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.
