Jomsom trek (part six):

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

 

Jomsom trek (part five): Tatopani to Ghasa

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.

 

Jomsom trek (part four): Poon Hill Sunrise, too much downhill, hot springs

Before dawn Sean’s watch beeps. The room is cold, I’m warm. I really don’t want to get out of my sleeping bag. But I peek out the window again at the mountains and shuck off my sleeping bag. My boots are cold and stiff and my feet are reluctant to go in.

Krishna is in the hallway when we emerge from our rooms. We check that we have gloves and headlamps. I have no gloves so Becca lets me borrow the windshells from hers. We walk down the steep stairs and out into the darkness. The flagstones are slick with frost. We proceed back up the hill and turn along a sidestreet and up more steps and across another hotel’s terrace, where some other tourists are arranging themselves for the same morning walk. A little farther and we pass through a gate where a sign announces Poon Hill. Here the path grows steep. Our headlamps light the narrow trail, a gully worn down through the dirt to the icy stones and tree roots. The frost on the leaves is thick and sparkling. When we emerge into clearings the stars are as well. I stop to remove my wool sweater so that I won’t overheat, and take in a view of the hills, a slow fog wave rolling over the saddle, the blue mountains above everything.

The path crosses into the open, among frozen bunches of grass and burrs. Then we’re at the hilltop, and the light is coming up behind the broken clouds in the east. We walk around the viewing tower which was built at the hilltop for little purpose other than to make it impossible to have an unobstructed 360° view. I climb up to have a look around, but having the roof supports in my field of vision annoys me, and I’d rather have my feet on the ground. Like the other fifty-odd people who’ve arrived to catch the sunset, we mill about trying to keep warm. I put my sweater back on and stick my hands in my jacket’s side vents. Krishna shivers. Despite his assurances, he’s not as warmly equipped as he ought to be. (I’ll have more to say about guides and gear in part seven, wherein the weather takes a swipe at us.) Becca and Sean and I move from place to place, finding ways to brace our cameras for the long exposures needed to get an image in the predawn. I clear a spot in the frost on a wooden bench. The sun comes up fast. There’s a lot to look at.

Becca takes this picture of Annapurna South (left, 23,684 feet) and Machhapuchhre (right, 22,942 feet), which stand to the southeast of Poon Hill.

She also takes these of the Dhaulagiri massif, north of Poon Hill. The big one is Dhaulagiri (26,795 feet), the seventh highest peak in the world, and the sixth highest in Nepal.

I wade through some burrs to take this one.

Once the sun is up all the tourists start taking pictures like these.

The Thai women who’d abandoned their guide in Tikhedunga are there, all making the peace sign when their pictures are taken. The English man who’d been kicked by the pony is there as well, with his wife or girlfriend, and he reports that his knee and ankle are in good shape. They thank Becca again for her help.

We come back down the hill considerably less cranky than we were when we climbed out of our sleeping bags. The trail is still slippery with frost. Back at the Green View Lodge, we order a round of oat porridges and Tibetan bread and get our things packed. Sean videotapes the food preparations in the kitchen and the woodfed clay stove and I make my coffee on the counter there. Again, my coffee apparatus draws a lot of curious attention from the Nepalis. (Admittedly the AeroPress is a strange device. It’s also the best coffee maker there is for camping and trekking—it’s small, durable, and makes great coffee.) Sean and Becca and I are likewise fascinated to see Tibetan bread prepared. It’s basically a pan-fried doughboy. The woman who cooks it at the Green View drops the dough into the oil and snips it twice with scissors, perhaps to keep it from overinflating. It’s delicious stuff, and when I decide I want to be a fatter person, I’ll learn to make it.

Both Sean and Becca left their hearts in Ghorepani. They both had their pictures taken with the objects of their crushes. These are the two sisters who run the Green View Lodge.

This is a puppy en route from his birthplace near the Annapurna Base Camp to an illustrious career as a dog in Bouddha.

I myself didn’t fall in love in Ghorepani. This curly-haired pony did bat her eyelashes at me, but I think she just wanted an apple.

Finally we’re on our way. Despite its auspicious beginnings, though, the day will be the hardest one of our trek.

 

Yesterday, ukaalo, all uphill, Krishna told us. Today, waraalo, all downhill.

