Phil Druker/Department of English/ University of Idaho

Chapter 1: Entering the Hidden Land  (© Phil Druker  2009)

A Cairn of Quartz--the end, the beginning  

Blue, white, red, green, and yellow Buddhist prayer flags flap wildly from cords tied to a ten foot tall cairn of quartz—a pillar that traders, yak herders, and pilgrims have built stone by stone over the last fifteen hundred years. The white and red quartz stones glint in the late afternoon sun.  I sit huddled against a rock that protects me from the ferocious wind ripping up the gorge that cuts between the Annapurna Himal and the Dhaulagiri Himal. Behind me rises the 18,000 foot Sangda La, a treacherously steep pass of loose scree that we crossed two days before.  Five thousand feet below lies the immense Kali Gandaki River that flows past the town of Jomsom, where we plan to arrive after another day of hiking. There, we hope to find space on an 18-seat airplane that will take us to Pokhara, and from there we’ll fly on to Kathmandu. Twenty miles to the east, snow-covered Annapurna peaks tower above clouds piling up with the coming monsoon.  From this 14,000 foot pass, the mountain ascends to a 20,000-foot, crenellated ridge.  To the north, emerging from the yellow dust blowing up from the river valleys, rises the low arid-brown Mustang Himal and behind that the dome of the Tibetan plateau. 

We have been walking for 20 days now through this hidden land of Dolpo in north-central Nepal’s Himalaya on the fringe of the Tibetan Plateau.  In all this time, I have not heard the sound of a motor, truck, car, motorcycle, or generator, not even an airplane, and I have not seen a road or a jet contrail.  My feet ache.  My backpack, although lighter than at the beginning of this trek, weighs on my back.  

I sit wishing I didn’t have to leave high, isolated Upper Dolpo—a sparsely populated, starkly beautiful land, where people of Tibetan heritage live by farming, yak herding and trading much as they have done for millennia, a land known as a refuge of “pure” Tibetan culture. But my sore feet, worn out legs, and aching back are glad that we’re heading down—down for the last time. My fellow trekkers, Charla and Laurie, have hiked far ahead of me, and nearly a half mile down the trail I can just barely see that Gelbu Lama, our Sherpa guide and cook, is waiting patiently to make sure I’m all right.  I can’t tarry and take in the scene any longer.  This trip—like the rest of my experience in South Asia—has been a wild contrast between the wonderful and the difficult, the beautiful and horrific.  I have traveled through China and Tibet, spent months climbing some of the highest peaks in North America, traveled from Mexico to Tierra del Fuego. Somehow this trek has become a pilgrimage that I don’t fully understand.

I stand, take a deep breath of the clear 4000 meter air, find a white piece of quartz, pick it up, walk to the cairn, say a prayer of thanks, touch the stone to my forehead, and carefully lob it on the pile.  Then I hoist my pack, take in the final view of the high country, and head down into the gale.

Kathmandu

The trek started in Kathmandu a month earlier.  I was taking a long shower in the Kathmandu Guesthouse after returning from the Mt. Everest region, where my wife Jeannie and I had spent two glorious weeks trekking and taking in spectacular views of the high peaks of the Grand Himalaya: Lhotse, Nuptse, Cho Oyu, Ama Dablam, and Everest.  As I got out of the shower, I heard her saying, “I’ll ask him.  I’ m sure he’ll want to go.”  She was talking on the phone to her colleague and friend, Charla Britt, who had been planning this trip through Upper Dolpo for years.  Another friend, Laurie Vasily, had met Dhan Bahadur at a disco in Kathmandu just a few months earlier.  Newly appointed by the prime minister of Nepal to serve as Chairman of the District Development Committee for Dolpo, Dhan Bahadur invited Laurie to visit this remote area near the border with Tibet, and told her that he would waive the $700 per person entry fee.  

Now, Charla was inviting me to accompany them on a 20 day trek through this restricted area of Nepal to the west of Annapurna and Mustang.  Off-limits to foreigners until the late 1980s, Upper Dolpo is one of Nepal’s poorest districts.  An area inhabited by yak herders, farmers and salt traders, the people live in some of highest villages on Earth.  Isolated by the high Tibetan border to the north, the 8000 meter Dhaulagiri Himal (world’s seventh highest) to the south, inaccessibly deep gorges to the east, and 5500 meter (18,000 foot) passes to the west, the region has always been a backwater and a haven for Tibetans seeking refuge.  In the early years, the Tibetans came from the wild, western area of Tibet called Zhangzhung to escape paying taxes; in the 1960s and 1970s the area harbored Tibetan refugees seeking to escape the Chinese conquerors of Tibet along with rebels, supported by the CIA, trying to fight the Chinese in their Tibetan homeland.  When we made this trek in March and April of 2004, the region was off-limits to tourists because Maoist insurgents controlled the area. In 1974, Peter Matthiessen trekked through Dolpo and recorded that epic trip in The Snow Leopard.  In 1999 the movie Himalaya again brought the area to the world’s attention.

I finished the shower and asked who was on the phone. Jeannie told me, Charla was wondering if I would like to go on a three week trek in Dolpo.  Ever supportive, Jeannie told me to go for it.  So I rushed to the phone, called Charla, and said: "Let’s go. What can I do to help?" 

A day later, I took Jeannie to the Kathmandu airport so she could return to our temporary home and her job in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where she was working for USAID (United State Agency for International Development), the agency that manages the American government’s foreign aid programs.  She had a year-and-a-half long assignment to help the agency find better ways to manage its programs for gender equity, a monumentally difficult task anywhere, but especially in that Muslim country.  She just had three more months to finish her project before we returned to our Idaho home.  I was on leave from my job as an English teacher at the University of Idaho, which I fondly refer to as a “highly prestigious institution of corporate education and higher sports.”  As one friend aptly put it:  Jeannie is trying to save the world; Phil is trying to play with it. 

At the glass doors of the Kathmandu airport, amidst the tumult of tourists alighting from their hotel vans or taxis and Nepali porters hustling to earn a few rupees, we ardently ignored the Nepali taboo against public displays of affection with long hugs and kisses as we said sad goodbyes.

The next week, I spent running around Kathmandu buying supplies and procuring permits from the Nepali government for the trip.  We had to wait until we arrived in the district capital of Dunai to receive a permit to enter Upper Dolpo so we didn’t need to obtain that one essential permit in Kathmandu.  But we needed to get permits to enter Lower Dolpo and the Annapurna Conservation Area. Laurie and Charla had just paid the $20 fees and received their permits. When Charla tried to have my name added to the permit, the bureaucrat insisted that was impossible because that permit was already completed.  So I needed to get a my own permit but the bureaucrats wouldn’t issue a permit to a solo trekker, which meant I had to find someone willing to lend his or her passport for a couple days, so I could use that person’s name to get the permit. I would gladly pay the extra person’s $20 fee, but it seemed impossible that we would find anyone trusting enough to lend me a passport.  From years of mountaineering, I learned to never say “never,” and miraculously, Laurie—with her ever-positive attitude—found a friend willing to lend her passport for a couple days.  Procuring the other necessary permits for the Annapurna area proved far easier.

Because Charla was finishing a two-year fellowship with the USAID mission in Kathmandu and Laurie was trying to finish her research on adult literacy for her dissertation from Cornell, assembling the Western food we would want, camp gear, and medical supplies became my responsibility. Doing all this for a three-week trip at home would have been a good challenge, even though I have taken care of buying supplies for two major mountaineering expeditions in Canada, many week-long backcountry ski trips, and innumerable extended backpacking trips.  Even so, the task of gathering food and supplies invariably seems overwhelming, and for me in Kathmandu this responsibility was daunting.  Where to go? What to buy? How to make sure I got a fair price?  Charla and I worked out lists.  Thankfully, she knew where to buy what we needed. 

Cars, pedestrians, and rickshaws jammed the narrow Kathmandu streets from dawn to dusk.  Even though it is the capital city with around a million people (estimates range from 600,000 for the city to 1.5 million for the valley), it really is a jumble of separate villages that have grown together.  Streets wind and curve with no apparent plan, bend around holy peepul trees (it was under this species of a sacred fig tree that Buddha was enlightened), and become confusing knots where they end in squares with Hindu temples at their centers.  Beyond downtown, street signs are rare.  Traffic lights don’t work so white-gloved traffic police attempt to control the bedlam at the major intersections.  In the early 1990s, using Chinese funds, they built a ring road, but since then the valley’s population has nearly tripled, so the city has expanded far beyond that road, whose relatively broad four lanes are perpetually congested.  Smog and traffic noise fill the air.

Whenever I left my hotel, touts assailed me trying to sell everything from miniature hand-made violins to bungee-jumping trips or marijuana and hashish (“smoke ” as they called it). Women carrying babies or lepers missing fingers, noses or other appendages begged for food or money.  When I first arrived in Kathmandu, the street scene—the rickshaws, the women in bright saris, the men in conservative Nepali clothes, the blaring car horns, and the crush of humanity—presented such an assault to my senses that I just wanted to hide in our hotel.  After living with Jeannie in even more crowded Dhaka, Bangladesh, and after a couple trips to Kathmandu, however, I grew to accept the street scene and even came to enjoy it.  I learned not to look at people’s faces so I could ignore them, and I made a practice of carrying a pocket full of small Nepali bills that I could easily hand to beggars who were obviously in need: lepers, really old people, injured people who couldn’t work. 

Some people say you shouldn’t give alms to beggars—it just encourages more begging.  But in Nepal, Asia’s second poorest country (just a very little better off than Bangladesh), people—especially the poor—have no economic safety net.  If you can’t work, you won’t eat.  The 5 and 10 rupee notes I sometimes passed out equaled less than 10 U.S. cents—a meaningless amount to me, but in this country where laborers expect to earn a little more than the equivalent of a dollar per day, those few rupees could make a difference.  And besides, baksheesh—begging—plays a significant role in South East Asian culture.  But I also learned that I could spend a lot of time and energy giving away money so I got pretty good at ignoring people. Once however, after procuring some permits and stopping to buy a few goodies for the trek, I felt a soft touch on the arm.  A young woman in a bright orange and yellow sari walked alongside me, carrying a baby while leading another youngster in rags. I tried to walk on and ignore her held out and plea, “Please mister. No food.” But I just did not have the heart to ignore her even though I knew she was probably a professional beggar (why else would she know English?) who probably earned as much by begging as the workers in my hotel earn with their real jobs.  Ignoring beggars, especially when I was lugging a bag full of food plus a wallet full of cash and credit cards, was hard to do. So as we walked through the crowded streets, I reached in my pocket, pulled out several bills, and placed them in her hand.

To avoid some of the tumult, I tried to get an early start.  After a quick session of yoga on the hotel roof with its view of snow-capped peaks to the north and clouds of burning incense rising from Kathmandu’s Hindu and Buddhist shrines, I went to a bakery to eat breakfast, where I read one of the city’s two English language newspapers.  Then I headed out to buy Western goodies for our trek: oatmeal, candy, cocoa, jam, powdered milk, cookies, and even peanut butter.  Oh, and don’t forget toilet paper. 

Although the stores had all the Western treats we needed, choices were limited, which was just as well because I may be one of the world’s most indecisive shoppers:  for me even the smallest decision can take hours. As I pushed the once shiny shopping cart down the store’s narrow aisles past shelves of seemingly randomly organized merchandise, I would finally stumble onto an item on my list.  Then my debate began: Should I buy the big jar of jam or two little ones? Should buy the cookies made in Thailand or in Brunei?  Should I get the mango chutney or the plum chutney or both? What about that mint chutney?  Maybe I’ll just buy it all. Was I buying too much? Would Charla and Laurie like what I bought?  On and on. It’s no wonder friends call me “the dilly dally lama.”

 Laurie found the time to help on one major shopping trip, and that was a good thing.  We loaded a shopping cart with food, and I hauled that back to my hotel room to add to the piles of food and medical supplies: the piles represented all the supplies we would need except for the main staples like rice, potatoes, vegetables, cooking oil, and kerosene, which we planned to buy at our jumping off town, Nepalganj in the subtropical lowlands near the border with India.

At dinner, in the evenings, and before I went to bed, I read as much as I could about Dolpo and Upper Dolpo.  The Lonely Planet provided a skeletal description of the trip. Another guidebook offered a little more information but did not discuss our route. I bought Peter Matthiessen’s Snow Leopard to re-read.  The 1978 best-selling book and National Book Award winner described his odyssey in Dolpo with George Schaller, a wildlife biologist studying blue sheep and searching for the nearly mythical snow leopard.  His laments about his failed marriage and ex-wife’s death from cancer, his accounts of taking LSD, and his explanations of Tibetan Buddhism were interesting, but his descriptions of the trip mostly frightened me.  Matthiessen’s book, like other accounts of travel in Dolpo, warned of bad weather, high passes, difficult route finding, surly porters, and non-availability of food and fuel.  I bought a map that purported to show the route and wondered if the contours that indicated many passes crossing 5500 meters (18,000 feet) could be correct. 

At some point, I realized this trek went through the area depicted in the movie Himalaya, a 1999 Academy Award nominee for best foreign film that offered a glimpse of life in this wild, high, Tibetan corner of Nepal. The movie tells the story of Tibetan salt traders and a young Buddhist monk—a painter of temple frescos and thangkas (religious paintings on tightly woven cotton)—who barely survive crossing the Himalaya. In one terrifying scene, to traverse a cliff face high above a shimmering blue lake, they claw their way across a flimsy catwalk made of sticks and flat rocks.  In that scene, a yak falls to its death, and the monk barely can force himself to make the treacherous crossing.  I called Charla to ask if this was the route we planned to take.  She answered, yes.  So I wondered if she supposed that somehow there would be an alternative trail.  She said that seemed highly unlikely and added “This is not going to be a teahouse trek.”

The next day, in another guide book, I read that wildlife we should watch for included blue sheep, wolves, snow leopards, and the Himalayan viper, which lives up to 3700 meters (12,000 feet).  Wolves and leopards: no problem. Snakes—they are a problem. I fear snakes more than I fear exposure on cliffs.  I resolved to tell Charla this trip would be too difficult.  I vowed to go to Lumbini in southern Nepal, Buddha’s birthplace, and spend thirty days learning to meditate instead. 

At 58, I was much older than Charla or Laurie, and so I knew I would be walking slower than they did.  I have vertigo (don’t ask how I go mountain climbing and skiing with vertigo—it just adds to the challenge).  Plus, I recently had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. The radiation treatments left me weak and my hip joints aching with radiation induced arthritis. I discussed these concerns with Charla, and while she reassured me I found myself debating about whether to mention that I have some form of MS—multiple sclerosis, which has made my right side weaker than my left.  Despite my fears and doubts, I truly wanted to make this trip and so decided to keep that a secret, and even though medical advice commonly warns that high altitude can worsen my condition, I hoped and assumed that it would continue to cause no problem.  

Because I had spent the last month trekking in the Mt. Everest region (two weeks alone, two weeks with Jeannie), Charla felt certain I had acclimated to the altitude and had the strength to make this trek. So with her usual steadfast calm, she reassured me while adding that because entry to this area had been so restricted by the Nepali government, probably less than three or four thousand people from outside Nepal had traveled there, ever. This became the final enticement. So I vowed to put aside my fears. That night, however, I could barely sleep—every time I closed my eyes, I saw myself falling off a cliff or tripping over a viper. 

The next day we met with a tour operator that Charla knew, Mr. Wang, who offered to find us a sirdar, a Sherpa who would manage the porters and the food while acting as our guide and cook.  The good news was that Mr. Wang had some old kitchen gear (pots, pans, utensils, and a tarp with poles for a cooking shelter) that he was willing to sell for $20.  The bad news was, first, that we were not allowed to bring a pressure cooker into the area.  We had counted on being able to bring one of these aluminum pots because they make cooking the main staples of the Nepali diet — dhal bhaat, rice and lentils —fast and efficient.  The Maoist insurgents who controlled most of Nepal, however, also used the pots to make bombs. So the army prohibited people from transporting pressure cookers on airplanes and from carrying them into areas the Maoists controlled.  This meant we would need to buy—and haul—far more kerosene than we had planned.  Second, and even more disturbing, the sirdar Mr. Wang had hoped to hire for us was busy. We could possibly make the trip on our own, but the thought of dealing with the porters, buying the food and fuel, rationing it, managing the camp set up every evening and the camp take-down every morning, cooking the food, and making sure we were on the right trail seemed daunting.  With typical Asian equanimity, Mr. Wang told us not to worry: he would find someone to help.

Then, he said we needed to buy insurance for the porters and the sirdar, but because the trip was so risky and he wasn’t organizing it, his insurer wouldn’t consider covering us.

We discussed taking a pressure cooker despite the ban but eventually decided against that. Our reasoning went like this:  If we encountered Maoists, which seemed certain, and if they confiscated the pot and later made a bomb that hurt or killed someone, we would feel responsible.  We also considered foregoing insurance for the porters, but in the end decided to buy it. Although we had little information about our route, we knew we would cross high, risky passes and hike along narrow, cliff-edge trails.  So, the chances seemed pretty high that one of the porters would get hurt, and the effects of not being able to work would be dire for him, and his family.  So not having insurance ultimately seemed irresponsible.

Two days later, and just two days before we were supposed begin the trip, we received word that we had a sirdar.  Although Gelbu Lama had never been in Upper Dolpo, he had helped with a trek through Lower Dolpo.  According to Mr. Wang, he was a good cook, an experienced guide, and a Sherpa with a little experience managing porters, food, and fuel.  That same day, Laurie found a trekking insurance company willing to bend its rules and sell us an insurance policy for our porters and sirdar.

Final details were coming together:  permits with my name on them arrived.  A generous friend of Charla’s, who worked in the U.S. embassy’s Kathmandu counselor office, loaned me a decent tent, which was a real blessing because the tents I looked at to rent were cheap Chinese tents that would not withstand even a short rainstorm.  Through another person at the embassy, we were able to buy sealable plastic bags for packing food—an item we take for granted in the U.S. but that was not available in the markets of Nepal.  I spent my afternoons in my hotel room repackaging food into plastic bags.  Everything we took was going to have to go in someone’s pack, and the airlines had strict weight limits for the 18-seat planes they flew to the mountains. Weight and space were major concerns.

I had the medicines all ready to go: enough for the three of us for all manner of problems: stomach, eyes, altitude, infections—a veritable medical clinic. I bought some sutures, which I hoped I would never have to use, and Laurie had a portable splint. Having worked as an orderly in Denver General Hospital and having taken various first aid courses along with wilderness first responder courses, I felt fairly comfortable dealing with medical problems, but I was greatly reassured when Laurie told me she had taken some advanced first responder courses.

Then we started to consider how much money to take.  We had to calculate for the porters, various permits, Gelbu’s wages, tips, food, and other supplies.  I hit an ATM near my hotel and withdrew $1000 in Nepali rupees—a 4-inch tall stack of bills.  The biggest Nepali bill is a 1000-rupee note (about $12).   Being a walking bank in an area controlled by Maoist insurgents known for extracting “tolls” was not a pleasant prospect, but we needed to pay the people who helped us.  So, I fretted about where to stash the loot safely.  I decided that on the plane rides, I would carry all the money in a money pouch that hung from my neck inside my shirt.  While trekking, I would carry some in that pouch, some in a stuff sack with extra socks, and some in a pocket hidden inside my parka. 

