Embedded Files
Note by David Liverman; transcribed from paper copy using OCR in 2016 by David Liverman. John undertook this trip shortly after his 70th birthday. the trek has changed greatly in the ensuing years- John refers to the "new" road and how it changed the trek from his previous visit.
Wikipedia now states "Continuing construction of a road has greatly shortened the trail and altered the feel of the villages, so the "best trek in the world" can not be said to hold true anymore. Road construction started in early eighties both from Dhumre to the north and from Pokhara to the west and then up the Kali Gandaki valley. The road has now reached Chamje on the Marsyangdi river valley and all the way to Muktinath on the Kali Gandaki side. This means that out of the original 23 days only 5 walking days of the trek is still without a motor road. It is apparent that there will be a road around the whole Annapurna Massif before 2017. In places new trails and routes have been marked so that the road can be partly avoided. The existence of the road has nevertheless totally changed the area and the appearance and the atmosphere of the villages. One positive note: the road facilitates transport, and makes mountain biking possible for everyone. There's a company renting out mountainbikes in Muktinath and Jomsom, since 2011. As the road sees very little traffic, and one can ride downhill (dirt road and/or single track) from Muktinath to Tatopani and descend almost 3000 meters in 2–3 days, it has created one of the world's best downhill mountain biking areas."
John's account thus portrays what already is an unrepeatable experience, but perhaps that is true for every trek on the route- no two experiences are identical.
Trekking permit
Contents
The Journey Out
Kathmandu
Pokhara
The Trek
Day 1 - to Naudaanda
Day 2 - to Tirkedunga
Day 3 - to Ghodopand
Day 4 - to Tatapanl
Day 5 - Tatapani
Day 6 - to Ghasa
Day 7 - to Tukche
Day 8 - to Jomosom
Day 9 - Jomosom
31.
Day 10 - to Kagbend
Day 11 - to Marpha
Day 12 - to Lete
Day 13 - to Tatapani
Days 14 and 15 - Tatapani
Day 16 - to Chitre
Day 17 - td Ghodopani
Day 18 - to Tarapani on the Ghandrung Trail
Day 19 - to Landruk
Day 20 - to Dhampus
Day 21 - to Pokhara
Back at Pokhara
Bus to Kathmandu
Back at Kathmandu
THE JOURNEY OUT
On the afternoon of 23 November 1990 I circumnavigated two Japanese tourists photographing each other outside Victoria Station, bought a ticket, and caught the Gatwick Express. I have had a firm belief in reporting early ever since unfortunate experiences of airline overbooking, and checked in two and a half hours before the scheduled take-off time, only to learn that the flight was delayed by an hour and a half, giving me the prospect of a four hour wait before we took to the air.
I read the Guardian from cover to cover, including a bulky supplement with a special review of the Thatcher years, which had come to an end the day before, ate an expensive ham roll and salad, and chatted to a fellow-passenger for Kathmandu - Carol Howard, a rather hard-faced woman in her early thirties. Carol had spent her earlier life working with horses in Virginia on what she called "events", but for some years had been a Conservative Agent with special responsibility for by-elections. She was planning a week on her own in and around Kathmandu before joining a group of ten for a 'white-watering' expedition on Nepali rivers.
At 9 p.m. we boarded a two-engined plane of Royal Nepal Airlines with sets of three seats either side of a central gangway and with more legroom than a Jumbo Jet, and took off half-empty for Frankfurt where the plane filled up. I sat next to an English couple whom I first took to be in their fifties, but the husband admitted to sixty-seven and had served with 5RTR (the Fifth Royal Tank Regiment) in the Seventh Armoured Division in France, though of course too young to have shared with me the Division's desert and Italian campaigns. They were members of an organised group offering a three-day trek followed by a lake and river trip in Nepal.
I glanced through the Inflight Magazine which carried an article on trekking from Pokhara. To my horror there was a map showing a new highway nearly all the way from Pokhara to Birethanti along what used to be the first two or three days of agreeable walking on the trek north.
After we left Frankfurt I tucked into a good airline meal with veal as the main dish, not being sure about pomfret which was the alternative. My experience of Asian menus suggested that this was a Nepali version of pammes frites, but it turned out to be a fish. I slept well, skipped breakfast which seemed to have disappeared into a four hour time-warp with the change in longitude, woke at Dubai for a brisk walk through the airport while the plane refuelled, ate an airline lunch, and slept again until we landed at Kathmandu at 4.30 in the afternoon the day after leaving Gatwick. The airport had been rebuilt since I was last there in 1987 when it was little more than a glorified shed, and was now quite a respectable international terminal. The Customs Officer asked me to open up my pack in which he rummaged ineffectually: it was stuffed so tightly that a proper search would have required the total emptying of its contents, which fortunately he did not insist upon.
KATHMANDU
I changed a travellers' cheque into rupees at 59 to the pound at the efficient airport bank and reserved a room at my hotel at the equally efficient airport booking service. I chose the Snowlion where I had stayed tour years earlier despite the offer of the man at the desk to find me something better. A taxi driver attached himself to me, and since he named only 80 rupees as his fare I agreed he should take me to the Snow lion which we reached in half an hour after a depressing drive through the back streets of Kathmandu. The Snowlion was just as I remembered it, four years older and shabbier, but with an obliging staff and the great advantage of a central but relatively quiet location near the main bus stop and no more than twenty minutes' walk from Durbar Square in the old city or from the White Tower which was the terminus for the buses to Pokhara. I moved into an upstair room at the back of the notel which had its own bathroom - including a bath and a supply of hot water, albeit rather unpredictable - and even a dressing table and wardrobe. The only drawbacks were that it was rather dark, and distinctly cold at night, so that I needed to transfer the thin blanket from the second bed onto my own. The nightly cost was 330 rupees, just under six pounds.
Carol had reserved a room at the two-star Ambassador Hotel (the Snowlion had no stars) which I reached by a half hour walk through streets I remembered well, skirting the walls of the Royal Palace. On the way I was engaged in conversation by a young man who told me a hard-luck story about his wife being in hospital after the death of a baby son, and needing medicines that he would be able to buy if I gave him the money. He was singularly unconvincing and . I had no scruples in refusing his request: as I looked back I saw him addressing the next tourist to pass by. The Ambassador was smart, clean, and brightly lit, in contrast to the sombre environment of the Snow.lion, It was also very full, whereas I had seemed to be the only occupant of my hotel, and Carol was in the foyer waiting for her recently vacated room to be cleaned and prepared. Having been assured that it would be ready in ten minutes, and realising that this probably meant at least an hour, Carol agreed to come out for a meal, and we dined well at an Indian Restaurant in the main road called Kantipur which I recalled from my previous visit. I walked Carol back to her hotel where we had a drink at the bar and then I returned to the Snowlion through streets that were almost totally deserted after dark, the more active night life being located in the Thamel quarter of the city about a mile to the north-west.
1 slept fitfully, having enjoyed an excessive period of repose during the flight, and woke up a couple of times to pull extra layers of clothing over my shirt. In the morning I needed some time to master the Snow lion's eccentric hot water system which produced nothing at all from the shower, and at first nothing but short blasts of steam from the wash-basin tap until it was eventually persuaded to release a stream of very not water.
Kathmandu mornings in the winter tend to be cold and foggy, and it is sometimes midday or later before the fog lifts. On this day, however, brilliant sunshine had broken through when I left the hotel at ten.o'clock, and the temperature had risen sharply into the eighties. Just down the road opposite the park was one of the principal termini for local and long distance buses (though not for Pokhara) which manoeuvred and double-banked on the main road while crowds jostled to get into buses which were already full to overflowing. An occasional cow wandered past, indifferent to the crowds and the traffic. For breakfast I searched out a Chinese-owned restaurant next to the British Council library, but the ownership had changed and the food and service had deteriorated. I was served by a young man who had spent his childhood in Aldershot where his father had been stationed with a Gurkha regiment; a Chinese put in an appearance later but he was not my old friend who used to chat with me as he served breakfast,
Walking back to the main street past the 'Sincere Typewriting Agency' I observed a number of Nepalis avidly reading newspapers spread out on the pavement, two or three readers stopping closely over each page. No-one was actually buying papers from the stall, where the vendor seemed content to provide a public service. I moved on to the narrow streets of the old town with the intention of buying a thick pullover, having intentionally left at home my old Kathmandu sweater. I was invited into a narrow corridor and up rickety stairs to an upper room with a ceiling too low for even your average Nepali to stand upright, but displaying a fine stock of woollens. I negotiated the purchase of a soft woollen pullover with a pattern in various shades of blue, finally paying half the asking price but probably more than double what a more determined bargainer would have paid.
I had decided to move on to Pokhara and start my trek as soon as possible since the season was already late, and to spend more time in the Kathmandu area on my return journey. At the Tourist Information Office in the old city I asked where is could book a bus ticket to Pokhara, and was given detailed instructions which I followed to the letter, without finding anything remotely resembling a booking office or ticket agency. Returning half an hour later to the Tourist Office, I found there a different helper who sent me off in precisely the opposite direction, leading to the main Post Office and the White Tower where the Pokhara buses began their journey. Here there were several ticket offices, and without difficulty I booked a seat in a bus leaving at 7 a.m the next day, with instructions to report at 6.30. After that I enjoyed a rather lazy day, taking a leisurely snack at the smart Annapurna Coffee House attached to the luxury hotel of that name, where they served a delicious capuccino coffee flavoured with a hint of cinnamon.
Again I called for Carol in the evening. While I was waiting in the foyer at the Ambassador the television was showing what appeared to be a film advertisement, presumably sponsored by the British Government or the NHS, encouraging Nepali girls to come to England and join the nursing profession. This may have been part of a world-wide advertising campaign, but was surely not cost-effective in a country like Nepal where the proportion of people watching television must be one of the lowest in the world. I thought too that the morality was questionable - and this view was shared by doctors working in Nepal with whom i discussed it - since nurses were far more badly needed in Nepal than in.Great Britain, the ratio of nurses to population being about one tenth of the British ratio.
We tucked into a Nepali meal of rice, lentils, and vegetables, followed by sweet yoghurt with fruit, at the Suntori restaurant on Kantipur, Carpi was enthusiastically committed to her work as a political agent, though cynical about M.P.s and even more cynical about constituency committees, With the second round of the Conservative leadership election pending, she was vitriolic about Heseltine whom she regarded as a dangerous leftie, and was strong in support of Major as the candidate most likely to carry om the Thatcher tradition. Describing party conferences and the annual dinner for agents as the high point of their year, when their services are recognised and praised by the leadership, she startled me by frequent references to "Mother", and it took me some time and some processes of mental adjustment to realise that she was speaking of Mrs. Thatcher.
Back at the Snowlion I checked that my earlier request for a call at 5.30 a.m. had been duly noted, and was disconcerted to find that the new man at the desk had no record of it. I repeated the request, and was assured that I would be called without fail at that time. I had little confidence in this assurance, and woke to consult my watch several times in the night, in between dreams of oversleeping and trying unavailingly to catch a taxi. In fact the phone rang at 5.30 with my morning call, though by that time I was up, dressed, and packed. In the darkness of a chill early dawn I walked the mile or so to the White Tower, where I successfully located my bus from among a dozen parked there, some bound for Pokhara, others for far more distant destinations. Two Australian girls were about to set off on a two day bus journey to Calcutta. Waiting for my bus to leave was a young Australian doctor, who was working on a medical aid project, with his wife and two children.
The bus set off punctually at seven, but called at several boarding points around the city before finally getting under way, and driving past the Bright Future English School and into the outer suburbs. It remained cold and foggy as we drove westwards along the Kathmandu valley past lorry parks and vehicle repair shops. About ten miles along the way we stopped with some trouble affecting a wheel or tyre which took half an hour to fix. The fog lifted about nine and it began to warm up. Progress remained slow as the highway to Pokhara had deteriorated badly in the four years since I remembered it as a good newly-surfaced road. Now, as we climbed out of the valley, I saw that stretches of the highway, some of them several miles long, had been swept by successive rains into the river far below, and the ground was being built up laboriously, layer by layer, until it reached the former level and new retaining walls and drainage ditches could be built. At each site where this was being done there were bumpy detours and one-way traffic, and sometimes delays of half an hour or more while lorries came the other way or JCB's shunted around. The passengers were quiet and patient, except for some continued disturbance provoked by a group of French tourists who insisted on occupying the best seats near the front of the bus although these had been reserved for a Nepali family who naturally protested but without effect.
POKHARA
The bus journey from Kathmandu to Pokhara took eleven hours because of the state of the road instead of the scheduled seven. About halfway we stopped for dahl baat in a village where all the buses seemed to pull in, creating a continual dust storm nearly up to the wartime standards of Tobruk, Indeed for much of the way the road itself was covered in a fine dust, with the repair operations adding their quota, so that the leaves of all the trees for at least fifty yards on either side were covered with a white coating. By now the snow-capped Himalayas extended right along the northern horizon, and we were given an opportunity to admire them at leisure when more trouble with the wheel led to another long halt, The Australian doctor and family having left the bus at Dumre, one of the main starting points for trekking, I chatted to two English passengers, Jo and Jane, both former staff nurses at London hospitals.
It was dark when we arrived at the Pokhara bus station at six, to be beseiged by taxi drivers and hotel representatives. As in Kathmandu, I planned to revisit my old haunts, declared my intention of staying at the Hotel Peaceful, and was escorted to a taxi by their representative, together with Jo and Jane to whom I recommended the place. On my last visit I had walked the two miles from the bus terminus to the hotel, but this time it had been a long day. The Peaceful was at the site of the dam where a few hotels and restaurants clustered by the southern tip of Lake Phewa, in quieter seclusion than the much larger number on the 'Lakeside' site about a mile to the north. At the Peaceful I was shown into my old room, from which I could see the sun rise over Annapurna and Machapuchre without getting out of bed. The accommodation was luxurious with its own bathroom and sit-upon loo, but at 150 rupees was too extravagant for the two young women who settled for the dormitory.
Reconnoitring the immediate area I found that little had changed apart from the appearance of a construction site alongside the Peaceful where a new hotel was being built. Some of the restaurants had changed hands or been renamed, one which I remembered as a friendly place for an evening meal now serving only breakfast. For dinner I felt one could not do better than the K. C. Restaurant just a hundred yards away from my hotel, where they had a delightful garden with bougainvillea and other flowers and shrubs overlooking the lake, and offering a superlative daylight view of the Himalayas, extending from Dhaulagiri right across the Annapurma range, with Machapuchre (Fishtail Mountain) in the foreground. Inside the restaurant was a cosy circular dining room where after dark there was a wood fire burning in the middle.
I sat down with Jo and Jane to a leisurely dinner next to the fire, discovering that they had both at one time been nurses at the Middlesex Hospital. Further research showed that when I was last in residence at the Middlesex, Jane had been the sister in charge of the ward opposite mine. Since leaving the nursing profession Jo had worked as a gardener for a year with the aid of an enterprise grant to start up the business, but did not see this as a continuing career in spite of the good money - fifteen pounds an hour in the home counties. During the last few months
.they had been travelling through Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, and then on to Bali, Java, Malaysia, and Thailand. After that they had a few weeks in India, mostly in Rajasthan, before coming to Nepal to relax. We swapped travellers' tales about India, recalling the magic of Jaisalmer, and - in New Delhi - the little bespectacled man in the Tourist Booking Office who we agreed was the most efficient man in India and who rejoiced in the title of Space Controller for Indian Railways.