It’s six hours downhill by the estimate of every Nepali we ask, but for us eight, descending by endless stone stairways through terrace farms, stone walled buildings with thatch roofs, stone walls ringing terraces where water buffalo stand grazing amid the stubble of last season’s rice. The day is sunny. The valley, which grows more expansive as we descend, is lush and the light like honey. The land looks impossibly fertile. Banana trees grow between the fields, red flowers like poinsettias on tall shafts arch over the road, sprays of bright orange marigolds grow in every flowerbed in front of the houses and along the stone walls, stands of bamboo twenty feet high sway in the breeze.

The relentless downhill is hell on Sean’s knees and mine. By the time we stop for lunch, we’re griping about knee pains and making jokes about our age and infirmity to Becca and Krishna, and by midafternoon, the two of us are limping and sidestepping down the steep stone steps. I lean heavily on a ski pole borrowed from Becca to spare my aching right knee as much of each impact as possible. It’s not enough. Still, the scenery becomes more and more impressive and it makes the stumping along worth it. Whole landscapes here are tilted over, striations in the stone not unlike terraced fields but slanted and on a grander scale, wrought by tectonic uplifts that render the concept of horizontality absurd. Every pebble is either resting at its angle of repose or else currently rolling into the gulf. The river gets closer, the farms more picturesque, the stair steeper. Sometimes it is an improbable stack of granite blocks pretending to be a stairway, or two stairways side by side, a new one beside an an old one that’s collapsed, undermined by a landslide or by the inevitable pull of gravity in the steepness of this landscape. Yet many people live here. The entire day is spent walking through farmland. The people have staked themselves against the steepness: they’ve built level terrace after terrace down the face of the mountain and planted rice and radishes and yellow-flowering mustard.

The river gets closer and the earth in places is visibly tumbling apart, too steep to bear its own weight. We cross chalky, dusty stretches, calcium scars exposed by past landslides. The dirt glitters with mica. The village streets are paved with dull slabs of gray and white marble. Outside the villages, marble is used for stone walls as well. Cows and buffalo stand in the small fields and watch us pass and every person, nearly, greets us saying Namaste! and even those who don’t, when greeted, respond without fail. The children hold out their hands and ask for eschool pen, sweets, chocolate, mithai, never for money like they do in the capital.

Becca and I, talking with Krishna, learn the Nepali words for up, down, steep, slippery, switchback, horse, donkey, mule, porter, thigh, hurt, heavy.

We have lunch in the village of Sikha, in a little gardened yard overlooking the depths of the valley we have yet to descend. Without thinking of the consequences in terms of the latening hour, we order momos, which take a long time to prepare because each one has to be folded up by hand. At first we’re glad for the rest, Sean and I especially, but an hour later, when we still have no lunch, we start to fear that we won’t be able to make it to Tatopani by dark. We talk for a while with two women at the next table who are medical students from Holland, interning for a few months in Pokhara and currently on their way to a cataract surgery field clinic in a village near Beni. We pore over our maps and try to calculate how many hours it will be to Tatopani, and to Ghasa the next day, and, if every mile hurts like today’s have, whether we can possibly make it to Tukche where we promised Amanda’s and my landlady we would stay in her parents’ hotel. Finally lunch arrives, vegetable and egg momos (no momo sauce but quite enjoyable) and uncommonly spicy tomato noodle soup. We bolt it down, I put on my habitual midday dry socks, we put our shoes back on, and we’re on the road again.

Half an hour before dusk we arrive, finally, at a village on the river and sit on the stone bench across from the ACAP office while Krishna goes inside and shows our permits. This moment of rest is worth every rupee of the guide fee. Where we’re sitting, we can hear the river. Dogs wander past on their errands. Ponies chew and stamp in a crowded paddock above us and one of them kicks another in irritation. A grubby girl alternately wheedles for a school pen and keeps tabs on her baby brother who, without pants or underwear under his shirt, is trying to get himself into trouble with his newfound walking skills. After a few minutes Krishna is done and we have to get up. My knees and thighs have already stiffened. He assures us we’re very close to the town of Tatopani, just another fifteen minutes’ walk. We’ve been fantasizing about Tatopani all day. The town’s name means “hot water” in Nepali and yes there are hot springs there. We’ve discussed how sore muscles swell in hot water, making soreness and stiffness worse, but good sense is clearly going to be trumped by the desire to soak. All we have to do is stumble the last mile or two.

