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This is the 5th day I’ve tried to phone from Kathmandu to Manali in India. It would be quicker to cycle! I spent 5 hours waiting one day but at least I read Solzhenitsyn First Circle. The other days the phone lines simply just weren’t working. So much for communication in 1978. So much for the bright idea of another fancy adventure exploring Manali. Oh well, go with the flow or the karma or whatever.
We returned from our 40 day Everest adventure on 10th December and since then we have had various medical issues. Joy has gone to hospital to have her stool tested because she cannot leave the loo. I’ve had three days of flu and we both have had colds. And I thought all this superhuman trekking could make us invincible to all bugs (joke). Maybe we should lay off the physical torments and hit the spiritual high spots. I think, though, that during some of the time during 8 hours of walking the mind gets detached from the body. Trouble is that my mind just daydreams – oh the fantasies that I’ve had are enough to create a new library of fairy stories. And if dreams are the precursor to reality then I am going to be cursed with being rich a few times over.
Talking about money, our tax rebates have made us rich again and we’ve decided to stay out here to use the next climbing season and Joy’s mum is going to send our climbing gear out so that we are prepared to do some properly equipped climbing. We aim to go skiing in Manali in Kashmir in Jan Feb and until then sunbathe somewhere till April when we hit the big hills again. If Iran is safe in July we will return overland but we both fancy flying if the money spins out.
So, Joy wrote a concise daily diary of the Everest adventure and I’m going to ramble on about the bits between the lines – we have time on our side at present.
The communications in Kathmandu are no better than those in the mountains. In Namche we wanted to post some cards but were told that it would be quicker to take them to Kathmandu ourselves because the “mail runner” took 10 days to get them out. We took 8 days to walk out – where else is walking quicker than the mail?
There are places one days’s walk above and below Namche Bazzar but not even the bank uses them. When the bank cashed my travellers cheques in Namche, it gave me 100Rs notes. This was silly because the little village tea shops and lodges can’t even change a 10Rs note. The explanation was that they had run out of small money and had to send a runner to the nearest bank which was 5 days walk away! For some bureaucratic reason they couldn’t get it flown from Kathmandu only 2 hrs flight away. We had been advised to have sweets and cigarettes to use as small change.
In the mountains, things are even more remote. An expedition on Pumori had a doctor who developed pulmonary oedema. The tracks were too narrow even for a stretcher so he was brought down piggy back to Periche where there is a medical centre staffed by one doctor doing high altitude research. We chatted to Dr Peter Hackett and he showed us the emergency pressurisation chamber, thankfully rarely used, that had been designed by Hamish McInnes and himself. He became ill on an interesting recon of Baruntse, east of Everest. We saw him again on his walk out, with his research gear. We saw one drum being carried with maybe $10,000 of blood analyser go tumbling down the hill when a porter slipped.
Consider that Nepal is the size of England, has 11 million people and virtually no roads except the highways running between India KM Pokhara Darjeeling. The population is spread all over the hills, 95% earn their living directly from agriculture or related business. The only communication is paths and porters. Yak are sometimes used but though they carry more weight the are abysmally slow. I remember Roland and Marie forlornly wandering along the track at a snail’s pace wondering how far the Yak would get that night. At least under our own portering we decided how fast or slow to go.
The porters really do carry 70 or more pounds and even kids carry heavy weights. The porters often have bare feet, in fact we often noticed their plimsoles in their carrying basket! How can they grip on mossy rock and slimy steep mod paths in bare feet? To see a bare footprint in the snow is like discovering Yeti tracks but they are the bare foot porters. They live on tsampa which is ground maize flour which is eaten dry or mixed with a cup of tea to make gruel. They also eat rice an veg and very little protein. This is the diet we enjoyed for much of our trek and I got used to dipping my fingers into a bag of roughly ground roasted maize while walking, a bit like ground up popcorn, not bad and a few carbohydrates and swelling the tummy to stop the hunger pangs until the next veggie meal.