It seemed to be a chilly night in my bedroom, partly because I did not discover until morning that the windows at the head of the bed were wide open behind the mosquito wire. Later I found that like most people in their first few days in Nepal I had developed a cold in the head,
At the KC next morning I chose the most modest of the three set breakfasts on offer, known as the small breakfast and consisting of two eggs, cooked in any way requested, fried potatoes, two thick slices of toast with jam, and tea or coffee. The other choices were the large breakfast and the still more substantial trekkers' breakfast. An unexpected bonus was a 10% discount on the charge of 22 rupees if the meal was taken sufficiently early - I never discovered the time limit as I was always well within it, taking my breakfast at about eight o'clock when the sun's rays were just reaching the garden while the unequalled Himalayan panorama to the north sparkled in full sunlight.
The manager at the Hotel Peaceful asked me, as I assume he asked all his guests, whether I was going trekking and whether I would require a porter, At one time I had contemplated going without a porter and enjoying the solitude of the mountains except when I chose to travel with others, but my resolve had been weakening, and whether or not I would prove physically able to carry a pack weighing twenty-five pounds on an arduous trek it would certainly be more enjoyable without it. Of course I could have lightened the load considerably: for a three week trek I took four changes of shirt and underwear, spare trousers, several pairs of inner and outer socks, a comprehensive first-aid kit, a lot of pills, trainers for evening footwear, camera and torch with spare batteries for each, a book for reading and Bezruchka's weighty Guide to trekking in Nepal for reference, as well as the obvious necessities in the way of warm clothes, sleeping bag, water bottle, washing and shaving kit, towels, toilet paper, candles and matches, and a tube of Easiwash for clothes. But the trek was strenuous, and even with a lighter pack it would have been a struggle that would have obliged me to engage a porter en route if I had started out alone. Maybe if I had been in better training . .
So I said Yes I would like a porter and a competent young man named Krishna and clearly of Indian origin materialised to organize the necessary arrangements. It is always difficult to identify the role of those who appear in or around one's hotel in Asia, and to distinguish between hotel owners, management, staff, friends and relations, intermediaries of various kinds, and miscellaneous hangers-on. I took Krishna to be an intermediary, and we soon established that for a trek of three weeks to Muktinath and back I would engage a porter who would carry my pack and who knew his way around these parts, and not a guide (a higher and more expensive class of person employed by more.extravagant trekkers or by those planning a more difficult or hazardous journey). My porter would expect 150 rupees a day if I also paid for his food: last time it was 50 but I was now getting twice the number of rupees for my pound. Having settled this and having decided that I would start the trek two days later on 30th November I thought I would have a lazy day.
A stroll to the Immigration Office and a short wait there while forms were filled in and processed secured me a three week trekking permit for the Annapurna Region and for Mustang Province which extends northward to Tibet, though the further reaches of that province would be prohibited. On my return I ran across Jo and Jane who had moved to a cheaper hotel on Lakeside, even the Peaceful dormitory at 80 rupees being beyond their modest budget, and who had linked up with Helmuth and Gareth, companions from their earlier travels: they then moved out of my orbit.
Pokhara had its usual cosmopolitan population, including a number of Japanese and Italians in addition to the usual crop of North Americans, French, Germans, and Scandinavians, plus the inevitable Australians from whom I learned the depressing result of the first Test.
During the day the garden of the KC was a pleasant place to linger over a drink, admire the magnificent view, and meet other travellers. Among the British friends I made were Clare (24) and her sister Rachel (18) from Oxford, who were flying to Jomosom next day and trekking back to Pokhara, a relatively easy walk and for the most part downhill, though there would be same stiff climbing on at least three days, including the long haul to the top 0f the Ghodopani Pass at 9600 feet which involved a full day up steep hills whether approached from south or north. On an earlier trip Clare had walked the length and breadth of Nepal on a 700 mile walk sponsored in aid of a third world charity. She had taken a degree in earth sciences at Kingston Polytechnic, while Rachel would be reading geography at Edinburgh next year. The two sisters had come to Nepal from India, where they had suffered a lot of harrassment from young men.
As the light began to fail carts piled high with hay for use as winter fodder drove into Pokhara from the south. They were powered by what looked like lawn-mower engines mounted on a platform with a single wheel, and conveying drive to the axle of the cart by means of a belt. They were followed by processions of women and girls walking slowly as they carried heavy loads of firewood, or of cut foliage for winter feed for the cattle, carried on their bent backs so that they looked like walking haystacks.
At the hotel an English couple had moved into the bedroom next to mine - Paul, an oral surgeon from Guy's, and Jenny who described herself as a freelance editor. They were taking a six week holiday, visiting friends in Nepal before flying up to Jomosom for the trek back to Pokhara. As a surgeon, Paul naturally had access to anaesthetics, which he and Jenny used during long and tedious air journeys after telling the cabin staff that they did not wish to be disturbed during the flight. We dined together at the KC on a tasty fish curry. I had an early night, carefully dispatching a giant spider on the wall six inches above the headboard before climbing into bed.
.Next morning I breakfasted with Nelda, who had taken early retirement from the Californian civil service in order to devote her life to travel and nuclear protests. She was probably in her mid forties, had taken part in a protest march across the state of California, and had served half a dozen brief spells in gaol. She was relaxing in Pokhara after a week's trek to Tatopani over the Ghodopani pass, returning via Ghandrung. Her fund of traveller's tales included a report of a disastrous trek in Northern Thailand, where her raft disintegrated and she had to take to the jungle with her male companion and a local guide who hacked their way through the undergrowth. At one point the guide disturbed a nest of black ants which promptly swarmed over the trekkers, covering them with painful bites and forcing them to tear all their clothes off and jump in the river. On another occasion a transport strike had stranded her for six weeks in Alice Springs, where she broke the monotony and isolation by making several local expeditions and by spending time with aboriginal communities.
I hired a bicycle for the day, a good model in excellent condition, and rode along the shore road to the end of the Lakeside quarter. This extended for a couple of miles along the lake, and offered more lodges and restaurants than in 1987, as well as the usual assortment of travel bureaus, curio shops, bookstalls, market stalls, photographic studios 'for quick picture for visa or trekking permit', and shops offering unusual combinations such as fresh butter and camera repair. Beyond the second great pipal tree which stood in the middle of the street, the main road turned away from Lake Phewa while a smaller tarred road followed the shore line, degenerating after a couple of miles into a stony and bumpy track along the edge of the lake. After a further mile I had to dismount and pushed the bike up the track as it climbed round a headland. This was hot work as the sun was now high and the headland cut off any breath of wind. Here I turned back, having identified a path that left the lakeside to go more steeply uphill in the direction of Sarankot, the village crowning the ridge that rose 2500 feet above Pokhara, with a symmetrical outline rather like Harter Fell in Dunnerdale, providing a modest foreground to Annapurna South.
I met three other cyclists and a party of twenty Nepalis accompanied by a small band and bearing poles supporting what I took to be one of the local gods or holy relics on a festive outing. After retracing the route back to Pokhara I met companions closer than usual to my own age over a pot of lemon tea at the KC, an Irish lady in her sixties and the slightly younger friend she had come out to visit who worked as a staff counsellor in Kathmandu for the United Mission to Nepal - a Christian mission supporting various aid projects.
In the afternoon I cycled three miles up the gentle hill past the airport to Pokhara town, a typical Nepali city quite separate from the new quarter developed down by the lake for the benefit of tourists. I posted the letters and cards I had written: there would be little point in trying to send any post from anywhere along the trekking route - in fact I did send a couple of letters from Jomosom but they arrived in England long after my return. I tried to buy a comb to replace one I had lost, and though I learned the Nepali word for comb and accompanied.it by suitable gestures at all the shops that looked as if they ought to sell such articles, it was only at the seventh attempt that I succeeded.
Next morning, as arranged with Krishna, my porter turned up and introduced himself as Om Bahadya Gurung - somehow I never got around to calling him that - and agreed terms of 150 rupees a day plus food, Krishna arrived soon after, slightly put out that negotiations had started without him, but helpful when it came to discussing the route as Om's English was severely limited, no better than Dhan's in 1987, This was a pity, as it would restrict communication between us, but would not be a serious practical disadvantage, Om was twenty years old, slight in build and several inches shorter than I. He had jet black hair worn long at the back, and an urchin-like appearance. He seemed bright and cheerful, though I later found him to be moody.
We agreed the aim would be to walk beyond Jomosom as far as Muktinath, and to walk back the same way to Tatopani and then divert from the route up by returning via Ghandrung. I insisted on starting on foot the next morning and walking over the Sarankot ridge, despite strong urging that we should get a taxi and drive along the new road at least as far as Phedi. I always suspected a conspiracy between the hotels, porters, and taxi drivers, recalling that on my last trek a taxi had been ordered without my knowledge to take Dhan and myself to Shining Hospital, l went on to explain that owing to my years I would be walking slowly so that the trek might well take as long as three weeks. This message was duly registered by the porter and kept in mind throughout the trek, so he would call out to me ' bistari, bistari' (slowly, sicwly ) whenever I put on a turn of speed, which was on the rare occasions when the track was level or gently descending and the going underfoot was easy. The caution was unnecessary on the steeper or more slippery sections of the trail.
In the KC garden next day, with the Himalayas clear and glittering in the early morning sun, I breakfasted with Clarence, a thirty-five year old Canadian who had been away from his homeland for ten years, including a spell working in Australia. He had trekked extensively in Nepal, and was starting next day for Manang and the Thorong La. When crossing the 17500 foot pass he would wear ordinary plastic bags inside his socks to keep his feet warm and dry. He held forth on various topics, including the degeneracy of the younger generation, some or whom had not stayed up at the Annapurna Sanctuary where he had spent the night on his last trek because it was too cold for them, and they had retreated to a lodge at lower altitude, Nor did they get up at sunrise to see the summit, Indeed all they did - the younger generation in general - was lounge about, take drugs, and have sex, pursuits which seemed to incur his displeasure in equal measure. He was rather a bore.
I was to meet more congenial companions during the day, after my walk to the Devis Falls. These lay a couple of miles to the south of Pokhara along a raad through wide plains criss-crossed with water-courses. Here the river flows through a narrow gorge leading to a waterfall where it disappears deep underground. It must be an impressive sight in the rainy season, but there was not much to see at this time of the year. The falls were approached through a rather half-hearted sort of park, lined with trinket and curio stalls, where Nelda had told me the prices were lower than in Pokhara: I noted it for a return visit. There i met a young Australian couple, red-headed Niall who had emigrated from Derry, and soft-spoken Cathy, obviously of Mediterranean extraction -- I found later that her parents came from Macedonia. They were planning a small trek to Ghodopani and back along the Ghandrung route but seemed vague about it.
At the KC in the evening I sat opposite Laurie, a lovely 28-year old blue-eyed iong-haired blonde from San Francisco. She was in the middle of a year-long world trip, having given up the job as a pensions analyst which she took after a degree in finance at the University of Hawaii. Laurie was feeling rather stiff arter the Ghadapani/Ghandrung trek. Her earlier travels had taken her through Egypt, Israel, Thailand, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Indonesia - we shared happy memories of Lake Toba on Sumatra. She had also travelled in China and Japan, and was next heading for Africa, moving down the continent to South Africa if that proved possible, for London (perhaps in May), to Finland with her parents (her mother was Finnish), and finally to Russia. When I gave her my address, she wrote it very neatly in a large hard-covered notebook, where she listed addresses, hotels and restaurants to visit, and all manner of other useful travel information, , all under an incredibly orderly and well-organized system. Laurie had a warm and friendly personality: of all women travellers I met, it was the Americans, and in particular the Californians, who were readiest to introduce themselves and to make friends.
.THE TREK
A daily record for the three weeks of the trek is set out in the next chapter. This is inevitably tedious and sometimes repetitive, so the reader may prefer to skip the detail and glance through the more general description in this chapter.
The Jomosom trail is the most popular trekking route in Nepal. It offers the best facilities, improving year by year so that guidebooks are always out-of-date and in most places there are more and better lodges for overnight stops than you would expect from the literature. You can walk from Pokhara (and back again) as I did; you can fly to Jomosom and walk back - or conversely; or if you are a real trekker you can start from Dumre between Pokhara and Kathmandu, reach the 17000 foot high Thorong La from the east, and descend via Jomosom to Pokhara, There are several variants. Jomosom gives its name to the trek as it is the provincial capital and principal town in the region, and also boasts an airstrip, but it has no other distinction, and has less interest and character than almost any other place on the route.
Almost all the way the route follows the course of a river, mainly that of the Kali Gandaki, one of the great rivers of Asia that flows through what is the deepest gorge in the world as it winds between towering Dhaulagiri and the massive Annapurna range: it must certainly be the deepest if measured from mountain top to river bed, I was aiming to go beyond Jomosom and to reach Muktinath, the sacred site of a famous monastery, and the last settlement before the Thorong La: to cross the pass was beyond my ambition, and in any case it is rarely attempted from the Jomosom side which offers a longer and steeper ascent than that from Manang to the east. Because of heavy snow on the day I planned to set off on the 3000 foot climb to Muktinath, I failed to attain my objective, but turned back from Kagbene where I had spent the night when the weather changed for the worse and I thought it prudent to retrace my steps and to reach lower altitudes than 10000 feet before snow and ice made the going too difficult. In fact, had I waited another day at Kagbene I would have seen the weather clearing and I could easily - well, fairly easily - have reached my objective, but assessing the prospects as they appeared at the time it was probably a sensible decision.
On the return journey I toyed with the idea of flying back from Jomosom (the Nepalis pronounce it 'Jomsom' without the middle 'O'): One's mood on the trek changes from day to day, sometimes from hour to hour, according to the weather, one's degree of fatigue, the comfort or otherwise of the last overnight stay, and often with one's state of health - but mine was never less than excellent. By the time we reached Jomosom on the way back I was going strongly, the sun was shining, the route was mainly downhill for the rest of the day, and on we went.
The village or little town of Tatopani occupies a very special place in the hearts of all who walk the Jomosom trail. Four days cut from Pokhara it lies on the riverside at comparatively low altitude among bougainvillea and orange trees, and offers the winning combination of high quality lodges, good food, and hot springs. It was as far as I got
.on my small 1987 trek, and this time again I had a rest day after I reached it, and the luxury of two rest days on the way back. Then I took a different, and more spectacular, route back to Pokhara, and walked all the way back to my hotel, disdaining offers from taxi-drivers at the point where the route met the new raad, thus adding four and a half hours walking for myself and my two trekking companions, and - to their strongly expressed disapproval - for our porters.
My trek lasted twenty-one days in all, of which four were rest days and one was a half day - though a stiff climb. The distance covered was about 160 miles and the height climbed, though difficult to estimate, was probably between 30000 and 40000 feet. Of the distance, not much more than twenty, or at most thirty miles, could be described as flat or of a gentle gradient; most of the walking was up - or down - steep mountainsides, often by means of steps or slopes that zig-zagged their way to achieve an almost vertical ascent or descent.
The ground underfoot was for the most part hard and stony, and when it was not, it was muddy and slippery. The steeper sections were often furnished with rough and irregular stone steps: this after all was the main road of the region, connecting villages with each other, and ultimately with the plains to the south and the high mountains to the north, formerly a trade route conveying rice and salt between India and Tibet. But in places the steps had been washed away by floods or covered in sand or mud. At other points the track picked its way over stones and boulders, often not of a size or shape to provide a convenient foothold, but big enough to strain feet and ankles, In places the trail was deep in mud, sometimes incorporating the village sewage: often streams had to be crossed by stepping stones, logs, or planks: heaps of mule dung at frequent intervals, invariably deposited in exactly the place one would have wished to have secured a foothold, required careful negotiation.