We cross a short cable bridge north across the river whose descent we’ve been paralleling all day, then a longer cable bridge over the wide Kali Gandaki which the smaller river joins. The Kali Gandaki is relatively low this time of year. In its wide bed it rolls around boulders and in pebbly shoals. Glacial sediments make the waters a clear deep turquoise. We hurry across. The far slopes above the river are already in shadows. Becca and Krishna and I make it across and wait for Sean while a mule train queues up on our side of the bridge. We shout to Sean to hurry but we can’t be heard over the rush of the river. Sean sees the mules though, and hurries across, and after he steps off the bridge, the mules start across. From the bridge we climb a steep switchback, wary of having another pack train roll rocks down on our heads. We pass through a small village and a construction camp where men are cooking and drinking at the end of their day. They sit around gas flames in the open-fronted shacks and watch us pass. Soon we start up another switchback improvised out of the sliding gravel slope. Above, the road mounts onto a sheer rock face. We walk a ledge for a couple of hundred yards, the river almost directly below and falling into deep shadows. We pass a place where we have to take care not to hit our heads on the overhanging stone, or trip over the chopped rebar sticking up from the reinforced trail edge on our right. The road crosses among fields on a wide tongue in the river. It’s now fully dark. It takes me a moment to realize we’ve entered the village of Tatopani because their electricity is out. The homes and shops are candlelit. The streets are almost completely dark. We continue along the street and people stand in the candlelit doorways and watch us.

Krishna shows us to a hotel. A boy with a candle leads us up the stairs to our rooms. Sean and I are giddy with soreness. The boy presents us with the customary menu and order pad. We discuss whether to eat first or go straight to the hot springs. The boy advises us to wait until morning for the hot springs, because it’s dark and the village lights are out. He seems to think it’s dangerous but we can’t ascertain why. Are there bandits? Wild animals? Are Nepalis just afraid of the dark? Probably they just want to close the kitchen early. We decide to defer further discussion until beer can be obtained to sharpen our reasoning. In the hotel’s dining room, Krishna also tries to persuade us not to go out tonight. We have headlamps and sore muscles and we’re undeterred. Sean and I drink a beer each, and become more undeterred. Finally we get our bathing suits and towels and headlamps from upstairs, and the four of us walk back through the dark streets. We turn down an alley in the direction of the river. The alley becomes a path, with a little stream running alongside. The path is rough but easily navigated. In a few minutes, steam swirls up in the beams of our headlamps and Sean finds himself spotlighting a naked man wading in the pool. We cross a low causeway to a shack on the other side, where a couple of young men are listening to Hindi music on a transistor radio by candlelight. Important bathing amenities are for sale, such as beer and Pringles. One of them collects our twenty-rupee fee and we wander off into the shadows to change.

The hot spring fills a cement pool at the base of a cliff. We sit on the submerged step and soak and groan appreciatively. We float a little. We eventually convince Krishna to climb in. I float around in search of where the water enters the pool, where it’s almost too hot, and sit there for a few minutes. Soon the other visitors have left and it’s just the four of us in the pool, and no lights other than our headlamps and the band of stars visible above the walls of the gorge. This is a more or less perfect hot springs wallow and could not possibly have been improved upon by daylight or electric lights. We decide that the Nepali standard for an optimum hot spring visit is not the same as the American one. After a while I notice a smell in the air that I haven’t smelled since early November in Kathmandu, a night-blooming jasmine called raatiko rani (“queen of the night”). It’s a spectacular overwhelming perfume. On the way back up the path I find a vine of it overhanging the path and put my nose in among the pale flowers and breathe in and the smell is dizzying.

On returning to the hotel, limp and loose from our soak, Sean and I order another beer and we all have a more determined look at the menu. Where we crossed the confluence just before dusk, our path converged with the planned route of the motorable road from Beni to Jomsom. Much of this road is unfinished, but Beni is accessible by car, so, being closer to a roadhead, Tatopani’s hotels have more extensive menus than the guesthouses of other villages on the route. Sean sticks with his plan to eat only dal bhat for dinner, but I’ve worked up a craving for animal protein, and the chicken sizzler I order, when it arrives, handily upstages Sean’s dal bhat and Becca’s lasagna. It’s half a deboned chicken smoking and sizzling on a griddle and smothered in gravy that’s bubbling and caramelizing on the iron. By the time I’m done with it there’s nothing left for the dishwashers to do.