Along with the other supplies, I bought a half dozen small tubes of super glue to repair my boots, which after a month of trekking in the Mt. Everest region had begun to fall apart.  Finding boots big enough for my size 13 feet in Kathmandu was pretty unlikely, and breaking them in on this trek would have meant shear misery. The super glue seemed to offer the only solution. 

On the evening before we were supposed to leave, an early monsoon storm drenched Kathmandu and knocked out the power as I was returning to my hotel with one last load of goodies and the huge wad of cash.  I took a candlelight shower, then had a solo “romantic” candlelit dinner.  Hail beating on the hotel roof kept me awake most of that night, and as I lay awake I wondered if the bad weather would cancel flights to Nepalganj.  Alternately, I hoped that the flight would be cancelled so I wouldn’t have to make this daunting trip, then cursed my bad luck for the weather that might prevent me from making the trek of a lifetime.

When I awoke at 5 a.m. the next morning to get a quick breakfast, low clouds loomed over the hills surrounding Kathmandu.  Charla arrived with her little four-seat Korean version of a Jeep. We stuffed my gear plus two duffels full of food into the back along with Charla’s gear and Purna Basent’s backpack.  For the first fours days of our trek, this Nepali journalist would accompany us.  He had never been trekking before, so Laurie wanted to give him, along with another friend—Shuvas Darnal, a leader of a Dalit (untouchable caste) human rights group—the chance to experience a trek. 

We drove around the yellowing, pink-tinged walls surrounding the king’s palace guarded by armed infantrymen and past a fortified police station, where dissidents protesting the unpopular monarchy were imprisoned, to the guide’s office where Gelbu was waiting with his backpack and our pile of kitchen gear.  We crammed five people plus equipment and food for a month of trekking into Charla’s little car. Because of my long legs, the others insisted that I take the front seat next to the driver, but my knees were jammed against the dash and in my lap I carried my backpack as if it were a pre-inflated airbag. As we made our way through the early morning Kathmandu streets, clouds hung so low and the weather looked so bad, it seemed that all our preparations would be for naught. We had to make this flight. There were not many to Nepalganj, and daily flights from Nepalganj up to Juphal, where we would begin the trek, were booked weeks in advance.

We begin to begin

We arrived at the Kathmandu airport just as workers were just unlocking the doors when.  Miraculously, the clouds began lifting.  Yes, there would be an early morning flight to Nepalganj.  And yes, we had seats on the relatively large 24-seat plane.  Charla and Laurie, with their excellent Nepali, haggled over how much extra we would have to pay to haul our overweight load on the Buddha Air, twin-prop airplane. Then I guided Purna, who had just once before traveled by air, through security.  Gelbu, a veteran of many flights to the Mt. Everest region, was used to the drill.  Before we had a chance to settle into the waiting area’s plastic bucket seats, they called our flight. We filed out to the tarmac, climbed the steps to the plane, ducked through the low door, and settled into the first vacant seats we could find.

The pilot revved the two engines. The plane bounced down the runway, took off and headed west out of the Kathmandu valley over forest-covered low mountains cut by deep river gorges.  The hour-long flight bounced through the chop and dodged through rain clouds or around thunderheads.  Thermals sent the plane rising then plummeting though the gray sky.  The amusement park ride at the back of the plane made me feel woozy, and as we bounced along I thought about Shuvas and Laurie, who were missing this ride because they were traveling to Nepalganj by bus in order to attend a friend’s wedding. About twenty minutes into the flight, Purna’s brown face had turned wan and sweaty. Then, like half of the plane’s passengers, he filled a barf bag.

Finally, as we flew over the low lying lands of the subtropical Terai with its terraced rice paddies, the weather cleared, and we landed at the small bunker of an airport in Nepalganj.  Overly eager porters who wanted to haul our gear to god-knows-where greeted us at the airport’s gate guarded by government soldiers toting automatic rifles. We weren’t sure where we were going to stay, but we had the name of a contact who worked with Dhan Bahadur and who supposedly had some kind of hotel. So we hired a mute porter to help us carry our gear through the concertina wire gates of the heavily guarded airport and down the street to Dhan Bahadur’s friend’s place.

Although the Nepali army controlled the town, the Maoists controlled the countryside around it. This was the typical situation throughout Nepal: the government controlled the main towns and a few major tourist areas; the Maoists controlled the rest of the country, and they were particularly powerful in the agricultural lowlands around Nepalganj.  A month-long cease fire in the civil war, which had begun nearly ten years earlier, had just broken down, and the army could not afford to lose control of this airport or town, which serves as a major port of entry for the huge quantity of products Nepal imports from India.  Because insurgents commonly stopped busses and extorted tolls from the passengers, Laurie and Shuvas’s bus ride from Kathmandu seemed a little dicey.  Sometimes, if the bus was violating a strike and the insurgents wanted to block a road, they burned the bus, or if things were really bad they took passengers to “training centers” to educate them in a “training” that usually lasted one or two days, but sometimes as long as a week or more.

We decided to stay at Dhan Bahadur’s business partner’s hotel even though Charla knew of a more comfortable guesthouse and even though his place was a dump: flies, hallways full of junk, drunken Nepali businessmen hanging about.  But not only was the owner a friend of our patron in Upper Dolpo, and more importantly, he was the agent for Yeti Airlines (an improbable name for an airline but one of Nepal’s main domestic air carriers), which we hoped would fly us up to Juphal, the mountain village where our trek would begin. So we hauled our gear and food up the narrow, dingy stairs to some small rooms with sagging beds and ceiling fans that clanked and squeaked.  When I asked about mosquito nets, the owner looked at me as if I were crazy.

I wanted to accompany Gelbu and Purna to the market for our last shopping excursion, but Charla convinced me that if I went, they would have a hard time getting good prices because in the markets, where the prices for food and other goods are not fixed, foreigners regularly get charged more than Nepalis.  So I hung around the hotel, drank tea, moved my chair to follow the shade as the day’s temperature rose to a muggy 32C (90 degrees F) while the Nepalis and Charla talked about what a cool, pleasant day it was. 

Before Charla and I could start to worry about whether Laurie and Shuvas would arrive safely, they strolled into the hotel. They reported that their friend’s wedding was beautiful, the feast was fantastic, and their bus rides were long but uneventful—the roads were open and except for red flags and banners they saw no sign of the Maoist insurgents.  Not long after they arrived, the hotel agent, who spent most of his time shouting into a cell phone or ordering his employees about with grand gestures and apparent threats, promised us that there was going to be a flight to Juphal the next morning—first thing—and he would find a place for us on it.

As the sweltering day began to cool, Charla, Laurie, and I strolled into town, past a little market, bullock carts with six-foot tall wooden wheels, boys playing soccer or cricket, and exotic women with angular faces wearing colorful saris and huge golden nose rings.  I wanted to take photos of these beautiful, quiet people but didn’t want to bother them with the camera, so I just walked on.  Small kiosks made of wood and little houses on stilts lined the road.  As we walked, we discussed logistics for the trip: everything was coming together as well as we could have hoped. Still we wondered if and hoped that we could buy kerosene and potatoes in Dunai, the district capital of Dolpo.

After the sun set into a bank of orange clouds low over the flat lands of India, we ate dinner at our hotel.  Leery of the greasy, spicy food, I picked at it and ate little.  The last thing I wanted was to get sick from the food here in the lowlands and then suffer consequences as we trekked through the highlands for the next 20 days. Gelbu, Shuvas, and Purna ate with gusto.  Alternating between Nepali and English, Laurie chatted enthusiastically about the wedding.  Charla wondered if I didn’t want to eat more, but I excused my lack of appetite by saying the weather was so hot that I didn’t feel like eating much.

Long before sunrise, we awoke, gathered our gear and food, piled it on a cart, and hauled it to the airport gate.  The agent, our hotelier, busied himself with shaking hands and other impressive duties.  We joined thirty or forty men and a few women stood impatiently waiting at the closed airport gate. Our breath steamed in the cold, damp air.  The soldiers lackadaisically appeared at the guardhouse as the sun began to rise and reluctantly started checking each person’s papers, patted us down for full body frisks, and inspected luggage.  We finally hauled our pile through the gate and to the airport, organized the tickets, and paid extra for our huge stack of gear.  We now had enough rice and food to last four people for nearly a month, plus extra food for the porters we planned to hire and for Purna and Shuvas. We had tents and the clothes and the kitchen.  We were assured that we could buy kerosene in Dunai, but we still needed to carry the empty plastic jugs for that.  I kept wondering how we would ever find enough people to haul this mountain of gear.

The $100, 30-minute flight from the subtropics up to 2400 meter (8000 foot) Juphal in the 18-seat, two-prop Yeti Airlines plane was definitely worth the price of admission.  After flying over the Nepali lowlands, we quickly reached the mountains, which were clearcut and extensively logged in the low, accessible country but which turned green and heavily forested as we flew higher.  Then, the views quickly changed from forest to snow capped peaks.  Roads and villages disappeared.  As we skimmed between the black rocks of a pass, we saw yaks grazing on the mountain meadows and sub-alpine tundra. The pilot headed up a valley, made a steep descending turn to the right, and flew down to a small flat grass airstrip with a dip in the middle and a wall of rocks at its end. 

The landing was a rough one. In September 2000, Maoist rebels attacked Juphal and Dunai, overran the two small towns and airstrip, killed 14 policemen, dug up the landing strip to isolate the area, and looted the bank in Dunai. This successful Maoist attack on Doplo’s district capital became a turning point in the civil war, which had been spreading since 1996.  Until this time, the government had minimized the importance of the Maoist Himalayan People’s War, and so it relied on the local police, rather than the army, to fight the insurgents. This shockingly successful attack, however, showed that the Maoists had gained a significant amount of strength, which the king and his government could no longer deny.

Wanting to get the plane back in the air as soon as possible in case the weather changed, the Yeti Airline agent quickly unloaded our gear, re-filled the plane with baggage, and boarded the passengers for the flight back down to Nepalganj.  Then the green and white plane, with a stylized yeti footprint painted on its tail wing, revved its engines, taxied to the end of the runway, and took off.  As I watched the plane —our last and only connection to the modern world—fly up the valley, I wondered: “Now what have you gotten yourself into?”

Soldiers toting semi-automatic rifles surrounded us wanting to see our permits.  Behind the eight-foot tall barbwire fence, a throng of people stood in ragged clothes begging to work as porters.

We hauled our backpacks and gear through the gate in the concertina wire enclosure, and the crowd of shouting men who wanted jobs engulfed us.  Charla and Gelbu immediately began haggling with men about who would get to help us.  A short man, Nora, with a crafty smile and a smattering of English got the job, and he selected an assortment of porters to carry our gear to the town’s only restaurant.  It wasn’t much—a stone building with a metal roof and an open area under the roof where rough wood tables were lined up on a dirt floor.  On a kerosene burner and a wood-fired oven at the end of the line of tables, the owner made us a breakfast of eggs, japaties (flat bread), and tea.  As we ate, 20 villagers crowded around to watch us.  Some asked Gelbu, Charla or Laurie for jobs and others just stared or smiled at us.  As I ate, I blinked in amazement at the assortment of women in traditional dress wearing necklaces strung with large chunks of turquoise and coral, snot-nosed children, and men wearing worn coats and tall hats that resembled turbans. From this throng, Gelbu picked Tashi—a stout 18 year-old with a sincere smile—to work as his assistant.

The outhouse behind the restaurant and family compound sat perched above a set of terraced fields where the family had recently planted potatoes and barley.  Geraniums and bright blue flowers bloomed in the morning sun.  From here I had a world-class view of the valley, the terraced fields beginning to green with new spring crops, and the snow covered 24,000 foot mountain ridge above.  Little did I know that this outhouse, with a square hole in its wooden floor, would be the last for nearly a month.

 

Finally Hiking

After distributing our gear and food to the six porters we hired, we shouldered our own 30 to 40 pound backpacks and headed through town unabashedly staring at the scene and the people, who stared down at us from their rooftops. Some friendly children guided us through the maze of 40 or 50 houses and to the main trail heading to Dunai. We had entered a strange new world of fort-like, three story stone houses with flat roofs made of packed mud and stone. In the morning sun, people washed clothes and relaxed on the flat roofs adorned with 20-foot tall poles from which white Buddhist prayer flags flapped in the wind sending their prayers to the gods. Alongside each house stood a wooden human figure totem with an over-sized, round head that looked like a carving from Africa rather than Asia. Erected to protect the household from all kinds of harm, these totems called dhauiliya or dok-pa are related to some very old gods that predate the spread of Buddhism to the area, which occurred around 1200 years ago.  

Gelbu led the way accompanied by Tashi. Behind them followed Laurie, Shuvas and Purna.  Charla and I brought up the rear, and local children followed us. Like all Nepali porters, our porters used a tumpline across their foreheads to carry their four-foot tall dhokos—cone-shaped wicker baskets—full of our gear.   Having never trekked before with porters, I kept worrying they would disappear with some of our gear or food even before we arrived at Dunai, where we planned to meet Dhan Bahadur and get our final permits to enter Upper Dolpo.   It was an easy, four hour hike downhill through the springtime from Juphal at 2400 meters (8000 feet) to Dunai at 2150 (7000 feet).  Adults on the trail ignored us or asked where we were from.  A few children begged us to take their photo or asked for candy, which indicated these people in this part of Lower Dolpo were somewhat used to tourists.  Men and children bathed with large buckets behind houses and lounged in the springtime sun. 

Below the trail, people in the area were constructing by hand—with picks, shovels, and steel pry bars—a new road from Juphal to Dunai.  Eventually, the road would meet a road being built to Nepalganj and so it will connect the area with the rest of the world, its markets and people of India.  This, the people of the area desperately want and need so they can transport their produce to the comparatively large markets in the lowlands. The prospect of the flood of Indian merchants, workers, farmers, and loggers along with the noise and pollution of trucks and tractors were threats that I wondered about, but I was just a tourist and a trekker who would return to the modern world—a world that the people of Dolpo lacked access to. 

We stopped for tea at a teahouse near a bridge crossing a roaring creek.  A few benches were set up outside on the patio in the sun, but we opted to relax inside on wooden chairs set up in a room that doubled as the family’s living room during the day and bedroom at night. A young man, who a half-hour previously had nearly run me over as he trotted his horse up the narrow trail, stood at the counter talking with the owner. Now, he was all friendship and brotherhood: he had hashish and he wanted us to smoke some.  We politely declined despite his insistence. “Watch,” he persisted, “See how peaceful this makes me.” He took a long hit from his brass pipe and pungent smoke filled the air.  He coughed, took another hit, and offered again.  Although there was a time when I would have gladly accepted the offer, I declined because hash and marijuana just make me even slower and more dim-witted than normal.   He started babbling about having lived in Miami for a while, having a good job there, wanting to go back.

Outside, a sign pointed upstream to a hot spring.  The teahouse owner’s daughter said it was about an hour’s walk and she would guide us. The stoner rambled on about how nice the hot spring was. Then he called for his horse, jumped on the little thing, whipped it hard with a stick, and trotted across the rusty metal bridge that led to Dunai.  I was all for checking out the hot spring, but Charla and Laurie reminded me that we still had to meet Dhan Bahadur and buy supplies in Dunai. So we declined this offer, shouldered our packs, and headed on.

We were a group of five for this first leg of the trip.  Charla Britt, with a Ph.D. in development sociology from Cornell, was a tall blond, serious 40 year-old woman who had worked and trekked in Nepal over the last 15years. She spoke Nepali exceptionally well, had a mind for details, and worked with USAID in Kathmandu to ensure that forestry and re-forestation projects in Nepal considered issues involving women’s equity.  Whenever I needed information on treks in Nepal, I relied on Charla’s advice, which I invariably found correct.  She had been trekking all over the Himalaya, often trekking alone. Before the Maoists gained strength and took control of this part of Nepal, she completed two treks in Lower Dolpo and so she had been to Dunai and Juphal.  While trekking, she wore a broad, heavy cotton, brown hiking skirt and insisted on carrying a huge backpack that consistently weighed over 45 pounds.  A strong woman and by far the fastest hiker of the group, her steadfast determination and organizational abilities reminded me the women explorers I had read about.  She was the organizer and our leader.  She figured out what to bring, how much money to carry, how to procure permits, and where to buy airplane tickets.  Her connections made it possible to find the agency that helped us.  Best still, she was a real worrier.  She worried about things I had not even imagined.  With her in charge, I stopped worrying after a few days into the trek because she worried enough for the two of us.  It was nice having a worrier worrying for me.  And she did a good job.  At first she hesitated to share her worries, but I begged her to worry aloud with us so we could help her make decisions. She agreed, but I know I will never know all that she worried about, especially in terms of me, my age, my health, my slowness, my inability to understand Nepali.

Despite my various ailments, high altitude rarely bothers me. My joke is that I don’t feel altitude’s effects because I’m dizzy all the time. A strong enough hiker, I have done major mountaineering expeditions in Alaska and Canada, and the previous month of trekking in the Mount Everest region had put me in fairly good shape. I have some decent medical experience, and despite my doubts I’m always up for an adventure.  Otherwise, there was not much to recommend me for this trip, so I felt incredibly lucky that Charla invited me especially given my health concerns.  So I vowed to help as best I could, make sure my perpetual slowness did not slow our progress, eat whatever came my way, and listen to the Nepali conversations hoping to pick up what people were saying.  But, I did not understand much.

Laurie Vasily, also from Cornell, had been working in Nepal for the last three years on a Ph.D. project involving adult literacy for the poorest of the poor in Nepal—the untouchable caste, called Dalits.  Most Nepalis are Hindu, and although the Nepali version of Hinduism does not include as many or the same castes that Hinduism in India includes, the Nepali caste system does include an untouchable class.  Through her work first as a Peace Corps volunteer and many years of field work, Laurie learned excellent Nepali and could converse readily. She told me that speaking Nepali made her feel like another person, a person with a completely different view of the world—a world where cause and effect are indefinite, where the edges aren’t quite as sharp as they are in English.  She had light brown hair, blue eyes, and despite working with one of Nepal’s most difficult social issues, she had a cheery personality, which made me wonder why at 37 she was not attached.

Through her work, she had met Shuvas Darnal and Purna Basnet, political activists in the movement to overthrow the king and make Nepal a republic.  Shuvas, a short dark-complexioned man with a short beard and dark eyes, organized and led a non-governmental organization working to expand human rights to Nepali untouchables.  A member of the untouchable caste, a natural leader, a bright, exuberant, well-read 25-year-old, he had graduated from college, a rare feat in Nepal where the literacy rate hovers around 50 percent. Thanks to his work, he had traveled to India and even Mexico.

