Political and Seismic Instability

In the morning we travel in wild-looking high valley country where thick pine forests cluster on the flats along cliff edges undercut by the river. The snow-ribboned flanks of Nilghiri and Tukuche Peak rise above, and the turquoise Kali Gandaki winds far below in a maze of earth. It’s a wonder how much stone the world has in it. But more of it is visible from this spot than most. We start out the day walking on the easy grade of the new road.

In the midmorning we cross a long cable bridge over a tributary canyon and stand among the outpost buildings of Lete, a station called Lete-Khola. A mule train we saw from across the gorge as it descended a steep switchback arrives in a few minutes, and the animals file onto the bridge ahead of their drivers. On a flat rooftop nearby a man in a wool cap is taking an adz to sheep bones on a chopping block made from an upright log. He chops each bone until it’s shredded and the marrow is dangling out, then puts it in a large aluminum bowl and selects another. The bowl looks like it contains an entire sheep in bloody disarray, except for the skin, which is staked out wool down and raw side up on the ground in a yard to the side. After the mule train has left, two women and a boy we’d seen foraging firewood off the precipitous side of the new road arrive across the bridge, carrying their loads of wood on their backs in hand-woven baskets slung with tump lines from their foreheads. The boy stops at the station house, presumably to add his load to the wood stacked all along the wall, while the women head for the switchback. A man arrives after that carrying a wire frame box on his back that’s neatly packed with goods. He’s smartly dressed, well groomed, middle-aged, as broad as he is tall. He looks like he could carry a mule. He’s a traveling one-man dry goods shop. He has batteries, wire scrubbies, fuses, ramen noodles, soap. Bungeed on top of it all is his transistor radio playing the news.

After a few minutes we go on. The foot trail cuts a steeper and more direct route across the wider curves of the new road, to the top of yet another tableland. There’s always another higher tier of land here. We cross past meadows, some bordered by stone walls, and through the shadows of a dense fragrant pine woods, and along a granite-flagged road into the town of Lete. Here the houses are white-painted stone with roofs made from thatch and hand-hewn logs with the bark still on them. The windowframes and doors are painted cheery blue, others are minutely carved unpainted wood. Prayer flags fly from poles made from pine saplings with their crown branches still on. The women wear bright reds and purples and yellows and have weathered dark skin. The way they wear their headscarves tight across their foreheads completes a slightly more than passing likeness to some Native American peoples, and here in a landscape reminiscent of the grandeurs of the American mountain west, but on an even greater scale. The foothills have their heads in clouds and are streaked with snow up above the treeline. The mountains are only visible this morning from their glaciered hems downward. Dhaulagiri’s massive icefall can be seem up above the town like a rampway into the clouds but the bulk of the mountain is hidden, sixteen thousand feet of it still above us. Behind us, Nilghiri’s peaks can be seen. They’re six thousand feet lower than Dhaulagiri, but still large enough to dwarf everything else in our view.

We walk a mile through the town between stone walls picture perfect and comparable, according to both Becca and Sean, to places in Ireland. We see a big Mahindra tractor and wonder how it got here. We see a man rolling red propane tanks over the flagstones, which makes a noise almost like a mule bell. We stop for lunch—a plain but satisfying dal bhat—in a village where most of the guest houses are closed for the season. Timur and red chiles are laid out on nanglos in the courtyard for the sun to dry.

From this place the road descends to a broad place where the river, in another season, has enough water in it to fill a basin half a mile wide. Now it’s a broad gray playa. We photograph a mule train crossing this space, bells clunking, loads jostling, their drivers jogging along behind in the dust they raise. Then we start across.

Streams have to be crossed on bridges that are nothing more than pine poles with their branches stripped off. A tractor is traversing the riverbed a quarter mile away to our left, towing a small trailer whose rattling and banging over the rocks can be heard as clearly as thunder. We take a road that cuts across a hillside rather than follow the wide bend of the riverbed. It’s a steep road that winds up through pine woods and then descends again onto a second, vaster riverbed, a mile wide or more. It’s as if we’re standing on the edge of a desert. We cross among stands of dry thicket and sea buckthorn where stray cows are grazing. There are towering mountains ahead and behind. We are on a plain of gray sand and smooth stones. At its far edges are slopes of red soil and steep pine woods perching and clambering and ascending over a thousand feet above this unexpected level place. Two men on trotting ponies ride past us. We emerge from the thickets and come to three rough huts made of bark and clearly not wind-tight. Two children emerge from one and stare at us. A man and a woman and a child emerge with loads of handwoven baskets on their backs and head off in the same direction we’re traveling. We take photos. A 360° panorama is about the only way I can attempt to sum it up with a camera. Then we continue across.

