Field Report 22:
Nepal - October 27, 1999

By Jeff Bell

The Quick and Dirty News

The dreams I had hoped for came true: I drank beer and gapped at beautiful women in Munich, survived through the first bit of being in India, trekked two weeks to Everest Base Camp, and fulfilled the macho dream of enduring all that high altitude. The really good substance was in the little stuff day to day, but, the last set of "I've got to" on my "list" nearly gone, a few more weeks in India, the year is done. As Paul McCartney once sang, and is still ringin in my head, "I'm goin' home!"

Nepal

There's a concept that if you go to see a place, you cannot help but also change it, perhaps ever so slightly. It would be crushing to contemplate that you might be helping destroy what is still so beautifully preserved in the remote hills of Nepal. There are a lot of trekkers on the trails in the Khumbu Valley in October, true, but it's still a fact that if you don't fly in, it's ten days or more of trekking from the end of the road to Gorak Shep, near Everest Base Camp. At times it seems natural, hardly worth marveling at, that villages could be so remote, so distant from ... a road ... but intellectually it's maybe one of those places that should be seen now, before things change.

One Brit I met remarked that "roads ruin everything in these countries, they just set up a way to funnel people from the country to the capitals, creating a spiral of poverty and suffering." In the 40 years or so since the early climbers used to get a ride to the Katmandu city limits and walk 30 days to Everest Base Camp, Nepal has only built the road halfway to Everest. The rest, you gotta walk, or fly, when the weather cooperates. So after I'd gotten over the shock of my stopover in Delhi, had gotten over the first of my many bouts of sickness in Nepal, I spent $2 for a taxi to the bus "station", and another $2 for the wild, 10 hour bus ride to the end of the road: Jiri. Or "Jiri, Jiri, Jiri" as the people who wildly yell out the bus windows, perhaps you just couldn't get enough of Jiri I thought. I found a good guide in Jiri, lost or had my camara swipped, bought the only camara in town it seemed, an Indian made "thing", and the adventure began.

The first few days were some of the best. In the lodges the guides and porters, would sing and dances for 3 hours or so night after night, in this case, playing it up for a German girl they all were clearly nutty over (one guy told me he was 23, unmarried, but expected that he would be married in a year, international, he said. I figured his chances were about as high as mine marrying a Nepali girl—many of them were very, very beautiful by the way—I didn't feel it was necessary to tell these guys, it just ain't gonna happen.).

Once I was asked by a bunch of guides and porter to sing "an American song." Frightened, my mind went blank, but outta my mouth came "This-a land is your land, this land is my land, for Cal-i-for-nia, to the New York Islands.." I got a few more lines into it, and realized I really didn't know any more words. But didn't matter, didn't realize until later that it had a campfire type melody, they'd picked up on the tune and were drowning me out with blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Good thing, I escaped.. if it came to "now give us another", I don't know what would have come out.

My guide ignored all altitude concerns as B.S., and me, being always game to push things, went right along with him (he knew me.., yah, he knew what I could do), and after a week of hovering around 9,000 ft or so, we went right up to 18,192 ft on top of Kalapathar in a matter of, oh, 48 hours. Right. The final climb took just over 2 hours and reminded me too much of the grisly end of my one marathon. If the hill tilted even the tiniest bit, I was immediately pinned. My guide, of course, came into his own at altitude, and I felt like the entire 2 hours I was in a bike race where I was on the edge of losing the wheel of the rider in front of me. You know, that feeling you get when you've been pinned way too hard and it suddenly hits you, "now wait, this can't go on. How much further we gotta go?"

I got to the top of Kalapather, and all I could think of was, oh yeh, Everest, that's great, I don't care that I'm here, let's go down now, OK? A couple pictures, yah OK, now let's get outta here.

Everest was partially obstructed by clouds on that climb, but I had seen it it clearly from the lodge down at Gorak Shep. It looked.. like the pictures. Except that the rock and snow were so detailed, I thought "it would be impossible to recall all that detail, even if I had studied the pictures harder." Altitude cause dumb brain. The detail of the snow against the rock changes all the time, year to year, storm to storm. One change from the pictures—the plume was blowing opposite from the traditional pictures. Expeditions climb in the spring when the jet stream flows in the opposite direction. It looked like a large pyramid at the top though, that much I expected and it was thicker looking than the photos. It didn't disappoint.