Purna Basnet was a 30-year-old freelance journalist and executive committee member of the Federation of Nepali Journalists, a group fighting for freedom of the press in Nepal.  Purna, who was rather tall for a Nepali, had a cassette recorder.  Although somewhat reserved, he persistently worked to find out what others were thinking and feeling. So he periodically pulled out his tape recorder and interviewed people we met or took notes as others spoke.  Sometimes he interviewed me, asking about politics and development, especially tourist development. Like Shuvas, he had never been trekking so Charla and Laurie invited these two Nepalis to give them the chance to experience what thousands of tourists come to Nepal to experience.  Although Dolpo is a mere 200 air miles from Kathmandu, it is a mystical land unknown to the inhabitants of the capital city except for what they have seen in the movie Himalaya, which was extremely popular in Nepal.  So they knew little to nothing more about Dolpo than we did.

To Lie or Not to Lie

As we hiked down the trail into the Thuli Bhrei river canyon, the slopes became more arid, the forest disappeared and it was replaced by scrub. I fervently hoped that we would not encounter any Maoist insurgents, but our Nepali friends were hoping we would meet some cadres on the trail in order to have the opportunity to learn about their lives.  Purna especially hoped we would encounter some Maoist cadres so he could write an article about the experience.  

The U.S. Embassy in Kathmandu warned Americans to stay out of the area, and if we had officially told the embassy we were going to Dolpo, the bureaucrats there would have done their best to dissuade us.  (The man who let me the tent I used on the trek wanted to go with us but he could not because of his job.)  Nepalis and American embassy staff consistently advised us not to say we were Americans because the Maoists were angry that the Bush administration had officially labeled them as terrorists and was supporting the Nepali government by providing huge sums of military aid—$40 million per year.  This struck me as ridiculous because the American government could have solved much of the unrest in Nepal by giving a quarter of that amount for developing a water system in Kathmandu that would remain reliable during the dry season and using another quarter of that to provide funds to create and finance some kind of agency that would manage a land re-distribution project for the immense number of landless farmers throughout rural Nepal.  But the American government has never taken much interest in my ideas about military aid.

            So, we had to decide whether or not to lie about our nationality. The joke running through the trekking areas of Nepal was that Americans were no longer trekking in Nepal, but huge numbers of Canadians had taken their place.  The month previous, while trekking in the Khumbu region, when Nepalis asked where I was from, I consistently lied and said I was Canadian.  This worked until I talked to a Nepali guide traveling with college students from Vancouver, British Columbia.  After that I stopped lying; the lie never felt quite right and besides it made me feel as if I were a CIA agent or some goofy character in a cheap spy movie. 

Despite numerous conversations, Charla, Laurie, and I never could agree on what to say about our nationality if we did encounter Maoist insurgents.  Laurie wanted to tell the truth and explain that she was an aid worker who was in Nepal helping the people.  Charla wanted to talk to the insurgents and see what would work best depending on the situation.  None of us wanted to be associated with the U.S. government in any way.  Because Nepali friends urged us to lie and say we were from Canada or anywhere but the U.S., I wanted to follow that advice and say we were Canadians or Germans or Swedes, but I didn’t want to test some Maoist cadre’s reaction to our being American in this remote region so thoroughly controlled by the insurgents.

Because most of the Maoists came from the lowlands where people often have little education, I reasoned they would not be able to read or interpret our passports.  In Nepal, around a third of the males and three-quarters of the females are illiterate so there was a good chance that the cadres would have no idea if we were Americans or Germans, and that might make a difference for us because the Maoists often charged Americans higher tolls than they charged others.  I wasn’t much worried about being kidnapped and held for ransom. The Maoists did not extort money from foreigners in that way.  Even large groups of tourists, who displayed vast wealth through their fancy expedition clothes, large entourage of porters, cooks, cook’s helpers, and guides, expensive tents, and shiny new kitchen gear, had not been held for ransom. 

We supposed the Maoists had a reason for not kidnapping tourists: their activities were blamed for severely reducing the numbers of tourists visiting Nepal.  In fact, when we made this 2004 trek, tourism was down almost 60 percent since the insurgency started in 1996, in a country where tourism accounts for approximately 80 percent of the economy.  Thus, huge numbers of people had lost their livelihoods. So, if the Maoists started to kidnap foreigners, tourism would dry up even further, and this would certainly decrease popular support for the insurgents, who never were too popular in the highland tourist areas of Nepal for two reasons: first, economic; second, religious—the Maoists were generally Hindus from the lowlands that the Buddhist highlanders living in the Annapurna and Mount Everest regions didn’t exactly like or trust.  Besides, if the tourists stopped coming to Nepal, the Maoists would have fewer trekkers from whom they could extort tolls.

And I wasn’t much concerned about being physically harmed.  We had heard of just one case of a tourist being attacked: a Spaniard refused to pay the Maoists’ toll in the Annapurna region.  When he tried to walk by a group of cadres, they hit him in the head with a rock. In 2006 when I visited the Annapurna region, a Belgian couple told me that they tried to walk past a Maoist checkpoint without paying their “entrance fee”; they were shocked when a Maoist cadre started whacking the man’s boots with a bamboo stick.  When he threatened to hit the man’s head, they stopped and paid the thousand rupee toll.

What concerned me most about the Maoists was the huge amount of cash and food we were carrying made us a good target.   If they took our money, we would have no way to pay those who worked for us, or if they took our food, we would have a very rough trip because people in the area have little extra food to share or sell.  Also, the remoteness of Dolpo meant we risked encountering cadres who did not feel obliged to adhere to the party’s policies, which could increase the threat of being kidnapped or treated badly.  The danger of being harmed physically, however, was much greater for the Nepalis who accompanied us. As we walked down the wide trail to Dunai, worries about meeting Maoists weighed as much, if not more, than my 40-pound pack. 

Nora, the leader of the porters we hired in Juphal, trailed along not far from Charla and me.  As we walked, he chattered in broken English about working for us.  When I questioned him about his old Chinese boots whose soles had separated from the uppers and flopped with each step, he assured me that they were good boots and he would be fine.  Or when I asked about the porters wearing flip-flop sandals, he promised that they carried good boots in the wicker dhokos on their backs and they were saving them for the mountain passes.  Or when Charla wondered where the five liter containers for kerosene were, Nora explained that the man carrying them had stopped for lunch and so he was behind.  When we asked if he knew the route, he assured us that he did.  “Many time, many time,” he would repeat and then list towns he had portered to.

Gelbu Lama, our 40-year-old Sherpa, had a European daypack stuffed with his personal gear. Tashi, whose family farmed land somewhere near Juphal, carried a huge dhoko full of kitchen gear and supplies.  It was a good sign that he and Gelbu were walking together: they were getting along and were taking the lead.

A couple kilometers outside of Dunai at the confluence of the Thuli Bheri and the Suli Gad Rivers, we reached an army barracks and guard post manned by five bored soldiers wearing khaki or blue camouflage. Toting M-1s and lounging against the sandbag walls of their guard post, the soldiers stopped us to check our papers and inspect our backpacks.  From them, Charla and Laurie learned that the government was putting on a “cultural” show that day and that everyone in Dunai was attending the show. The soldiers were clearly unhappy that on this festive day they had to stand guard duty at this lonely guard post while their comrades were in town watching the singers and entertainers from Kathmandu, who had arrived by helicopter via Nepalganj.  They checked our papers and cursorily checked my pack for contraband:  material the Maoists could use to make bombs or weapons. They more carefully checked Shuvas’s, Purna’s, and the other Nepalis’ packs by pulling everything out and piling it on the sandbags of their guard post.  This differential treatment made me uncomfortable, but it made Purna and Shuvas angry because, as they told me later, they felt they were being treated as second class citizens in their own country. 

Dunai (2200 meters/7000 feet)

At the edge of town we passed through the Buddhist stupa forming the town gate for Dunai.  The walls of this stupa, a Buddhist monument erected to protect the area from wrathful demons or to bless the people as they enter or leave town, had recently been painted white and decorated with colorful new frescos depicting various Buddhist deities, saints, and guardians. As we walked the flagstone main (and only) street, which wound between rock-walled buildings and past a small town square, where water dripped from a spigot, we were encouraged to find a number of shops but distressed to see they were closed. The two restaurants were vacant.  The street was deserted.  Everyone was at the cultural show on a flat across the river.

Charla guided us through town to the Blue Sheep Hotel.  No one was there.  We bemoaned our bad timing, and for lunch we broke into some snacks we had hoped to save for later in the trip.  A young boy wandered by and he summoned his older sister whose father owned the hotel.  But she did not have any keys and we couldn’t leave our packs in the open. As we waited, our porters straggled in with the rest of our gear and food.  The hotel sat near an old wooden bridge, built on stone piers that cantilevered over the river of the 100-foot-wide Thuli Bheri River, which ran clear and blue-gray through the canyon. I wanted to visit the town’s monastery that sat on a hill beyond the bridge, but it was closed because the monks were at the show. The bridge looked so rickety that when Charla assured me that the monastery was very plain— a new building nothing special inside—I gladly decided not to bother walking the half mile up to it. 

Laurie and Charla went with Gelbu to see if they could buy the items we needed in town. Although Dunai is the district capital for Dolpo, the town isn’t much more than a cluster of stone houses, a military outpost surrounded by ring after ring of concertina wire, and shops lined above the southern bank of the river.  I waited guarding the gear.  They came back with good news.  In Dunai we could buy everything we still needed: potatoes, onions, and kerosene.  But because everyone, including our patron Dhan Bahadur, was watching the cultural show, we could not buy anything until the show ended, and the show would last until dark so we would have to wait until the next day to purchase supplies.  This concerned Charla and because this meant we would spend too much time here, making us late.  We told friends in Kathmandu that this trek would take about two weeks, but it was already obvious that we were moving slower than we had hoped.  Laurie, who needed to finish her Ph.D. project, was especially concerned about time, so Charla promised her that we’d make the trek in less than three weeks.

The daughter offered to watch our gear, so we headed back into town where we crossed the mostly solid suspension bridge to join the crowd of around 600 people watching the show set up on a wooden platform just above the riverbank.  The band consisted of three men who played a small harmonium, a drum, and a flute.  The star of the show, Komal Oli, a popular folk singer from Kathmandu, wore a colorful shalwar kamis (baggy cotton or silk pants covered with a long dress commonly worn throughout South Asia) and sang flamboyantly.  The crowd loved her and applauded wildly after each song.  Soldiers danced with each other.  Men were dancing.  Women were dancing.  A politician made a speech.  A comedian impersonated well-known but unpopular politicians and the crowd laughed.  There was more music and dancing.  Purna pointed out that most of the people in the audience were outsiders from the lowlands rather than from the highlands, and he told me the show was mostly propaganda supporting the king and the army.  In Dolpo, these “outsiders” populate the district capital where they run the stores, governmental offices, and schools.  The ethnically Tibetan highlanders live up in the hills, and at the edge of the crowd just a few of them stood in their traditional dress watching the entertainment.

To counter the propaganda shows and meetings that the Maoists put on when they take over an area, the government and the army organized their own cultural shows.  A mix of music, comedy acts, dance acts, and political speeches, these shows attract huge numbers of people in remote areas where little entertainment is regularly available and where there are no televisions, no videos, no CDs or tapes, just the national radio that people listen to religiously for the news each morning.  Outside of Dunai, which had a single gasoline generator, there is no electricity except that which is supplied by small solar panels for lights and recharging batteries that German and French aid agencies have brought into the area. Up here, as in much of rural Nepal, batteries cost three times more than they cost in Kathmandu, and the batteries are Chinese or Indian batteries that don’t last long.  So it was no wonder that everyone in town was at the show.  Besides, there is nothing better than live music to draw a crowd.

A blue uniformed policeman, a tall officer with a neatly trimmed moustache, approached and asked where we were from.  I hesitated but quickly decided to tell the truth: he had pretty good English and if he asked to see our passports and permits, I feared we would have big trouble if he discovered a lie.  This turned out to be the correct choice. He was the district national police captain, and he was the man who could issue the permits to travel through the area.  Plus, he was friendly and glad we were Americans.  So we stood together watching the show and chatting.  Like many Nepali soldiers and police, he had served with the United Nations peacekeeping forces in Bosnia, Haiti, and Lebanon. Now, he was here in district capital of Nepal’s most remote region trying to keep the Maoist rebels from overrunning the country.  It was not a problem with the people, he told us.  It was a problem with the politicians who were so corrupt that they could not bring themselves to compromise for fear of losing some power, which meant losing some money.  He explained how well he and the district’s other officers got along with the Maoists in the region, and that neither the army nor the insurgents could win the war so the politicians had to find a solution.

He was a nice enough person, and even Purna—the skeptical journalist—was impressed with his frankness, but I don’t like talking to police.  I didn’t trust him to tell the truth, and I wasn’t sure what I could say without getting in trouble.  The music and the speeches, which at first held my interest, were becoming monotonous and my legs were tired from hiking four hours and now standing.  Plus, my stomach was beginning to rumble with hunger.  The others felt the same way, so we headed back to town and the hotel to find something to eat.

The show ended and the throng streamed across the suspension bridge to town. Dhan Bahadur, a stout, charismatic man with slicked back hair and the air of authority, arrived at the hotel with his entourage.  We shook hands all around and followed him to his house, an apartment above some shops in the center of Dunai. We made slow progress through town as the streets were full of people who wanted to shake Dhan Bahadur’s hand and ask for favors.  Then, as we started to climb up the rickety wooden steps leading to the wooden balcony of Dhan Bahadur’s house, Shuvas recognized his uncle, a tailor who owned a shop beneath Dhan Bahadur’s house. 

Shuvas knew his uncle had a tailor shop here in Dunai, but because everything was closed for the cultural show, he didn’t bother to look for him.  We stopped for another series of happy introductions.

Most of the people living in the high country of Nepal practice Tibetan Buddhism while the low and midlanders practice Hinduism or a mix of Hinduism and Buddhism. So I wondered why Shuvas’s uncle had moved here.  Was it because in this Buddhist part of Nepal, castes are not important and so as a Dalit—an untouchable—he would have more opportunities without being treated as a second-class citizen? 

Later I learned that Dalits can work as tailors anywhere in Nepal, and experience has shown me that Nepalis tend to be relatively mobile: they go where they can find work. This district capital, although extremely isolated, offered a few jobs that teachers, government bureaucrats, and shopkeepers from the lowlands took. In this way, they perpetuate the traditional roles that people from each tribal group or caste have played in this area for centuries and that were codified through royal decree (the royal family and its ministers are Hindu) in the early 1800s: the midlanders form a trade link with the Buddhist highlanders, whom the Hindus look down on as beer-drinking cow eaters. 

The highlanders of Dolpo, who live by farming, and by raising sheep, goats, and most importantly yaks, traditionally traded salt, which they caravanned by yaks over the Himalaya from Tibet to trade with the Nepali midlanders.  For the people of Dolpo, this trade compensated for their inability to grow enough grain in the district’s harsh, arid mountains.  So the salt trade formed a major part of their economic cycle until the 1960s when an economic and geo-political squeeze conspired to dramatically limit that trade and greatly reduce its importance.  From the south, expanding trade brought cheap salt imported from India to most parts of Nepal.  In the north, the Chinese rulers of Tibet periodically closed the border even to these local traders despite a 20 kilometer trade zone that is supposed to allow free movement of people, goods, and herds.  On top of that, the Chinese government imposed market controls that made the salt trade less lucrative for traders from Dolpo.

Finally, we climbed the steps to Dhan Bahadur’s house, took off our shoes, and sat on cushions that ringed the living room.  His wife brought tea and the police captain, with whom we talked earlier, came by.  Then a Buddhist monk with wild long black hair, a thin moustache and bearded chin sat with us.  The conversation was all in Nepali, but I sat listening intently and when Charla, Laurie, or Purna had a chance, they whispered brief comments to tell me what the conversation was about.  Or the ever gracious Dhan Bahadur said a few words to me in broken English.

The monk was an amchi—a Tibetan Buddhist herbal doctor—and the brother of Tenzin Norbu, the famous painter monk portrayed in the movie Himalaya.  Dhan Bahadur’s wife, a thin woman with long black hair and bright eyes, brought more food.  The town’s gasoline generator was running so we had electric lights.  We offered Dhan Bahadur some gifts that he accepted with smiles but which he didn’t open.  As I listened, they discussed Nepal’s political crisis and lack of development in the area.  It was getting late, and he offered to take us to the best restaurant in Dunai, which of course is just down the street.  The restaurant had beers and a menu, but the kitchen was nothing more that an open-fired brick oven and two kerosene burners. The place was being reconstructed so the ceiling was propped up with poles and the floor was rubble.  Around 8 p.m., Dhan Bahadur said that he had to go but that he would see us later at the party.  As we ate, we wondered what party he was talking about, how it would take to buy what we needed in Dunai—permits, food, kerosene—and if we would ever get going on the trek.

Do you want to dance?

We walked through the dark to our hotel, but the hotel grounds­—a pasture really—was alight with a huge bonfire and the place was full of men, soldiers, and a few women. At the center were the musicians and Komal Oli, the folksinger from the cultural show.  She and an army captain were singing:  He sang an improvised rhyming insult, and she answered with a rhyming retort.  The crowd was dancing to the lilting music and clapped encouragement to the singers. The man sang:

         “You have such beautiful long black hair.
         Where did it come from? The market in Nepalganj?”  

To which she responded

         "Who was the beautiful woman in your car?
         It couldn’t have been your wife, so it must have been your sister.”
While they danced with the music supplied by men playing a hand-held harmonium and a drum, the crowd applauded and laughed at the ingenuity, irony, and spiciness of the original lyrics.  In a place of honor near the fire, Dhan Bahadur sat in a chair next to another official.  But that official did not sit much because he loved to dance.  With his middle-age paunch and stiff movements, he wasn’t the best dancer by any means, but the soldiers and other men always gave this official wide berth as he danced and pranced around the fire, sometimes alone, sometimes with the female singer.

As I looked at the crowd, I realized a huge number of the district capital’s governmental officials along with many of the region’s army and police officers sat watching or dancing.  This made me wonder about security.  There were no guards.  The hotel compound stood at the base of a forested ridge at the end of town. Guard posts were bunkered into the hills at the other end of town, but this part of town seemed unprotected.  For Maoists to attack would have been easy.  They controlled the highlands around town.  They controlled the countryside.  A single well-placed mortar could have wiped out all the governmental leaders for the region.  A truce between the government and the Maoists had ended just days before we left Kathmandu, and since then the Maoists had attacked garrisons in towns near Nepal’s second largest city, Pokhara, so a new attack here in Dunai was clearly within their capabilities.  The night was moonless and the darkness beyond the light of the bonfire was complete.  Still, no one seemed the least concerned. 

As the soldiers dance, I wondered how it could be that when the Maoists overran this town in 2000 that the town’s little bank, which they looted, held 50 million rupees (that’s over a million dollars).  That such a huge sum of money was stored in the little bank was curious, but even more strange, a helicopter brought the cash to Dunai just two days before the Maoists attacked, and the army garrison stationed just outside of town, did not enter the fight because the government had not authorized them to do so.