Sleep falls on me tonight like a lead blanket. I wake once in the night to the clanging of mulebells and the clatter of hooves on the slates below our window. In the morning, the muscles of my legs are as sore and stiff as they’ve ever been in my life.

 

Jomsom trek (part three): Roads, Tikhedunga, a problem with the hired guide requirement, Ghorepani

We cross a footbridge to where Nepal’s other government’s officials have their checkpost. Below us turquoise water tumbles in a ravine and bright red and yellow and purple flowers grow in the rocks. Krishna shows our ACAP and TRC permits while we wonder how many checkposts there are per mile on this trail. But soon we’re on our way, and we won’t see another checkpost for several days.

We walk mostly uphill on the wide trail, passing under rhododendron and orange trees and stands of high bamboo. Nettles grow on the stone walls. Frequently we pass wide stone benches, built into the walls along the roadside or enclosing the trunks of big shade trees. These are rest areas, where porters and tourists and old women alike stop to rest. At some of these places women sell oranges from woven baskets. We stop to drink water, to put on sunscreen, to strip off our jackets. We pass people every few minutes, a good number of them tourists, though they’ll be less frequent in coming days.

The weather is sunny and hot and I worry that I packed too many woolens. The road is a dirt footpath, inaccessible to automobile traffic, with frequent stairs made from large fitted slabs of granite sunk firmly in the dirt. In usage it’s less trail than highway, and built as solidly as anything of asphalt. Pack trains pass regularly, mules and ponies and donkeys, the animals wearing tin bells with wooden clappers that clunk as they walk, announcing their approach from around the switchbacks. They are laden with plastic weave or burlap sacks full of potatoes, rice, beer and soda bottles clinking; with red propane tanks hung upside down one on each side from the packsaddles’ wooden bows; with plastic jerrycans full of kerosene; with parcels of sewn-up plastic that have the recipients’ names written on them in black marker; with suitcases and duffels and hikers’ packs. The drivers follow behind the last animal, one or two per train, carrying switches, clucking or shouting Ha! at the mules and ponies or slapping their rumps if they get bunched up or stop to munch the greenery. Many of the animals wear halters with colorful rosettes knitted on the forehead pieces, with reflectors sewn onto them, with ribbons hung below their ears, with gold and red tassels swinging from their breasts.

Most goods that travel to and from the villages of the Kali Gandaki river valley in the districts of Kaski and Myaagdi and Mustang through which we’ll be trekking are carried there by porter or pack train. Many of the villages along this route have never been visited by automobiles or motorcycles. Jomsom, the capital of Mustang, is not connected to the rest of Nepal by motorable roads. Some things come into Jomsom by plane but it’s a small plane, nor is the freight cheap. There’s a road under construction from Beni to Jomsom. It will be years before it’s finished. For freightage purposes the river is unnavigable, rocky and steep with too much water in the summer and too little in the winter. For the trekker, this inaccessibility means an area relatively unspoiled: picturesque villages and farms, clean water and air. Tourism makes up most of the area’s economy outside farming, and the local governments have encouraged the booming guesthouse business and prioritized keeping the environment clean. There are drinking water stations in many villages, providing free, safe water to the locals, while charging a small fee for tourists.

We skip lunch and arrive in the early afternoon at our first guesthouse in the village of Tikhedunga. We step into the courtyard, which is open to the road and flagged in the same stones, while Krishna arranges rooms for us. The price is a very agreeable off-season rate, 50 rupees a night, or about 70 cents US. We are shown our rooms off the second story balcony overlooking the courtyard and presented with menus and a pen and order sheet. After cleaning up a little and changing into dry socks we go down and sit at a table along a railing off the back of the courtyard, with a view into the gorge partially obstructed by a bamboo grove. We eat tomato soup and delicious panfried potatoes with garlic and seared sliced peppers and onions. Krishna teaches Becca a tabletop game where small pucks are flicked across a chalk-powdered surface, ricochet and collide and ideally land in one of the pockets at the corners. It’s like a cross between pool and air hockey and I’ve seen it all over the place since, though I’ve forgotten the name.