In the northern section the river valley widened to up to a mile across: here the trail often led along the river bed, higher routes being used in the monsoon, on a stony or sandy surface, and crossed deep rivulets spanned by precarious makeshift bridges. Throughout the trek the walker had to concentrate firmly on where the foot would next be placed, contemplation of the mountains being strictly reserved for the halts.
Landslides were additional hazards, Where the fall had taken place some time before, a diversion had been built, stabilised with stones, and flattened by usage, so that nothing worse than an extra climb and descent - usually quite steep - faced the traveller. More recent landslides were steeply sloping nightmares of mud and slippery clay, through which rudimentary paths had been traced. Here it required great care and skill to remain upright: a fall would not be fatal but would certainly be extremely messy and there would be a risk of sprains or minor fractures. On higher ground, especially in sections of the trail not reached by the sun, there were icy patches where an incautious step would have led to a fall. All these hazards I approached with extreme caution, taking small steps and using my bamboo stave as extra support, bearing in mind always that medical care or wheeled - or winged - transport would be a week or more away. In the event I fell only once,..slipping on a partly thawed muddy path and subsiding gently onto my bottom with no more serious harm than a very dirty pair of trousers.
Despite my poor head for heights, vertigo was no problem, presumably because the routine of walking day by day along cliff edges, often hundreds of feet above a deep gorge, accustomed the eye and brain to the precipitous landscape. Once, when admiring a mountain panorama, I was surprised to observe that I was standing no more than a foot from a sheer drop, not a practice I would normally adopt. There were some awkward moments on the approach to Kagbene, where a very narrow cliffside path had the wrong sort of camber, and it would have been disagreeable to encounter someone - or still worse a pack animal - coming the other way, but no-one did.
Suspension bridges set their own problems. There were dozens of them across the Kalj Gandaki and other main rivers where the track changed course from one bank to the other: long bridges two or three hundred feet above the blue torrent, or shorter bridges over tributaries with deep gorges of their own. Usually there was a handrail, at least an one side, and the planks underfoot were generally in good condition, especially when the bridge was a fairly recent replacement for one which had collapsed or been washed away, leaving clearly visible remnants some distance up or down stream. Others inspired less confidence, the biggest gaps in the rotting planks being covered with large stones to prevent the unwary walker from dropping through. I had no feeling of vertigo when crossing these bridges, but they usually developed a swaying motion, both laterally and vertically, causing a disconcerting sensation akin to sea-sickness,
The landscape was of tremendous variety: the altitude varied from 4000 to over 10000 feet and the rainfall from 8" to 50" within quite short distances, so the vegetation ranges from Mediterranean to Alpine, and the trees from broad-leaved to conifers, Vegetable and cereal crops can be seen at all stages of their cycle, from seedling to stubble, cultivation being intensive wherever the ground was flat or the hills could be terraced. Cultivable land was valued so highly that where the trail passed through croplands it was confined between dry stone walls five feet apart, just wide enough to allow the passage of a parter with his load.
The most dramatic changes take place a day's march beyond Tatopani, that is on the fifth day's walk from Pokhara. The broad-leaved forests, which include oak, are superseded by pine forests, which next day give way to scattered individual pines, and then to scrub that becomes sparse in the high altitude low rainfall zone. In the wetter high areas, as along the 10000 foot high ridge eastward from Ghodopani, there were vast forests of rhododendron, some of them fifty feet tall with trunks twenty feet in circumference. This is the biggest rhododendron forest in Nepal, possibly in the world, and must be a magnificent sight in flower after the spring rains.
Lower down, as around Tatopani, orange and lemon trees were bearing ripe friuit, poinsettias were at their brilliant best as their outsize bracts coloured in response to the shortening daylength, and bougainvillea brightened the walls and gardens of the lodges. Exceptionally, the climate around Marpha just south of Jomosom and at a height of 8000 feet, was suitable for apples, just like the Kulu Valley in northern India, and there were fruit orchards where apricots were also grown.
The mountain views unfolded from day to day. To begin with, inaccesible Machapuchre dominated the foreground to the north, standing apart from the Annapurna range extending behind and on either side. Dhaulagiri to the north west appeared less impressive at that stage because of its greater distance, and it was half hidden by lower mountains. On the third and fourth days of the trek clouds built up and obscured the view: Ghudopani itself at 9600 feet was in wet cloud and drizzle, and those wishing to see the sunrise from Poon Hiil four hundred feet higher up - as I had done successfully in 1987 - took one look outside in the cold hour before the dawn, and went back to their sleeping-bags,
After that the weather cleared and remained bright with the single exception of the day I was going to climb from Kagbene to Muktinath. The peaks of the Annapurna range unfolded in all their glory, Annapurna South being dominant until the trail wound round behind the main range and for two days kept close under the almost vertical face of Dhaulagiri, revealing sometimes the western peak, sometimes the main summit and its slightly lower partner (in the Lake District we would call it Dhaulagiri Little Man, but that doesn't sound quite right in the Himalayas), and sometimes the whole splendid panorama of the range. It was Dhaulagiri, of course, that Herzog's ill-fated expedition of 1952 set out to climb, turning their attention to Annapurna only after weeks of reconnaissance proved that the maps were entirely misleading and there was no possible approach to Dhaulagiri from that direction. By that time nearly all the good weather was past, and they suffered appalling hardships on the first ascent of Annapurma.
From Jomosom onwards new mountains came into view, Mount Tilicho behind which lies one of the highest lakes in the world although it is now in a prohibited military zone. From the sacred confluence of rivers between Jomosom and Kagbene there was a clear view up the valley to the summits of Thorong and its sister peak guarding the pass between them. On the return journey the trail from Ghodopani to Gandrung offered fresh aspects of the Annapurna range from end to end, occasional glimpses back to Dhaulagiri, and finally fresh angles of Machapuchre from relatively close quarters.
The local people seemed always well-disposed to us. Naturally a trekker's main contact is with the lodge-keepers and their families with whom we would often spend our evenings. They were hospitable and friendly - on one occasion embarrassingly so when the lively lady who ran the lodge at Tadapani considered it unseemly that I should spend the night by myself. Nepalis or Tibetans one passed on the trail were seldom communicative: they would return a "namaste" greeting but usually without enthusiasm, and would seldom volunteer it. Probably they were simply fed up with the constant stream of trekkers cluttering up their roads, as I expect I would be if I passed a couple of dozen Japanese tourists every time I walked from my cottage to Oxen Park. In high season two hundred trekkers a day crossed the Thorong La, and from Jomosom south the daily total must have been double that,
.The mule drivers we encountered were inclined to be surly, preoccupied with their beasts and with their transistor radios, while the mules themselves were ill-mannered in the extreme, their sanitary arrangements leaving much to desired. The incautious trekker could easily be shouldered off the trail and against a cliff or a wall: the trekker's rule of the road, of course, is always to step inside the path of an oncoming mule, horse, ox, or other animal so as to avoid being pushed off the cliff or into the river.
Along most of the route the people were of Thakali stock, of Mongolian rather than Indian origin-- some of the horsemen in the Jomosom area could have been taken for outriders of Genghis Khan - and traders by tradition, living astride one of the main routes between India and Tibet and China. It was because of their enterprise and adaptability that there were more and more lodges and eating-places along the route and that their quality was steadily improving. The people and their children looked cheerful and healthy; it was said that this was the most prosperous community in rural Nepal and I could well believe it. The lady running the lodge at Tatopani, where I stayed again after four years, had two children at boarding-school at Kathmandu. It was good to feel that the people in the villages were reaping economic benefit from our travels, since the initiative to convert their houses and to provide lodges and associated facilities had been taken by the villagers themselves, and the profit remained with them. Some trekkers who had followed the route before complained ungraciously about rising prices: for my part I was glad that local incomes were increasing, while prices still remained absurdly low by western standards.
The only observable harm I could attribute to tourism was the growth of begging among the children, noticeably worse than four years earlier, with little hands extended with requests for rupees, pens, or sweets. This practice would not have grown up unless some trekkers granted these requests, and one can only wonder at the thoughtless behaviour of those responsible. They can hardly be ignorant of the consequences, since the Nepali Government makes it clear in the strongest terms when issuing trekking permits that the encouragement of begging by children has the most disastrous effects on family life and on education. How can anyone with a grain of sense or honour stoop to comply with such degrading practices among a proud and independent people?
Although the lodges have become more frequent and more comfortable as the demand has increased, in the smaller villages they can still be fairly basic, with a few poky bedrooms leading off the kitchen where simple meals are cooked over an open wood fire, and where the family and guests crowd together in the cold of the evening or the early morn. Water might be available only in buckets carried from the village tap. There might be a shed somewhere in the back yard serving as lavatory and washroom, perhaps reached through a barn where the domestic animals lived, or their carcasses hung from the roof. Rural life in England must have been much like this two centuries ago. In the more sophisticated lodges there would be a separate dining room with tables and chairs or benches, with its own wood stove or a bucket of glowing charcoal under the table. There could be running cold water in a shed designated as the bathroom, supplemented on request by a bucket of hot water. In a few villages there was electricity (though not in the bedrooms), either from the hydro plant at the base of Mount Nilgiri or from small generators. In some villages solar panels had been installed in the main lodges by the Annapurna Coservation Authority as part of a special development plan to save wood fuel, but in the short winter days and cold nights they could provide no more than lukewarm water.
The lavatory, even in the best lodges, was a shed with a hole in the ground, and a first task on arrival - particularly if dusk was approaching - was to locate this facility and reconnoitre a route to it. This could be quite a tricky operation at night if starting from an upstair bedroom and descending an unnervingly steep staircase (formerly the access to the upstairs would have been by ladder, and the new staircases constructed in deference to travellers were built with the same gradient), trying to work out which of the three bolted doors downstairs led to the outside and which to the family's bedrooms, and steering a course around any resident animals or other obstacles. Two or three nocturnal visits on a cold night - I found that the frequency depended on how cold one was in bed rather than on the evening's liquid intake - amounted to quite an undertaking. But the stars were superb.
Washing could also be something of a trial, The temperature fell sharply as the sun began to go down, and any enthusiasm for a shower that one had developed during the heat of the day evaporated just as quickly at the prospect of stripping off in a draughty shed as the thermometer dropped to zero. In common with other trekkers I soon figured put that honour was satisfied by a good wash and change of clothes every three days or so, and this being the general practice there was no ill-feeling between trekkers about it. We could not have earned good marks for fragrance, and the local people with limited experience of the outside world could be forgiven if they assumed that all foreigners smelt as we did.
The beds were hard, as I would prefer, consisting of boards covered by a thin mattress, and heavy quilts were provided at the higher altitudes, The places seemed reasonably clean, and I suffered no insect bites while trekking, although I did in Pokhara and Kathmandu! The occasional rat would scuttle across the floor of the kitchen or dining-room, and sometimes appeared in the bedrooms according to fellow-trekkers, but I never came across one in my own bedroom.
In the lodges and shops along the route, supplies were far more varied than in the days, not long ago, when you were advised to stock up at Pokhara, or to take the last opportunity at Chandrakot, Bread, cheese, biscuits, bottled water, even toilet paper, now seemed to be generally available. On a fairly remote stretch of the trek, a walker came into the small 'restaurant' where we were eating our dahl baat, asked for a Cadbury's milk chocolate - and got it!
All the lodges displayed, more from prudence I suspect than from loyal enthusiasm, portraits of the Royal couple, the Queen being a handsome.lady, but the monarch himself with turned down moustache and weak shifty eyes behind big round spectacles, not the sort of man you would buy a second-hand Kingdom from - and from all accounts his appearance was not belied by his character.
As there were villages all along my route, and with no great distance between them, it would have been possible to take something like five hours a day as the trekking norm. However, right from the beginning it was more often six or seven hours, partly through sheer momentum, and partly because of splitting the journey into convenient sections, staying at the villages with the better lodges where possible, dividing the longer climbs into separate days, and so on. For example my porter wanted to spend our second night at the delightful village of Birethanti by the edge of a river in a deep valley, but I insisted on another two hours' climb to Tikhedunga - as in January 1987 - so as to reduce the tiring ascent to Ghodopami the following day.
The usual programme was to set off some time between seven and eight thirty after a cup of tea and sometimes a plate of porridge, halt after a couple of hours for a second cup of tea, to stop for an hour or an hour and a half for a leisurely dahl baat some time between midday and two, and to continue for two or three hours to the day's destination. Rather than keeping to a programme of short days, I preferred to take longer days and to enjoy occasional rest-days ( which helped to catch up with the washing), taking three in all at Tatopani with its hot springs; and one, rather undiscriminatingly, at the less attractive Jomosom. In all, anyone familiar with the route would regard my rate of progress as creditable.
With the exception of the furthest part of the route, where I recall a morning's walk towards Kagbene without meeting another soul, there were frequent encounters with local people and other trekkers. The locals were usually about their business and often carrying heavy loads, and of course there were the mule trains, sometimes a dozen or more passing in the course of a morning. With trekkers you might often pass the time of day if they were so inclined. Usually I would greet them and start a brief conversation - a welcome diversion on a long climb - and usually they were glad to respond. But there were often more determined trekkers, typically carrying huge rucksacks, who were reluctant to stop and who returned my greetings, if at all, in the most perfunctory manner.
Day 1
Soon after our start at 7. 15 I became concerned about my porter. He seemed to find my pack heavy, though it was no more than twelve to fifteen kilos, a very light load for a Nepali porter, and his own belongings amounted to very little, although I was reassured to see that his anorak and boots were of high quality. He lagged behind, and took short rests from time to time: in retrospect I can see this as a form of protest at my refusal to start off by taxi as most trekkers did. We had agreed to start off by climbing the Sarankot ridge directly above Lake Phewa, but he indicated a route through the suburbs of Pokhara going parallel to the ridge. At each junction or when we passed any track leading in the direction of Sarankot I asked whether we should not turn left, but he pointed straight ahead although we were getting further and further away from the track that I could see winding up the mountain-side.
My confidence in him was not increased when he enquired the way from a bystander. Eventually it became apparent that he was aiming at the end of the ridge from which the ascent would be the most gradual. Perhaps this was sensible, since the direct climb from Phewa might have proved a stiff challenge for me on the first day, but it did mean a tedious three mile walk through suburbs and neighbouring villages before we left the road.
At last we turned up a steep track that led diagonally to the line of the ridge. Here to my surprise we overtook Niall and Cathy, carrying their own packs, who had decided to take the route via Sarankot to Ghodopani, though they still seemed unsure about their plans thereafter. They had taken a bus from Pokhara to the start of the track. We were to travel together for the next four days, Niall was good company, with a dry wit and a good line in light-hearted banter which he directed to the three of us indifferently: the porter understood little of it, but realised that Niall's intentions were friendly, and was glad to be included, so that his spirits rose accordingly. A couple of days later he volunteered to carry Cathy's pack for a while as well as mine, when she was obviously suffering.
Even by the more gradual route the climb in the heat of the morning to the top of the Sarankot ridge seemed arduous on our first day, and we were glad to stop for a cup of tea at a hut below the brow of the ridge. Here two Nepalis were playing the local version of pool on a board with pockets in the corners and coloured counters in place of billiard balls. After our break the track led through lightly wooded country along the undulating ridge and through the straggling village of Sarankot, offering attractive views to the south across three or four miles of Lake Phewa and back to Pokhara. But by midday we were hot and thirsty: Cathy and I had sore feet and toes, and Niall had strained a muscle in his back when shouldering his pack. We took a second break at a hut that provided cold bottled drinks where I drank some fizzy orange - the only time in the whole trek when I did this, as usually lemon tea was available and a great deal more refreshing.