And I wondered how this conflict would ever end. According to the Kathmandu newspapers (there were two papers in English), the Maoist leader, Prachanda, was refusing to compromise: he insisted that the government be controlled by the proletariat, that there be a constitutional assembly, and that the king step down. King Gyanendra came to power in 2001, after the son of his brother, King Birendra, assassinated the royal family and then committed suicide during a drunken, drug addled ramage.  This bizarre tragedy rocked the mountain kingdom to its core. Birendra had been a relatively popular figure and throughout the country in homes, offices, restaurants, and teahouses the royal family’s photograph was proudly displayed.  The king was considered a reincarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu (the Supreme Being), especially in the rural areas where most Nepalis live, and although the monarchy’s popularity was waning, Nepalis generally had supported the 240 year-old monarchy headed by King Birendra, who had allowed Nepal to become a parliamentary democracy in the early 1990s.

With this assassination, rumors and doubts abounded: Why did the crown prince massacre his family?  Was it drugs and alcohol, or was he angry because his mother did not want him to marry a woman from the wrong caste? Had Gyanendra encouraged his nephew to slaughter the royal family so he could become king?  Why hadn’t Gyanendra attended the regular family gathering—an event that everyone else in the royal family attended and that he was scheduled to attend? The new king, who many considered a heartless businessman and whose drunken son had recently run over a much admired Nepali movie star, quickly lost popular support when he arrogantly dismissed the parliament and seized absolute control of the government. Even though the Maoists controlled eighty percent of the country, Gyanendra thought he could win the civil war by closing down Nepal’s nascent democracy. Through his bluster, he made it clear that he thought he could defeat the Maoists, especially with military aid flowing from the U.S. government. Although the Maoist threat was real here in Dunai, I had to wonder if somehow the regional officials had bought off the Maoists, bribed them not to attack again, or had reached their own agreement, separate from the national authorities. 

With her hands, the singer beckoned to me to dance.  I’m a stiff, unpracticed dancer, but despite my doubts, I entered the ring the audience formed around the fire and tried to dance enthusiastically with the famous singer by attempting to imitate the Nepalis, who expertly and expressively dance with fingers pointed, hands waving, and bodies swaying in stylized motions similar to what you might see in an Indian movie. I danced, pranced, and waved my arms, but my efforts felt unimaginatively stilted. Still, the crowd appreciated my humble efforts, and the onlookers clapped to cheer me on.  Dhan Bahadur thanked me for my dancing.  Men requested to dance with me and I obliged for a while, but grew tired and finally had to sit down.

Bottles of strong, clear local liquor, arag were passed around.  Many of the men were getting drunk.  It was nearly midnight when the musicians packed up their instruments and Komal Oli, her voice worn out from a day and now a night of singing, said she had to stop.  We were hoping for an early start the next day so we headed to bed as men continued to drink around the dying fire.

 

Aphrodisiacs over tea

In the morning, we met Dhan Bahadur at his house, where the ceremonial process of drinking tea again commenced. His wife served tea and more tea, then a breakfast of soup plus flat, home-made bread.  The monk amchi arrived so the ceremony started over again with more tea.  Dr. Namgyal Rinpoche is an amchi, a Tibetan doctor who uses his knowledge of medicinal herbs and the spirit world to cure disease. When people in the area get sick, they seek his aid, and he’s able to treat many ailments, but when people have illnesses he cannot treat or when they have broken bones, he sends the patient to the little clinic in Dunai, which was staffed with a couple of nurses or medics and financed by European non-governmental agencies. He established amchi schools at his monastery in Do Tharap, 30 miles up river from Dunai, and in Sumdo, a small village through which we would travel if we could ever get out of Dunai.  Later that day, he was returning to his gompa (monastery) Ribo Bumpa Gompa, and he invited us to accompany him. Delighted by the opportunity to travel with a lama visit his monastery, I started to accept the invitation, but Charla reminded us that we are not going that direction, and politely declined. Although disappointed, I knew we should follow our plan.

The conversation turned to yartsa gumbu, a strange combination of a caterpillar and a mushroom that grows on the grassy slopes of the Himalaya between 13 and 16,000 feet (4000 - 4800 meters).  Locals harvest and sell it to contractors, like Dhan Bahadur, who transport it to Tibet where they sell it to the Chinese for $2000 per kilo.  While Purna frantically wrote notes, I tried to confirm—over $1000 per pound.  Yes, Dhan Bahadur and the amchi concurred.  Why does it bring such a high price?  Dhan Bahadur told me it makes men strong —it relieves joint pain, makes you feel energized, but most importantly it works as an aphrodisiac. 

He retrieved a handful from a back room and passed it around.  The yartsa gumbu, which in Tibetan means “summer grass, winter insect,” looked like a desiccated, light yellowish brown worm or root. Some were up to six inches long, others were shorter.  The weird combination of an animal and mushroom formed in the spring, after the monsoon rains started, when a species of the gold and black tiger (lepidopera) moth that only lives in the Himalaya laid its eggs on high grassy slopes. After its eggs hatched out as larva, which live in the turf, fungal spores from the mushroom  (cordyceps sinensis)  spread by the wind parasitized the larva, ate them from the inside, then grew back up through the living larva’s body to reemerge as a small mushroom. 

On a good day, a young agile person can pick 20 or even 25 per day, which they find because the yartsa gumbu wiggles in the turf. They then can sell each piece for about the equivalent of a dollar—this in a country where laborers regularly earn one dollar per day if they can find work and where much of the economy is based on barter. While the “herb” grows throughout much of the Tibetan Himalaya, including areas in Eastern Tibet, India, Bhutan, and Nepal, the yartsa gumbu growing in Dolpo fetches the highest price—it’s consistently the biggest and therefore considered the most potent.  This trade, which has grown over the last thirty or forty years, has transformed the economy of the area, which had foundered because of China’s trade restrictions. These days, over 20,000 people from the lowlands troop to Dolpo in the spring, when the monsoon starts, where they can earn $200 to$1500 in a season.

Despite the fantastic price, Dhan Bahadur complained that the Chinese were exploiting the market and selling the aphrodisiac for huge profits in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Korea, and Taiwan.  So, he wanted to find a way to keep the profit here in Nepal by processing the product locally. This, he said, is the best hope for emerging out of the rural poverty and stagnation that plague the region. The amchi agreed, but he was concerned that too many people were coming to the area for the harvest and that these people not only strained the local’s ability to provide for the visitors but the large numbers of diggers were harming the highland environment. Japanese scientists have perfected a method to cultivate yartsa gumbu, and they tried to convince locals to buy into their technique, but the product was inferior to the natural and so few people in Dolpo had bothered with that.

With so much money passing hands, the Nepali government became involved.  Through the 1990s, it banned harvesting yartsa gumbu in accordance with fears that over-harvesting would cause the moth population to collapse, but that did not make sense because the larvae would have died before becoming a reproducing adult whether people collected them or not. So, the government levied a high tax on it.  Ironically, Dhan Bahadur, a government official, did not pay tax to the government, which in 2002 pulled its troops and forestry department officials out of the area except for those in Dunai. Instead he paid a lower tax to the Maoists, who threatened to kill anyone who didn’t pay.  Once the harvest started, Dhan Bahadur planned to send 50 contractors into the field to buy from the collectors.  Then, traveling by horse, he would transport the yartsa gumbu over a 5400 meter (18,000 feet) pass and into Tibet, where he would meet Chinese buyers.

Dhan Bahadur said he had tried it by crushing it into a powder and mixing it in milk. At first it made him feel sleepy, but later, after taking it for a few days, he began to feel “perk up,” but it works best if you take it for longer than a week or. Yartsa gumbu, the amchi said, is not a traditional medicine that Tibetans use.  Rather it is a Chinese medicine that the locals harvest because they need money more than they need an aphrodisiac. I considered asking Dhan Bahadur for a couple pieces to test, but I decided not to.  Our little expedition really didn’t need to deal with a horny old man. Besides, to keep my prostate cancer in check, I had taken a four-month dose of a drug that suppressed my production of testosterone, and I was apprehensive about the yartsa gumbu disrupting that treatment. Even though the treatment left me feeling sexless, unenergetic, and overly emotional, and sometimes gave me hot flashes as if I were a menopausal woman, I wanted that treatment to work. If it worked, doctors said I had 10 to 15 years to live.  If it didn’t, the prognosis was grim. The yartsa gumbu might have briefly overcome all those side effects but I didn’t feel like experimenting.

More tea came and I took advantage of the lull in the conversation to ask the amchi to bless my turquoise and sandalwood Buddhist prayer beads, which I had just bought in Kathmandu.  He looked at me with a suspicious eye—as if wondering why a foreigner like me would want him to bless Buddhist beads, but he agreed, so I handed them over.  He cupped them in his hands, chanted a five-minute mantra, rubbed them in his hands and blew on them, rubbed another section, blew some more and when he had done this to the whole string of 108 beads—one for each of the manifestations of the Buddha—he cupped them in his hands again and chanted another mantra.  The room went silent.  He handed the beads back to me with a smile.   I thanked him and offered him 100 rupees (two dollars), which he accepted.  Then Purna made a similar request.

Charla began fidgeting, concerned about the time, and rightly so.  Because it was well after 9 a.m. the stores would be open, so we sent Gelbu to buy the food and kerosene we needed while Dhan Bahadur accompanied us to the army barracks.  There, we met the troupe of actors, musicians, and singers on their way to a waiting helicopter that would ferry them back to Nepalganj.  As they left, a soldier escorted us to an inner courtyard, where the district administrator met us. He was none other than the paunchy, middle-aged, balding man with a beak nose who danced around the fire and with Komal Oli the night before.  As we introduced ourselves and exchanged business cards, an army private served tea. I was getting tired of the seemingly endless tea ceremonies and palaver, but Laurie reminded me this was an important part of the culture, so I smiled and kept drinking while the administrator told us about his plans to develop the district, one of Nepal’s poorest.  

His plans hinged on developing yak and livestock production, developing herbal medicine production and markets—especially yartsa gumbu, and developing tourism.  To do this, he said, he was working with officials in Kathmandu to reduce the $700 per person permit fees the government was requiring to enter the area.  He wanted us to have a successful journey so we would promote the area to the outside world. Then the police captain arrived and escorted us to his office where we drank yet more tea and discussed our route.

Our planned route was ambitious, he said in English, although he had never left the town because the threat of being attacked or captured by Maoists was too great.  In fact, he told us, the military had completely pulled out of the area two years before, and they had no contacts in the region.  All the government supporters and officials had fled. If anything happened, whether we got sick, sprained an ankle, fell off a cliff, or encountered Maoist insurgents, we would have to deal with the situation as best we could, and we could not expect any help from the government, the national police, or the armed forces.  With a not so reassuring smile, he told us that he thought we would be all right, took our passports, copied our names into an official ledger, and said we were free to go whenever we were ready.

Laurie asked if he could give us an official permit.  He answered that we would not need one because no government officials were in the area to check the permits.  Besides, he said, if the Maoists found us with a permit, they might think we were traveling with government support, so we would travel more safely without one. We did not find this information exactly reassuring, but we were glad we could finally get started.

He wished us good luck and a private escorted us through the concertina wire fortifications of the command post, through the rows of whitewashed barracks, and to the gate that opened to the town square. We were now completely on our own.

Trust the porters?

Back at the Blue Sheep Hotel, the porters were distributing loads, with Gelbu and Nora overseeing the process.  Gelbu had selected five porters:  it was a motley crew wearing tattered clothes, greasy thread-bare black cotton jackets that looked like sport coats, various types of wool hats or turbans, and all with flip-flop sandals or broken down tennis shoes. Judging from their clothes, we gathered that these men were from the central highlands below Dunai and Juphal. Only Tashi—whom Gelbu had selected earlier to be his assistant—had a friendly smile and showed actual interest in helping.  He, like Gelbu, spoke Nepali and Tibetan, but he spoke very little English.  Charla and Laurie, with Gelbu’s help, negotiated the terms.  We had thought that we would provide food, but the porters insisted they wanted to bring their own.  This would cost us more, but would mean less of a logistic problem for us as long as they actually brought the food they needed.  We wanted to pay 250 rupees per day plus provide food, but they wanted more money so we agreed to pay 300 rupees per man per day (about $7).  They all assured us that they had good clothes and were ready to haul our gear to the high mountains, agreed that Gelbu was the boss, and promised that they could make the return trip on their own without problem.

Still, we were not exactly pleased with our crew, whose surly attitude was apparent behind their obsequious smiles and kowtowing. At this point, however, Laurie and Charla assured me that we really had little choice.  Dhan Bahadur had recommended Nora as a trustworthy sort so we couldn’t just fire him and his crew. That would cause Dhan Bahadur to lose face. Plus, if we fired these guys, we had no way of knowing if we could find others to make this trek. We figured the trek, which was starting here in Dunai and ending on the other side of the Dhaulagiri Himal in Jomsom, would take us at least another 20 days, and that the return trip would take the porters another ten days, for a total of around 30 days.  Because the rainy season was due to begin in just a few weeks, most able men had fields to tend and plant.  Finding people who had a month of free time wasn’t easy.  Besides, we had to get going. 

So in an effort to keep the porters’ loads as light as possible, along with our own clothes and sleeping bags, we stuffed our backpacks with as much group food and gear as we could stand to haul.  Still, all the kerosene, rice, wheat, spices, sauces, candy, cooking pots and utensils, stove, tents, and tarps made a huge load, which meant each porter had to carry about forty to fifty pounds.  I suggested we hire one or two more porters and we considered this, but Nora told Charla that we had enough porters and finding more would take too much time.  So in the end, we let Gelbu and Nora figure out the best way to distribute the load, and decided we would take our time for the first few days.  As we progressed, we reasoned, we would eat the food, and the loads would become more manageable. 

Compared to the trekking expeditions commonly seen in the Himalaya, we were traveling light.  Outfitted expeditions treat their tourists to fancy food that includes fresh eggs and meat, exquisitely large expedition tents, a toilet tent, a large cook tent, numerous stoves for cooking and heating wash water, huge amounts of fuel, foam mattresses, and satellite phones for emergencies. We had none of that.  For the three weeks, we would consume the rice, lentils, potatoes, flat bread, and tea that Gelbu made for us with supplies and the single-burner stove we hauled. We might be able to augment our diet with some yak meat, which we hoped to buy in the villages we passed.  Aside from food and fuel we also had to haul shelter.  Charla had a comfortable tent for her and Laurie.  I carried the small borrowed tent that Gelbu and I would share.  The cook shelter was roomy enough for three porters.  Purna and Shuvas would have to find houses to stay in for the next three days they planned to accompany us, and we hoped the porters would also find suitable shelter in the small farm communities where we planned to spend each night. 

The weather was fair and getting hot as noon approached.  Our backpacks were loaded and ready to go.  In the pasture, where the night before we partied and danced, the porters were sorting, packing, and distributing the food, getting it ready to pack into their four-foot tall wicker dhokas.  It seemed they were making slow although steady progress to get ready.  However, when I saw Gelbu and a porter emptying plastic bags of cooking oil into used plastic pop bottles, I said we had to go. 

Charla and I left first.  Laurie, Shuvas, and Purna walked slowly behind us gabbing.  Shuvas invited his nephew—a high school student on vacation—to accompany us and he trotted along excited to be with his uncle.   People travel around the world to go trekking in Nepal, but most city-dwelling Nepalis would hardly consider going on a hike.  This was the first time these three Nepalis had gone trekking.  We told Gelbu we were leaving, and he said he would stay behind to make sure all our supplies were packed and that the porters left town on the correct trail. 

As we walked for the last time over the flat, white rocks that formed the pathway through town, I wondered about twenty years from now, when a road finally arrives here.  It will be interesting to see how they get anything wider than a jeep through the town’s single lane path.  But that was not our worry.  Instead, I was trying to get used to the 35 or 40 pound pack on my back and the shoulder straps that strained my shoulders. I was wondering how I would hold up carrying this much weight for over two weeks.  And, of course, I was worrying about encountering Maoists, and I was worried about the trail.  The previous night during dinner, Laurie told a story about a Peace Corps supervisor who was walking up this trail to visit a volunteer when she stepped off the trail, tumbled down the steep hillside, and was knocked unconscious by the fall.  It took two days to get her down to Dunai, and a day to get a helicopter.  She regained consciousness but the whack to her head left her with an impaired memory.  Mostly, however, I worried about the police chief’s comment that we are completely on our own—I wondered out loud if the authorities were sending us to the highlands merely to see what the Maoists would do with us. Charla said she was wondering about that too.

The trail led through the outskirts of town, through some pastures and fields, and to the confluence of the Thuli Bheri River and the Suli Gad River, which we followed upstream.  As we walked at a leisurely pace to make sure everyone would catch up, the dry canyon walls sparsely covered with a drought-stunted juniper forest gave way to a lush mixed forest with an over-story of magnificently large juniper, pine and spruce and a dense under-story of brush.

After an hour of hiking along the rushing river, we came to a sign announcing we were entering the Shey-Phoksumdo National Park.  A little further along we entered a small village that had an office for the park, where we encountered a Nepali wearing the usual worn out clothes. He stopped us, introduced himself as the park warden for the area, and insisted we pay another fee.  I thought, after spending a week in Kathmandu procuring permits, that we had bought all the permits we could ever need. Charla argued we already had permits and we pulled out the official papers with our photos attached that we obtained in Kathmandu.  Yes, yes, the man agreed but shook his head.  That’s the national government permit. There’s also a local fee.  Thankful that he did not ask us to drink more tea, I pulled out three 1000 rupee notes from one of my money stashes to pay for us foreigners. 

As I impatiently watched the guard write our names in his ledger, a process that seemed to take hours because he could not decipher our names in the English script of our passports, Gelbu, Tashi, and Nora arrived with the five porters strung out behind them.  We headed on while they rested.  The trail became even more narrow and steep.  Although generally easy enough to find, it was a difficult trail that was strewn with uneven rocks and that snaked around boulders. Sometimes it paralleled the river, but to pass cliffs or wherever there was not flat ground alongside the river, the trail climbed up the ridge and through the lush forest; then instead of remaining high, it dove steeply back down to the river.  It was, after all, a trail built by hand, without the aid of dynamite.

As we trudged on, clouds built, the temperature fell, and the sky turned gray.  At first, the fine drizzle provided a comfortable way to cool off after a hot morning.  Soon, however, the drizzle turned to steady rain.  The trail became wet, slippery and sloppy.  We stopped to wait for the porters because we wanted to make sure they had a way to protect themselves and our supplies from the rain.  Gelbu came up and said he had bought some plastic to distribute, but no one knew where the sheet of plastic was.  So we rooted around in the porters’ whicker dhokas until we found it.  As we were cutting the sheets, I tried to get the slowest porter, a six-footer nearly as tall as me—a man with a coal-dark narrow face, a black turbine, sneering smile, and a proud demeanor—to give some of the weight he was carrying to the other porters. This insulted him and he turned surly.  But I persisted, and with Gelbu’s somewhat reluctant help, I got the porter to give up some of the weight he was carrying.  This didn’t exactly win points with the other porters.