As Sean and I are finishing up our beers a Nepali man strikes up a conversation with us. He’s a guide, distinguished from most Nepali travelers by his Gore-Tex windshell and good boots. He pulls up a seat and orders another round of beers for Sean and I and soon we’re talking and this man is getting increasingly drunk. Krishna, who doesn’t drink, is casting glances at us, and we’re exchanging smiles amongst ourselves. He’s guiding a group of ten Thai women, he tells us. He’s been guiding for years. He’s an expert on the region, and other regions as well. He frequently interrupts Krishna to give us the benefit of this expertise. Later, over dinner (a very tasty dal bhat with greens and radish achar), he’s sitting with his clients and shouts over them in a drunken outburst, something about mountains. In the morning we’ll see him stumble out of his room with vomit dried on his collar to discover his clients have left without him. Sean and Becca and I agree that we’ve gotten very lucky with our guide, especially now seeing how it can go badly. We’ll talk with a shop owner a few days later in Jomsom who’s sincerely worried that the guide requirement, instated only this past October, will drive away tourists. It’s a valid concern. If you get a guide like this, will you be eager to trek in Nepal again? Will you recommend the trip to your friends?

The second day’s walking, as Krishna warned us, is almost entirely uphill. We walk through terraced farmland where buffalo are chewing at the lower branches of trees. The villages perch on the slope overlooking a wide and extensively terraced gorge. It pains the mind to try to imagine the amount of work involved in carving these terraces out of the mountainsides. We pass the last of the tourists we shared the hotel with in Tikhedunga, and we’ll be the sole guests at each guesthouse from here on out. The road is now almost entirely of stone, hand-fitted slabs of granite, horse dung dried and sifting between them. It winds in narrow streets among brightly painted stone buildings with blue corrugated or slate roofs. All of the buildings are oriented to the road, whose flagstones are joined to side yards and restaurant terraces. Chickens roam freely everywhere. Huge red or white roosters stand on the stone walls and puff their feathers and berate us as we approach. Big woolly dogs sleep on the stones. Some of them are large enough that they might be intimidating, were they not all so lazy and good-natured. Occasionally they’ll get up and trot alongside or ahead of us for a ways with their fluffy curled tails bobbing. None of them ever barks. Restaurants are common, with gazebo-like dining platforms hanging over steep drops and spectacular views. The forested slopes above are in a cloud. The snowy shoulder of Annapurna South can be seen at times in the breaks.

We stop for lunch on the terrace of a large restaurant, eat noodles Chinese style and mashed potatoes sticky with cheese while the first cold breezes of the trek blow from below. An English hiker coming up the road walks past a muscular pony and pats its back and it casually kicks him in the back of the knee and sends him sprawling on the stones. A crowd quickly gathers. Becca prevails upon the man to let her wrap his knee. She’s a trained wilderness responder, and the horse didn’t break the man’s leg, so all around it’s his lucky day. We continue upward, casting a warier eye on the pack trains that come more frequently down the hill.

The trail climbs into rhododendron forests, the trees’ branches gnarled and creepy with moss. There are fewer people, and the remoter areas of the woods have a haunted feel. The overarching branches make the road into a tunnel. We cross a concrete bridge over a rocky draw where turquoise water churns, and the stones are littered with red leaves. The concrete railings of the bridge have been broken off by some past flood fifteen feet above the current water level and their rebar armatures are exposed and twisted and rusting. On the far side we climb into a meadow and are met by a herd of goats that overspill the path. They have young kids among them, that gambol and bound with all four feet in the air at once. One of them climbs to the top of a rock in the midst of the herd, can’t find a way down, and leaps for it. The shepherds are a man and a young boy. After they’ve passed, we see no one for a while. We walk past a seemingly abandoned stone house and I look into the breezeway and see what at first looks like a child sitting there, until it looks up at me with an alarmed white-ringed monkey face. It leaps away and out of view down the hill. Did you see that monkey? I ask Sean and Becca, but they didn’t see it. There are movements in the trees. Half a dozen or more of these large gray monkeys are watching us. They emerge onto the trail behind us to watch us walk away. A pair of them leap a stone wall and run through a fallow field just downhill from the trail, alternately chasing and tackling one another and stopping to watch us suspiciously. These monkeys are not like the Kathmandu monkeys. They’re larger and more muscular and they seem more territorial. It occurs to me that walking past them alone might be a bad idea. I ask Krishna if they ever attack people, and he says, Yes, alone? Definitely attack. I don’t know if this means they’re definitely known to attack, or if they definitely will attack. I let the vagueness stand because I don’t have the Nepali skills nor Krishna the English skills to work it out in a reasonable amount of time, and I’m more interested in keeping a close eye on the monkeys in the field to our left.