It was easier going in the afternoon. The air cooled as the sun clouded over, and we walked down the far side of the ridge, gaining a wide view.northward of the river valley and the trail from Phedi to Sukhiet past the Tibetan settlement of Hyanga which had been my starting route on my first trek in Nepal. We gazed down on the new road, an ugly white strip that for much of its length appeared to follow the old trekking trail, now alas not a route to be recommended for the walker.
Our descent of the ridge took us to join the road. Its surface was thick with dust, which billowed up in great clouds as lorries sped past carrying man and materials to extend the road into the mountains. Deep storm gutters were being constructed, punctuated by culverts to carry away the flood waters in the monsoon, and preserve the road surface. We now followed the road for most of its route, leaving it at times to take a short cut along the old trail where the new route took a wide sweep to maintain a tolerable gradient. At some points where we left or joined the route there were concrete steps to link the old and the new. It seemed a far cry from the unspoiled trail of the old days. The contrast was most striking at Naudaanda where we settled in for the night at a pleasant enough lodge, but the once quiet village now directly adjoined the road and had totally lost its earlier charm. Notices warning trekkers against thieves underlined the change for the worse.
As we left Naudaanda we registered at a police check point where our trekking permits were stamped and we signed our names in the book. These check points are distributed along the route, and while the police always ask to see the trekking permits the procedure beyond that seems to vary from place to place. The Naudaanda station was one of the more bureaucratic, and we filled several columns in the registration book including an entry for age. Out of curiosity I looked back several months in the record to see if I could find a fellow-pensioner, but could not raise anyone above 47, though later in the trek I met two or three who must have been in their fifties or sixties.
The clear mountain views, usually a feature of the next stretch towards Chandrakat, clouded over before mid-morning. The route through Khaare was mostly along the new road, easier walking but less interesting and a lot less agreeable than the old trail. Om proposed that we should rest for our dahl baat at Chandrakot and spend the night at Birethanti. As I had been this way before, I felt confident enough to overrule him in view of the long haul the next day to the Ghodopani Pass at 9600 feet. I saw no point in starting that climb from the bottom of the valley, and insisted on reaching Birethanti for dahl baat by the river, and then climbing for a couple of hours in the afternoon to reach Tirkedunga for the night.
The descent to the river was steep, uneven, and slippery, in fact very hard work, and it was a relief to reach the bottom of the valley and cross the long suspension bridge to the delightful row of houses and lodges lining the river bank. I led the party to the place I remembered from my last visit, with a balcony overlooking the river, and here we rested and took our dahl baat, despite objections from Om who wanted us to go to the place next door where presumably he had contacts or hopes for a commission - and perhaps that is where he had planned to spend the
night. What with a longer day's journey than he had bargained for, he enjoyed a good sulk for a couple of hours, but regained his good humour on the last lap and entertained us by playing tunes on his nose flute, He also proudly displayed his new spectacles, complete with the price tag that he kept on the left lens, and further demonstrated his goodwill later on by thoughtfully preventing me from crossing a bridge before I noticed that most of the planks were missing, and suggesting that I forded the river instead.
From Birethanti we climbed through woods high above the valley for half an hour before the trail descended and led along the widening river bed, Cathy and Niall were now suffering after that painful descent before lunch, but I was feeling nothing worse than a slight weariness during the final two hour climb through Hille to Tirkedunga. Our lodge proudly advertised electricity and hot showers, and there was indeed strip lighting in the dining room and outside the lavatory shed: this seemed to be the usual practice where there was electricity - sometimes the bedrooms were wired up and even had bulbs but they never had any power, reasonably enough in places where power is limited, and after all bedrooms are for sleeping in. As for the hot shower, a young woman trekker emerged from it warning us that the water was icy cold, but later in the evening I was delighted to find it genuinely warm although I never discovered by what means this was achieved.
Here I met Devin, a tall 35-year old from Iowa who had spent the last two years teaching in Japan, and was trekking in Nepal on his way back to the University of Alabama where he taught creative writing and poetry. He readily agreed that you couldn't teach people to write good poetry, but if they wrote any at all he hoped it might be possible to teach them to write poetry that was less bad. His younger companion was Sandra, originally from Preston but recently working with computers in Reading.
DAY 3
Niall and Cathy joined Om and myself as we began the long ascent at 7.30, Clouded skies shielded the mountains from view but kept the temperature down as we slowly negotiated the interminable zig-zags up to Ullere, catching glimpses of other trekkers almost vertically above or below us as we toiled along. I found it necessary to rest frequently for very short periods, about two or three minutes at a time, and my companions raised no objection. When we reached Ullere at 9.45 and relaxed over a plate of porridge, I reflected that the climb had seemed no harder than on the last occasion when I was a mere 66. The climb onwards to Banthanti (there are many villages of this name which means clearing in a forest - just as the Lake District is full of Thwaites, but they are more easily distinguished as they usually belonged to Haver or Fins or Thorn or some other Viking) was easier going, up a gentler gradient through broad-leaved forest, and even offering the occasional level stretch or downhill canter, to be taken cautiously however as there were treacherous patches of mud mixed up with mule dung.
Om was now in high spirits and once disappeared from view completely, leaving my pack at the foot of a tree, to reappear suddenly swinging.from a branch overhead and chattering like a monkey. He enjoyed a good plate of dahl baat, as we did, at our last halt of the day, at Nayathanti, before the final stiff climb to the rundown village of Ghodapani and the summit of the pass beyond, For the last hour or so we were walking through thick cloud with no view but the dripping trees on either side, and it was bitterly cold. There was an hour of fading daylight left, the first lodge we tried was full, and we settled gratefully into the second - the British ex-Ghurka Lodge - which proved an admirable choice. Devin and Sandra were there, together with other friends we had made on the journey, including a Swiss girl who was celebrating her birthday with the aid of an iced cake with candles miraculously conjured up by our Ghurka host. It was Sandra' s birthday the next day.
The night was bitterly cold, with the temperature below freezing. I had not asked for a blanket to reinforce my lightweight sleeping-bag, and finally managed to warm up my feet by pulling my thick sweater over the foot of the sleeping-bag. During the night I knocked my torch down to the floor where the batteries rolled out , Luckily I found them by scrabbling under the bed and restored the torch undamaged.
DAY 4
I began the day by wishing Sand a happy birthday, but she was not likely to enjoy it as she had been up all night with vomiting and diorrhea, and was not going to stir far from the lodge. Thick cloud still enveloped the pass, and anyone hoping to climb Poon Hill for the celebrated sunrise view was doomed to disappointment, I had no ambitions to do so again, having witnessed it in perfect conditions four years earlier: Niall took one look outside before creeping thankfully back into his sleeping-bag. We were ready to move on at nine after a nourishing bowl of porridge cooked with sugar. Om was only just stirring, but soon caught up with us on the steep descent, nimbly racing down while I cautiously descended step by step with my knees protected by tubular bandages that relieved the strain of an all day downhill trek. The clouds began to lift, to reveal snowy mountain crests, as we followed a trail high above the river valley down to the village of Chitre. The going underfoot varied a good deal during the day: for long stretches there were quite good stone steps, sometimes comfortably spaced so that I could descend without slowing down, sometimes so steep as to require a much more circumspect approach. At other places the descent was over rougher ground or around landslides: one recent landslide had left a sea of sloping mud crossed only by a rudimentary track winding steeply up and down at the most improbable angles. This I traversed inch by inch with the utmost care, helped by Om who once almost lost his own footing when hauling me up a particularly difficult slope.
At last the path began to wind more gently down to the village of Ghara, straggling a mile or more along the trail, followed by another precipitous zig-zag descent for two hours - it seemed longer - to the river bed. It had been a long day, and dusk was approaching as we crossed the new suspension bridge to the south of Tatopani, observing as we did so the remains of its predecessor which had collapsed into the.river leaving only the supporting structures on the banks. The final stretch of the trail lay along the west bank, past the police check point and along to the beckoning prange trees and poinsettias of the village. Tired now, and spre-toed after eight hours or more of steep downhill walking, I led my companions through the village to the Kamala Lodge at the far end, which I remembered with particular affection from my stay there in February 1987.
Kamala Lodge was still presided over by the Lady in Blue, as I always thought of her, a handsome Nepali woman who wore a smart blue parka at all times except during the brief heat of early afternoon, Tatopani lies in a steep-sided valley where the sun did not rise over the mountains to the east before eleven on December mornings, only to sink behind the range to the west by three in the afternoon. The lodge was nearly full, and for the first - indeed the only - time on the trek I had to share a room, on the understanding that I could move into one for myself the next morning. Over dinner I sought out my room-mate, and was relieved to find a congenial companion in Jason, a young man from New York who was on his way back from crossing the Thorong La, having left his fellow-trekker behind to recover from altitude sickness. We both slept well.
TATDPANI (DAY 5)
Except to those who insist on local conditions untouched by tourism, Tatopami exceeds in charm any other village in the vast trekking area north of Pokhara. And perhaps tourism is not the right word; no-one can reach Tatopani without strenuous and prolonged physical exertion (though this may not always be so as the new road advances) so trekkers feel they can enjoy the luxuries offered by this small village and can bask in the hot springs in an atmosphere of mutual congratulation. The natural setting by the river is delightful, though it brings its hazards, over half the village having been swept away by the floods in 1989. There must be over a dozen well-kept lodges, some of them noted for the quality and variety of their cuisine, Of these the Kamala ranked highest, though the Dhaulagiri and a couple of others ran it close, and I was not the only trekker to revisit it after a period of years, to the pleasure of the lady in blue, though I could not emulate a German trekker who, on his second visit, presented her with a gold brooch from Thailand,
The dining space at the Kamala was in the garden, partly roofed over but studded with orange trees in fruit and with vivid poinsettias. A notice warned "Do not pick up oranges - extrictly forbidden". The food was so good that many trekkers staying at other lodges broke the unwritten rule that you ate in your own lodge, and came to the Kamala for their evening meal. You wrote down your order on a sheet of paper, and not long after the boy who acted as waiter came running out of the kitchen with a sizzling plate of pizza, chop suey, vegetableburger, or whatever you had chosen, calling out your room number, while visitors from other lodges were identified by name, so there were continual cries of number six", ' Dave', 'Helmut', ' number fourteen' and so on. The blue lady was on perpetual patrol, supervising all that went on, and not hesitating to intervene herself if anything looked like going wrong,
.From Tatopani one could take walks along the river banks or up the foothills of the looming mountains on either side - or one could lounge about, get up-to-date with the washing, eat and drink at frequent intervals, bathe in the hot springs, and chat with fellow trekkers. I opted for the lounging about: it was, after all, a rest day, and I sent my porter off to do his own thing till the following morning.
The first new friend I made was James Cotton, a medical student in his final year at King's on Denmark Hill, and a near neighbour in Camberwell where he lived about two hundred yards up the road from me. Like Jason he had come over the Thorong La, and had left behind his companion who had developed altitude sickness the other side of the pass. They had planned to spend the aliotted part of their final year practising their profession in Nepal, a favourite choice among medical students, but had had no reply to their enquiries from the Nepali authorities. So they decided to set off on their trek, and then to present themselves at a local hospital where they had no doubt their help would be welcome. His friend Jonathan must have made a quick recovery from his mountain sickness, as he joined us next morning for our breakfast, which tasted even better than usual as we sat looking up the valley to the peak of Nilgiri lit up by the early sun. James and Jonathan were hoping later that day to complete the long climb back to Ghodopani,
Judy from Boston introduced herself. A personnel consultant and headhunter in her mid-thirties (and hoping to start a family before long) she was resting to recover from a knee strain acquired during a trek to the Annapurna Sanctuary, while her husband set off for Muktinath. In case I should run into him on his return journey the following day, Judy gave me a detailed description of Chris, including the colour of his eyes and his rucksack.
During the morning I moved up to a better room which I had to myself. It was one of a newer series of rooms built slightly higher up the hill and reached by a flight of forty or fifty stairs. The upstair residents had their own loo and washing taps, as well as a good washing line which caught the afternoon sun and wind - I lost a handkerchief which blew down an inaccessible ravine. Niall and Cathy moved up top, as they had been bothered by rats in the night in the downstairs accommodation, though in the next room I had heard nothing. They had decided to go back to Pokhara via Beni, which had been my return route in 1987, so we parted company at this point.
In the afternoon I accompanied Judy to the hot springs. She told me later that she felt self-conscious there on her own, attracting some stares from the local populace who thought it more fitting that women should be escorted there by their menfolk. Without wishing to doubt her natural friendliness, I assumed this was one reason for her to develop an acquaintance with me, Where the village ended, just beyond the Kamala, steps led down to the river bed where arrows indicated a route over large smooth boulders to two pools each about thirty feet square which had been constructed to contain water from the hot springs. The upper pool was too hot for anyone but the most masochistic of bathers to attempt total immersion, though it was possible to sit on the side and dangle the legs in the water without serious pain. In the lower pool the temperature was reduced to a more tolerable level by a cold water hose pipe. The facilities were completed by a changing room consisting of four stakes trying, with variable success, to support some sacking (it was obvious when the changing room was in use as the head and shoulders of the tenant protruded above the sacking - tall, modest, ladies were obliged to stoop); and by an overflow tap where you could wash yourself or your clothes, using soap that was forbidden in the pools. An enterprising Nepali was hiring out washing bowls at three rupees a time.
The springs were well patronised by the local people and by trekkers. It was a delicious experience to lie in the pool and ease any aching muscles while admiring the snowy peaks of Nilgiri and its neighbours. The more formal arrangements did not have the charm of the rock pool over the river, with room just for three (or maybe four if you all knew one another very well), which I had shared on my earlier visit with Patrick Joyce from Chicago and Sharon from Glasgow, I had assumed that access had been cut off by the 1989 floods and their consequences, but in fact it was still possible to reach the rock pool as I learned later from a Danish boy of exceptional grace and beauty who would have been well cast as the object of Aschenbach's obsession in Death in Venice.
For the evening meal, I rejoined Judy, who was sharing a table with two presentable young men from Germany, one of whom - Martin - was going on towards Muktinath the next day as I was. As we talked together a strong sweet scent filled the air: Judy said it came from a flower that opened soon after nightfall. Martin told me it grew in his garden in South Germany, where it was known as the 'night-candle'. The evening grew cold and the night was brilliant with a full moon. I ventured out from my bedroom in the small hours and had no need of a torch: the bright moon was vertically overhead.
DAY 6
Next morning at eight, with a parting gift of two oranges from the lady in blue, I began the gradual climb up the steep-sided gorge in which Tatopani lies. Poinsettias, oranges and other citrus fruit trees, and even an occasional banana tree, lined the start of the day's walk. Wherever the gorge widened, small plots of crops occupied any flat pockets of land. Three women in a shed sat over a water-wheel grinding something - presumably some kind of cereal. One made a gesture of invitation, holding up four fingers. Whatever it was, I didn't want four rupees worth of it so I declined her offer.
The path snaked round a hill, passing through a tunnel cut in the rock. The mountain panorama, featuring Nilgiri and various permutations of the Annapurma range, changed constantly as we followed the bends of the river. Trains of mules and of horses succeeded one another from the north, holding us up when the path was narrow and we had to climb aside to let them pass: I soon learned that horses required a wider berth than mules. After two hours we stopped at the straggling village of Dana - well, all the villages straggled; because of the lie of the land they had nowhere else to go but along the track.