But I don’t over rate their abilities. They walk fast for spurts, then stop and rest their load on wooden sticks that are shaped like an ice axe with the T upright to hold the pack. They seem to have little stamina and we carrying 30 – 40 pounds could often outpace them for up to 3 hours till we stopped for tea. They walk faster uphill then on the level, probably because they have to be careful where they place their feet. They are tough, they walk until it is dark and are near a stream, then by magic they use any wood, even wet stuff and even use their kukri striking a stone to start a fire, though this was showing off for us and most use matches. Then covered only in one blanket they shiver in the mist or frosty air till morning. It was a moving sight at night to look from the warmth of the valley at Kari Khola to the valley sides above and see the little fires dotted about from the temporary cold night’s refuge beside a fire in the open for the porters.
Porters and Sherpas drink Sherpa tea. The problem is it has butter and salt in it and tastes awful, but the butter sticks to the chin and beard and goes rancid. Also toilet paper is unknown and they don’t even wash their hand or bits in the stream so the combined result is an aroma that is nature in the raw; the stink; the path, its surrounding vegetation, the air, all get impregnated with the stink, especially in the heat. I must admit that it is inconvenient and unwelcome to wash when trying to keep warm in the freezing conditions, and keeping moving is the priority. So I stank a bit too but eventually the various body bacteria seem to find an equilibrium, or my nose got used to me. And I’ll give them, and me, their due, diarrhoea is difficult to contend with and many of them – and me – have to openly squat at the side of the path, but it is bad when they do it in the middle of the path. Toilet paper is 75p for one roll at Namche which is the price of a few meals.
If there was a world wide competition to see how many people can be packed into a telephone kiosk, then the Asians would win and the Nepalese would be in the finals. They practice every day on their busses. Our bus was the size of an English 35 seater and inside the benches are squashed so even Joy can just get her knees normally between her and the next seat. My 6ft 2 legs are a painful unbendable curse. 3 people are expected to squash on one side, two on the other side of the gangway. So many people crowd in the aisle that when they try to sit on the floor, they have to sit between each other’s legs. A few hens and a goat or sheep complete the compliment which now suffers the next 8 hours from Kathmandu to Pokhara.
We nearly had a disaster when we finished the Everest trek because the last bus had gone from Lamosangu and the town was full of shanties, sewers and con men. Fortunately a lorry carrying mail from China gave us a lift on the back. In fact we passed the service bus after half an hour and it had broken down and we gave 26 others a lift on the back of this lorry. Crowded but cold.
We saw our first elephant the other day. It was loaded with bamboo shoots and 2 guys and it was trotting through the traffic as if it realised that it could walk over the cards if it wanted.
In Kathmandu heavy loads are still moved by hand, they make a trailer out of a lorry back axle and have a third metal wheel covered by a half of an old tyre. When going downhill they put the tyre below the third wheel where it acts like a skid – there are no other brakes! These trailers are loaded with up to half a ton of sacks, wood, metal etc and 2 or even 10 people push them. “The dignity of human labour” acquires a fresh meaning out here. It surely is more dignified even to accept these “human machines” than to have the obvious replacement of trucks which would put them out of work. Not really true, of course – oh to be released from tedious labour to follow our creative self. I suppose that’s what we’ve just done, but don’t anyone be too jealous, there’s a dharma force working which will balance our present freedom ie when we return we will have to tie ourselves to any old tedious labour to earn the crust.
We have seen many roads being repaired, or hacked out of virgin mountainside. The work is done only by hand. The only combustion engine that I have seen was for a drill to make holes for the dynamite. Even boulders the size of buses are broken up by hand. In Pokhara groups of women sit in fields surrounded by piles of boulders laboriously smashing them to pebbles with a 5lb hammer. Women children and men dig and carry the earth using the ubiquitous wicker baskets strung with a woven strap from their forehead.
The road to Pokhara is normally only single carriageway and some parts are being widened. We cannot complain about the old single track roads in Scotland in 1978, these are much worse. A new road is being built, probably with Chinese help, from Lamosangu towards Jiri which is towards the Everest region. It will mean that people can save 3 days of walking by taking a bus. Even worse, it will mean porters are not needed for those 3 days – progress brings its salvation and misery together.
Roland calculated that Namche Bazaar’s Saturday market must supply food, clothing etc for 1000 locals and many tourists who hire stuff there because little can be grown above Namche – it’s 11,000 ft. Actually most organised trekking groups bring their own food and fuel. So if each native Nepali needs 15 – 20 kilos including rice tatties veg fruit paraffin etc it will need 300 porters each Saturday to supply the market. Indeed we passed about that number on the Saturday that we walked out.
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