NOVEMBER 1999
“How did those cosmic forces throw up such massive geological slices that touch the blue edges of heaven?”
“A trek in the Himalayas is when you find out the truth about yourself.”
ONCE A ROYAL PALACE, the Shankar Hotel is now used as a base for trekking by Peregrine Travels. The men in bright red uniforms and gold buttons represent one world of extremes. They salute me as I come in for breakfast in the huge ballroom, unwind my stiff starched napkin and then, after breakfast, salute me again and point me to the peaceful lawns and gardens,. Later that morning we meet the other world, familiar but forgotten until the noise and the smell hit me. Our tour bus snakes slowly through the colourful squalor of Kathmandu, with its choking traffic and shrieking horns, to see the sights. We see Hindu temples, a body awaiting cremation on the burning ghats, Sahdus contorting their limbs for a photo fee, and a small boy playing “Frere Jacques” on an Indian flute, also for a fee. We visit the obligatory Tibetan refugee carpet factory, and end up walking clockwise (always good luck) round a vast stupa, or Buddhist temple. Within its circumference is an internet café which “guarantee peaceful atmosphere”. Tomorrow my room-mate, studying medicine in London, heads East for Everest Base Camp, while I head West for the Annapurna Range. Little more than a quarter my age, I can sense in him that excitement that has drawn so many thousands towards Everest. Mallory died near the summit in 1929 and they found his body in 1999, still not knowing if he had reached the summit before he died. They had asked him why he had wanted to climb Everest and he had said “Because it’s there”.
Next day it is an eight hour drive to our first campsite. Those of us who have driven before in Tata buses on mountain passes settle down to enjoy the scenery. The others let out shouts and gasps for an hour or two, then they fall into a fatalistic silence. Brakes and horns shield us magically from buses and trucks coming the other way, round a blind corner on the wrong side of the road, with extra passengers swaying on the roof. We pass dangerously close to those haystacks that move along the road above little brown feet, but we always stop for cows and for ducks crossing the road. Every few miles we are stopped by a bamboo pole pulled down across the road and the navigator leaps out. Sometimes he pays a bribe, sometimes the time of day and the number plate are recorded for future analysis, presumably in a stone-age equivalent of a radar speed trap. The navigator’s other job, during reversing, is to bang on the side of the bus to indicate the number of inches clearance, with an extra loud bang for no inches. We pass enigmatic signs to “Bright Future English School” and “English Boarding School” which seem always to point up a dirt track to a disused warehouse. A sheet of rusty-red iron on a corner advertises “PC World”. We cross a trade route and battle with huge trucks grunting and snorting their way up from India, and finally arrive at a neat row of twelve little two-man tents, two toilet tents, and a dining tent, all set up in a dried out paddy field next to a roaring torrent hurrying down from Tibet to the Ganges.
THE TREK comprises 13 Australians (I am affectionately accepted as Australian, despite or perhaps because of my colonial background), a girl from London and a lanky teacher from Canada. I share a tent with Scott, like me on his way home from Europe, but in his case 16 countries in 9 months. In Istanbul he had been persuaded to join four friendly African businessmen for drinks and odd tasting biscuits and had woken up two days later lying in a park, minus money and passport. Others include Sue Thompson who, with her sisters, had been at North Sydney Girls High with Kate and Madeleine. I had left England with a chill, caught trying to get fit hiking up and down the Cotswold valleys and, on day one, found myself trailing the others until I saw four buzzards trailing me. I am the oldest and least experienced on this tour, the other mature-age trekkers having done a lot more training than me. But the youngsters seem have trained even less than me and two are very soon on antibiotics. Our leader is Sherpa Dorjee, of the Sherpa tribe, vast experience and a born leader. There are five other Sherpas, though only one is from the Sherpa tribe. Their job is to ensure strict hygiene, serve us food and, like sheep dogs, keep us on track, and anticipate trouble on dangerous sections. They have a great sense of humour, a sharp eye and a helping hand just when you felt you might fall. We have our own nicknames for “Mo Mo” Modan, “Sour” Dawa, “Big” Bigram, “Little” Bigram, and “Roger” Rames. Then there is the cook, Ram Prasad, and two kitchen hands. Finally, there are 18 porters. With my daypack around eight kilos I stumble along and, at high altitude, slow right down gasping for breath. The porters carry loads equivalent to their own body weight, probably 45 kilos, with a strap across their foreheads, overtake us uphill and are sometimes seen running downhill. They all sleep huddled together in the dining tent at night. Later they will suffer spinal problems in a very poor country where life expectancy is 54.