Finally we reach a long building with the aspect of a church, on account of its many wooden-mullioned chancery windows. It lies in a quiet mountain hollow, drifts of fallen leaves on the ground, brown and gray hillsides and pink roses on a trellis, an autumn scene out of a germanic fairytale. We stop for a while and Becca pets a dog that looks part husky. We exchange a few words with a shy teenage boy selling knitted goods. The churchlike building seems prepared for a banquet but there is no one to attend. Chickens look on. A sheepskin is drying on the corrugated roof of a shed. We move on, down into a ravine, across a stream, and up into Ghorepani. With its stone buildings and stone walls and cows standing and chewing cud in the yards the place could pass for rural England. After a short discussion weighing good views against good accommodations, we continue up the hill a few minutes more to Ghorepani-Deurali, a small village in the saddle of two hills with a view through the clouds at the flank of a snowy mountain.

The town has the remote and wild beauty of an American mining town from frontier days, complete with ponies hitched at a hotel railing and a public watering trough. The hotel that Krishna leads us to is a three-story building on the ridge, the Green View Lodge. We’re the only guests. We’re given the last rooms on the third floor, at the end of a long corridor of closed blue doors. The hotel is quite cold. The internal walls are plywood and exposed two-by-fours with the electrical cords for lights and switches stapled to them. There is no insulation anywhere, and over the course of the day as we’ve climbed into higher altitudes and clouds, it’s become clear that it’s going to be a chilly night. First Sean and then I take advantage of a hot shower in a stall that opens onto the courtyard. I stand my hiking boots upside down against the door so as not to get water in them and strip out of my clothes, socks last, and put my feet on the cold slate floor. I turn on the water and scald myself happily until the bare electric light bulb goes out. In the faint daylight coming over the top of the door I dry off with my chamois swim towel and force my damp legs into long underwear. Then I join Sean and Becca in the guesthouse’s common room, by a stove made from an oil drum. The beautiful proprietress in her wool scarf and unruly hair feeds split rhododendron logs into the fire and we hang up our socks to dry. Becca and Sean and I talk American politics and the two sisters who own the hotel sit and listen and have a quieter conversation with the young man who will later be introduced to us as the cook.

When we retire to our bedrooms they are deeply cold. The sleeping bag is a welcome shelter. Sean and I wear our wool caps to bed. I wake periodically throughout the night and pull the curtain and peer out the window at the moonlit mountains, three or more peaks now standing in the dim cold moonlight, waiting for our predawn hike up Poon Hill to see the sunrise. A cloud arches over the mountain like an ice rainbow cast by the moon.

 

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Jomsom trek (part one): Getting to the trail

Taking the trek to Jomsom and Muktinath was Sean’s idea. When he first contacted me and said he was coming to Nepal, he was already determined to do this trek, inspired in part by the impression made on him years ago by Peter Mathiessen’s The Snow Leopard. (Amanda doesn’t like this book. I have no idea if this is why she didn’t come with us.)

Sean and I were in the process of making preparations when, a couple of days before we were to leave, our friend Becca asked if we wanted any company. We said certainly, and she ended up contributing the lion’s share of the logistical work. Her boyfriend did NOLS (National Outdoor Leadership School) with a guy named Amrit who works for the trekking agency Borderlands, and he set us up with a guide and arranged our TRC permit. As of October of this year, a new law went into effect requiring foreign trekkers on the major routes in Nepal to be accompanied by at least one guide or porter. It seems to be mainly a make-work law, and certainly benefits the trekking agencies, but it also has the potential to degrade more than enhance the experience for trekkers here. (More on that in part two.)

The route we chose begins outside Pokhara, in the village of Nayapul, and goes via Jomsom and Kagbeni up to Muktinath and back to Jomsom. This route is known as the “apple pie trek” because it runs through Nepal’s apple country, and the popularity of the route is such that the tourist infrastructure is well developed here, so if you want, you can eat apple pie every night along the way. The peak season is in September and October. We got a few warnings that December might be too cold but Vishwa assured us we’d be fine, being Americans and thereby accustomed to colder weather than Nepal generally experiences.