Then, as we were adding some weight to Nora’s pack and getting ready to cover it, I discovered two liter bottles of beer near the top.  “Where did this come from?  Why are you packing beer?” I asked, angry that he was carrying beer instead of the gear we hired him to haul.  This lead porter, who had pestered us since we hired him in Juphal, insisted that Dhan Bahadur had given it to him.  I was ready to dash the bottles on the rocks or drink it all there myself, but Nora looked at me with such sad eyes and Gelbu looked at me with such worry, that I realized we had no choice but to let Nora bring the beers along.

Meanwhile, two boys came tripping down the trail carrying long bamboo fishing poles and a nice sized, gray trout still squirming in their basket.  Purna and Shuvas immediately started to negotiate with the boys and agreed on a price.  It was a big fish and I said, “We’re going to eat well tonight,” but as the boys handed the fish over to Shuvas, it slipped through their hands, hit the ground and somehow managed to bounce, then jump into the water between some rocks on the edge of the rushing river.  The boys tried to regain their catch, but it disappeared in the current. We gave them the money we had agreed on, and they happily continued down the trail, while Gelbu and I went back to cutting sheets of plastic for each porter.  Loads, shoulders and heads covered, we continued up the now slippery trial—if it wasn’t wet slippery rock, it was slick mud. 

The loads, however, were now a little more evenly distributed. The porters, despite their grumbling about the difficult trail, were making good time, and they were protected from the rain, which had turned to a cold, steady downpour.  The underbrush and thick forest of tall pines, firs, and junipers all covered with moss revealed that this was a wet place.  I wondered what the rainy season would be like if this was the dry season. As the day turned to a soggy evening, I worried that the rain would bring out the leeches, inch worm-like devils that hang from the brush waiting for a warm body to pass, latch onto you, then engorge themselves with your blood. You can pull them off, but their bites bleed until you rub salt into them, and still they can itch for days.  I was relieved that we only found a couple on our clothes rather than having bloody socks and itching ankles.

We trudged on through the rain. I asked Charla where we would find shelter for all the porters in this storm.  She said not to worry; a campsite was upriver and we should get there by dark.  She wasn’t worried about shelter; however, she was worried about Nora. Earlier, she thought that she had recognized him from her last trek through Lower Dolpo, but after seeing him with the bottles of beer she felt certain he was the porter who instigated problems: he was a drunk who could not stay sober at night and who during the day spread rumors and trouble among the porters.  Wishing she had mentioned this earlier, I suggested we fire him on the spot, but she said we couldn’t do that.  He was the lead porter and if we fired him the other porters would leave with him.

All this reminded me of trouble with porters Peter Matthiessen reported his The Snow Leopard.  In September, 1973, he accompanied wildlife biologist George Schaller, who traveled though Dolpo to study the blue sheep that inhabit the high country. In his still widely read memoir, he consistently complained about problems with porters, who were difficult to hire, who would only go as far as they wanted to each day, who kept demanding more money, who were ill-prepared for the high country, and who ultimately abandoned him when the going became difficult. 

Glory to the Revolution
            As we climbed up the river trail, settlements thinned out so we rarely saw even a farmhouse or field.  The few people we met on the trail seemed uninterested in us, and unlike people in other parts of Nepal they kept their heads down as they passed us, barely returning the greeting of “namaste” —a traditional greeting used throughout much of Nepal that means “I salute you/I wish you peace.”  Perhaps they didn’t want the Maoist cadres who controlled the area to think they were associating with foreigners; perhaps they weren’t used to foreigners and strangers; perhaps people in these parts didn’t customarily say “namaste.”  The thickening forest accompanied by the dark rain and the locals’ unfriendly bearing all made me worry even more about encountering Maoists.

This worry increased as we progressed up the river gorge and the trail led past recently painted Maoist graffiti:  hammers and sickles painted red on flat rocks accompanied by slogans taken from Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book.  Purna and Shuvas translated: “Without socialization of agriculture, there can be no complete socialism.”  “In a class society, everyone is stamped with the brand of a class.” “Whoever sides with the revolutionary people is a revolutionary.” “The enemy will not perish of himself.”

These slogans reminded me of the late 1960s when Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book became popular among some of the most radical anti Viet Nam war protestors in the U.S. As an anti-war protestor, activist, and conscientious objector to the war, I knew a few radicals who trumpeted the Maoist line and who went to anti-war rallies chanting, “Mao, Mao, Mao Tse-tung. Mao, Mao, Mao Tse-tung,” while waving their little red books in time with the chant, just as millions of young Red Guards were doing in China.  That kind of rhetoric and one-dimensional thinking never appealed to me, it certainly did not go over with most Americans.

Charla walked ahead of me and the rest of our expedition trailed behind.  So I trudged up the steep, slippery trail alone in the rain thinking about the Maoist graffiti.  It seemed incredibly anachronistic 15 years after the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union but more pertinently considering the rampant capitalism and consumerism that have overtaken China’s economy since the mid-1990s. 

More troubling, it was difficult to understand how the people of this Tibetan Buddhist area of Nepal could want to associate with anyone describing themselves as Maoists considering the bloodshed and horrific history of China’s “liberation” of Tibet in the 1950s and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.  Then, the Red Guard—radical groups of Chinese youth, supported by the Chinese army—did everything possible to destroy traditional culture throughout China by attacking “the four olds”:  the old customs, the old culture, the old habits, and the old ideas.  The destruction, however, was particularly fierce in Tibet where they looted and destroyed monasteries—sometimes even using army artillery to shell the buildings, burned sacred texts and thangkas, forced monks and nuns to marry and even copulate in public, executed lamas, and used thousand-year-old temples as pig sties. Only a few monasteries, like the Potala Palace in Lhasa (the Dalai Lama’s winter home and the seat of Tibetan government), were spared.  These political upheavals, coupled with forced collectivization of farms and herds along with a benighted policy that forced nomads to plant wheat rather than raise animals in the high, arid pasturelands of Tibet, caused hundreds of thousands—some say millions—of Tibetans to starve or die because of political strife.  The cataclysm sent streams of Tibetan refugees into Nepal, and many of those refugees traveled the very same trail we were trekking.

That stream of refugees devastated Dolpo’s economy by causing two problems. First, the Dolpa-pa (inhabitants of Dolpo, pa means “people” in Tibetan) had no reserves of food to help their Tibetan brothers so they had no good way to deal with the food shortages caused by the influx of people.  Second, the refugees brought their yak herds across the high passes into Nepal, but the sparse pastures of the highlands of Dolpo could not support additional animals. Thus, hundreds of the Dolpa-pa’s animals, along with the Tibetan’s animals, died of starvation. Then, because their pastures were so severely overgrazed, the Dolpa-pa had to sell off large numbers of their remaining sheep, goats, and yak for extremely low prices. Even now, the yak herds in Dolpo are much smaller than they were before 1960.

As we walked through the persistent rain, Shuvas, Purna and I discussed all this.  Shuvas was a supporter and wanted a revolution. The ten-year-old democracy in Nepal was not working, especially for the untouchables and other minorities, who were continually marginalized, mistreated, and ignored by the majority.  But I asked, how could you have a revolution without a bloodbath similar to what happened in China?  Shuvas was sure that they could learn from the mistakes of the past and that the Nepali Maoists didn’t want a “cultural revolution.”  They just wanted an economic revolution.  I was taken back to the 1960s and my desire to see a world revolution that would topple capitalism, that would end racial injustice, and that would bring peace and freedom to all.   Now, however, the idealism of my youth was smothered in comfortable middle age and I told Shuvas this.  He smiled and said that I would see that idealism reborn.  As we climbed though the dense forest and the rainy fog, I shuddered each time we met someone on the trail and expected that at any moment we would encounter that idealism at the point of a machete or an AK47.

The river cascaded through a densely forested gorge and so we climbed steeply, then more steeply still as the trail followed the rushing torrent of a tributary.   At sunset, just as Charla promised, we arrived at a thatched roof, stonewalled farmhouse built so a cliff face formed one wall of the house.  Purna, Shuvas, the cousin, and the porters could sleep in the house’s smoky loft—smoky because like most houses in the region it had no chimney. Since most cooking was done over a fire on a clay hearth in the corner of the house’s main room, smoke from the kitchen fire filled the room, then found its way through the thatch roof, which is not healthful for the inhabitants, especially women, who often suffer from chronic respiratory disease because of the smoke. On a grassy flat below the house, we set up our two tents. In a side room full of sacks of barley, Gelbu lit our pressurized kerosene lantern and the kerosene stove. Soon he had hot tea for us, and that hot tea tasted damn good even though I thought I had drunk enough tea for a lifetime earlier that day in Dunai.  We were all cold, wet and hungry.  Getting dinner together took forever because no one knew what porter’s wicker dhoko carried.  Finally, Gelbu and Tashi finished cooking the traditional Nepali meal of dhal bhaat—rice with curried lentils—which warmed us, filled us, and even tasted great, proving again that hunger makes the best sauce.

The Forest Dark and Deep

The next day dawned soggy and gray, but the rain that continued for most of the night had stopped.  Tashi delivered hot tea to our tents along with his broad smile and our breakfast of oatmeal was soon ready.  Nora and the porters cooked their own breakfast over a smoky little fire—just tea.  I was concerned they weren’t getting enough food, but Charla reassured me that Nepalis don’t like a big meal early in the morning.  Instead they would stop around 10 or 11 A.M.  and make a pot of dhal bhaat, which would see them through the day.  Nora tried to help me fold up my tent but he was still drunk and hung over from drinking his beers and the chang (locally made barley or millet beer) he bought from the family at whose house we were staying.  So I asked him to go get his own stuff together. 

We loaded up the wet tents and camp gear while the porters repacked their loads, and we headed up through the dense forest, wet with the night’s rain.  The day cleared and grew steamy.  The trail crossed then re-crossed the river with slippery wet, wooden cantilevered bridges.  Sometimes our map correctly showed these crossings.  Sometimes it didn’t and showed the trail on the opposite side of the river from where it actually went.  Gelbu had a good sense for the right trail. So, we gave up trying to follow the map and followed him instead.

The trail was a rough one, in turns muddy then rocky. At times, the trail followed the river bed and stayed flat and easy. Most of the time, however, it led up steep switchbacks that crested on a ridge hundreds of feet above the river only to plunge down more steep switchbacks to the river.  This was trail building at its finest.   At one cliff face, people had jammed poles into cracks in the rock to form beams over which they laid sticks, boards, flat rocks, then dirt to form a scaffold about ten feet above the raging river.  The trail was just wide enough for a horse or yak with its load.  At first I feared the rickety affair would collapse beneath my feet, but after a few tentative steps, I felt assured, even surprised, by the scaffold’s sturdiness.  Charla, of course, trouped across this cliff-face catwalk as if it were a level sidewalk at home in the U.S. Laurie, after a little reassurance, made it fine, but I secretly worried that if the trail was this difficult down low, it would surely be doubly difficult up high.

As we climbed, the views of forested mountains gave way to snow-covered summits, and the downriver breeze turned cold despite the sunny weather.  We stopped at a farmhouse for a break, and while the wife made us some good, hot tea, Charla discussed the trail with the owner.  He had made our trek many times before and knew all the rest spots, how much time it took to get from one point to the next, and seemed like a friendly, helpful, responsible sort, unlike Nora.  Charla and Laurie tried to convince him to come with us, and at first he seemed somewhat agreeable, but when our troop of porters straggled into his farm compound, his attitude changed and he said he’d see how his field work went.  If he had time, he would catch up with us.

When we asked about the Maoists, he reported cadres had recently traveled through the area, but now they were gone.  When they would come back he didn’t know for sure, but he thought they would probably return soon because they went to the high country in this season to gather yartsa gumbu and to collect tolls from the collectors.  He didn’t know if we’d encounter any cadres on the trail but thought maybe we would.

This elicited the usual discussion about how to handle the Maoists.  At this point, I was sure that saying we were Americans could really get us in trouble, so I half-seriously argued that I would say I was from Mexico and speak Spanish.  Charla and Laurie still said they would prefer to tell the truth but they would see how things went. Shuvas and Purna hoped to meet the cadres but had no advice about what we should tell the insurgents and doubted they could help us.  The farmer said the cadres all had guns.

Early afternoon found us at a narrow gorge of yellow cliffs over a small flat.  Here the trail led to a cantilevered bridge built from flat stones placed so their weight allowed the stones to reach across the river, and when the pile of stones closed the gap across the river, the span was completed with logs.  The bridge stood about twenty feet over the river. 

Under a cliff that formed an overhang, Gelbu stopped and readied the kitchen to prepare lunch. After unpacking the whole kitchen and setting up the stove, he boiled water for rice and fried soft flat bread made from wheat flour and water—nan.  An hour later, Laurie, Shuvas, Purna, and his nephew finally caught up with us. By then lunch was nearly ready.  We ate and chatted in the sun.   Laurie reported the porters were spread out far behind us in two groups making their afternoon dinner. 

            Despite the beautifully deep blue green pools in the river, the large junipers and pines, the warm sun, and the fresh clear breeze, Charla and I worried about our slow pace.  The hot, luxurious lunch was a real pleasure, but setting up the kitchen and preparing the food had taken Gelbu well over an hour. At this rate, we feared we would be traveling so slowly that we would run out of food. So we resolved to tell Gelbu we could not stop to prepare hot lunches each day.        Nora appeared and pleaded that the village where we wanted to stay was too far so he and the porters wanted to stop at a village just an hour up the trail.  A long discussion ensued. Even though our proposed destination for the night was just a three or four miles further up the trail, Charla could not convince Nora to go further than the next village which was about two miles away.  She did, however, get him to promise that he and his men would haul our gear up to Ringmo the next day.  We were all feeling a little muscle sore, so although disappointed we would not reach our goal for the day, I was glad to have a short day and the opportunity to dry my tent in the afternoon sun.  But we also knew that if we continued at this pace and hiked only five hours each day, our trek would extend far longer than we had planned.

I asked Laurie how she was doing.  Not well, she said.  She had blisters on her feet and her pack weighed too much.  Both Purna and Shuvas had borrowed large backpacks for this trip, and it looked like they were full, but still I asked if they could carry some of Laurie’s gear for just a day or two.  They happily agreed.  So we pulled stuff out of Laurie’s pack to add to their packs.  When I lifted their packs, I was astounded to find that although they looked full they weighed hardly anything.  They were packing just a few extra clothes for themselves.  So I grabbed even more clothes and books from Laurie’s backpack and stuffed the items into theirs. Now they not only looked full but they were full, and Laurie was able to walk a little faster.  At first I was angry that our Nepali friends were not carrying their fair share, especially given the heavy loads Charla, Laurie and I had.  As I walked on however, I remembered that these men had no experience with trekking and so they had no way of knowing that they could have been helping Laurie with her load.

That afternoon, we found a campsite across the river from a small village.  In the three-sided, stonewalled shelter built by the national park, Gelbu set up his kitchen as clouds blew past the snowy peaks that towered over the river valley.  We set up our tents and they dried in the cold breeze.  The porters and our Nepali friends found shelter in homes in the village.  The villagers who walked by our camp coming home from their fields or pastures with cows or dzos (a cross between a cow and a yak) barely would say hello, much less stop to have a conversation with us foreigners.

Gelbu and Tashi cooked dinner while I sat on smooth white boulders above the rushing stream that the Suli Gad River had become as we hiked towards its headwaters.  I took in the view of the 20,000 foot peaks above and wrote in my journal about the day’s events and sights; Charla and Laurie rested in their tent.  Laurie tended her blisters, and we were glad we had brought plenty of medical supplies for that. Tashi kept our teacups full and then brought us dinner.

As we sat by the river eating our dhal bhaat and nan, Charla, Laurie and I plotted strategies for dealing with our surly troop of unfit porters.  Charla was disappointed that Dhan Bahadur had recommended Nora—he had to have known he was a drunk. But we were stuck with him. Given how slow and ill-equipped he and the other porters were, we feared that the 16,000 to18,000 foot passes that stood ahead of us, where the night-time temperatures would surely fall well below freezing and where we would probably encounter snow, would prove too difficult for them and cause serious trouble, perhaps even death.  Given the way they insisted on stopping where they wanted for the night, rather than where we wanted, we feared we would have a small revolt if we pressed them. Given the cool reception they were receiving from people in the area, who were more Buddhist and less Hindu as we ascended, Charla feared the Buddhist highlanders of Upper Dolpo would refuse to deal with the mid-country, Hindu porters. Still, considering their pay and heavy loads, we really couldn’t fault them too much for being stubborn and slow.  Besides, we wanted to keep our employees at least somewhat happy so they wouldn’t complain that we were exploiting them if we met Maoist cadres.

We had to keep in mind that these poor Nepali porters had probably never portered like this before.  They were merely farmers used to carrying heavy loads from their homes to market.  From our point of view, however, they had made an agreement with us: at the end of the journey we would pay them a fair wage for this part of the world—a relatively generous wage really at 300 rupees per day (about $7)—and unlike most tourists, we were carrying heavy loads just like they were, although this did not seem to impress the porters in the least. 

After dinner, we asked Gelbu to sit with us and talk. Gray squalls covered the peaks above and the wind blew cold downriver as we sat discussing our concerns, alternating between Nepali and English. Gelbu agreed that these porters might cause problems, a comment which we took seriously because Sherpas generally tend to look at the positive side of things. But when he reported that Nora didn’t help much and that maybe he was drinking too much, we knew we had to shed the porters and find new ones somehow.

Earlier that day, Shuvas and I had discussed the differences between western and Nepali labor agreements.  In the West, he explained, contracts form the basis of labor agreements, which people enter into based on concepts of freedom and equality. In Nepal, however, the contract is different because the society is still feudal in many respects and divided by a strongly delineated caste system.  So, when the porters enter into an agreement with me, I become the boss.  I’m in control of everything.   And since the porters are below me in status, they can’t ask for all they want when they enter into the agreement—they feel that they do not have the power to do so or that asking for what they need may offend me.  So, from their point of view, the contractual agreement is a starting point—rather than an end of negotiations—and as we continue on in the relationship they will look for opportunities to ask for more.

At this isolated campsite across the river from a small farming community whose inhabitants showed no interest in us, there was nothing we could do to resolve our problem. So we  went to sleep hoping that in the morning Nora would be sober enough to help and that the men would be willing to move on to Ringmo. Although a small town, it offered our only hope for finding porters more suited to this rigorous trip or better still for hiring a yakman and his yaks. We reasoned that managing one man, who knew the trail and knew his yaks, would be far easier that managing a group of porters.  Plus, a yakman would be accustomed to the rigors of traveling in the high country. Of course, finding a yakman in Dunai or Juphal would have been preferable, but really we were lucky even to find our ragged crew of porters in that relatively low country.  If our porters refused to haul our gear up the steep 12 kilometer (7 mile) trail, which gained over 1000 meters (3280 feet) as it climbed up to Ringmo, we would have to deal with it somehow.  We just needed to get them and the gear up to Ringmo, and there we would see what we could find. 