There are ridges of sand piled by the wind in the innumerable dry watercourses. Sometimes we cross the turquoise streams split and wandering in their landlocked beach, and we cross on pine poles. The final crossing is on a plank bridge that Krishna says, come summer, “Kali Gandaki eat.” The idea of the river filling its bed shoulder to shoulder is a little frightening. In all it’s taken us nearly two hours to cross. We catch up and keep pace for a while with the family of basketmakers. Krishna talks with them as we walk. The wind has picked up to a steady rush and waves of dust roll across the valley floor and scour our windbreakers. We pass fields with stone walls that have full-height wooden doors standing in archways. They are only fields but they seem like the ruins of giant storehouses, and this impression and the blowing dust lend an apocalyptic air to the place. Krishna points out Tukche away across the riverbed but it’s impossible to judge the distance. Everything seems out of scale. Sean is limping. We’re not sure if we’ll be straggling into town after dark for a third night running. But gradually a few buildings along the west shore of the riverbed become visible and we have something to measure our progress by. A side canyon opens up. High on the ridge we can see colorful flags flying, a monastery with a broad view of the gorge. We cross a stream, we pass men bearing loads of goods setting out even at this late hour from Tukche, and we arrive at the village gate.

Tukche feels like a refuge after crossing the arid riverbeds. The village feels particularly old-fashioned and solid and colorful. The rooftops are stacked with cordwood. Cows and dogs and chickens roam in the streets, ponies stand unsaddled and resting, there’s a motorcycle repair shop, a wide schoolyard empty other than a patrolling red rooster. There’s a colorful monastery with prayer flags whipping in the wind, there’s a distillery of apple brandy. We walk through most of the town before arriving at the Yak Hotel, Kalpana’s parents’ hotel, where we’ve planned all along to spend a night.

The hotel is sturdy and cozy. With the dust and wind picking up outside, the light inside is dim. The walls are white-painted wood with exposed beams. Our rooms are off a short corridor on the second floor, where a railing overlooks the common room lit in soft gray light falling down the high narrow space from skylights on the third floor. There’s a dining room on the second floor as well, cheery with plants. Outside, clouds are wrapping themselves around the mountain as the sun goes down and a fierce wind is whipping dust through the streets. On the neighboring roof a man is tossing armloads of cordwood down to the street.

We rest a while in the room and enjoy hot showers. It hasn’t been cold enough until now for me to wear my flannel-lined jeans. I brought them because I have no wind pants so they’re the next best thing, and I pull them out of my backpack now realizing that they’re clean. Changing into them makes me feel like a new person, albeit a new person with very, very stiff legs. In a little while I hobble down the steep stairs to the dining room, where an electric heater is in a pit under the table, and the draped tablecloth keeps our legs and feet toasty. For dinner, it’s some soup, and then dal bhat, and then some apple momos with custard on them and a little bottle of apple brandy, of which Sean and I only drink a tiny amount before retiring to our room, our sleeping bags, the big thick blankets on the beds, the comfort of being snug while the wind moans outside.

The family that chews together, moos together

A stream of the Kali Gandaki river, actual color

The riverbed of the Kali Gandaki a few miles south of Tukche

The view south down the riverbed from Tukche

At the south gate of the village of Tukche

In the morning breakfast takes a while. Sean and I are wobbling around and creaking. I eye the pastries in the hotel window, then decide on yogurt, for the protein, and muesli. In the street I buy wool fingerless gloves with a fold-over cap that turns them into mittens. I need something to cover my hands because the wind in the Kali Gandaki Gorge is legendary. These are hand-knitted so not entirely windproof, but they’re warm and cheap.

In the dining room the previous night, we talked with a Nepali hydrological engineer traveling in the area as a tourist. He eschewed the title of tourist, preferring to be called a traveler and reserving the word “tourist” for us foreigners. He was going the opposite way, and we were keen to know what the road was like. In other words, was there much up and down? Our knees needed to know. We already knew that there were no concentrated altitude changes in the next few days’ route, as we would now be traveling along the river. The climb from Kagbeni to Muktinath was the other big one of the trek, but that was still a few days off. According to the Nepali tourist there was a lot of roadwork along the way, we’d have to look out for rocks rolling down on our heads, but it would be fairly flat going.