We bought plane tickets for the return flight from Jomsom to Pokhara, US$69 each. Between Kathmandu and Pokhara we took the bus. Sean and I nearly missed our 7am bus from Kathmandu because we assumed we could get a taxi, but none was to be had. We took a local bus and then a minibus, crammed aboard with our backpacks among the wary morning commuters. The bus to Pokhara was a luxurious Mercedes with only half a dozen passengers. It left only a few minutes after we’d thrown our packs into the storage compartment and climbed into our reserved seats. Bottled water was handed out, and the massive bus began to nudge its way among the taxis, motorcycles, bicycles, and pedestrians. In half an hour or so, we got clear of the traffic and began to ascend through the sungolden smog, the sun rising among the shadows of brick factory smokestacks and new buildings in the outskirts of the city, bristling with rebar, and we rose into the hills and the clean air.

The road to Pokhara winds through the lush terrace-farmed valley of the Trisuli River. This is one of Nepal’s main highways, a two-lane blacktop comprised mostly of hairpin curves one after another above hundreds of feet of canyon, for two hundred kilometers. It’s a well-built and well-maintained road, with concrete barriers in many places to prevent or at least discourage vehicles from plunging over the side, and it’s wide enough for two large vehicles to pass. Nonetheless, the sheer curviness of it, and the ever-present chasm, prods at the coddled western driver’s sense of mortality. It’s usually a given that in a plane crash, everyone dies. Here, the same is true of bus crashes. (Note to parents/family/friends/others who love us: Most bus crashes in Nepal happen at night and on less well-maintained local buses. Drivers are drunk or fall asleep, or there’s a mechanical failure, poverty being a harsh taskmaster when it comes to automative maintenance. But out of our concern for you, Amanda and I will try like hell not to be on one of those buses. Besides, this bus ticket came with perks such as an included lunch and a no-livestock policy.)

The bus arrived in the early afternoon in Pokhara and we climbed down into a gaggle of pestering taxi drivers offering to take us to various hotels. We were meeting Laurie, who lives and works in Pokhara as an interpreter for the U.N. High Commission for Human Rights, and we were planning on staying at the hotel where she stays. None of the drivers had heard of this hotel, though they offered up at least three hotels with similar-sounding names. We got ourselves loaded into one man’s taxi, but he was apparently the navigator, not the driver. When he tried to get into the passenger seat Sean shooed him off and got in instead. There was no room for him. But a few hundred yards down the road it became apparent that our driver had no idea where we were going. He hadn’t asked us. We stopped him, got out, found another taxi whose driver, by virtue of not being part of the bus park feeding frenzy, was presumably more trustworthy, and proceeded to the more easily located Pokhara office of Borderlands, where Amrit had arranged to have our TRC permits waiting along with our guide and 250 rupees change.

From there we walked to the hotel, dropped our things, went and found Laurie at the U.N. office and had tea with her. While she finished her workday, we went for a paddle on the lake. The snowy slopes of some massive mountain peeked out for a while from the clouds. Later we met Laurie for Newari food, eaten under a thatch canopy by the lake, and returned to the hotel with her through the peaceful Pokhara streets. Pokhara is Nepal’s second largest city but the lakeside neighborhood is so utterly pleasant that Becca and I were soon rehearsing arguments to convince Amanda and Anna (Becca’s friend, whom she’s here visiting until spring) to relocate their research. Pokhara is warmer than Kathmandu in the winter, and the air is clean, and the nearby mountains and the lake provide the sort of picturesque setting which is essential to good Ph.D. research. I’ll post our new address when the arrangements are finalized.

In the early morning, we took in the view from the balcony of the Hotel Supriya. There was fog on the lake and a near-full moon above. Laurie gave me a cup of hot coffee. Krishna Lama, our guide, waved to us from the narrow hotel walkway between two gardens where a water buffalo could be heard grunting from behind a hayrick. We invited him up, situated our bags, said goodbye to Laurie, and went down to the taxi Krishna had arranged for us. I tied our backpacks to the roof rack. On the way out of town we bought a few baked goods from one of the “German bakeries” that are common here. Money somewhat confusingly changed hands, so in the cab I explained the process known as “Jon’s Delicious Reckoning” to Sean and Becca. The taxi broke free of Pokhara’s traffic and began the climb into the hills, to more and more enticing views of the Annapurna range. Krishna explained to us about the striking mountain Machupuchhre (“Fish Tail”) which is deemed holy and is therefore off limits to climbers. Which is fine. I didn’t want to climb it anyway.