On to Ringmo

The day dawned cloudy and cold. Although our tents were dry, the slopes a couple thousand feet above were frosted with new snow.  Tashi delivered tea and before I could get out of the sack, Gelbu brought breakfast.  I didn’t want to make Gelbu feel that he was my servant, so I got up, dressed, and took my plate full of food to the shelter where he set up his kitchen.  We ate and talked over the loud hiss of the pressurized kerosene stove, where Gelbu was boiling water for more tea and for washing dishes.  While we packed up our gear, Gelbu and Tashi washed all the dishes, packed the kitchen, then strolled over to help me finish pack and roll up my tent.  I was embarrassed that they were so efficient and I was so slow.  They rolled up my tent with such expertise and efficiency that I was still getting ready to help them by the time they finished.

Shuvas, Purna, and the nephew strolled up from the village all smiles.  They reported that the farmers were extremely friendly and accommodating.  They slept warm and dry, comfortable by the smoky fires in a loft with a family, and the family insisted on sharing breakfast tea and tsampa (roasted barley ground into flour) with them.  They left money for the family, but the family didn’t want to take it.  The hospitality and kindness of the country folk thoroughly surprised and delighted our friends from Kathmandu.  They extolled the virtues of their countrymen as our group of porters straggled across the bridge from the village.  We were glad to see that they were ready for another day of hauling.

By 7:30 Gelbu, Tashi, and the porters nearly had everything packed, so Charla and I, followed by Laurie and the others headed up the trail. We had an early start for once—a good sign because we had a steep trail ahead and at least seven hours of walking to reach Ringmo. Walking just a mile per hour is a pretty slow pace, and I was sure the locals could travel the distance in about a third the time.  But given the steep, rugged climb and the fact that altitude was beginning to become a factor, the slow pace seemed reasonable.  I trekked along happily, pleased to be moving up to the high country, thankful that I was able to keep up with the others, and relieved that we had the cooperation of the porters, at least for the moment.

As we gained altitude and the valley broadened, the forest thinned.  We passed families working their terraced fields where they planted potatoes, buckwheat, millet and barley, and after two hours we passed the school and village where we had wanted to stay the previous night.  A few students were in the schoolyard playing games. They waved to us as we passed, and we waved back, happy that finally some locals were willing to engage us. 

We stopped for an early lunch and tea at the medicinal herb farm, school, and the museum that amchi Namgyal Rinpoche told us about over breakfast at Dhan Bahadur’s house. Inside the building, we found a natural history museum with displays of dried plants and photographs showing the medicinal herbs used and cultivated in the region.  Outside the stone building, three monks were preparing seedbeds of fine, black soil for the herbs.  A teahouse across the trail supplied us with tea and dhal bhaat, and we bought packages of crackers and cookies to replenish our diminishing supply and to augment our lunch.  We shared cookies with the monks, who laughed when I spilled crumbs from the cookie bag down my chin and onto my sweater.  The porters arrived and made their lunch in the teahouse yard.

Meanwhile, Purna interviewed the monk in charge about sowa rigpa, the “science of healing.”  The amchis diagnose problems by checking the patient’s pulse or urine, and base their treatments on the balance between the three humors—wind, phlegm, and bile. Previously, amchis were trained as young children by their fathers or by monks, and while this training still continues, schools have been established to preserve and teach amchi knowledge.   This museum and herb farm, initially funded by the World Wildlife Fund and some European groups, serves that purpose.

After lunch, we headed up the trail.  The wind blew cold at our backs and except for a few stunted pines or junipers, we left the trees behind in the lower valley.  As we entered the rocky scrub-covered landscape, we passed two broken down stone buildings. Charla told us that those buildings used to house a national park guard post that the Maoists had bombed the year before.  The wind was cold and the place was desolate, so we hike on.

The trail became stair-step steep, just as Charla had promised.  Although it switch-backed up 2000 feet and the thin air at 11,000 feet made me feel out of breath, it was a relief to know we were finally gaining and maintaining elevation, unlike on the river trail below where we climbed and climbed to reach the top of a ridge only to lose elevation with steep descents back to the river.  Here, we climbed and climbed, and as we climbed out of the valley it became a deep gorge, beyond which appeared the high peaks of the 24,000 foot Kanji Roba Himal north of Ringmo.

We trudged up the mostly treeless ridge.  As we climbed higher, the roar of a tremendous waterfall grew louder.  Finally, we crested a point that offered a view of fantastic waterfall: Nepal’s either first or second tallest, depending on which authority you trust, as it cascaded through the gorge and down the thousand foot headwall that formed the dam for Lake Phoksumdo.  It was an improbable scene: the whole Suli Gad River seemed to gush from the mouth of a cave in the headwall and tumbled down a 900-foot waterfall. Wisps of vapor rose in the wind as the cascade blasted down the canyon walls.  Other smaller waterfalls sprung from caves tumbled down the cliff, and gaping mouths of caves where waterfalls had previously run pocked the cliff face across the gorge. 

We stopped to take in the view, and then trekked up the trail to the low pass above Ringmo that afforded a view of the small town, the pine and juniper forest, and the spectacularly blue lake. From this vantage point, we had a good view far down the trail we had just ascended, but the porters were nowhere to be seen. The climb and the stupendous views had energized me so much that I considered going back to find them, but the trail was so steep that I quickly dismissed this ambitious idea while reckoning that if the porters had bolted with our gear I would be hard pressed to catch up with them. So, I continued toward town, walking happily through a birch grove—the thin air sweet with the smell of the trees just beginning to bud out in the warm spring sun—and then a pine forest.

 Ringmo (12,000 feet)

As we approached the town of 40 or 50 stone houses, which from a distance looked like a medieval fortress, we passed a tumbled-down row of mani stones—flat stones inscribed with Buddhist prayers or scriptures—their inscriptions fading with age and covered with moss.  Then we came to a row of ancient stupas.  These 25-foot-tall monuments made of stone then covered with mud plaster were whitewashed and decorated with ocher paint.  The first cubical tier is about 10 feet tall and 15 feet square—it represents the earth; above that is a white, uneven dome, which represents the heavens; and that is protected by a roof made of flat rocks supported with wooden posts and beams once painted red.  Then above the roof stands a cubical platform that supports a round pillar, and the whole affair is crowned with a metal roof that comes to a peak, on top of which rests a ball—and all this represents the protection provided by Buddhism.  Grass grew from the rock roof, plaster peeled from the sides, and the ocher paint had faded to expose the whitewash beneath. 

Later, I compared my photos of the stupas with photos David Snellgrove took during his epic, eight-month 1956 journey through the Buddhist Himalaya, just a few years after Nepal opened its borders to foreign travelers.  Probably the first western traveler to enter Dolpo and certainly the first to spend a significant amount of time in studying the area’s culture, Snellgrove had worked for the British government in India before that nation gained independence in 1947, and he studied Tibetan and Tibetan culture at Cambridge before he traveled the Himalaya to learn about Tibetan Buddhism and to record what he feared was a fast fading culture and religion.   I found that the stupas had changed little during the intervening 50 years.  He did note some finely painted mandalas on the roof of one of the stupas that I didn’t notice although other current trekkers have recorded seeing them. 

At the town’s edge, our group congregated at the small stone building that housed the national park office. Outside was posted a Maoist bulletin board but it hung bare.  The park worker—the only one brave enough to remain in Ringmo, he told us—required that we each give him 1000 rupees for permits to enter the park.  We argued that the police chief in Dunai told us we wouldn’t have to pay a fee, but since he never gave us a permit, we had nothing to support our claim.  We paid the fee and asked for a permit or receipt.  He couldn’t give us one because the previous year the Maoists looted the park office of its computer, radio, flashlights, uniforms and warm jackets, and they then burned all the books and forms, including all the permits.  He wanted to enter our names in a little notebook he carried and to see our passports, but we convinced him that wasn’t necessary. Later that evening we saw him again.  He was stumbling drunk, and we figured the 3000 rupees we paid him should keep him drunk for a very long time.

We walked though the dusty town with its lanes haphazardly laid out between the assortment of two and three story stone houses.  On their flat roofs people stood and watched us pass.  When we waved and shouted “namaste”—the Nepali greeting, they ignored us or offered faint smiles.  When we took out our cameras, they shook their heads no and the women disappeared.  I’m not sure why we didn’t shout the Tibetan greeting, “Tashi delek.,”  For some reason it did not occur to us that we had entered a region where Nepali culture did not predominate.

As we continued through town toward the lake, we discussed why these people didn’t want their photos taken:  Shuvas was convinced the people were tired of being exploited by rich tourists who gave nothing in return for the photos. Purna said it was all right for us to take photos of anything we wanted because he and I are journalists.  I didn’t accept his advice and chided him for not respecting people’s request.  Charla explained people feared what would happen to the pictures.  Would the photographer use the photos in bad ways, would someone sit on the photos or use them for ass wipe, would someone make fun of the poverty and dirty clothes depicted in the photo?

Farmers were busy plowing fields: an ancient scene that cannot have changed for thousands of years.   One man guided two yaks that pulled the wooden plow tipped with an arrow-shaped iron shank. Another guided the plow in a straight line while muscling the plow’s tip deep into the rich but rocky brown soil. Behind them followed women who picked rocks or who broke the larger clods of earth with a wooden mallet. The men encouraged the yaks with a sharp “huh, huh.”

When they got to the end of a row, they all stopped and chanted a prayer for the worms they might have killed in the process—so deep was their belief in reincarnation. Then they turned the yaks, aligned the plow and started again. 

The incredibly beautiful Lake Phoksumdo sits a half kilometer north of Ringmo.  Over four kilometers (2.5 miles) long and a kilometer (0.6 miles) wide, the ethereally deep steel blue, azure, and turquoise lake shimmered in the sun.  A sacred lake, no one dares draw water from it. So everyone hauls water from the river outlet that rushes along the east side of town.  No boats are on the lake and if fish live in the lake, no one would even consider catching them. Actually, because of religious beliefs, people in the area would avoid eating fish in any case.  They gladly eat yak meat, but the yaks that supply that meat die because they had “an accident,” as yakmen say with a smirk. Besides, when a yak dies, it gives its life to provide food to many people for many meals, along with its fur, bones, and entrails—all of which the people use.  When a fish dies, however, it gives its life to feed merely one or two people.  Using this same logic, people in many parts of the Buddhist Himalaya avoid raising (but not necessarily eating) chickens.  

The view north of the lake was a wild one.  Huge barren peaks towered above broad glacial valleys that rose from its shores.  Directly above the lake at 11,000 feet towered 21,000 foot peaks that formed the southern shoulder of the Kanji Roba Himal. Glaciers and icefalls crowned the peak crests and tumbled down the east and north slopes.  Pine and fir forests covered the mountains’ flanks.  It all made a dramatic scene, and for us, that drama was heightened by the view of our next day’s trail: the treacherous catwalk that crept along the sheer cliff on the lake’s west side forty or fifty feet above the lake surface.   On the east side of the lake, on a ridge above the lake stood Tshowa Gompa, a monastery the Bon religion.

Phoksumdo-Shey National Park provided a shore-side campsite that offered a spectacular view of the lake. Gelbu and Tashi set up camp in its three-sided stone shelter.  Because Purna and Shuvas had never spent a night in a tent, we offered them our tents so they could have the experience.  Ringmo’s only guesthouse was open and the prosperous, entrepreneurial owners wanted us to stay there. On their door, they had posted a sign announcing that the crew for the movie Himalaya stayed there. Most important, they offered to help us find a yakman to take us over the mountains to Shey Gompa and beyond.  Although I wanted to stay at the spectacular lakeside campsite, I decided that staying with Laurie and Charla would work best. The rising wind along with the lowering clouds, which promised the weather would take a nasty turn, made it easy to decide.  Besides, I calculated that sleeping on a bed rather than on the ground would feel good, even if my bed was in a storage room crammed with sacks of barley and rice, harnesses and tethers for horses, winter clothes, boots, and farm tools.

So after we took a few photos, we hoofed it back to town and the guest house.  There a steep ladder—actually a ten-foot long log with steps notched into it—led to the second floor kitchen and rooms with small glass windows.  It was dark and smoky but out of the cold wind.  Laurie and Charla wanted to rest, but I wanted to visit the monastery at the eastern corner of the lake before it grew dark, so I hiked back to the lakeside camp to meet Gelbu, Purna, and Shuvas.  We walked along the shore, crossed the lake’s outlet river, and found a trail through a grove of long-needled pines growing near the lake’s edge, and finally climbed the ridge to arrive at the monastery’s cluster of stone buildings.

The Bon

The 800-year-old Tshowa monastery’s yellow stone buildings were closed tight with locks on their wood doors, the main gompa (temple) was boarded up, and piles of rocks and stacks of timbers lay on the ground outside the building, whose interior was being reconstructed.  White prayer flags flapped in the wind.  Otherwise the place was silent.  No monks appeared.  A worn yellow sign on the monastery wall proclaimed in red hand-painted letters: “Bon Monastery.  Not Buddhist.  Bon a separate religion.  Respect our religion.” 

What is the Bon?  As with so many pieces of Asian culture, the explanation is never straightforward. 

For Tibetans, on the one hand, the Bon was the magical, animistic, shamanistic religion that their ancestors practiced before Buddhist lamas conquered the Bon gods and demons during the 7^th Century.  On the other hand, the Bon religion is still practiced, but often Tibetan Buddhists look down on the religion as an imitation of Buddhism, with the main difference being that the Bon circumambulate shrines and spin prayer wheels in a counter-clockwise direction while Buddhists go the opposite clock-wise direction. 

The Bonpo (Bon people), of course, have a different story. For them, the Bon religion is the original religion of Tibet.  It started in the distant past, somewhere—the location lost to history although current archeological expeditions are working to find it—in the high, dry country west of Tibet in a place called Olmo Lungring. There, Donpa Shenrap, a figure similar to the Buddha achieved enlightenment. He, like Buddha, realized that all suffering is caused by desire, that all existence is created by cause and effect, and that with correct understanding of this cause and effect—by ceasing to desire—we can end all suffering, and thus gain spiritual liberation. His teachings of a nine-fold path to enlightenment (Buddhists have an eight-fold path) spread, and the powerful early kings of Tibet made Bon the official religion of their kingdom.  With fierce warriors—their faces painted blue—they conquered much of central Asia and even parts of western China. When the Tibetan king converted to Buddhism in the 7^th Century and made it the official religion of the kingdom, Buddhism as practiced in Tibet took on many of the features of Bon. So for the Bonpo, their religion is the fountain from which Tibetan Buddhism sprung.  Sometimes, the Bon still like to point out that when their religion reigned, Tibet was the most powerful kingdom in the region.

Some western writers claim the Bon founder, Donpa Shenrap, plagiarized Buddha’s ideas, and some scholars contend that the Bon is a heretical sect formed after Buddhism came to Tibet. But it doesn’t take a great scholar or anthropologist to understand that Buddhism “officially” arrived in Tibet over a thousand years after Buddha’s death. Instead of coming to Tibet directly from northern India where Buddha preached, the religion came to Tibet via the Silk Road after first becoming well-established to the south in Sri Lanka, to the east in South East Asia and China, and to the west of India in central Asia.  (In Afghanistan, the monumental Bamyan statues of the standing Buddhas built into a cliff wall in the 3^rd Century CE, which the Taliban destroyed in 2001, testified to Buddhism’s past dominance in that area.) 

It seems likely that Buddhist beliefs spread into Tibet, where they merged with the local shamanistic religion, and this was elucidated by Donpa Shenrap, to create the “new” Bon religion. According to tradition the Bon religion predominated until the Tibetan king Songsten Gampo married two Buddhist princesses—one from Nepal, the other from China—and converted to Buddhism in the 7^th Century CE. He and his successors expelled the Bon from Lhasa and the surrounding region, but it never lost influence in many parts of Tibet especially in fringe areas like Dolpo, which was part of Tibet until the early 19^th Century. In fact, the Samling Monastery in Dolpo, just 20 miles north of Ringmo, is considered an important center of Bon learning.  

Bon has evolved along with Tibetan Buddhism, even though the Buddhist lamas who controlled Tibet did their best to expunge it by attacking their monasteries and destroying their scriptures. The first form of Buddhism established in Tibet, the form practiced by the Nyingma sect, which bares some similarities to Bon, currently prevails in Dolpo and throughout much of the Nepali Himalaya, including the Solo-Khumbu where the Sherpas reside.

According to the recent Chinese census, about ten percent of the Tibetan population practices Bon, but that number could be inflated to undercut the Dalai Lama’s and Tibetan Buddhism’s prestige.  About one percent of the Tibetan refugee population in India is Bon, but it’s hard to say who collected that data.  The Dalai Lama, in his continuing efforts to unite the various Tibetan Buddhist sects, has stated that the Bon religion is a form of Buddhism.  Currently, Bon religious centers have been established in the U.S. and Europe.  For me, however, it was impossible to determine if a person was Buddhist or Bon unless I noticed which direction he or she was circumambulating a shrine, and the Bon monastery on its promontory over glittering deep blue and silver Lake Phoksumdo looked like any Buddhist monastery.

We stole peeks through cracks in the building’s shutters, but the darkness inside swallowed my flashlight’s beam, so we circumambulated the buildings and departed, disappointed that no monks were in residence who could open the building. Gelbu, whose father and father’s fathers had been Buddhist lay religious leaders for his Sherpa community, didn’t have much to say about the plain Bon temple, except that the Bon are simple people.  Shuvas and Purna had never seen anything like this seemingly deserted monastery before.  We all wondered where the monks were and worried that the Maoists had chased them away.  Later, people in Ringmo said that the monks had traveled to a festival and they would return the following week.  The Maoists, townsfolk told us, sometimes stayed at the monastery and took a tribute of food but otherwise did not bother the monks.

When we returned to the campsite, we found Charla impatiently waiting.   She had expected Gelbu to just show us the way to the monastery because she  wanted him to help her negotiate with a yakman that the hotel people found for us.  She and the yakman had waited two hours for us to return.  She and I exchanged harsh words about time and speed.  I told her I wouldn’t come this way again so I wanted to see as much as I could.  She and Gelbu hurried off. 

As Shuvas, Purna, and I walked back to the guesthouse, a small woman in tattered traditional dress lugged a huge five gallon bucket up a steep bank to her house, as the men-folk watched.  The water for all the households arrived on a woman’s back. This sparked a discussion about development.  What would development mean in this rustic village?  A five star hotel?  Jet skies on the lake? A series of small, cheap hotels? A street full of shops and restaurants catering to foreigners?  It was hard to imagine this town supporting large numbers of tourists when there was not even a well in town and no outhouses.  Except for a few solar panels that powered small radios and dim low-wattage light bulbs, the town had no electricity. What would development mean for these people who in many ways are living the same life people lived here 400 or 500 years ago?  The biggest change they had seen since their ancestors moved into the area may be the spread of potato cultivation.  From Dunai it is a three day trek; from Jomsom (the next closest town with regular air service) it takes two weeks of steady trekking. Will tourists come by helicopter? Does development necessarily mean westernerization?  Who will organize the development?  Will it be officials from Kathmandu, who are foreigners here in Dolpo nearly as much as westerners? What did the local people want, I wondered.