Here I’ll steal a story from David Holmberg about an older Nepali woman who was a guest in Ithaca for a while. She would take the bus to Cornell each day but would get off at the bottom of the steepest hill in town, Buffalo Street where it ascends from the commons to College Town, rather than stay on the bus for the circuitous ride around the back side of the hill and up to campus. The bus driver one day said to her, Why are you getting off here? If you stay on the bus, you won’t have to walk up the hill. She just looked at him and said, What hill?

The point of the story is that asking a Nepali to tell you whether a road is flat is like asking a fish to tell you if it’s windy out.

So we set out through the rest of Tatopani, which stretches for almost a mile along the river. Relative to the villages we’ve passed through in the last few days, Tatopani is big town. Its hot springs and expansive hotel menus with their crumble brownies and apple pies entice the roadweary trekker to stay on an extra day here. We don’t have the time, though, if we want to make it to Muktinath and back to Jomsom to catch our return flight to Pokhara.

When we’re clear of the village, the trail immediately begins to ascend. We get stuck behind a mule train on a switchback but only for twenty minutes or so. Mule trains pass us in both directions. The trail again skirts ledges over the river. The shoulders of the gorge become steeper. In the earlier part of the day we pass many road construction sites. The motorable road that will eventually connect Jomsom to Beni is being built outward from the villages and construction camps along this route. Men work on the road by breaking boulders and shoveling. Women in Nepal commonly work construction as well. I’ve seen them laying bricks and welding at construction sites in Kathmandu. But along this road we see mostly men. These women making rocks into smaller rocks were not typical.

Over the next day or two, Becca and Sean and I have a discussion about where the Nepali men are. We’ve noted that in the villages there are women and small children aplenty, and old people, but able-bodied men seem to be scarce. After seeing all the men working on these road crews, Becca suggests that the numbers balance out, but Krishna assures us that the road crews are not from the area. So the local men are in fact scarce, and by all accounts the prosperous villages along the Jomsom road are less affected than the rest of the country. The war between the maoists and the king’s army has cleared the men out. Many have fled the countryside to avoid conscription by the maoists, or violence at the hands of either side’s soldiers. They’ve gone to Kathmandu for work, or left the country to work in the construction sites of Dubai, in the factories of Korea, in the restaurants of America. Many men have also joined the maoist army as well. The estimates vary widely. The maoists boasted of a very large army during the insurgency, but now, being held to account to provide a corresponding number of weapons to the U.N. monitors, they’ve claimed a tenth as many soldiers, and more splinter groups over which their central authority has no power. In any case many, many more men have left the countryside than have joined the fight.

At lunchtime we eat on a restaurant’s terrace yard overlooking a narrow gorge where the river’s turquoise waters are tumbling between two tight stone walls and then bursting over a rapids. On the slope above, where our path goes, a road crew is loosening boulders and rolling them off the roadway where they crash down the long talus slope toward the river. They unleash a few small landslides a minute. Above them is a waterfall. Our path crosses the talus slope below the road crew. We’re so eager to go up there and dodge rocks rolling down a 45° slope that we don’t order momos, and our lunch arrives very quickly. Sean and I pore over his topo map and perform several calculations and recalculations of the day’s cumulative altitude changes, for the sake of our aching knees.

After lunch we climb up toward the construction site. Krishna shouts up to the men on the road crew, who pause in their boulder-rolling while we cross the talus slide. There’s no path except what travelers have stomped into the soft dirt. On the far side we cross a small wooden bridge with a few splintery chomps taken out of its beams by falling rocks. Above us is the waterfall, below is the creek rolling down to meet the river.

Several more times as we walk the west wall of the gorge, the path detours below construction areas. We have to make our way across boulder fields and rockslides. The work is being done entirely by hand. Men use steel bars and water to pound holes into the rock for explosives to be packed into. They split rocks with crowbars. They shovel gravel in two-man teams, one pulling a rope tied to the end of the shovel to help throw the gravel aside. They carry loads of rocks in wicker baskets slung from their foreheads with tump lines. The crews live in tents near the constructions areas. Their laundry is laid out on rocks to dry. They cook over fires built in the lees of boulders.

In the midafternoon we cross a footbridge and walk the rest of the day with the road construction across the gorge from us. The walls of the canyon here are vertical and a couple of thousand feet from the river to the slopes above, where the pine trees peer over the edge. The splitting and cracking of massive rockfalls echoes down the gorge. We look up at the sound. By the time it’s reached us the rockfall is already well underway, great clouds of dust tumbling down from where the scar of the new road cuts across the opposite wall of the canyon. From here, the men look as small as ants.