On the way up into the hills, we fetched up behind stopped traffic due to a small protest. It apparently had something to do with students, hence the burning tires.

But this quickly dispersed and we were on our way. We stopped at a checkpost to show our ACAP and TRC permits. Another couple miles up the road, we were dropped at the trailhead in Nayapul. We arranged our packs, paid our driver, and started out.

 

Royal Stag, Royal Challenge, Royal Warrior

Nepalis love their scotch, and Royal Stag seems to be the most popular scotch in Nepal. We were buying it regularly until DC told us to steer clear of it on the basis that it’s frequently counterfeited. I won’t speculate about what goes into counterfeit scotch. But this might explain the royal hangovers.

Royal Challenge is a brand I’ve seen on bottles of scotch and cans of beer in some of the stores. I have yet to take the Royal Challenge.

There’s a flaking billboard at one intersection in town, and I haven’t had my camera handy, but it advertises a whiskey called Royal Warrior. I haven’t seen this one in the stores. If I do, will I buy it? Would you?

I also wonder if these brands will need to be renamed if the king is stripped of all his governmental powers. “The People’s Stag” does have a nice ring to it.

 

Biscuits

The Bhat Bhateni Supermarket has two full aisles dedicated to biscuits. They’re apparently very popular here. Our favorite at the moment is an oat bran biscuit called Hob-Nobs. There’s a Polish knockoff of them (sweeter, less oaty, not as good) that I had to buy just for the name…

 

The Pizza Quest Begins Tonight

There are two pizzas that people talk about in Kathmandu. Fire & Ice makes the most famous pizza in town, and the restaurant is something of an institution. Mike’s Breakfast, also an institution, is not a pizza restaurant, but on Fridays they do pizza and it’s said to be the best pizza available here.

Then the other day I was in the locker room at the Radisson getting dressed for a workout and I overheard a Nepali man asking an American man when his pizza restaurant was going to open. The American had a New York-via-L.A. accent and when I heard him say that their basic pizza was crust, tomato sauce, and cheese, “the soul of pizza,” my ears perked. The Nepali man was asking him what toppings were available and he seemed a bit miffed that potatoes were not one of them.

I asked the American what the story was. He said he just opened a week ago and had started the restaurant to give some of his workers work. I didn’t ask what his workers did when they weren’t making pizza. The place is called Sal’s Pizza, and, since there are now three pizzas in town that merit a try-out, I can officially declare it a quest. We shall try all of them!

(This is going to be a lot easier than the New York City edition was, I can tell you.)

We begin tonight at Mike’s Breakfast.

 

Night sounds

Lying awake in the wee hours I had some time between dog symphonies to appreciate the subtler sounds of Handigaon at night. We’re on the first floor so some of the sounds are of the neighboring yards, one overgrown and rural, the other carefully manicured. There are crickets chirping most of the time. Roosters crow here and there in the distance. An occasional cow lows. Before dawn, someone can be heard, perhaps over at Amanda’s old place which is just down the street, ringing a bell over a mandir. There’s also a mysterious trumpeter, probably also doing a blessing, who plays a descending four note tune that sounds almost like an elephant. I’ve heard it the past two mornings, and imaged a trumpet made of thin hammered brass dimpled like a cymbal. A little while ago I heard what sounded like a mechanical typewriter, for a minute or two, maybe upstair, maybe next door. It can be hard to tell sometimes whether a sound is coming from our building or a neighboring building or outdoors. The construction is brick and concrete and there’s no insulation so sounds conduct clearly through the walls. Small animals move in the underbrush. Mice or geckos shout in the corners.

Toward dawn, a motorcycle engine rumbles to life. A car goes rattling over the potholes and cracked pavement. Then a few more cars get out on the street, and the minibuses, and more scooters and motorcycles, and pedestrians and bicyclists, and the cows get up and start grazing along the bases of the streetside walls. It takes a lot of honking to move all of that traffic through the available space. Accidents must be so common they have no business being called accidents. I haven’t seen one yet, which I find surprising. But I try to keep my elbows in and my knapsack on the off side.