We ate in the guest house kitchen around the wood stove.  The wife, husband, and daughter sat on one side of the wood stove, which had a stovepipe, an unusual amenity in the region. Charla, Laurie, and I sat on the other.  Charla reported that she and Gelbu had been able to hire the yakman, a local farmer and trader who had made the trek often and was ready to go because he had finished his spring planting. The guesthouse daughter served up heaping portions of dhal bhaat, which we ate with gusto in part because it tasted great and also because we were relieved to know we had solved the problem of the porters.

 With still a little daylight left, I went to find Purna and Shuvas, who had returned to the campsite to eat with Gelbu, and we wandered through town.  They wanted to buy some rakshi, a strong drink made of fermenting barley.  As we ambled though town, we met Sonam Lama, the yakman who had agreed to haul our gear with his yaks to Tingku—at least 10 days away.   A stout man with black hair cropped so it stuck straight up, he had a broad smile but serious dark brown eyes.  He wore typical Tibetan male garb: Chinese tennis shoes, khaki pants, a sweater, a heavy chubba  (a Tibetan overcoat), a huge silver ring, and around his neck a amulet strung with two bright red balls of coral between which hung a black and white polished stone—a “magic eye” dzi bead.  His chubba, made of a green velvet-like material and lined with wool, was a large jacket that draped nearly to his knees and had extra long, wide sleeves. It was all held together with a belt wrapped around his waist.  When the weather turned warm, he slipped the chubba from his shoulders and used the belt to wrap it around his waist; when the weather turned cold, the belt and a long silver lapel pin held the jacket tight around his body and he folded his arms so he could stuff his hands far into opposite sleeves. 

He told Purna and Shuvas where they could find some rakshi but declined their offer to buy him a glass.   We found the small store that Sonam suggested and sat on short stools while the proprietor ladled out big cups of the liquid mixed with rotting, fermenting barley gruel.  I really wanted to try the stuff, figuring it would make a great story for my drinking buddies back home, but I was afraid to drink it for three reasons. First, from sad experience, I know how sick alcoholic drinks can make me at high altitudes, remembering when my wife Jeannie and I drank some beer in the guesthouse beneath the north face of Mt. Everest in Tibet—that brew never made us feel drunk; instead it immediately gave us severe hangovers.  More importantly, I did not want to have stomach trouble on this trip:  I could not imagine anything more miserable than trekking at altitude with diarrhea. Third, I feared that the brew would cause me to get up during the night to pee, and I fervently hoped I would not have to climb down the notches of the log ladder leading to my guesthouse room in the middle of the night. Not only would a fall from that would be disastrous, but also I suspected that the family would lock their stone house’s door.

Besides, it was nearly dark and getting late so I left Shuvas and Purna to their drink and returned to the guesthouse, climbed the notched log to the kitchen, retrieved my toothbrush and water, and climbed back down the log. Outside, rain mixed with snow driven by a cold wind clicked on my rain parka as I brushed my teeth and peed while praying I would not have to get up during the night.

I hurried back to the warmth inside.  The family was eating dinner.  Charla and Laurie were sitting by the fire chatting with the family: the mother, the father, and 16-year-old daughter, who had a nice smile and long black hair. She kept in perpetual motion, cleaning dishes or bringing in firewood and twigs for the fire. The mother tended the fire and fussed with the tea.  The husband relaxed.

Although the husband wore western clothes and had short hair covered with a white baseball cap, the wife and daughter both wore traditional Tibetan attire with large turquoise and silver earrings, huge necklaces with orange coral beads and “magic eye” dzi beads made of agate or glass, and long navy-blue skirts covered with red yellow, black, blue and green striped aprons, white shirts, and black wool sweaters. The chief difference between the mother and the daughter’s garb was the necklace the mother wore, which held the household keys. Everyone wore Chinese tennis shoes.

The kitchen’s stone walls were covered with adobe. As we talked, a bright kerosene lamp hissed, the fire in the stove glowed. Smoke-blackened water pots steamed on the iron stove top.  Cooking utensils hung from the walls; bridles and whips along with bags of food dangled from the rafters; a wood shelf was stacked with blue and white Chinese porcelain bowls, saucers, and tea cups.  Hewn wood timbers supported the roof and short pieces of those timbers lay on the floor to form a table and chopping block. Outside the kitchen stood a carved, brightly painted wooden chest, above which hung a shelf crammed with bowls, steam pots and weavings. The daughter brought in a pile of birch limbs to fire the stove in the morning.

They showed us a photo book from a Buddhist festival in Boudha near Kathmandu.  When they traveled to the capital city two years before to attend a Buddhist ceremony, a monk presented them with this book to remember the event, and now they proudly shared it with us. We all started to yawn so Charla, Laurie, and I left for our rooms as the family spread out fleece skins and blankets for their beds by the stove.  Before I crawled into my sleeping bag, I inspected my boots and was relieved to find that my super glue repair job was holding.  I climbed in the sack happy we had a yakman but dreading the next morning’s confrontation with the porters.

Shedding Porters

Rain mixed with snow fell through the night and splattered against the little window in my drafty, storage-room sleeping quarters.  I awoke at daybreak, descended the log ladder, pried open the heavy wooden doors, and stepped outside. Dark clouds enshrouded the peaks. Snow frosted the flanks of the mountains.  The lake shimmered a cold gray-blue.  Breakfast fire smoke steamed from the roofs of Ringmo’s stone houses. A woman pitched fodder from her flat roof down the three stories to four large yaks waiting in the cobbled lane below. 

Our guesthouse family had been awake for an hour, the daughter had the fire going and tea ready, and the mother was preparing breakfast.  Amazingly, she had some eggs and planned to make us an omelet.  I joined Charla and Laurie in the kitchen, and sat on a stool as we all listened to the national news that crackled on their handheld transistor radio. Laurie and Charla told me the news was full of reports about Maoist attacks: in Beni—not far from our destination of Jomsom— rebels overran a police station, killed four policemen, and looted munitions before blowing up the station with pressure cooker bombs.  In Kathmandu, students rioted and burnt two government vehicles.  Rain closed the Nepalganj airport. 

Because we now had Sonam and his yaks to haul our gear, we had to tell the porters we hired in Dunai, except Tashi, that we no longer needed their services, pay them off, and send them on their way back to Dunai and Juphal.  As far as we knew, they still did not know that we had hired Sonam, but when I went outside again to pee, Nora stood guarding the door and asking about money. The clouds began to rise. North of town, we could see our pass climbing steeply over a barren ridge and into the clouds. The mountains around town were completely white. The steep trail was covered with snow. I feared a day of treacherous hiking awaited.

After telling Nora to wait, I went back in and reported Nora was asking for money.  With Gelbu, we retreated to Charla and Laurie’s room to calculate how much we owed.  The five porters each got 300 per day, so that came to 1200 rupees per man; plus we had to pay them for the two days it would take for them to return home.  We re-checked our figures.  We didn’t want an argument though we knew we would get one, and we wanted to be fair but we had a limited amount of cash.  Most of the trip still lay before us.  We inventoried all our money and asked Gelbu if he needed some extra to buy supplies in Ringmo.  He wanted to get more kerosene and cooking oil.  He figured this would be the last chance till the end of the trip.

When we exited the room, Nora was standing in the hallway smiling nervously.  We asked him to go outside and wait.  After he went back down the stairs and was safely outside, we recalculated and I gave Gelbu the stack of rupee notes that he would distribute to the porters, who now congregated around the front door of our guesthouse. I took a couple thousand rupees extra to give as a gift and for what we considered a severance bonus. Then I apprehensively followed Gelbu out the door as Laurie and Charla, who waited in their room, wished us luck.

The men clustered around Gelbu as he explained the situation.  He repeated the bargain that we had made with the men in Dunai and Juphal.  They started arguing immediately and claimed we agreed to more.  How much more, I asked Gelbu.  They claimed Gelbu’s calculations were short by 100 rupees per man. The discussion went on for nearly a half hour, and I could see Gelbu was losing ground. So, I told Gelbu to say we were just giving them what we agreed to, then I would talk. That seemed to satisfy most so Gelbu counted out the red and green bills.  Then Gelbu translated as I told them that Charla, Laurie, and I wanted to thank them for their help and offered to give each porter an extra 200 rupees as a gift.  They grumbled that wasn’t really a gift so after about fifteen minutes of arguing I puffed myself up as seriously as possible, said that I understood but I had to ask Charla and Laurie if it was all right to pay them more money.

So I went back into the guesthouse, climbed the notched log, gave Charla and Laurie a quick progress report, pulled more bills out of my money roll, descended the notched log stairs, and returned to the cluster of porters who had surrounded Gelbu as they argued the fine points of our previous agreement, replayed the difficulties of the trip, and complained about the heavy loads.  Gelbu translated all this for me, while the porters glared at me with distrust.  Again, I puffed myself up and told Gelbu to tell them that we had decided to give them the 500 rupees they were asking for if they promised not to ask for more. A ten minute discussion among the porters ensued and even the tallest porter, whom I angered the first day and the one who pressed for the most money, finally assented.  So I passed out the rupees and shook their hands as they took the money.

I tried to smile and get the men to smile back. The tall porter took the money and muttered something rude under his breath.  The other men in tattered clothes shook my hand and smiled back. I told Gelbu to tell them they should leave soon as they had a long hike back down to Dunai. Nora stayed behind because Shuvas and Purna had agreed to hire him to carry their packs and accompany them to Juphal where they would catch a plane back to Nepalganj. 

Gelbu said we would depart at 10 despite the all-night rain and snow.  The steep trail covered with snow looked plenty treacherous as it climbed precipitously to the top of a cliff and then scratched along the rim of the cliff face, which plummeted nearly a thousand feet down to the lake.  I packed my gear and returned to the kitchen to write a note to Jeannie, which I would give to Purna and Shuvas, who would email it when they returned to Kathmandu. I wanted to let her know I was fine but also to inform her that the trek was going to take at least a week longer than we had planned. As I sat and wrote, the wife churned yak butter tea, baked up some roti (flat bread) on the stove top, and fried an omelet for our breakfast.

We walked out to the lake camp and rolled up the tents that were drying in the stiff breeze blowing out of the south.  In the stone walled yards that we passed in town, women sat weaving at looms staked out on the ground, and in the rocky fields near town, men and woman were plowing. 

The Most Beautiful Lake, The Most Frightening Trail

At the lakeside camp, we waited for Sonam to arrive with his yaks. Ten o’clock came and went, but still no Sonam.  We got word he was in the pastures above town trying to find one of his yaks.  By 10:30 Shuvas and Purna were getting anxious to leave because they wanted to hike all the way to Dunai and arrive by nightfall.  They told me that earlier that morning they had tried to walk out onto the catwalk trail above the lake but lost their nerve. They couldn’t believe we were really going to hike that wild trail into the mountains.  Purna pulled me aside and told me he really didn’t think Laurie had the stamina to make the trip.  Shuvas and he felt certain that she should give up and return with them. I had my doubts, especially whenever I looked at the rickety catwalk across the cliff above the lake.  But I knew Laurie was committed to making this trek, so I assured him that we would all be fine and that we all would make sure Laurie was safe.  We stood for photos by the Lake Phoksumdo, handed Purna and Shuvas the notes we wanted them to email, and bid heartfelt farewells. Then, our Nepali friends headed back to town and down the trail to Dunai.

Finally, Sonam arrived with his four yaks: Kawa, Dobo, Mombo, and Chepta.  They were good looking animals—dzos really, a cross between a yak and a cow which is smaller and less shaggy than a yak but a little more manageable.  Sonam’s wife, wearing a traditional long black dress and a necklace strung with huge chunks of turquoise, helped Sonam load our packs and gear on the wooden packsaddle yokes that were hitched to each yak’s back. 

Gelbu and Sonam suggested we get started. The yaks would do better if they could move at their own pace on the cliff-side catwalk where, because the trail was so narrow, they could not pass safely.  Besides, they would catch up, which we knew to be true.  So we shouldered our packs and headed up the trail that followed the lakeshore.

For two weeks now I had been dreading THE CATWALK.  The episode from the movie Himalaya replayed repeatedly in my mind: the cliff face, the insecure trail perched on logs jammed into the cliff face high above the lake’s surface, the gaping holes in its flooring.  The exposure and the precarious footing frightened the young monk, a respected painter of religious paintings and monastery frescos, so much that he froze. His older sister reassured him and took him by the hand.  Just then, a young herder boy slipped and startled a yak, causing it to take a misstep and plunge through a gap in the catwalk. It tumbled down and down to the blue lake far below.  When the yak finally hit the lake, the splash appeared as tiny speck on the blue surface.   The caravan leader, the grizzled clan patriarch named Thinlen, carefully edged his way past the leading yaks and returned to the hole in the catwalk. There, he repaired the trail with flat rocks. Then, to test his repair work, he jumped on those rocks to make sure they would hold.  He and the young yak herder tried to make the frightened yaks to move, but they refused to budge.  Finally, the patriarch expertly coaxed the yaks along the catwalk. The monk, gasping and grasping his sister’s hand with fear, followed.  

Now, I wondered if I would freeze with terror or fall through a hole in the catwalk.

The seemingly rickety wood and stone scaffold, however, was surprisingly sturdy: not wide but relatively secure despite the holes through which the lake surface shined some 50 feet below.  Charla charged ahead, unafraid. I hiked ahead of Laurie and at the places where the trail narrowed or seemed especially precarious, I held Laurie’s hand for her encouragement as much as mine.  I forced myself to focus only where I placed each footstep.  If I looked at the lake or through the holes in the catwalk, I became dizzy with vertigo.  When Gelbu caught up with us, he held Laurie’s hand and I followed his sure footsteps.

After about 30 minutes of steady hiking along the catwalk, the trail rounded a corner and met solid ground.  Still, a misstep here would have sent us plunging down the sheer cliff to the lake.  Nevertheless, I felt greatly relieved to have crossed this hurdle, and based on the sketchy reports I had read, I told Charla that the trek should be fairly easy from here on out.  She agreed.

The trail climbed steeply over the ridge.  The lake shimmered blue and silver in the afternoon sun, which had long since melted the snow from the trail. As we climbed to nearly 1000 feet above the lake, we could see its far end, the stone buildings of Ringmo and the Bon monastery on the lakeside bluff.  Rising clouds exposed blue icefalls and glaciers rising to the snow covered 24,000 foot-plus peaks. Across the lake, a wide alluvial fan spread out as it reached the lake at the base of a broad glacial valley.  Black clusters of dots—yaks—crept across steep green pastures beneath the peaks.

As we climbed, I speculated about what formed the lake.  I told Charla and Laurie that the hill behind Ringmo must be a moraine, given the jumbled porous rock that formed it.  Laurie was uninterested and focused on getting up the steep, precarious trail.  Charla was not impressed with my explanation.  Her father was a geologist so she had heard this kind of talk before, and even to me my explanation seemed somehow incorrect. The ridge at the outlet of the lake did not have the classic form of a moraine—rather it was an uneven ridge that came down from a steep mountain to the east.  Later, I would find a better explanation while reading Stones of Silence, George Schaller’s account of his 1973 Dolpo expedition. A world-famous wildlife biologist, Schaller invited Peter Matthiessen to accompany him while he studied blue sheep and the snow leopards that preyed on them (based on his experience on that expedition Matthiessen wrote his book, The Snow Leopard).  In his description of the lake, Schaller claimed that an earthquake must have caused a cataclysmic rock fall to form the dam, creating Lake Phoksumdo.

Oddly, or maybe not so oddly, Schaller offered a scientific explanation for the local legend about how the lake was formed.  According to it, while Padmasambhava (also known as Guru Rinpoche), the miracle working lama who brought Buddhism to Tibet, was subduing and chasing the old demons and gods out of Tibet in his effort to make the country safe for Buddhism, he encountered a particularly potent demon who escaped by flying over the Himalaya and hiding near Ringmo.  Fearing that Padmasambhava would find her, the demon bribed the people of the town with a huge turquoise so they would let her hide. Padmasambhava flew all over the Himalaya looking for her and when he arrived at the town, he asked the locals if they knew where the evil god was.  They reported that they had not seen the malevolent god, but when he saw their turquoise stone, he grew suspicious and turned the stone into dung.  Angry that the demon had deceived them, the locals revealed where the demon was hiding, but to get revenge, she caused the mountainside to crumble, which buried the town and formed the ridge that dammed the river to create Lake Phoksumdo. Padmasambhava then cast a spell that bound her to the bottom of the lake. That is why the lake is sacred: no one wants to disturb it for fear that they will somehow allow the demon submerged in its depths to escape.

We trekked on in the sun, reached the ridge, got our last views of Ringmo, and headed down through first a birch forest that gave way to a forest of junipers, firs and pines.  Mid afternoon, we reached the shore of Lake Phoksumdo again, where the inviting grassy flat near the lake made an ideal campsite with an incredibly beautiful view of the northwest corner of the lake and the peaks all around.  I hoped we would camp here, but after Sonam watered the yaks, he headed them across the alluvial fan, through the grass, and up the dry river.  He didn’t want to stay near the lake because we would have had to use its sacred water for drinking, cooking, and washing.  Already tired and now disappointed that we wouldn’t take advantage of this ideal campsite, I begrudgingly shouldered my backpack, and followed the others up the river.  I didn’t know about the demon at the time, but clearly Sonam did not want to tempt fate.  Charla said she thought the night’s campsite would not be too far.

The soil in the valley was so porous that despite the innumerable creeks and waterfalls cascading down the nearby mountainsides from the snow and glaciers above, the water disappeared into the gravelly hillsides and none reached this dry riverbed near the lake.  So, we continued up the trail that followed the dry, braided river bottom.  Around each bend, I hoped we would find water for our evening camp; however, the broad valley floor offered none so we continued on. . . .and on.

Miles ahead, a ridge met the valley floor and I speculated that if we didn’t find water there, we were going to have a tough time.  It was nearly dark when we reached the base of that ridge. The sun had set long before behind the high himal that we would have to climb the next day on our way to Shey Gompa.  We reached a flat where water miraculously was flowing above the riverbed’s porous gravel, and nearby we found a place to make camp.  Sonam turned out his yaks and we busied ourselves with setting up camp:  our two tents and the red plastic tarp for the kitchen. The sky turned golden, lighting up the peaks which shaded to pink about the same time that Tashi brought us cups of tea.

 

The Happy Crew

We were a happy crew: three Americans camped with three hearty Nepali men from the mountains—Gelbu Lama, Tashi Lama and Sonam Lama.  We joked that these men, despite coming from different parts of Nepal, must be brothers as they all had the same last name.  We had a glorious campsite in the middle of the Himalaya. We had a willing yakman who was strong and knew the route.  He and Gelbu were getting along well.  Tashi got along with everyone.  Now, we figured, if the weather cooperated, we should have a smooth trip.