THE TREKKING DAY starts at six am, porters singing, the sputtering of large kerosene burners, like helicopters warming up, the clatter of stainless steel, then mugs of hot tea arrive at tent doors, followed by bowls of hot water for washing. After “wakey-wakey” comes “washy-washy” with condies crystals dissolved in water before each meal (and not one of us got bowel trouble). Toilets are a hole in the ground, the tent pole, or “grunting stick”, providing support while crouching. At night the sky is indigo, sprinkled with stars.
Breakfast (porage, chapatis, eggs, tea)
Lunch (tuna, beans, cheese, tomato, cucumber, giant radish, tinned fruit, and tea)
Dinner (soup of the evening, spicy cabbage, spinach, curried potatoes, rice, beans, poppadoms, dahl, sometimes dried buffalo meat, tinned fruit or rice pudding. For sugar with tea, the Queenslanders say “two spoons for me and one for the sugar industry”)
Bedtime is usually 8:30, or 7:30 when the temperature is below freezing when we are ready for double sleeping bags, and the porters are more than ready for us to vacate the dining tent.
“A LITTLE BIT UP, A LITTLE BIT DOWN” says Dorjee, signifying back-breaking climbs followed by knee-twisting descents. On the first day, climbing up through oak and rhododendron forests with heart pounding and gasping for breath, I had felt like dying quietly under a rhododendron bush. But on day two the vultures are replaced by eagles which I take as a good omen. On day three, on steep rocks covered in wet leaves, I skid twice, spectacularly I am told, landing on my backpack in a gully holding my camera aloft, crushing only a plastic water bottle. Julie is not so lucky and a suspected wrist fracture is being strapped to a piece of wood fashioned into a splint with one of the Queenslander’s bush knives. “Attention-seeking” says her husband, but Julie has guts and keeps going with strong pain-killers. Next day as we plod clumsily from the campsite hordes of children, with baskets on their backs for harvesting barley, tear through the forest above and below us, shrieking with laughter. Further on two boys sit in a field playing a mountain melody on flutes. Passing curious villagers we put our hands together and say “Namaste”, I bow to thee. Dorjee discourages us giving gifts of money to children, but to give to the schools we pass. At Poon hill (photo above) at last we see why we have come. Here in front of us the jagged white rim of the Himalayas is stretched from Dhaulagiri to the Annapurnas to Machapulchre. Below these staggeringly beautiful peaks, sharp ridges and deep valleys hang like badly folded blankets. At Chitre we camp behind a teahouse and, being Saturday night, we are invited to a party. The porters have bought, skinned and cooked a goat, the Sherpas provide music with tabla, flute and harmonica, and we are all instructed in Nepalese dancing in the huge kitchen.