Everest Base Camp

The next morning, Mahesh, my guide, and I walked up the glacier to "Base Camp". It was farther than it looked, 2 hours away, which is a lot at that altitude, distances and heights are hard to judge. This was a big morning for me, Everest Base Camp was, well, kinda sacred to me, but in a sense that, well, worried me that it was more greedy maybe than spiritual. I don't know. Like all big mountains though, the scenary was overpowering, made you feel small. We found the prayer flags and Buddist momument the Sherpas had built and knew we were in the right place. All sorts of other signs signified the presence of past expeditions. Stone tables, flattened sleeping areas, debris, blackened stones.

To Mahesh's mild disappointment, we lingered there for a couple of hours, staring up at the Khumbu Icefall, the Lhotse face, visible through the Cwd above, and listened to the sounds of nearby scavanging birds, avalanches, rock slides, and the mutterings of glacier all around us. We watched as the light changed and the fast moving clouds moved high up in the Cwd and above. For me it was magic, a connecting of dots with my youth, when I had read and re-read about the U.S. 1963 expedition which daringly pioneered a route up the West Face.

Before leaving I had to get a little closer, if I could to that Ice Fall. After climbing over a few ranges of tooth-like snow and rock glacier barriers, I found to my delight, debris from other encampments, in particular a Portugese expedition. Half-buried, I found a crampon, then stuck in a dicey spot (requiring a "daring" move over a five foot drop, you see, I had to live out some sort of fantasy out there) some new looking red climbing rope (which had been cut up), and some tin cans of Portugese sea food—anchoives. How could you wanna climb on a diet of fish?

Gokyo

My guide wanted to get home for a big festival, so I let him go, and plotted a lower elevation route over to Gokyo, which I heard was spectacular. Two nights and two days and when I got there it was a spectacular day, and I thought I was in heaven. Here was a cold country equivalent of the paradises I had found in the tropics. Tourquoise lake, warm sun, massive snow covered peaks in all directions, and a steep tundra hill behind the lodges which lead up to a knife edge drop down into a massive glacier than ran to the horizon it seemed in either direction.

It's said that travellers tell all the same stories, about the same places. Sitting on a veranda, there was a Canadian and a German comparing stories, and it happened that they were both decent rock climbers and they ended up talking about the same climb each happened to have done in some coastal place in Thailand, and at one point were both talking about a single handhold. "Do you remember, there was this hold, up above the....". Then it hit me, these guys did it, they got the world condensed to a common place on the globe the size of your hand. It's a small world after all.

Next Morning

Paradise was no more the next day. By 10am it was snowing hard.

I got up though in the dark at 4:30am to climb Gokyo Ri. Now a strange thing happened: by this time, I was acclimated, those two days at lower altitude made all the difference in the world. The air was thin, yeh, but a single step up just felt like a workout, not a dead heat sprint. The climb was longer than Kalapathar, but the same 18,000 ft altitude, and rather than 2 hours plus going up, it took... 1 hour and 5 minutes. It felt great.

Just before the top, I came upon a guide with a couple of climbers. The guide made it clear by the way he surged and waited that he was not going to let there be any doubt as to who was the strongest up there. When I got to the top, he was standing there, in his sweatshirt, no gloves, bright soccer style warm up pants. He had his back to the prayer stones and a gleem in his eye. I said hi and asked his name, and it was one of those moments that Sherpa men have where they fill up the space in the Westerner's brain that holds them as legendary mountain people. I don't even remember what he said his name was except for the way he carefully and quietly delivered his name, and as is traditional, with his last "name" being Sherpa. It was all in his manner, but it reminded me of a moment I had had on my previous PR trek to the top of Mt Whitney, when after dropping my climbing stick off the steep side of the near top of the mountain, I turned around to the face of a full blooded Native American Indian man asking me kindly if I were OK. A body wave went to the very top of my head triggered by eeiry, otherworldly feelings.

You could call it macho stuff, the pride the Sherpas feel in their abilities, for sure, but you gotta hand to him, this guy sure felt and played the moment, and he WAS awfully impervious to altitude and cold.

I got the hell off the mountain top and decided that with paradise lost, it was time to boogie. I got halfway to Namche Bazaar and called it quits when I found a cozy lodge.