Over tea and porridge.I met two trekkers on their way south, One was an attractive and friendly brown-skinned woman whose ethnic origin mystified me, her accent being faintly antipodean with a hint of South London, and her features suggesting a proportion of Polynesian. She knew London well, but had recently been living in Australia. Her older companion was gruff and uncommunicative, his accent perhaps Scots-Canadian.
Continuing alongside the Kali Gandakhi the track passed through a small village characterised by elaborate ornamental wood-carving around the doors and windows of houses of whitewashed stone. After crossing the river by a long, swaying, suspension bridge, we walked along the opposite bank high above the blue torrent, meeting men carrying stacks of wooden crates emitting a strong scent of apples - the crop from Marpha being transported south for marketing. Next I encountered a tall handsome trekker striding vigorously towards Tatopani with a red pack on his back. ' Hallo, Chris!' I called out, much to his amazement as he had never set eyes on me before, while I was able to recognize him easily from Judy's description. I assured him that his wife was eagerly awaiting his return. He had followed the trail as far as Marpha but decided not to push on to Jomosom and Muktinath, and he recommended the lodges where he had stayed in Ghasa and Marpha,
At Rupse Chaharo, which means waterfall, a great rush of water tumbled hundreds of feet down the mountainside, being joined near the foot by three more waterfalls from other points on the mountain rim. The track could no longer continue on the west bank in the face of a sheer cliff, and another long suspension bridge crossed high over the Kali Gandakhi to a village on the opposite bank where we rested and ate our dahl baat. I tried to photograph a handsome old woman, with a face full of wrinkles and character, outside the lodge, but she shook her head vigorously as if to say 'you don't want to photograph an old woman like me', and disappeared indoors, so instead I snapped her granddaughter who had no such inhibitions.
A few miles further on we recrossed the Kali Gandakhi by a suspension bridge with recently renewed planks. I wondered if there was a Provincial Inspector of Bridges who decided when old planks should be replaced by new, and if so what criteria he applied - did he, for example, wait until someone actually fell through? The track now crossed several fast-flowing tributaries of the Kali Gandakhi , either by means of stepping-stones or by a variety of bridges, some quite solidly constructed, others consisting simply of narrow planks or precarious logs. At one point about four hundred yards of the cliff had collapsed and we had to pick our way carefully above the gorge,
The sound of the torrent below was always with us, quieter where the gorge widened, louder when it narrowed again, and rising to a powerful roar as it echoed back from a three sided tunnel in the rock which took us round a projecting cliff. When the gorge opened out again we had a fore taste of the cold wind that from mid-morning onwards blasts its way from the south into the northern part of the valley up to Jomosom and beyond.
.After a brief interval of pleasant easy walking up and down gentle inclines, the trail climbed steeply over a ridge and descended precipitously to yet one more suspension bridge before the final punishing ascent to the prosperous village of Ghasa. Somewhere on the way we should have passed another village called Khabre, but I saw no trace of it. What with annual floods, landslides, and the destruction of bridges, villages would sometimes move bewilderingly from one side of the river to the other, or might be abandoned altogether if access was cut off for long periods. Perhaps this had happened to Khabre.
From entering Ghasa we took nearly twenty minutes to reach the far end of the village where the Kali Gandakhi lodge recommended by Chris was situated. As we approached it, at a height of 6700', we caught our first glimpses of wide belts of conifers replacing the broad-leaved forests of the lower elevations. The lodge was indeed a pleasant one, with the garden catching the last half hour of the sun's rays, but by four o'clock the temperature was dropping like a stone and I took my pot of lemon tea indoors to the dining room, a large well-built room that could comfortably accommodate twenty or thirty below a ceiling supported by oak beams, and with a wood stove in the middle.
There were seven other guests: a French couple from Fontainebleau who had flown up to Jomosom and were now walking back, a group of three Tasmanians and a Dutchman who had come the hard way - over the Thorong La - and a Chinese trekker walking north from Pokhara. The French couple were totally wrapped up in each other, while the Tasmanian/Dutch group played cards together in a closed circle. The Chinese trekker provided the best company. After our meal we sat opposite each other writing our diaries by the light of a candle between us. He was filling the pages of an exercise book with amazing speed, writing his Chinese characters from right to left - he explained that it could be done either horizontally or vertically.
He came from Taiwan where he was studying for a master's degree in engineering. I took him to be about thirty - he had spent some years on military service - and he was widely travelled. From a visit to Britain he retained fond memories of our Bed and Breakfasts. He had trekked extensively in mainland China, where there had been no restriction on the Taiwanese for two years. The beauty of the Chinese landscape was unequalled, but facilities for trekkers were rudimentary although he managed better than westerners since he spoke mandarin and was invariably charged a lot less for accommodation and food. He was also free to travel in Tibet, and was heading there now, hoping later to cross into China by one of the new highways.
Later, more general conversation developed around the wood stove. The Tasmanian girls became more communicative, describing their night at Phedi, the last stopping place before crossing the Thorong La from the east. They spent the night in a cold and grim dormitory with primitive facilities, and sleeping was difficult as trekkers began the ascent from 2 a.m. onwards. Others to whom I spoke later had no complaints: they thought that in view of the altitude and remoteness of the site the people who ran the lodge did well to provide any food or shelter at all.
.We were joined in conversation by our lodge-keeper who spoke passable English. He was a well-informed man, asking me about Mr. Major who (I now learned) was our new Prime Minister, and whether he was of the same party as Mrs. Thatcher. He also asked the Taiwanese a lot of questions about China and Tibet, trekkers from Taiwan or mainland China being something of a rarity in Nepal: and prevailed on him to drink two glasses of chang, the local fermented beer, on which my friend pronounced an unfavourable verdict, comparing it to alcoholic yoghurt.
DAY 7
Next morning we were challenged by a cold wind from the north when at 8 a.m. we began a steady climb through the pine forests. At about eleven as the temperature rose in the valley, the wind duly reversed in direction and blew strongly and steadily from the south. We breakfasted by the suspension bridge crossing to the small village of Lete, where Dhaulagiri loomed over us, only to be obscured later by cloud. It was a fairly hard day's trek, mostly between eight and nine thousand feet, as we followed the course of the Gandakhi, sometimes fifty feet above the river, sometimes five hundred. In mid-morning we were overtaken by Martin and my friend from Taiwan, both strong walkers. Soon after, as we passes a large flock of sheep being driven along the track, there was some commotion among the drovers: Om said that one of the sheep had fallen off the cliff.
An easier stretch took us through the extensive village of Kalopani, a prosperous settlement with solidly-built houses, many of them of new construction, and healthy looking crops flourishing on a plain half a mile wide raised above the river and about two miles long. At the last lodge in Kalopani, which looked very welcoming, we stopped for our mid-day halt, and I chatted to a cheerful English couple who were members of a group coming down from the crossing of the Thorong La which they had approached from Pokhara instead of the usual starting point of Dumre, crossing over westwards further up to join the popular route. The young woman was training to become a leader and instructor in outdoor activities, and flattered me by asking what my job was.
After Kalopani the trail descended to the river bed, now three-quarters of a mile wide, and remained in the bed for most of the rest of the day, taking short cuts across the wider bends of the watercourse, and climbing up the cliffs only when promontories jutted steeply out into the gorge, Vegetation became sparser as we moved into a higher and more arid zone: the pines thinned out and were dotted over the hills like the landscape background to paintings of biblical subjects by Italian primitives, In the river bed the route crossed numerous rivulets, some quite deep, by stepping-stones, planks, or logs, all of which tested my balancing skills.
I had hoped to make it a short day, ending at two or half past at Landrung, leaving Marpha as the destination for the morrow. Two lodges as we entered Landrung looked unattractive, so I pressed on in the hope of finding somewhere more inviting, but left the village behind without seeing any other lodges. The adjacent village of Khobang was a quite extraordinary place, built in a rock tunnel with underground entrances to the houses on either side, in order to provide protection against the perpetual wind. Khobang was picturesque but did not cater for trekkers, so I decided to push on for another couple of hours, the trail having levelled off now, and spend the night at the larger town of Tukche which had electricity and several good lodges.
It was indeed easy going on this last lap, except for some patches of soft sand where the feet sank in. Electricity cables, leading from the hydro station at the foot of Nilgiri, followed the valley, and in one section where there were overhanging cliffs the poles had been concreted in at an angle of forty-five degrees. Tukche was visible a long way off along the river bed. The air was clear, and the mountains on either side lent a deceptive scale to the view, suggesting that we would reach the town in about half an hour. An hour later it seemed to be exactly the same distance away.
We reached the town just before dark. I looked into the first lodge and was just thinking that I might do better elsewhere when the owner insisted on showing me a room, which looked comfortable, promised me a bucket of hot water, told me that he had the very latest thing in underfloor heating, and pressed me to stay. When I accepted his invitation he conjured up a pot of delicious lemon tea with a generous portion of freshly squeezed fruit, served in a cup and saucer of decorated chinaware instead of the usual mug.
There was a clean bathroom with a stone floor, and big enough, the owner assured me, for ten people to wash in at once, but I proved to be the only guest that night so his claim was not put to the test. On the floor I was confronted by two large buckets of equal size, one full of boiling hot water, the other of cold, and two small jugs. As what I wanted was a bucket filled about two thirds with hot water and one third with cold, I was momentarily baffled, and thought of exercises in arithmetic books about vessels of inconvenient size, or of puzzles involving a boat and an island and a wolf, rabbit and lettuce. Then I caught sight of a cold water tap, and even at the end of a hard day I worked out that I could start off by emptying the bucket of cold water and refill it as and when required to make the desired mixture. After that it was all plain sailing, and I finished up by emptying half a bucket of warm water over my head.
I ate a first-class chow mien and the house special 'Mustang apple pie' which was delicious. The underfloor heating consisted of a pit under the dining table in which a brazier of glowing charcoal was placed. The proprietor spoke good English, and in Tukche (as in Ghasa) information about Mr. Major was eagerly sought: by now I had ceased to be surprised. My interrogator told me he had one son and one daughter, and did not want any more children so that he could provide a good education for these two. This reminded me that the lady in blue at Tatopami had two children at boarding school in Kathmandu, a testimony to the deserved prosperity of the Kamala Lodge. I was given a heavy blanket to put over my sleeping bag and slept long and well.
On a cold morning we delayed our departure until 8.45 and wrapped up well; on the advice of the lodge keeper I wore glasses as well as gloves since a lot of sand was blowing about. There was a howling gale from the north and Tukche was still in shadow from the mountains as we walked through the town along a good trail about fifty feet above the river bed. By ten o'clock we were in sunlight and the gale had moderated to a fresh breeze. For two miles the trail passed between large boulders with not much vegetation to be seen except for some bushy pines.
To the left rose high clay cliffs eroded into tortured shapes and intersected by recent landslides. To the right the river had etched a secondary gorge in the wide flood plain, and ran swift and deep through the narrow channel, Approaching Marpha, we passed the agricultural research station where apples, apricots, and other fruits were cultivated. It was surrounded by extensive orchards from which the crop had not long been gathered. Marpha lived up to its reputation as a clean and attractive village, its unique distinction being its sewage system, with fast running water carrying the waste away through stone channels covered over with meat stone slabs. I stopped at an attractive lodge for lemon tea and an omelette, and felt very sleepy, perhaps as a result of struggling against the strong wind, Three trekkers were resting there after crossing the Thorong La: tall and with long fair hair, they looked like Vikings but turned out to be Israelis.
Marpha seemed to be something of a holy place. The trail was straddled by a chorten housing holy paintings and Buddhist prayer-wheels; at other points there were lines of prayer-wheels housed in little stonebuilt shelters in the middle of the trail, so that travellers in either direction could pass by on the left and give the wheels a turn; on the hill above the village were the scattered buildings and cells of a monastery, apparently deserted.
It took another two and a half hours to reach Jomosom, the trail now undulating through an increasingly arid landscape, while the wind had now reversed and thankfully was behind us. I thought I saw Jomosom from far off, a white town on a ledge at the base of cliffs, but it turned out to be Thinigaon half an hour further on and on the far side of the river, and inhabited by followers of Bon-PD, an ancient religion believed to be a precursor of Tibetan Buddhism. We saw several riders of Tibetan appearance cantering by on small horses, singly or in twos or threes, sometimes followed by their womenfolk on foot. With the river bed on Gur right and hills ever more twisted and eroded on Gur left, we approached Jomosom, just as undistinguished as its reputation, and reached a line of lodges starting from opposite the airstrip.
There seemed little to choose between one lodge and another, all offering reasonable standards of comfort, and after looking at two others I settled for the Trekkers' which offered electricity - in the bedroom! - and hot showers (which proved to be the usual bucket). My room was spacious and light by trekking standards, encouraging me to take a rest day in Jomosom despite the town's lack of charm. Most of.the town seemed to be on the other side of the river, crossed by a suspension bridge supported by tall blue towers that looked new, and there was a singularly unpromising District Post Office at which I posted two letters with little hope they would ever be collected, let alone delivered. They ultimately arrived in England, long after my own return.
Thinking that I might want to fly back when I reached Jomosom on the return journey from Muktinath, I called at the office of Nepal Airlines which was nominally open from two to four in the afternoon. It wasn't, but after a few minutes a young man saw me waiting outside, went to fetch a key, let me into the shed that served as his office, and with courtesy and efficiency explained the arrangements for booking flights to Pokhara and for getting on waiting lists. I put myself on a list that involved no obligation on either side but would probably help if I decided to fly, and returned to the Trekkers' Lodge which now had a fire going under the table, closely surrounded by three Nepalis, a young Australian woman, and her Singaporean partner. I succeeded in squeezing in and getting my feet under the table, becoming comfortably warm over supper before climbing into my sleeping-bag.
At breakfast I joined two Germans, one with reasonable English, who were eating big puffy rolls of Tibetan bread spread with jam, each a meal in itself. I think they had done some hard trekking: one ate three rolls and the other four. At the Marca Polo Lodge by the airstrip, trekkers were waiting in the sun to see if the daily plane would turn up - there had been no flight for three days. It was agreeable to sit in the sun until the wind started up at mid-morning (which would of course put an end to any prospects of a flight) after which everyone would be muffled up to the eyebrows if they ventured outside. Eventually it became clear that no plane would turn up, though explanations varied from technical troubles to an engineering strike (i.e. a strike of the engineer who looked after the local plane). By now there was a steady accumulation of prospective passengers, including about thirty Tibetans who sat patiently all day on the steps of the airline offices hoping to board a plane to take them the first stage of their journey south to Dharamsala in India where the Dalai Lama would be arriving soon.
There was not a lot to do in Jomosom, and as this was a rest day for me it seemed logical to spend most of it resting. I sat in the Marco Polo where there was a high room with upper windows that let in the sun and made the place much brighter than the Trekkers'. I met two Australians, two Swiss, and a young Irishwoman who had just climbed a 20,000 foot peak on her own. She knew Alan Blackshaw by reputation and told me that not long ago he had joined a veterans' expedition to a Himalayan peak. An American from Long Island had just returned from a Yugoslav expedition to Annapurna 1: he was their doctor and said the climb was being abandoned because of bad weather, no surprise since the plan had been to ascend by the difficult north route at a hazardous time of year. It was too easy now, he commented, to do things the straightforward way, especially with the amazing advances made in recent years in the design of footwear and other equipment. I was to meet his climbing companions later.