The evening comes on. With Sean’s knee aching especially on the downhill stretches, we make slow progress along the trail. We pass almost no one. We see a lone man in a ravine above us chopping wood, who shouts to ask if we want to buy ganja. A few times we pass and are passed by a man and a boy, the boy carrying an oblong DirecTV satellite dish on his back so that he looks like a turtle. There are maoist slogans painted on the steel phone poles.

We cross into Mustang District in the late afternoon. A little tea shop is blaring awful Hindi dance pop. We get turtleboy’s father to take our picture.

Dusk is coming on by the time we reach the cable footbridge across which is the Mustang District checkpost. The bridge is a long one. It bounces under our feet. You have to adjust the pace of your walking so as not to continually build up the bouncing like a trampoline. We stop in the middle to appreciate the view of the river and the gorge.

A few men and women are sitting around talking at the checkpost, but the checkpost itself is closed for the day. We continue along the road. It crosses a terraced riverbottom in a wide area of the gorge. The hilltops, that we would call mountains, come into view above, with the last rose-colored sunlight on their snows. To our right are fields and a steep mesa beyond with a dense forest clustered along the top of it. We pass among stone walls with flowering cactuslike plants growing in the dirt packed on top of them. Krishna shows us a trick, which is that you can grab the spiny stalks of these plants and stroke them toward the red-flowered tips without hurting yourself. The spines are willing to bend in that direction. We all try it, then continue on. We are in the outskirts of the village of Ghasa. By the time we pass through to the far side of the village it’s fully dark. We pass a few dark buildings. The town grows sparse, we walk among fields again. The lone light at the far end of town is our hotel. The hotel owner asks Krishna in a brusque voice why we’re so late.

Again, we’re the only guests in the hotel. In the breezeway outside our rooms, Becca approaches a fluffy mountain dog that’s asleep on the tiles. She asks one of the hotelkeepers if it’s friendly. He shrugs. She approaches the dog, pets it, eventually has it on its back as she scratches its belly and it pedals its leg happily. From the way the dog reacts and from the way the hotelkeeper is looking at Becca, the dog doesn’t get this sort of attention very often.

We sit on the beds in Sean’s and my room and pull of our boots and change socks and pass around the little jar of Tiger Balm I thought to buy in Kathmandu. We all apply it liberally to our leg muscles and the room is soon heady with the smell of peppermint oil and it makes the cold mountain air feel even colder in our nostrils. While Sean takes a quick nap with feet elevated, Becca and I go to the common room. There’s a television on, and a few locals have arrived to watch the news and some cornball Benny Hill-style sitcom. I drink a beer and write in my journal. Sean arrives, and we eat dinner.

When Sean and I go back to the room there’s a wolf spider the size of a child’s hand perching on the wall above his bed. We call Becca in to look at it. Sean picks up a feathery handbroom to have a swat at the thing, but by this time it’s gotten nervous on account of all the scrutiny, and when Sean steps up onto the bed, it scurries up into the crack between the ceiling and a corner beam. That’s the last of it we see until the next morning, when there are two of them there on the wall.

The weather has been cold. The marble in the house holds it in. The rooms are like meat lockers. The smoke and dust of the city hang in the air day after day with no rain to clear it for a month now. The smoke is from cars and motorcycles burning gasoline and motor oil cut with kerosene, and from garbage fires where people burn street sweepings, fallen leaves and plastic bags and juice boxes. In the morning the sun comes up gray and bleary, and the hills ringing the valley are the barest shadows behind the haze. Amanda and I are wearing sweaters and wool socks and hats indoors all the time. The propane heater we bought will heat a single room, but not so much that you want to take your hat off. We sleep every night in our down sleeping bags with a thick cotton quilt over us. There is no double-pane glass in the house. There are no storm windows. The walls are concrete. The solar water heater will produce a moderately warm shower in the afternoon. A month ago you could get a hot shower but not anymore.

It’s not cold like in the States. There’s never a frost. Snow is more or less unheard of in the valley. Bright orange flowering vines dangle down walls, red and pink flowers grow in the flowerpots on people’s roofs and terraces, and all of the fruit vendors sell fresh oranges that didn’t need to be shipped halfway across the world. Nepal has three growing seasons a year. In our back yard, napa cabbage and mustard are growing. Still, we’ll be glad when the warm weather and the rains return.