingly picturesque — heartbreaking because,
well, it's cool to take pictures of the Middle Ages but sucky to live in
them. When we visited the gompa, we were shown a Tibetan prayer book of the
Prajnaparamita (Heart) Sutra, painted in silver and gold on black paper; the
monk told us it was over 700 years old. I told him that was older than my
country, which unfortunately confused him.
*
We were in Kagbeni for the final night of Tihar, the Nepali Hindu festival
that coincides with India's Diwali. Several innkeepers told us that Tihar
wasn't celebrated up here in the Buddhist Thak Khola, but the local folk culture is syncretic. Even in the Buddhist monasteries, you find paintings of
popular Hindu gods, and after all, we were on our way to Muktinath, a holy
site for both Buddhists and Hindus. Besides, even if the locals are
Buddhists, the many porters and trekking guides passing through are largely
Hindu. And everyone likes a party.
As far as I could gather, Tihar is celebrated by getting drunk and singing
Nepali folk songs and dancing. There is also a custom something like
trick-or-treating, in which groups of singers and musicians and dancers go
from one house or shop or lodge to another and beg for money: pay them and
you receive their blessing; don't pay them, and they don't go away. We met
one such group at lunch on our way to Kagbeni, and they were already well
sozzled by then. We gave them a few rupees and had our foreheads tapped by a
trident, the symbol of Shiva, and were then left to eat in peace. When the
same crew arrived several hours later at our lodge in Kagbeni, they were
barely able to stand. Later another group came and sang and danced — one of
them made the incredibly self-conscious declaration, "This is culture!" —
and then made their pitch for money. "We use the money for the
community,"one singer said, "to build bridges, fix trails." "Or maybe we go
on a picnic!" declared another. "You give us some money, we can buy
alcohol," admitted a third. It was a holiday, so we all gave. (Of course,
having filled the lodge with such Hindu nonsense, the owners felt it
necessary to bring in several Buddhist monks to sit in the small prayer room
and do puja [prayer] all the next day, with much clanging of bells and
cymbals and blowing of horns and conches.)
*
After Kagbeni came our final ascent, a long climb up to Muktinath at 12,500
feet. You begin with a long, steady climb that takes you at last out of the
Kali Gandaki valley and up among the peaks. As we walked, the field shouts
of Kagbeni's planters drifted up to us, until at last we turned a corner and
the next great valley opened up in front of us. In the heavily eroded folds
of the valley walls gape great caves like mouths, and you can almost imagine
them as some kind of Tolkeinesqe living beings. Higher up, curious little
red and white villages huddle in clumps on the brown slopes, surrounded by
thin bands of fields and orchards. And above them, wreathed in shifting
clouds, rise the snowy peaks, looking closer and more forbidding than at any
point so far.
We made our final breathless climb up to the village of Ranipauwa, just
below the Muktinath shrine, and dragged ourselves into a lodge we'd had
recommended, only to find an Irish woman and her Nepali guide with whom we'd
been chatting the night before in Kagbeni. After some tea and rest, the four
of us made the walk up to the temple complex — which is, of course, above a
flight of steep stairs. The guide was a great help, leading us around
Muktinath and explaining parts of it, though when it came to the Buddhist
symbols, I found myself explaining things to him.
Though the temple enclosure is blessed with enough spring water to provide
for a dense grove of poplars, there is no architectural or artistic
masterpiece to see, unless you count nature's impressive handiwork in the
peaks that rise all around. Muktinath is a holy site not because of what's
been built there, but because of a curious geothermal phenomenon: two jets
of flame that appear to burn upon flowing springs. Hindu legend has it that
when Brahma created the world, he himself created these flames as prayer
offerings. What the Buddhists make of them I'm not sure, but it's a Buddhist
temple that houses the flames, which you can just see if you get down on the
floor and peer through the metal gratings. The other major holy site within
the complex is a Vishnu temple, behind which 108 water taps flow with fresh
spring water. The story here is that if you bathe in all of them, your sins
are washed away and you go to heaven. This is a curious notion, considering
that Hindus don't believe in heaven, but I suppose one doesn't look to folk
religion for logical consistency.
The next morning I awoke before dawn, climbed out of bed and walked alone
back up to Muktinath. The gates were open, and I went to sit up among the
chortens and watch the sun rise. The high cirrus clouds turned pink, then
gradually whitened as the first full sunlight illuminated the highest peaks
to the west. I watched the light creep down the peaks until the whole vast
ridgeline was aglow. Then, making my own small prayers, I began the long
descent.
*
From Muktinath it was another day down to Kagbeni, then a morning ride on
horseback to Jomsom — we were indulging Jenny's Mongol Warrior/Lawrence of
Arabia fantasies, though we both ended up with entirely new sets of sore
muscles. In Jomsom we stayed in a hotel so posh that we had a TV in our
room; we watched BBC World to catch up on things, then switched to French
rap videos. The next morning, after the usual confusion that attends
third-world travel plans, we boarded a little German prop plane and in 20
minutes flew the entire distance of our trek and landed in Pokhara, glad to
be warm again and to breathe the lush air of the lowlands.
Our return coincided with a three-day strike called by the Maoists, which
had little effect on Pokhara but kept the long-distance buses off the road.
Then Jenny came down with an awful stomach bug — cramps, projectile
vomiting, the whole deal. Now I've got it, though I think I'm getting
better. This, in any case, is how one loses weight in the Subcontinent.
We'll probably be here in Pokhara for another day or two while we recover.
After that we'll head for Royal Chitwan National Park, where we expect to
ride an elephant and see some rhinos and maybe go to the elephant breeding
center and wash the baby elephants. And maybe, just maybe, we'll see a
tiger. You never know.
Ly,
PS: Graeme, we thought you would be amused to know that we spotted a Nepali
trekking guide wearing an All Blacks cap.
--
[alive and well in pokhara]
[back from the mountains]
[trekking i: from the hungry eye to the super view]
[trekking ii: bikinis, goat's blood and apple pie]
[trekking iii: how many manutes to a dhaulagiri?]
Date: Fri Oct 25, 2002
Josh
"To find oneself where one has longed to be always, to a reflective mind,
gives food for thought."
- Virginia Woolf, "Orlando"
Date: Mon Nov 11, 2002
Josh
"To find oneself where one has longed to be always, to a reflective mind,
gives food for thought."
- Virginia Woolf, "Orlando"
Date: Tue Nov 12, 2002
Josh
"To find oneself where one has longed to be always, to a reflective mind,
gives food for thought."
- Virginia Woolf, "Orlando"
Date: Thu Nov 14, 2002
Josh
"To find oneself where one has longed to be always, to a reflective mind,
gives food for thought."
- Virginia Woolf, "Orlando"
Date: Fri Nov 15, 2002
Josh
"To find oneself where one has longed to be always, to a reflective mind,
gives food for thought."
- Virginia Woolf, "Orlando"