Back in my own lodge, I ate with the two Germans, three Nepalis, the Australian woman (who had a bad cold and not much conversation) and the man from Singapore who had graduated in Australia and was much travelled and exceptionally well-informed. Our meal was served by the eldest of three delightful little girls with neat pony-tails who played happily around the lodge all day. The eldest could not have been more than eight or nine, but she took our orders with perfect aplomb, served up the meals efficiently, and tended the fire under the table. The mother remained in the background, while there was no sign of any men around.
As some of my companions left hopefully for the airport, I set off with Om, crossing the bridge, and passing a depressing accumulation of concrete administrative buildings before going through the old town, which was not much more inspiring. At the northern end of Jomosom there was a large square surrounded by railings which appeared to be some sort of royal shrine, with a statue of the reigning monarch in the middle, Not knowing the English for statue or sculpture, Om ingeniouslyy described it as 'King - Photo". Each morning seemed to be colder than the last and I was wearing practically every stitch of clothing I had with me, including woolly hat and gloves. We heard the plane flying in to the airstrip at nine o'clock, which meant that it would probably be able to make a second return trip from Pokhara before the wind got up. It was good to know that the engineer had called off his strike. Our trail took us steadily uphill alongside or sometimes on the river bed, and for the first time on the trek the route was practically deserted - we saw no-one at all for an hour and then Om met an old friend who walked along together with us. There was not so much loose sand and we made good progress. It had warmed up by mid-morning when there were fine views backwards to Dhaulagiri, and a new range in the distance ahead, probably marking the frontier with Tibet. To the left was some dramatic geology, the landscape resembling a smaller version of the Grand Canyon. Mountain sheep, indistinguishable from goats, grazed on steep slopes, watched over by their shepherds. There didn't seem much to eat, but perhaps this was an area of higher rainfall.
The river and the trail forked at a place known as Eklai Bhatti, or lonely inn, but the loneliness must have proved too much for the innkeeper for there was no sign of habitation. However it was a holy place, being at a confluence of rivers, and there was a sacred plantation of small trees. Looking along the right fork - we were taking the left - you could see the Thorong La aand the peaks either side of the pass, and a third peak that was Mount Tilicho guarding one of the highest lakes in the world, now in a forbidden military zone. Our route from here followed a good wide track between dry-stone walls, where we met occasional mule and ox trains, and the first trekkers who had come over the pass early that morning.
Kagbeni was a scattered mountain village, entered through a chorten, with a river flowing through its middle between stone banks and crossed by wooden bridges. Trees, now almost bare, followed the river, The village was lined with narrow passage-ways and stairways and odd nooks and crannies in which domestic animals munched away. Following a recommendation from one of my Jomosom friends I found my way down a narrow alley-way to the Annapurna Lodge, famed for its solarium, and next door to the Red House which in retrospect would have been more comfortable and gregarious. I ducked through a low doorway into the dining room, illuminated by sunlight filtering through high windows. There was an almost vertical staircase to a narrow corridor, precariously fenced off by a frail banister, off which the bedrooms led. The whole place was built of old wood that had been used many times before, now crumbling away in places, and with plenty of gaps and holes to admit the freezing night air. At the end of the corridor, a door opened out to higher ground where you could walk past a pit about 30 feet square where oxen were eating hay, to a lavatory shed in a very exposed position and to the solarium, built with windproof cement walls and on the south side paned with glass protected by wire netting. It looked out on to a couple of trees and a vegetable patch where there was solidly-hearted cabbage and some despondent cauliflowers. Nearby there were solar panels for the lodge's water supply, and everywhere there were piles of hay, and stacks of logs and kindling wood which must have come in useful now that winter was setting in, at a height of over 9000 feet and in the face of that perpetual wind. The washroom was on the lower level, approached through a barn housing some oxen.
The lodge was wired for electricity, and a network of cables was in place to supply the village. Kagbeni had had a wind generator, built by a Japanese firm, but unfortunately the design had not catered for the strength of the wind in these parts and the windmill blew down after a few days. In the solarium, reading with apparent concentration, was a Frenchwoman of about thirty, with good English, and her sister and brother-in-law, with little. They had stayed the previous night, after crossing the Thurong La, at the North Pole lodge at Muktinath, where they had been badly bitten by fleas. I settled down to reading "The Field-Marshal's Memoirs" by John Masters which I found absorbing. By extraordinary coincidence, the Permanent Secretary at Defence, who was party to the establishment conspiracy to suppress the memoirs, was called Whitmore, anticipating the appointment of Sir Clive a decade or two later. Presumably you can hardly sue in such circumstances, though I suppose you could express a preference for another Department if you happened to have read the book.
After the sun set we all went down to the dining room where a brazier had been set under the table. We were joined by a rather shaggy German couple, who were aiming, travelling light, to climb to Muktinath and back the following day. We all wore all our clothes, and it was quite cosy, with oil lamps hissing. Om was monching around saying something about rakshi : he disappeared from view later, and probably got comfortably sozzled. After our meal the German girl ordered hot chocolate and rum - it never ceased to amaze to find what is now available in these remote places - and was surprised to get a fair sized bottle of rum alongside her steaming cup. Her companion expressed his feelings to me about English kitchen (I assume he meant cooking as in Cuisine) which he claimed consisted entirely of fish and chips.
At four in the morning I hauled myself out of my sleeping bag to go to the loo. After negotiating the treacherous right angle bend at the top of the stairs I opened the door to the outside world and found myself walking to the shed over deep snow. It was still snowing at six, and at seven when we met for breakfast and discussed our respective plans. It was out of the question to push on and climb over three thousand feet to Muktinath: even if physically possible there would be no point in it when visibility was nil. The German couple decided to retrace their steps and catch a return plane from Jomosom; the girl had a sore foot which helped their decision. The French were going back anyway. I had time to wait in Kagbeni for a day or more in the hope that the skies would clear, but I thought the bad weather might have set in, and it would be wise to go back to lower altitudes, remembering at least one stretch of the trail along the edge of a steep cliff that would be hazardous if covered with ice.
Om and the lodge-keeper had no advice to offer except that the pass was closed, but whether for the day or for the winter no-one could say. Cravenly I decided to go back. I would have to leave Muktinath for my next trek, or possibly for ever.
Om now seemed disappointed we had abandoned the trek to Muktinath - perhaps he was hoping to meet a friend there - and started off on the road back to Jomosom with extreme slowness, following a girl of seven or eight who walked confidently by herself over the snow in her thin shoes. We were soon caught up by the Germans and travelled with them for a while before they pushed ahead. There was a strong, cold, wind, but the snow began to die away and the going underfoot was easy. We kept more to the river bed than on the way up, and avoided the more awkward places at the higher level. When we reached Jomosom at midday I told Om that I needed to change some money if we could find a Bank. He stopped outside what I took to be a cattle barn, but it proved to be a branch of the Bank of Nepal that provided a service at least as efficient as the Camberwell branch of Barclays.
Lunching in the Marco Polo, once again I met the Germans who were waiting for the Nepal Airline office to open at two o'clock: the girl was going to fly back followed by her companion on foot. I toyed with the idea of taking the flight myself: maybe three days of boredom in Jomosom waiting for the weather to clear, or another ten days of trekking including the punishing climb up to Ghodopami? But it would be mostly downhill to the beckoning delights of Tatopani, where a rest day, or even two, could prepare one for further efforts, and the shame rankled from turning back at Kagbeni. At this point the sun shone through to reinforce the message. I decided to walk on.
When I wanted to start off for Marpha, Om explained - with help from a local interpreter - that he had left some belongings with a friend when we passed through Jomosom the first time, and his friend was now away from home. He would await his return, and follow me later to Marpha. I knew it was an easy afternoon's walk, and started the descent to the river crossing south of Jomosom, stopping to take a photograph down towards the river bed. While I was doing this I was teased by a group of northern people on their way south, who tried to take away my camera,.and then ran off with my gloves, I assumed that this was all in fun, and so it proved. More persistent was an elderly man walking by himself and carrying a ruined transistor radic, which he pleaded with me to mend. He made signs requesting cigarettes and from his demeanour I guessed that the poor old chap was mentally handicapped. Eventually he went on his way.
Beyond the river crossing the trail took a pleasant course past cultivated fields and the abandoned monastery to the north of Marpha. The hillside above the monastery was peppered with what were presumably once monastic cells, but now looked like - and perhaps were in fact - cattle sheds. Along the trail were numerous wayside shrines, constructed of local stones in patterns of white, brown, and grey, and housing prayer wheels. In the centre of Marpha was Baba, Lodge where Om would meet me, entered by a low doorway from the main trail leading into a courtyard. Up a fight of steep concrete steps were the bedrooms, where I settled into a big double room with electric light, and rested, feeling rather cold as Om was carrying my pack with all my warm clothes and he did not arrive until three hours later when it was getting dark. It was a brilliant starry night with Orion vertically overhead, and I slept deeply from nine o'clock, waking at four and relaxing comfortably in my sleeping bag, dozing off again and waking with a start to find that it was already light.
DAY 12
The first hour's walking after an eight o'clock start was bitterly cold. The going was easy, mostly flat or gently downhill along the river bed, so that icy patches presented no hazard. When the sun rose above the mountain crests, walking was very agreeable indeed, and the sky turned a vivid blue with fleecy clouds around the summits, For almost the whole day the trail wound around the base of Dhaulagiri, with the eastern peak almost vertically above and the main summit and its approaches in full view, and unfolding mile by mile. For a while I walked with two young Australians, Tim and Beth, who had come over the Thorong La travelling extremely light, their loads being no more than I would normally take for a day out on the Lakeland fells - and of course they had no porter. They had come out to Nepal travelling overland under their own steam from Vienna, going through Hungary, Rumania, Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan. The only difficulties they had were in Iran, where they found the public transport impossibly crowded because it was so generously subsidised!
Tim and Beth belonged to the class of trekkers who preferred the lodges on the route from Dumre up to the Thorong La because they were more 'genuine', offering only local food which you ate with the family around the fire. Higher up, at Manang and Muktinath, the lodges were simple but solidly built of concrete to keep out the wind and the cold, rather than of wood with gaps between the planks. We took photographs of each other against the backdrop of Dhaulagiri before the Australians took leave of me and zoomed off (as they put it) ahead,
Om and I stopped briefly for tea in Tukche before continuing down the river bed of the Kali Gandakhi. with the ever unfolding pandrama of Dhaulagiri on our right and the sun now reaching the summits of Nilgiri.and Annapurna to our left. I was greeted by an old friend as Martin, first met at Tatopami, emerged from some bushes alongside the trail and walked with me for an hour. He had reached Muktinath the day before the snowfall, and had managed the descent to Kagbene in the snow. He was a gentle pastoral type from South Germany where he was a physiotherapist, hoping one day to set up his own practice. His appearance was one of benevolence, behind spectacles and a wispy moustache: he spoke slowly and softly: he walked steadily and gently as if to place as light a burden as possible upon the earth; and he had no plan for his trek, deciding from day to day where he would go.
Martin decided to spend the night at the Kalapani Guest House at the nothern end of the village, an attractive lodge located to catch maximum sunshine and advertising a good menu and a selection of good local walks. I would have liked to stay there but wished to reach Tatopani the following day which would have been too long a journey. So I pushed on for another hour and a half, through the long village of Kalopani and down to the isolated Namaste Guest House at Lete by the suspension bridge, coldly situated put of the sun beneath the steep edge of the Annapurna range.
This was a fairly basic lodge, with washing and lavatory sheds approached through a barn with the odd goat carcase hanging from the roof. I thought at first I would be the only trekker, but as evening wore on I was joined progressively by the entire Yugoslav winter expedition to Annapurna, who had abandoned the ascent of the North Face as the avalanches became more and more dangerous. Attempting the most difficult route at almost the worst time of year, they had hardly expected to succeed, and the dominant mood was one of high spirits and relief at a casualty-free descent in the face of severe hazards. One by one they came down, continuing till well after dark, the twelve Yugoslavs, their three Sherpas (one of whom had reached the Everest summit on an earlier expedition), and about thirty Nepalese porters. Each of the later arrivals was greeted with loud cheers and a bottle of beer, the logistic preparation for the climb having included the provision of large quantities of alcohol in Lete to greet their descent.
The expedition was not sponsored by state or by private enterprise, as I was informed by a 28-year old Croat who spoke English fluently. They each contributed $2000 and the majority were professional people, my friend being a mechanical engineer working for a German-owned company, and with an American girl friend living in Yugoslavia and working as an orchestral conductor. He was not in favour of mixing men and women on an expedition, as this usually led to trouble, but their team included one woman, and a very attractive one at that, with medium length blond hair parted in the middle to reveal a broad and serene brow, below which was a dreamy smile and a strong body with wide hips. She kept herself to herself at first but later in the evening joined in the celebrations and twirled round vigorously in the dancing. One of the male climbers, I think, had a special relationship with her.
.They were a cheerful high-spirited lot, though occasional ethnic differences showed through, as when my companion mentioned the Yugoslavian Alps and another member of the team told him he meant the Slovenian Alps. I learned all about the Croats, of whom 400,000 are said to live in Pittsburgh, and large numbers also in South America where they have made substantial investments especially in Chile. They never lose their identity when they emigrate, in this respect (it was helpfully explained) being just like Jews. After this party at Lete, they would have a better party at Tatopani, followed by an even better one at Pokhara, after which there would be a really good party in Kathmandu but not in the place which we destroyed last time'.
As the evening wore on I was feeling quite hungry, and hoping that a roast pig or goat might be served to the mountaineers. However, they seemed resolved to eat plateful after plateful of chips, in between which they drank a lot of beer and rakshi, and smoked great quantities of cigarettes (which they assured me was a good training for mountaineers as it got them accustomed to breathing in difficult conditions). At some later stage in the evening a large iced cake put in an appearance and was shared by all, but there seemed no hope of anything more substantial as all the efforts of the lodge-keeper were devoted to maintaining the supply of drink, even to the extent that the fires under the table which were keeping the cold night air at bay were allowed to go out. Although I was getting colder and hungrier as a result, none of this dimmed the high spirits of the expedition members, who progressed from loud but monotonous Serbo-Croat songs to even louder and more monotonous Nepali songs, and from song to dance. Drinking went on fairly heavily, but I tried to restrict myself to the socially acceptable minimum, taking one glass of beer and one of rakshi, only to find that every time we clinked glasses the Yugoslavs contrived to tilt some of their drink from their glasses in to mine.
The party became quite rowdy. A big bear-like man on the other side of me to the Croat gave me a friendly pat on the back from time to time, nearly knocking me over in the process and sending all the breath out of my body. Some of the party, my sober and rather prudish Croat friend told me, were making rude jokes because they were drunk. There seemed no point in going to bed while all the noise was going on. Some time after midnight the 43-year old leader of the expedition made a speech in English for the benefit of his Nepali colleagues, thanking them for their help and support. It was greeted with thunderous applause. A little later, when the party seemed to have passed its peak, I announced my retirement to bed in a brief speech, also received with tumultuous cheers.
I lay awake a long time, with desperately cold feet, while the flimsy building shook to the heavy dancing of the Yugoslav expedition to Annapurna. I must have drifted off to sleep in the small hours, only to be rudely woken up at four in the morning by a flood of liquid coming through the ceiling immediately above my face. I pulled my sleeping bag over my head until the flow stopped, wondering whether it was melting snow until I realised that snow would not be melting in the coldest hour before the dawn, and remembered with horror that the Yugoslavs had taken possession of the upper bedrooms, and that there were large gaps in the.planks that formed my ceiling and their floor, I was inclined to put the worst construction on this episode, but a closer examination suggested that there was nothing worse than a spilled bottle of rakshi, followed by hot arguments in Serbo-Croat. By the time I had moved over to the second bed in my room, as the first was soaked through, my feet were as cold as when I had first climbed into my sleeping-bag.