The next morning there was 2 feet of snow and the trail which continued to edge along a very steep mountainside, with a couple thousand feet in either direction, seemed awfully avalanche prone. I wasn't imagining it, a couple years before a team of porters were killed in an avalanche on that trail. And the name of the "village" I was in: Lusa.

No problems though, kinda fun to be on the edge a bit (no more thanks). I waited for a yak train to blaze the trail, the only other hitch getting back to Lukla was a sudden fit of throwing up out the window of a Sherpa's home in Namche. Oh, and the next day was a grueller too. 6 hours of hiking, no food in the stomach.

What Can You Say

I've been in Nepal a month, and one stat I just can't reconcile in my mind is the one about Nepal being the fourth poorest country in the world. It doesn't fit because you would expect that the poorer the country is, the more suffering you'd see.

In fact, everyone I've talked to feels that suffering is the last word you'd use to describe the Nepali people. Out in the hills, it's most striking, everyone seems calm, and very much at peace with their environment. But then that is mirrored in the faces of the trekkers too, they too seem very at peace with what they are up to, and in fact the activities of the trekkers and the porters and guides and many of the people we met were in fact very similar. Our lives were busy, but simple, and we all were more than anything else, preoccupied with the present, living in the moment. You can see it in the faces of people stirring a pot, leading an animal, carrying something—they are busy with what they are doing at that instant, and no other thoughts are crowding in. And when is there ever a good moment in life when you aren't just living in that moment?

True, there some things in life that just can't get done without a lot of planning and worrying about the future, but maybe one of the traps of affluence is that it adds a layer of worries and concerns that are not of the moment which don't often feel very satisfying.

Another strange observation: affluence naturally seems to stem birth rates, it's an effective birth control. But in these developing nations, population growth is their biggest problem, lack of affluence doesn't slow the birth rate. Sadly, that's perhaps the biggest problem Nepal faces. Having a large family is a good insurance policy—more hands to help out, someone to take care of you when you get old.

I asked a Brit who had been here many times where he thought the ground floor was on "helping out", where is the first place to start. His answer: education. Maybe, but then there are places in India where education is highly valued, but it doesn't wipe out poverty. What about water distribution? Electricity? Warm clothes, shoes? Food to the regions where subsistance farming fails that year? Bottom line: there's no clear consensus on where to start.

All in all, though, Nepal is a place with such amazing natural beauty and kind and appealing people, it is no wonder that there are lots of people who skip trips elsewhere and come back here again and again. It all makes sense, I doubted it before I came, but I can see the power of attraction, clearly.

Footnote

Before getting to Nepal, I spent a week, a great week in Munich with some good new friends of friends, who are now friends. I had yet another epiphanet (so many, I must run out sometime) that Octoberfest, another of the hidden figures in all the dots in life to connect, ... it's purpose, it's ability to last... is not just in drinking beer, but,...in drinking beer, to for a moment, with all the people around you... to just, live in the moment. To have that one moment, perhaps day after day if it's possible, since it goes on for a couple of weeks, where you're properly primed and you feel that ... life is just so wonderful. Even the locals get into it, they've gotta work in the day time, you've got until 11am when it closes to reach that moment. Along with about 1 million other people who are there for the same thing.

And as far as quantum drinking, well, Octoberfest, the Germans being larger in dimensions that apply to drinking as well, serve you a beer, you're first beer, in a standardized stein which could be a small tropical aquarium, punchbowl, a trap for catching the used motor oil in your car. It's basically a pitcher. The only saving grace is that the standard is to fill it with one liter (1 lit.) of beer, which gives the impression that everyone, everyone who is holding, is part way through one of these monsters and certainly feeling just as happy as you are. Or more.

There's much more to post—on Germany, on 24hrs in Delhi. But gotta go, traveling is a series of ghosty images left behind, going forward is all that matters, and it's near the end. The lasting image I'll have of Nepal is looking up at a skyline that looks green and much like something from home and far above it, giant white peaks, as if pasted in the sky, huge and blindingly bright. The mantra that keeps coming back—the mighty Himalayas, mighty Himalayas. Their mountains, but we can say that they our ours too, given by Mother Earth. Mighty indeed.
 

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