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| Langtang mountain (Day 2) |
Nepal is the birthplace of Buddha, but is probably best
known for being the gateway to the Himalayas and home of the mighty Mount
Everest. Some people may come to
Kathmandu for the street shopping, but I’m guessing that a majority of the
western tourists are there to go trekking in the mountains.
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| Lama tea house child waitress |
Kathmandu reminded me of a Brazilian Favela with a
population of 2 million very charming people.
The famed Nepalese charm disintegrated when you put them behind the
wheel of an automobile though!
A quick aside about traffic in Kathmandu … it is very hard
to describe, but here is my first effort to explain it:
- Start with NASCAR and take half of the drivers and make them race in the opposite direction on the same track
- Include about 10,000 motorcycles and 1,000 bikes per block and have them move at times parallel, but most of the time, perpendicular to the general traffic
- Replace road pavement with dirt and gravel
- Replace the air with contents of a barbeque exhaust
- Line the streets with the contents of the nearest landfill
- Include an assortment of monkey’s perching on fences, dogs running on the shoulder, and cows lying down in the middle of the street
- Remove all traffic signals, streetlights, and line delineations
- Have each driver honk on their horn from the beginning to the end of each trip.
- Take the pedestrian density of Manhattan and have them each run for their lives in the midst of the madness
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| Shepard resting (Day 6) |
I’m sure I’m not giving the scene justice … but I personally
will never complain about any traffic I encounter in the U.S. again.
From the city I was driven about 6-7 hours by jeep over to
the base of the Langtang range for a 6 day hike through remote mountains. The jeep ride was an exhilarating
white-knuckle affair that I may need a few years of therapy to work through
emotionally.
I was hiking solo with the help of Rabin the guide and Suba
the porter. Rabin & Suba are Nepalese
and both from small villages. Rabin
learned English by Hollywood movies and Hindi by watching Baliwood
musicals. By his estimate, he saw the
movie The Titanic 51 times and if there were a few minutes of silence, he would
start singing pop hindi dance songs (or play them from his cell phone). I personally had never seen the movie Titanic
… but I’m pretty sure there is a scene where someone says “you jump, I jump”
after chatting with him for about a week.
Both Rabin and Suba were fantastic emissaries for their country. They were both as sweet as they were sure
footed. For example, when we ended the
hike Rabin said, “this is not the end of your trek, but rather, this is the
beginning of our friendship” … not sure if that was from the Titanic as well,
but it seemed sincere and genuine when delivered :)
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| Tea house on the river trail (Day 3) |
The format of the hike was pretty amazing. The paths are along routes connecting
Nepalese/Tibetan tea-houses. Basically
you would hike for 4 hours – go to a tea house for lunch, hike another 4 hours
and go to a different tea house for dinner.
The tea houses were very very basic.
The only way to deliver goods to these outposts was to have someone
carry everything (and I mean everything) by head or lashed to their back all
the way from base camp. The only
exception seemed to be water (that was delivered by donkey). If you walked along a steel bridge spanning a
valley, every bit of it was carried by people from the bottom of the
mountain. As a result, it was not
uncommon to see someone passing you on the trail with a 50 kg (110 pound) bag
of cement strapped to their forehead. I
also saw someone bringing up a bathroom door, a kitchen stove, and 12 foot
spans of lumber all on their back balanced by a strap connected to their foreheads. While all the westerners were decked out in
their expensive northface gear, the locals wore shorts and flipflops and drank
water from the streams and carried the real weight … these are a very
impressive and hard working people!
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Tea house chef and her two 'range' stove
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The tea houses were very social … the local woman cooked food
for all guests on a single wood fired stove that poured smoke into the kitchen
and flavors into the air. Locals ate
Dahl Bat – which was a combination of stewed mountain potatoes, rice, and
papdam (a crunchy thin tortilla). After
which you retired to your ‘bed’, which was really a sheet resting on a bed with
the dimensions, and comfort level, of a park bench. The tea houses did allow hikers to avoid
carrying tents and let us keep out of the rain (and hail) from the ever
changing mountain weather. Guides and
porters slept in rooms if there were extras, otherwise, they slept in a big
heap in the common room surrounding the kitchen fire.
After hiking around New Zealand for a month, I was feeling
well conditioned for the Himalaya trekking.
However, the transition from Scuba diving at several atmospheres of
pressure in Thailand to zipping strait up steep mountains a week later proved
too much of a challenge for my body and I was bedridden with altitude sickness
at a lowly 12,000 feet or so. I was so
fired up to hit 15,000 the next day, but after 16 hours of laying in bed with a
splitting headache and no food, I made the combat decision to descend and visit
some remote villages on a nearby mountain a few thousand feet lower. This turned out to be a great decision
because the villages were so remote even the guides had not been there for
around 10 years and I pretty much had the mountain to myself. After a few days, you get used to the
lifestyle, but every now and then I thought, “holy cow, I’m on the border of
Nepal and Tibet in a hut in the middle of nowhere.” I won’t soon forget those feelings and the
charming people I met who reside on those impossibly steep slopes.
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| Rabin, Suba, and a tea house family on my last day in the mountains |
– Tibetan Tony