There were few signs of life among the Yugoslavs when I got up at seven, but the wood fire was alight in the kitchen where one of the Sherpas was making popcorn. He held a saucepan with a little oil in it over the fire until it was very hot, then dropped in the corn, which promptly exploded, and shook it vigorously. It tasted excellent, as did some Tibetan bread with the local apricot jam. We set off at what seemed to be the rush hour for mule trains, a whole succession appearing one after another just behind us, just like heavy lorries breathing down your neck on the motorway. We followed the same technique as on the M6, pulling in to let the mule trains pass. On the softer sections the mules threw up clouds of dust, which hung in the air as we walked through them.
After the relative ease of the previous day, the journey to Tatopani was a hard one, mostly hard and stony underfoot, and with frequent switchbacks, some quite steep, I think the route differed in some places from that which we had followed on the way up, probably because for some stretches we were on the opposite side of the river. Plodding slowly up one of the steeper slopes, I was passed by four Yugoslavs effortlessly gliding uphill at high speed. Walking through the next village I was surprised to see a rat scuttling over my foot, much to the amusement of Om and the villagers. For most of the day we were walking directly above the river, sometimes several hundred feet above the water, which was often a strip of bright blue, and at other times a band of molten silver where the sun's rays caught the foaming torrent. We passed through pine forests, and nearer to Tatopani through Alpine meadows and fields of green barley. At last I could see the red of the poinsettias, and the oranges on the trees as we drew near the village. At the Kamala some of the Yugoslavs had settled in and were drinking quietly, but with an early night in mind I avoided them and sat with a group of Australians. At the Kamala one ate in the open, and it was very cold after 7. 30.
DAYS 14 and 15
Two idle days at Tatopani, eating, sleeping, washing clothes, meeting old friends, making new ones, languishing in the hot springs. I swapped my John Masters book for Wuthering Heights, I dropped into the Dhaulagira Rest House where I recognized Peter, an architect of about thirty from Melbourne, reading Foucault' s Pendulum by Umberto Eco. He was a serious mountaineer and trekker and had come over the Thorang La, where he noted symptoms of altitude sickness but was able to descend quickly enough to avoid any serious trouble. His work in Australia was mainly designing communal buildings for aboriginal settlements. He had also answered a bizarre advertisement from the Earl of Stradbroke who occupied a vast house in 3000 acres, with his twelve children from two.marriages. He was advertising for numbers of staff, including a nanny and an architect. Peter's task was to build a scale model of the Earl's homestead. He might be coming to Britain to build a replica of the Stradbroke Australian home on the Earl's English estates, if planning permission could be obtained.
A Norwegian couple told me about their journey by the Trans-Siberian railway into China. They enjoyed seven comfortable and relaxing days in a two-berth compartment, being plied regularly with rather boring food three times a day, Toby and Jill Tattersall were doctors training to be G. P. s. Jill had been to Nepal before on her last year as a medical student. The senior Tattersalls were near neighbours of mine in the Lake District, living in a cottage in Lindale. As Toby and Jill were flying back to England in a few days I gave them some letters to post. An entertaining companion in the evening was a polyglot Dutchman whose five languages included Nepali, and who gave hilarious and convincing demonstrations of speaking English with first a Dutch and then a German accent. At breakfast, after chatting for a while to a blond, pink cheeked young lady, I asked when she was going back to England, only to learn to my amazement that she was Danish, her English being perfect in idiom, intonation, and everything else. She had spent a year in Cornwall when she was sixteen, working as an au pair with an English family. As always I left Tatopami with regret.
Starting at eight o'clock on a cloudy morning, we soon climbed out of the orange and poinsettia belt. It was a hard day's trekking with some long climbs, difficult going, and a couple of awkward landslides to negotiate. Frequent halts offered opportunities to admire the view behind us, where the snowy pinnacle of Nilgiri seemed from where we stood to be as high as Dhaulagiri. We decided to stop for the night at the small village of Chitre, where Om installed me in the first guest house we reached, which seemed to me to be rather low standard, without even a board outside to advertise its services, The bedroom was unattractive, the washplace and loo difficult of access and not likely to win any prizes for the best-kept facilities, so I made a personal reconnaissance through Chitre and discovered a greatly superior lodge about ten minutes's walk further up the trail, where I met two New Zealanders, Dave and Dinah, encountered earlier on the trek. I went back to collect my kit, much to Om's displeasure though the lodge-owners showed no resentment at my change of domicile.
Dave and Dinah had been travelling the world for a couple of years, working in various places including London, where they had spent several month Dinah doing a secretary's job and Dave working as an accountant on privatisation of the Electricity Grid. They had come over the pass and had both been suffering from dysentery, Dave still moving slowly and tiring quickly. After a hard day I was ready for bed at 8.30 and went to sleep almost at once.
.DAY 17
After sleeping soundly for ten hours I kept the cold of the morning at bay with a plate of steaming porridge and set off on the way up to Ghodopani at half past eight, closely followed by Dave and Dinah who caught us up at our first halt. The trail climbed steadily through forest, mostly up stone steps and without much respite, We reached the top of the Ghodopani pass at 10.45, where Om persuaded us to stop for the day, explaining that it would take another six hours to reach Tarapani along the ridge towards Ghandrung, and that there would be no place in between where we could spend the night. This proved to be untrue, as we later found there were lodges at another Banthanti (not the one on the way up to Ghodopani from Ullere), but we took his advice and relaxed for the rest of a clear and sunny day at the top of the pass, washing clothes and chatting.
We stayed again at the well-equipped 'Ex-Ghurka Lodge", where I noticed for the first time that the two adjacent lavatory sheds were labelled respectively Ladies and Gents, although the facilities inside (consisting of a hole in the floor) were identical. Having washed our laundry and ourselves with the aid of buckets of hot water we sat in the sun, where it was pleasantly hot if sheltered from the wind, admired the view of Annapurna South with fleecy clouds around the top, and talked with our fellow travellers and with our host, who explained that he was not of the Ghurka people, but had served for seventeen years with the regiment of that name. The Ghurka regiments had originally been recruited by the British from the Ghurka peoples with their warlike traditions, and the British then applied the same description to any other soldiers enlisted in Nepal though many came from other tribes.
By half past three the air was cooling rapidly and we moved into the lodge and gathered round the fire. We were joined by Andy whom I had met at Tatopami and who recommended an onward route through Chomrong where there was another Ghurka lodge run with great efficiency on military lines. It would be a longer way round to Landruk, but with fewer ups and downs than the Ghandrung trail. I regretted later I had not taken this advice, and noted it for the next occasion, Twc Londoners from Clapham, Steve and Debbie, accompanied by a porter, joined the group, and then, with the others, climbed Poon Hill for the sunset while I remained content with my recollection of the superior sunrise view four years earlier.
We passed an agreeable evening comparing travel notes and listening to our host's experiences. Again I heard good reports of the Red House at Kagbemi, and regretted I had been tempted by the solarium to stay next door. The lady in charge at the Red House liked to keep her double rooms filled up and took pains to pair off her guests in what she regarded as suitable couples. Our lodge-keeper told us of his service in England, Hong Kong, and Borneo. He recalled Aldershot with nostalgia (which I did not share - one of my soldiers had found the place so depressing that he had blown his brains out in the barracks), and took pride in his service on guard duty at Buckingham Palace. From his account of fighting in Borneo there seemed little to choose in.bloodthirstiness between the Ghurkas and their opponents, and a head count had a literal meaning. The British troops were not in the same league, and usually got left behind when the Ghurkas did a forty mile night march through the jungle.
In more peaceful strain we moved into an explanation of Nepali politics, though even here violence was not far away as if you decided to stand for Parliament - as our host intended - you or members of your family might find yourselves accidentally shot at. One problem here was that the population of the country was divided about equally between people of Mongolian and of Indian (Brahmin) origin, while the latter occupied far more than half of the top jobs in government and elsewhere, Our friend suggested that equal representation of the two communities should be ensured in Parliament. There followed a lively argument among the Nepalis sitting round the fire - who included members from each group,
Dave was sick again so he and Dinah decided to cut out Ghandrung and head straight for Phedi and the road back to Pokhara. Om and I set off along the ridge that went due east from the top of the pass, together with Steve and Debbie, who proved to be entertaining companions. Ten years before they had met as geology students at Bristol University, but had decided against a career in that discipline, Steve qualifying as a chartered accountant and Debbie moving into computer software. They had given up their jobs in order to travel the world for six months or more, during which they might seek work for a time in Hong Kong, with a view to a possible longer stay there if things worked out.
It was a great day's walk under a clear sky along the ridge which extended the whole width of the Annapurna range a few miles to the south of the summits. To start with, the trail climbed gently uphill to about 10,000 feet, at the top of the great rhododendron forest. A modest summit to the south rose clear of the forest to give a magnificent panoramic view as good as that from Poon Hill. After a level walk on top of the ridge the trail became gently (by Himalayan standards) undulating. The going was fairly easy, over a thick carpet of leaves, though there were occasional patches of snow and ice, and a tangle of tree roots extending over the path offered a hazard if you looked at the view instead of where you were putting your feet. A long steep descent led to a clearing in the forest where there was a small village that was naturally called Banthanti, where we stopped for a pot of lemon tea.
In the afternoon the ups and downs became steeper though we were never far from the top of the ridge as it descended gradually. We passed two English girls, one fair and one dark, with their porter, the blonde moving slowly and cautiously. We reached Tarapani in time to admire an incomparable sunset over Annapurna and Machapuchre, sitting outside our lodge together with an Italian couple from Bologna. As is often the case, the wife spoke the better English, and she was good to look at with the unusual combination of eyes of a clear blue-grey and ravenblack hair.
.The lady who ran our lodge, perhaps in her late thirties, was of a playful disposition - Steve described her as 'frisky" after she had made a dive for the towel round his waist as he came back from a shower (only to find that he was wearing briefs underneath). Around the evening fireside she shifted her interest to me, deploring the fact that I was travelling alone - even worse - sleeping alone, a situation which she clearly intended to remedy. As all this took place before an admiring audience, Steve and Debbie enjoying my discomfiture, and several Nepalis having a good laugh about it, I was not sure how sericusiy to take the proposition, and thought it prudent to explain that I was seventy years of age and (tongue in cheek) too old for that sort of thing, but this only evoked more laughter, my prospective bedmate indicating with unmistakeable gestures that she was sure I was a strong man and that my age should present no obstacle.
My unease grew when I retired for the night and found there was no way of locking my bedroom door. I managed to secure it with a knotted shoelace, and to make sure I could make a hasty exit to the loo if need be during the night I put a pair of scissors by the door to use for cutting the lace should I be unable to untie it. I enjoyed an untroubled night.
DAY 19
We were still at 8600 feet and spent the next morning an a long descent through the forest. The trail followed the course of a tumbling river, the banks being strewn with ferns and mosses with patches of mahonias and occasional tiny primulas of a delicate mauve. At first there were patches of snow and ice, but it became warm as the day drew on and we lost altitude. There were a few tricky stretches when the trail crossed and recrossed the river over steep and slippery rocks. Steve and Debbie, who were fast movers, pushed on ahead, and I travelled with the two English girls, Sam (for Samantha) and Julie, who were nurses from Guy's, Julie's difficulties and slow progress being accounted for by the fact that she had never been hill-walking before - not anywhere, let alone the Himalayas, Nor did she appear to be in good training, while Sam was tall and athletic, and a strong and experienced walker. Julie was most unhappy on the steep stretches, either uphill or downhill, and on the flimsy swaying bridges. Once I slipped on a muddy patch, and sat down gently on the trail, suffering nothing worse than a black and slimy pair of trousers.
We stopped for morning tea at a clearing on the hillside. A glance at my notes suggests that we met a couple called Anna and Mac at this point, but I think it more likely that I was recording a view of Annapurna and Machapuchre. Later we stopped for daal baht after we left the forest and entered the approaches to Ghandrung. For some unexplained reason we had a long wait for our food here - usually daal bhat comes up quickly enough - so we were refreshed for what proved to be a tough afternoon. There was a long steep descent into and through the straggling town, then zig-zagging steps down a precipitous hillside of a V-shaped valley, across which we could see Landruk half way up the opposite hillside. Lower down the valley the trail wound steeply down through terraced fields of stubble, and at last across the river at the valley bottom by a swaying suspensoin bridge. Now the really hard work began, an hour and a half of unremitting climb in the heat of the afternoon with the sun on our backs, through terraced crops to the first houses in Landruk,
Landruk was an extended line of houses and lodges along a level track parallel with the valley and opposite Ghandrung, Steve and Debbie were already installed in a lodge to the left of the track, and our porters led us to a similar lodge to the right. I was shown to a small and dreary room which I didn't like, and thought I might do better to join Steve and Debbie, This idea evoked protests from the porters and from the lodge-keeper, who immediately gave me a better room. Sam and Julie were in the next room, feeling very cold as they carried emergency light-weight blankets but no sleeping bags. Although we had descended a couple of thousand feet during the day, the night was still cold.
DAY 20
Now within two days of the end of the trek I put on my last clean and unused shirt and discarded my one and only undervest which I had been wearing continuously day and night for longer than I would care to record. The day's walk started delightfully, the trail contouring the hill on the east side of the valley. After a while it appeared to be heading straight for a wooded hill where no way through was apparent, but the track wound round and round at the same elevation before rising gradually as it turned into the wood. There followed an hour's climb through the wood, unremittingly steep. Here at last I found - on the twentieth day of the trek - that I was really getting into my stride, often taking the lead in our group ahead of Steve and Debbie, and not needing to pause any more often than my younger companions. After a particularly steep section that I climbed at a good speed I asked Sam to check my pulse, and was gratified to find that it was no more than 98.
We halted for daal baht at the village of Pothana at the top of the hill, where another valley now opened out to the west and north, both Annapurna and Dhaulagiri re-appearing after an absence of two or three days. From Pothama the trail wound downhill, steeply in places, but for the most part at a comfortable gradient, and often well paved for easy walking. We left the forest and passed through fields of oats and yellow-flowered thori, the track being confined to a width of five feet within dry-stone walls, and into Dhampus where the crops grew right up to the house walls. The whole of the Ghandrung route had been free of mule trains, but we had to evade the curved horns of a train of buffaloes in the narrow main street. Several lodges abutted the street, and some new ones were under construction, The view down now included the new road from Pokhara, a white snake far below, scarring the landscape, while to our rear Machapuchre dominated the skyline. We settled in to a comfortable lodge, all five trekkers and the three porters who seemed to have become good friends, a few yards back from the track, with the loo on the other side of the road approached by climbing a wall and descending some hazardous steps. As I went in I asked for a pot of lemon tea, and was amazed to have it brought upstairs to my bedroom where I was taking off my boots!
Morale was high that evening among the trekkers as we neared the end of our endeavours, and the porters too were in high spirits and slaughtered
.a chicken, cutting its throat and pouring the blood into a bowl. Well, it had had a better life than it would have had on a battery farm, and at least was being despatched by those who were going to eat it rather than by some impersonal middle man or piece of machinery. Steve ordered some local wine which we all sampled: it was hot and strong, with a fairly nasty taste, and was probably made from fermented rice. I met Sylvia from Germany who said it had been snowing for four days over the Thorong La. Later on, most of the trekkers played cards by candlelight, watched by the local children staring through the wooden bars that separated us from the road. Women and young girls were carrying baskets of firewood up the trail. Later still we had singing and drumming in our lodge, the porters apparently improvising words to a familiar and monotonous tune. The lady of the lodge took over the singing, more melodiously. Finally there was individual dancing to the music, all the movements being sinuous and feminine whether executed by women or men, the porter of Sam and Julie dancing with particular skill and grace. Steve had a go, encouraging general hilarity. It was a happy evening, undimmed by any thoughts of the following day's climb: from now it was downhill all the way.