“IT LOOKS LIKE AN ASDIP DAY” says Ray – a Queensland expression meaning “Another Silly Day in Paradise”. Poking his shaggy head out of his tent, he takes his hundredth photo of Dhaulagiri, at 8167m the sixth highest mountain in the world, its snows now golden in the sunrise. My washed hankies had turned into squares of ice the minute I pinned then to our tent ropes. We are camped for two nights on Khopra Ridge which gives us a chance to climb to 4,300 metres or 14,500 feet, half the height of Everest and twice as high as Kosiosko. To the West is the Koli Gandaki valley, the deepest in the world, and we peer over its edge to watch tiny planes and helicopters, far below us, flying silently up the valley to Mustang, Dolpo, and Tibet. Several trekkers have opted out of the last climb while the rest of us dump our packs and use both hands to get there. You daren’t look at the view, only at your hands and feet until you get to the top. There is only one accident, in a snow fight in drifts of ice-hard snow and Dorjee, running away from a snowball, twists his ankle in a pothole and our two physiotherapists earn their supper. Next day we watch two avalanches crumbling and exploding in silent slow motion down the near face of Annapurna South (7237m). Behind it is Annapurna Fang (7643m) which has never been climbed – too difficult and, to the east, Machapuchre, or The Fishtail, also has never been climbed – not only difficult but holy. Of more immediate concern to me is the appearance of some Lammergeier, bearded vultures with a wing span of three metres, but they seem quite happy up there. Now on the way down and back, we camp below a mountain entirely on fire above the tree line. Down on the flat bottoms of valleys men balance on one bare foot behind buffalos, perched on ploughs of a design probably unchanged in eight thousand years, women thrash the ground with sheaves of corn, while more buffalos tread in circles as children somersault in the hay behind them.
IT’S A TOUGH WORLD UP THERE. Dorjee has climbed Dhaulagiri, it took him a month from base camp to the top. Two weeks ago Dorjee came across the body of a porter. It turned out he had altitude sickness and had been sent home down the mountain on his own and with inadequate cold weather gear. “Have you ever lost anyone, Dorjee?” “Yes, once on Everest. I was leading 70 porters. One fell into a waterfall – with a sack of onions”. We stay only two nights on the ridge because he can smell snow is coming when it shouldn’t. Once camped on Dhaulagiri he was very unpopular for deciding to pack up an expedition at two am and move it down to a safer altitude, very unpopular until they heard next day that 31 Japanese had perished in the avalanche above them.
COMING AND GOING. Arriving from London three weeks ago I had had a six hour wait at Delhi airport which turned out to be handy since it took four hours for them to find my suitcase. Then, after checking it in on Royal Nepal Airlines I mistakenly joined a surprisingly short queue at Security Check and nearly got shanghaid as a “Guest Worker” (slave) headed for Saudi Arabia. Now three weeks later and back at the Shankar the phone rings at five am – my room-mate has booked an early tourist flight round Everest before going back to London. Been to Everest, but can’t let go. Others are going on to Varanassi, Agra or Bangkok. I am off to Sydney, determined to watch my baggage more carefully this time. But this time the problem is different. In Mumbai I am looking for the Sahara Airlines transfer coach when two shady characters call out “Sahara Airlines?” I say yes and they tell me the next coach is in four hours, but I can get this taxi. We start off and I explode loudly when they explain the fare structure. I then explode more quietly when I realise that if I jump out they still have my baggage in the boot. As I take off for Sydney someone somewhere in Mumbai is laughing all the way to his piggy bank. Later I wake up slowly, conscious that something is wrong with the classics channel (there is often something wrong with the classics channel on long international flights). Balakierev’s second symphony loops back into itself excluding all other items on the program. In my dream state it seems to depict a slow journey through immense vertical spaces – cellos and bases define the space and then a circular rocking structure of bells, triangles and voices suggest some endless progress. Then the pilot wakes me up “Those passengers on the left hand side will shortly get a good view of Ayers Rock” and Balakierev is now describing the same slow journey but now through an immense horizontal space – where a million tiny white clouds are splattering a million ink-black shadows onto a vast red desert stretching to distant horizons. Then customs is spraying iodine solution onto Himalayan remnants in the treads of my boots, and Joan, Rebecca and Shivaji drive me to home, sweet home.
POSTSCRIPT. Photos, even poor ones, are worth keeping even as mental clothes pegs holding the fabric of the journey in line. But even my poor ones are now lost, so I have included some professional mountain shots. Here are Dhaulagiri, Annapurna South, Annapurna Fang, and Machapulchre.