Sonam lit a fire and used a blackened metal pan to warm water for brewing brew yak butter tea, black tea laced with yak butter.  In the meantime, he pulled some roasted barley flour out of a yak wool bag and kneaded it with yak butter to make tsampa. Then from some pocket in his chubba, he pulled a plastic bottle full of chang, which he shared around.  I only took a little. So he insisted that I share some of his yak butter tea. Although he barely had boiled the water, I drank a cup of the brew: the yak butter coated my lips and made the tea taste like yak, a taste reminiscent of the smell of a wet wool sweater.  It’s not a great taste, but Sonam’s yak butter was not rancid like the butter used to make the tea I had sampled years before in Tibet so it but actually it tasted pretty good, and the high calorie brew definitely warmed me. 

He sat placidly in the smoke until it was almost completely dark, when he rounded up the yaks and hobbled them near camp.  Near his fire, he rolled out some worn, woolen horse blankets to sleep on, and Tashi slept in the kitchen under a couple of wool blankets.  As I got ready to go to bed in my cozy down sleeping bag, I was in awe of Sonam’s and Tashi’s toughness. Gelbu rolled out his sleeping bag in my tent, and we joked briefly about how little room we had in the tent before he promptly fell sound asleep. I recorded the day’s events in my journal for a short while, got up to pee, and returned to the sack.  Getting out of my sleeping bag and the tent without disturbing Gelbu was no easy matter, and besides at 14,000 feet the air was plenty chilly.  I had no choice, but I promised myself from then on not to drink so much tea with dinner and that chang, no matter how tasty or good it felt, was off the menu for me.  During the night icefalls thundered down the mountainsides, a fine rain mist fell through much of the night, and I got up to pee three more times.
Climbing to “Snow Camp”
            The next day dawned clear so we spread gear and tents out to dry in the sun while we ate breakfast.  Then, we struck camp. Gelbu and Tashi moved with their usual amazing speed and efficiency to pack up the kitchen and get bags of gear and food, along with containers full of kerosene ready for Sonam. Sonam lifted all the bags to test their weights before loading them on the yaks.  They could carry about 100 pounds each, but getting the loads evenly balanced on the wooden x-shaped pack saddles was imperative. By nine, we started upriver through the huge Alaska-sized canyon. Fantastic peaks towered over us on both sides. A monal, a large strikingly purple, blue, and red pheasant, which serves as Nepal’s national bird, whistled from a rock in the firs.  Charla told us this should be a relatively easy, short day.

Continuing up the river, we passed a group of eight timber cutters working in the woods.  They were cutting the large firs and sawing them into timbers and planks.  They waved from their camp and Gelbu recognized one of the men so he found a place to ford the racing stream while we continued up the trail.  The men were from his district, in the Mount Everest region of Nepal.  They came here because they needed the work: the lack of tourism caused by the political unrest meant they had to earn money somewhere.  The pine, spruce and fir forest in this remote river valley seemed dense and virgin, but it only covered a narrow strip of the mountains’ shoulders, so we wondered how much they planned to cut. And because we were in Shey-Phoksumdo National Park, we wondered if the men had permits to cut and how they got the permits, given that there were no park officials in the area.  We also wondered how and where they would manage to haul the timbers.  Gelbu, however, could not answer any of our questions. 

As we hiked up the river, the canyon narrowed but we followed the well constructed trail and were happily surprised to find sturdy, newly built wooden bridges crossing the river.  The canyon had narrowed, forcing the river through a narrow slot that our trail surely followed.  We met three men on horseback herding about 40 goats—tiny, knee high ones—many of which carried small leather or wool bags full of salt.  The herders told Sonam that the shortcut canyon and pass were open: the winter’s snow had melted. 

At 11, we stopped for lunch: roti from last night’s dinner, peanut butter and jelly—my favorite, and boiled potatoes that Gelbu had packed. Sonam wondered why we didn’t cook a meal, but when we told him that cooking a regular meal of dhal bhaat would take too much time, he seemed pleased.  The river and trail continued up the big valley. On its north side, a narrow box canyon steeply ascended and through this canyon roared a cascade.  Sonam said we would go up that.  It is a good short cut, he claimed.

My mountaineering experience told me that shortcuts mean lots of hard work, and the map showed contour lines so close they darkened the map, indicating an incredibly steep climb. The main trail appeared longer but the map showed it going up an open slope that was steep but nothing as steep as the shortcut.  Charla and I discussed the plan and she asked Sonam if we wouldn’t be better off using the main trail. No, Sonam said.  It was too far and this short cut wasn’t that steep.  He knew the trail so we put the map away and followed him, even though the brief text from the Lonely Planet suggested this was not the best way to go and in Snow Leopard, Matthiessen reported this climb was one of the most difficult of his epic journey.

We climbed up and up the canyon for hours.  The rocks were wet and slick. The trail crossed and re-crossed the torrent.  Although the canyon’s red rocks are beautifully marbled deep green, they formed a slippery, steep trail, which really wasn’t a trail at all but merely a steep wash. Still, we were making good time, and we are definitely going up.  The yaks generally were sure-footed, but their loads sometimes caused them to stumble on the slick rock and they balked at the steepest faces so Sonam, Gelbu, and Tashi had to push the yaks—shoulder-tall animals about the size of a lean cow—up the gorge. When I could, I also helped.  After three or more hours of climbing, the narrow slot opened to steep barren mountain sides that disappeared into the clouds.  Even though snow began to fall, we felt relieved to emerge from the increasingly slippery rocks of the box canyon.

As we trudged up through the clouds, we met three Tibetan horsemen. One wore a red wool balaclava covered with snow.  They all wore western style clothes but their unshorn, long black hair was braided into a red cloth, which they wrapped around their heads, in the style of the Tibetan drokpas--nomads.  Their stout, chest-high horses each carried three-quarter inch thick horse blankets woven with blue, green, red, black, and white Tibetan motifs, on top of which rested pack saddles carrying brown yak wool bags.  They told Sonam that the place where he had planned to camp did not have enough grass or water for the four yaks.  So we would have to hike higher than planned.

We continued on through the snow squalls, past snow fields, through the fog, up a steep draw under steeper still mountain sides shrouded in clouds.  It was getting late, and the short easy day Charla mentioned earlier had long passed.  But then the clouds rose, the snow stopped, and the basin opened to a broad alpine meadow.  There was plenty of grass for the yaks. A creek cascaded down a pitch encased in a chandelier of ice where water streamed from an ice cave edged with rows of ten-foot tall icicles, which Gelbu said looked like a skirt made of ice.

Charla, Laurie, and I felt plenty tired.  That day, we climbed 1300 meters (over 4000 feet) to 5100 meters (16,800 feet).  The altitude, the cold rain with snow, and the steep eight-hour hike wore us out, and we were all thankful that Sonam had finally found suitable pasture for his yaks and a great campsite for the night.

Sonam unloaded the yaks.  Their backs, slick with sweat, steamed when he took off their saddle blankets, and they scampered off to eat.  Although they resembled long-legged cows, the yaks somehow reminded me of dogs in the way they wagged their long furry tails and hopped off, free of their loads and prodding masters, happy to eat and drink.  

We were surrounded by peaks and moraines.  Monals called from the rocks.  We saw some white ptarmigan. Below, the rocky tundra abruptly fell toward the abyss formed by the box canyon we had spent the better part of the day ascending.  Above rose barren mountains, snow covered peaks, and our trail cutting switchbacks through the notch we would climb through the next day.  I thought that notch had to be the pass—the entrance to Upper Dolpo, and I wanted to go inspect the view but could not find the energy.  I asked Gelbu and Sonam if that was the pass, but told me the pass was still a long way. I believed they had misunderstood me.  

After setting up the tent, I retreated to the cook shelter to write and to get out of the cold wind.  Charla and Laurie rested in their tent.  Sonam found enough sticks and dried yak dung to start a fire.  Despite the wind and squalls that punctuated the cold, clear evening, he sat cross-legged on his blankets, brewed his tea and made tsampa.   Gelbu was frying up potatoes in curry along with garlic and peppers.  The spicy hot peppers stung our eyes and made us cough. Tashi, Gelbu and I laughed at ourselves for coughing and at the sweet smell of the cooking food.  The kerosene stove roared and hissed loudly above the wind. A pot of rice was on the boil. The stove and hot pots kept us warm despite the gusts of frigid wind that snuck under the red tarp and the around duffels full of food which lined the edge of our shelter.

Somewhere close to our camp in October 1973, Peter Matthiessen camped. George Schaller had gotten lost looking for the pass.   All their porters, except for two loyal Sherpas, had deserted them when an early fall snowstorm dumped three feet of snow. Matthiessen wanted to turn back, but Schaller insisted that they struggle on to complete his study of blue sheep.  He went on to Shey Gompa and Matthiessen had to lug all their gear over the snowbound, 18,000 foot pass that guarded the entrance to Upper Dolpo, a process that took days.

Laurie brought her cup for more tea.  The sky cleared, giving us a spectacular view of the 20 to 24,000 foot peaks of the Kanji Roba Himal we passed under earlier in the day.  Gelbu said I did a good job helping with the yaks, and Laurie joked that she would have a difficult time trying to explain to Jeannie that I had become a yak herder.  In the next life, I said.  Gelbu said I’ll come back as a very small person since I’m two times the normal size in this life. I agreed. If there’s any justice he was right. I take up a lot of space.  The sunset was a colorless gray. 

Lost on Kang La (5600 meters, 18,400 feet)

Through the night, squalls buffeted our wind high camp, dropping snow and sleet.  Between the storms, the moon shone through the broken clouds, lighting up the canyon and the mountain peaks all around.  The day had dawned still, cold, and clear.

At 5 AM Gelbu got up to get water and tea going for breakfast.  Certain that the pass was just above our camp, I got up a few minutes later so I could hike up to it and take in the view.  The sun shone on the snow covered peaks on the ridge above us to the west.  But as I hiked up the ridge above our camp and past the frozen waterfall, I noticed a formidable gray cloud band growing on the south-western horizon above the Kanji Roba Himal.

Hiking as fast as I could so I wouldn’t be late for breakfast, I climbed the ridge to see the pass—the entrance to Upper Dolpo—that I was so sure stood just above our camp.  After a half hour of steady climbing, I arrived at the ridge and could see that the mountains opened but they kept rising far further than I could walk before breakfast. I then realized that Gelbu and Sonam had not misunderstood me the night before: the pass was still at least two hours away and a long, steady climb.  So I took in the view and hurried down the frozen trail to camp.

When I returned to camp, Gelbu had breakfast ready. I wanted to say that we should leave as soon as possible because a big storm was on its way.  But my previous weather predictions hadn’t been correct, and I figured that we would get caught in the storm either earlier or later, so I decided to keep my concern to myself and determined simply to help get ready to leave as quickly as possible.  Even when Laurie marveled at the clear blue sky, I said nothing about the looming front. My short morning’s walk at 17,000 feet had tired me and made me ravenously hungry so even though I hurried as much as possible, I was ready to go only minutes before the rest of the crew. As I packed, I watched the high gray cirrus clouds thicken. When the sun topped the ridge above the cirque where we camped, it glowed dull white.

By 9 AM we were packed and on the trail that headed up the barren ridge.  The wind picked up steadily and by 9:30 it was howling. Thunder cracked and roared, echoing through the mountains. The wind increased to gale force. The temperature plummeted.  More thunder rumbled. I stopped to put on my warmest jacket and rain parka. By 10, we were trudging up a steep hillside in a full-on blizzard.  Thunder shook the mountains again, and I began to wonder if the gods were trying to keep us from entering Upper Dolpo.

In the blizzard, we lost the trail. Sonam, apparently picking the route from memory, guided the yaks up a steep, quickly becoming snow-covered ridge.

The yaks, their fur now frosted with snow, tried to avoid ascending by heading on a contour to the left and by doing whatever they could to get around Sonam to head back down. Sonam however wanted to go up and to the right.  To help, Tashi and Gelbu each herded a yak uphill, but that left one yak unattended so I hiked alongside the gray yak, “Dobo”—the last one, which I made my responsibility, and I struggled to make sure it headed up, where we wanted to go, rather than down, where it wanted to go.  Imitating Tashi and Sonam, I shouted at it, encouraged it with kind words, called it “bhaji”—grandfather, like the Nepalis often called me, pushed its rump, or twisted its tail to pull it up the slope.  When the slope steepened, despite the danger, I walked on the yak’s downhill side so I could push its load from below to help it maintain its balance.  I yelled, “shush” or “huh” and tried to whistle like Tashi and Sonam were doing, but because of the cold, thin air I could not manage a sound. In the white cloud of the blizzard, I only knew we were going up, and I didn’t want to allow this last yak to get separated from the others.

When we topped one ridge, I momentarily thought we had finally reached the pass, but then through the fog and blowing snow, I could see we still had to ascend at least one more rolling ridge.  The wildly blizzard continued to batter us as we crested one wind-scoured ridge after another. Heading into the wind-whipped fog and snow, Sonam lead us along a high ridge toward a black cliff face that loomed above the ridge.  I hoped he wanted to head over the ridge to the north (our right), but the fog and wind-driven snow made it impossible to see into that abyss.

At the ridge crest, just beneath the black cliff, Sonam searched for the trail over the pass.  This, I figured, was not a good sign.  Had we climbed though this blizzard only to get lost on this 18,000 foot ridge?  We could see no cairn strewn with prayer flags, which typically marked a pass. In the wind-blasted whiteout, we could see no trail heading down. Even here, on this wind scoured ridge, we were trudging through nearly a foot of soft, fresh snow. In the freezing cold, I feared Sonam had become disoriented in the blizzard.  Finally, he found a way to descend into the clouds and swirling, blowing snow.

It was a steep shot down the northwest side—a great face to ski down.  But we were not skiing.  We had yaks, who despite their reputation in the West, actually do not fare well in snow.  Their loads made them awkward, and they stepped hesitantly as they felt for footing on loose rocks buried under as much as two feet of fresh, slippery snow.  Sonam wrapped a leather thong around the lead yak’s horns to guide it down the precipice. The other yaks followed cautiously.

A Disaster

As they descended the steep slope, the yaks kept slipping and falling. We all attempted to help them keep them moving.  But, like the yaks, we were thrashing and slipping in the snow.  Under the weight of his four-foot tall wicker dhoko (porter’s basket) full of kitchen gear and with his mere running shoes, Tashi kept taking falls that landed him on his butt. Gelbu, a surefooted Sherpa with good boots, made steady progress.  Laurie butt glissaded down the steep parts of the slope.  Charla did the same.  I followed slowly, checking each step and watching to make sure the others were all right.

About twenty minutes into this treacherous descent, the second yak—Mombo—slipped and could not stand despite our efforts to help. Sonam unstrapped the load from the injured yak’s back and inspected its left rear leg.  Dislocated, he reported through Gelbu, who translated. So, he and Gelbu, who previous to working as a guide raised yaks to earn a living, forced the yak to lie on its side, attached the leather thong to its leg just above its foot, and pulled in an effort to re-locate the leg into the hip joint.  No luck. They tried again from various angles with the same result.

Here on this 40 degree slope battered by the driving wind and snow, we knew we could do little to assist the yak.  But through the blizzard, we could see a flat perhaps a half mile down, so we helped the yak to stand and encouraged it to descend while we carried its load.  I carried a duffel full of food, Gelbu carried another duffel plus our tent, Charla and Laurie each carried or dragged packs down the steep, snow-covered slope. 

As we descended, the snow depth decreased to less than a foot. But the footing became incredibly treacherous.  We all slipped and fell, even Gelbu.  Laurie and Charla continued to butt glissade down the steep parts.  Tashi followed.  Charla and I shared our trekking poles with Tashi and Gelbu.

With his ever-steady determination, Sonam managed to keep the injured yak moving. When we reached the flat, the snow and wind miraculously stopped, and the sun even burned a hole through the clouds.  We reloaded the three yaks, with Sonam assuring us that we need not carry any of the extra weight ourselves, which was a great relief, as we all had heavy packs already.

Sonam again laid the yak down in an effort to relocate its leg. At his insistence, we moved on down the trail, which we could now see as a long indentation in the snow heading down the valley.  When I realized Sonam was alone with the injured yak, I returned to help.  As I trudged back up the slope, another squall brought more wind and snow.

I found Sonam pulling on the yak’s leg and I tired to assist.  No matter how hard or from which angle we pulled, the joint would not pop back into place.  Sometimes, I pulled the leather thong while he tried to ease the joint into the hip socket.  Other times we both pulled.  Our efforts had no positive effect. The yak lay passively in the snow breathing hard. Sonam stood the yak and tried to encourage it to move down the trail. But now, the yak was in so much pain that it would not move.  We wrapped the leather thong around the yak’s horns so that I could pull and Sonam could push.  The yak refused to budge.

To keep the yak warm, Sonam put two yak wool blankets on the yak’s back and tied them in place with rope braided from yak wool. Then he picked up the wooden pack saddle, and told me, “Go.”  We walked down the trail.  I turned and called to the yak, “Come on, Mombo. Let’s go.” But my plea had no effect. The yak just stood staring wide eyed through the falling snow.  Sonam never looked back.  He hoped that at Shey Gompa, our next stop, he could find a friend who knew how to take care of the yak, and the next day they could return to rescue it.  I knew he feared that the wolves or the snow leopards, or the wind and the cold, would get Mombo first.

In the sun between storms, we stopped on a ridge for lunch. I passed around energy bars that I had brought from home for emergencies. This constituted an emergency, I figured. We also hungrily ate crackers, cheese, and soy nuts. The clouds lifted just enough to afford views of the snow covered peaks that formed a jumbled ridge of layered red sedimentary rock severely buckled into arches and eroded into cliff faces.  We continued on.  Our descent brought slightly warmer temperatures, but the thaw made the snow covering the slippery mud or slick rocks on the trail even more slippery than it was above.  I slipped and tumbled down a steep but short slope.  It happened so fast that no one saw the fall so luckily nothing but my ego was bruised. As I brushed snow and mud from my pants, I felt extremely thankful I had not fallen up higher where a similar tumble could have caused a disastrously long fall.  Just twenty minutes later, I slipped again and did a graceless uphill face plant in the snow and mud.

As we descended, the ochre walls of Shey Gompa appeared below the gray storm clouds.   It stood on a green hillside in the tree-less valley below, and even though it was still hours away it offered a welcome sight. Another snowstorm blew down the valley and obscured the view of our goal; however, we now knew where and how far the monastery was, which gave us new energy to continue down the trail through the wet, heavy snowfall.  We hiked for another three or maybe four hours through the snow, then mud and rain.  We were all soaked and tired.  Sonam was glum.  Charla, Laurie and I worried about how we would pay him for his yak, and we fervently hoped that Sonam would be able to recover the poor animal the next day.  Charla said that a good yak like that was worth probably $300 and we would have to find a way to help Sonam.  I realized that it was a very good thing indeed that I followed Charla’s advice and brought plenty of money. This trek, which we had mostly undertaken for fun and adventure, had become a disaster for Sonam and his poor yak.  We had finally entered the hidden land of Upper Dolpo, but at what cost?