Sunrise coloured the sky a bright orange. I enjoyed my last outdoor shave in water that was cold but not icy, in sight of Annapurna, Machapuchre, and just the tip of Dhaulagiri. After breakfasting on Tibetan bread and boiled eggs we started on a mile of gradual descent, and then steeply zig-zagging steps down towards the road fifteen hundred feet below. All of us were going strongly though Debbie had a sore foot and Julie was not too happy about the almost vertical drop below. We reached the road at Phedi, where taxis and other vehicles were waiting. While Sam and Julie boarded a taxi, Steve, Debbie and I followed our pre-arranged plan of resisting the siren calls and striding out to complete the journey to Pokhara along the road.
Our porters thought we were crazy, and most inconsiderate, and they sulkily lagged a long way behind. I had walked every inch of the trek since leaving my hotel three weeks earlier, and it somehow seemed the right thing to walk back the whole way up to the very gates of the hotel, with colours flying, whistling Colonel Bogey if necessary to keep up the flagging spirits. Perhaps if our porters had been Gurkhas they might have seen the point.
It was easy walking on the road, though somewhat tedious, and marred by occasional dust-clouds when a taxi passed, though fortunately there were not many lorries to kick up bigger dust storms. At three or four points we left the road and took short cuts through villages. The porters wanted to stop for daal baht at about half past twelve when we still had two hours to go. A dahl baat halt could take anything up to two and a half hours, and I increased my unpopularity with the porters by saying firmly that food would wait till we reached Pokhara, though we compromised by agreeing on a short rest. The porters were probably working harder than on the trek proper, since on flat road walking they lost the advantage they had over us on the gradients and rough going, and we were now setting a cracking pace.
At half past two we reached the lakeside of Pokhara where Steve and Debbie peeled off to their hotel, while I went on to change travellers's cheques at the Bank and to arrive at the dam site at three. The Hotel Peaceful restored to me the belongings I had left with them, but had no room with a shower and loo available, I moved next door to the Hotel Garden, which turned out to be rather better. The hotel manager was quite hurt when I asked if there was hot water, and assured me that it was hot for twenty-four hours a day - as indeed it was. Lemon tea was brought up to my comfortable and spacious room - it seemed spacious after the trekking lodges - and I paid Om his wages. We had some communication problems arising from what he should be paid for the rest days, and he hung around for a while after the money was paid over, but in the end he went away contented, together with a Swiss Army knife I gave him.
I undressed and piled my filthy clothes on the floor. I stood under the hot shower for a long time, longer than I had ever stood under a shower in my life. Typing this five months later I can still feel the surge of sheer sensuous delight and relaxation. I observed my silhouette in the mirror and found it only slightly improved: I had not lost much more than half a stone. My reverie was interrupted by Sam and Julie who had discovered my whereabouts from the Peaceful, so I wrapped a towel round my waist while we compared notes, Later I adjourned to the K. C. Restaurant and ate a big apple pancake washed down by two banana lassis, I sat with a couple who were teachers from Dulwich College and who sometimes did a stint with the International School at Singapore which had links with Dulwich and with Atlantic College. We looked out towards the Annapurna range through a slight haze that turned the view into a theatrical backdrop.
The evening turned cold and I went back for a sweater, returning for a pot of lemon tea at the K. C. A new moon appeared in the evening sky, and I retreated from the garden into the semi-circular restaurant where the waiters started up a wood fire in the central hearth with a liberal application of kerosene. The candles on the tables were reflected in the windows; it was a cosy scene. Back at the Hotel Garden I expected to sink quickly into a blissful sleep, but felt such delight at lying between sheets and reading by a bedside lamp that I savoured the experience until half past one before sinking into oblivion.
.BACK AT POKHARA
Having returned to Pokhara on 20th December I decided to see if I could advance my flight back to England, which had been booked for 11th January so as to provide a comfortable margin for any delays or mishaps on the trek. Royal Nepal Airlines ran one direct flight per week, so I would try for January 4th, or failing that December 28th which would give me three or four days in each of Pokhara and Kathmandu with little time to visit anywhere else. Enquiries at Pokhara airport, which dealt only with internal flights, led me to telephone the airline office in Kathmandu who advised that 4th January was fully booked with a waiting iist, while there was no problem with 28th December, for which I promptly made a booking to be confirmed when I reached Kathmandu.
The next task was to book the bus journey from Pokhara to Kathmandu, preferably by one of the slightly more comfortable tourist buses, and this I did for 25th December, reasoning that there would be fewer tourists choosing to travel on Christmas Day, and there would be correspondingly more room on the bus for what was bound to be a long trip of ten hours or more on a very dubious road, judging by the outward journey. It then seemed a good idea to telephone my loved ones in England to report the change of plan and explain that it was due not to any disaster but to the fact that I had finished my trek in good time. Never before in my travels had I tried to phone England, having been put off by the advice in the Lonely Planet guide to India that one would need to allocate an entire day to the purpose and endure countless frustrations, as in the case of trying to post a parcel home. However, the experience of other travellers suggested that telephoning from Nepal these days was simple and straightforward, and so it turned out to be.
Along the lakeside were a number of booths, scattered among the souvenir shops and restaurants, occupied by travel agents who would book your bus journeys to anywhere on the continent. Sume of them advertised that you could make international calls from their premises, and wires connected to their roofs lent some plausibility to these claims. I shopped around, obtained a few quotes from competing establishments, and decided to call the following morning from the office offering the best terms. When I arrived next day the owner had to be retrieved from a nearby restaurant, but as soon as he turned up he dialled my number for me and within seconds I was connected, with a better line than I usually had in London.
I enjoyed four lazy days in Pokhara, seeing friends old and new, and always in sight of the glorious Himalayan panorama that now took on a different aspect as the air was hazy and the mountains appeared ethereal as though etched on glass, no longer sharply outlined against the sky as they had been before my trek. Among the old friends were New Zealanders Dave and Dinah, who had managed to get back to Pokhara in one day from Ghodopami with the help of transport from Phedi. Dave had been feeling very ill, but was now completely recovered and was lively and talkative, a transformation from the morose and withdrawn character that I remembered. His appetite too had recovered to a quite remarkable extent as he demonstrated at our evening meal. He downed a large steak that.must have weighed twelve ounces or so, and then made short work of a repeat order. This was followed by a huge slice of cake - there were no half measures about portions of cake in Pokhara - and again a repeat order. In spite of the efforts required to dispose of this feast, he managed at the same time to be the life and soul of the party, Among other things he told us was that he was one-sixteenth Maori, by virtue of which he enjoyed certain privileges granted to the Maoris including a free university education.
New friends were Pat from California who had made a small trek to Ghodopani and back, taking both a porter and a guide, which seemed rather excessive. Her guide had explained that it was necessary for her security that he should share her bedroom during the trek, but remained on friendly terms after she demurred. Marion from the German Embassy was on her way to drive to Lumbini near the border with India to visit the birthplace of the Buddha. Pat was a nurse at an ambulatory surgery, where the main objective was to discharge patients as soon as they were able to walk through the door. Marion told me that the Old Vienna restaurant in Kathmandu, which I was hoping to revisit, had closed a few months ago.
At breakfast one morning at the K. C. I sat next to Clarence, the boring man from Toronto who took a poor view of the younger generation. I would not have sat at his table if I had recognized him, but he was disguised by a beard and whiskers he had grown during his trek, which he described in some detail complete with icefalls and other hazards. For fifteen minutes I couldn't get a word in. At the next table an Englishman of about forty, with a younger woman companion, was observing my predicamemnt with some amusement. Later he introduced himself as Peter, an educationalist who had spent seven years in Saudi Arabia where among other things he had been writing text-books. He was on his way home 'to sort out some domestic problems' in which I imagine his companion played some part. He said that the Saudi people, as distinct from the royal family, were deeply unhappy about the presence of American troops. He was pessimistic about the future of the Arab world with its bitter divisions.
I had a curious experience at the hotel. There was a young Nepali on the staff, maybe about twenty years old, who greeted me daily and exchanged friendly words though his English was limited. He indicated he would like a private word with me some time, but when I gave him an opportunity to do so he became increasingly conspiratorial and suggested that the conversation had better take place in my bedroom. One afternoon when I was sitting alone on the terrace with my book he came by, and beginning to lose patience I pointed out that we could have our private talk now, and asked him to sit down and tell me what it was all about. After a good deal of stammering and embarrassment, which could not be fully accounted for by language difficulties, I realised that I had been slow in the uptake, and that whatever he wanted, the bedroom was the place for it. I made it clear politely that I was not interested, and added one more item to the list of hazards that confront the solitary traveller.
I had several meals at the K.C. with an agreeable youngish Dutch couple, Marion and John Willem, but they had flown off to Kathmandu by Christmas Eve when the restaurant was offering a special dinner, or rather a choice of three special menus. I chose the vegetarian meal at under 3 pounds. It was a veritable feast - minestrone, cheese with cream, a moussaka of vast proportions, rice, apple tart, and a chocolate mousse enriched with brandy, I was joined by a communicative young man of about thirty with a faint transatlantic accent that I thought indicated a Canadian origin, but he turned out to be a Swiss geologist who had graduated at the Colorado School of Mines near Denver. He had been working with the German company Deminex in the Gulf, and was now planning a seven-day trek, possibly starting with a flight to Jomosom. I gave him some ideas for the route and found him to be a kindred spirit, who (like myself - so far) had never suffered any stomach upsets on his travels, and attributed this to an immunity acquired from frequently eating bread, cheese, or other food that had gone mouldy, and a complete indifference to any dates stamped on packets or cartons.
BUS TO KATHMANDU
I paraded outside the hotel at 6.45 when the bus was due, but there was no activity in sight except for an American family with five children who were waiting, not for the bus, but for their porters who had been ordered for six o'clock. They were planning a five day trek via Birethanti and Ghandrung, although to judge from their pile of baggage they could have been aiming to trek beyond the Tibetan frontier and well into China. They were still waiting for their porters - how many? I wondered - when my bus arrived at 7:15, so I presented my bamboo stick to the father of the party to help him on his way.
We made a couple of stops to pick up passengers in Pokhara, one outside an expensive hotel where our driver blasted away on his two-tone horn until he at last conceded that no-one was coming, and then pulled in for a longer halt at the bus station where we were abandoned by the driver and conductor, presumably in favour of their breakfast. The bus appeared to be in good condition but I thought it better to reserve judgment until it was more severely tested. An orange ball of sun rose to apply a delicate tint to my old friends Anna and Mac, but it was still cold and I was glad to be wearing my thickest sweater and anarak.
As we left Pokhara we drove through prosperous farming country, new houses and neat plots suggesting a government irrigation scheme. Then fog began to close in on either side of the road, enveloping us in clammy cold, and persisted for a couple of hours. In spite of this we made good progress, and as the fog cleared we passed through Dumre, which I now recognized as the starting point for the trek over the Thorong La, before stopping at a smaller town for a lunch halt. For my Christmas Day dinner I had a plateful of dahl baat for 25 rupees (forty pence) which was somewhat below standard, consisting of too much baat and not enough dahl. However a generous second helping, free as always, removed any cause for complaint.
We were joined by a smartly dressed Indian, seen off by his family with a garland of flowers down to his waist, and two or three others, but the
.bus was far from full (as I had guessed) and I had plenty of leg room in the front seat up by the driver. We ran into about twenty miles of roadworks which we negotiated without inordinate delay, great progress having been made in the month since I had made the outward journey. Where the road had slipped into the river, new foundations were being built up by heaps of stones held together by wire netting and topped with concrete. I wondered how long the repaired road would last. The work was done by a combination of JCB's and manual labour, the workers living in improvised tents and shelters by the side of the road.
The bus arrived in Kathmandu no more than nine and a half hours after I boarded it, which must have meant well under nine hours on the road from Pokhara, This was good going considering the state of the road, and the journey had been comfortable and not at all tiring.
BACK AT KATHMANDU
A ten minute walk from the bus stop took me to the Snowlion where I was greeted like an old friend and shown into a large upstair room at the back. In front of the hotel the road was busy with traffic avoiding the potholes and pedestrians picking their way along the disintegrating pavements or risking their lives in the traffic. In search of metropolitan luxury I strolled to the Annapurna Coffee Bar which presented its reflecting windows to the passer-by. Within, everything was clean and gleaming, a pleasant setting in which to enjoy a toasted sandwich and two cappucinos flavoured with cinnamon, at a cost several times that of my Christmas dinner earlier in the day - but well within my daily budget which, as usual on my travels, was running comfortably within ten pounds a day for food, hotel, travel, and everything else included.
Only two full days in Nepal remained to me, of which I planned to spend one in the holy city of Bhaktapur. On my day in Kathmandu I revisited the temple of Swayambhu two miles to the west of the city. Outside the old town are fields with vegetables in neat rows extending right up to the walls of the outlying houses, providing the fresh produce that is displayed in the street markets - huge, creamy cauliflowers, bright orange carrots, purple onions and aubergines, peas, beans, lentils, and crisp-hearted cabbage. The road crossed the Bagmati sacred river, at this season no more than a succession of muddy pools in which children played, oblivious of the bloated carcasses of dead sheep and cows with their feet in the air.
The Buddhist temple of Swayambhu, resplendent with prayer flags flying from the huge stupa, is reached by climbing an interminable steep staircase, punctuated by shrines and statues of the Buddha, while tribes of monkeys on either side wait to swoop on the unwary tourist or worshipper and carry away any accessible foodstuffs, cameras, or other objects not firmly attached to the person, I took a few photographs at the top, since the film on my last visit had been wiped out, but the topmost platform does not provide enough space to take a good picture, for which purpose a helicopter would be needed. On return I passed through the oldest part of town, where tall brick houses with fretted wooden windows were in various stages of decay,
.In the evening I went in search of the Kathmandu K. C. Restaurant, of which I had heard good reports in Pokhara, but it was not where it was shown on my 1986 town map. However I found myself in the Thamel quarter in a livelier part of the city than I had seen before by night, with shops, restaurants, and crowds of tourists thronging the narrow streets. Once more I settled for a snack in the Annapurna Coffee Bar, and thought I would have a look in the adjoining fashionable hotel. I sat in the luxurious lounge for a while to see how the other half lived. It all seemed very strange: people were wearing dresses, suits, with proper shoes, they had expensive-looking suitcases instead of stained rucksacks, they did not speak to anyone outside their immediate circle, there were signs to the ' Banquetting Room', and I felt self-conscious sitting there in my well-worn Rohans and trainers.
My last day in Nepal dawned clear and sunny. I asked five people, including a policeman, where I should catch a bus to Bhaktapur, and received five different answers. The man in the local bookshop put my mind at rest by indicating the exact place in a side-street where I should board the bus, and indeed there was one waiting, apparently full to overflowing, but it was just possible to squeeze in and take up the position of a vertical sardine. The journey took only twenty minutes - and cost two rupees!
Bhaktapur took my breath away. From the bus stop I walked down the wide brick-paved main street flanked by tall houses with elaborately carved windows and balconies, a scene that seemed not to have changed for two or three hundred years. The streets were clean, and the air sweet and cool, like an English morning in early summer. No tourists were in sight and no-one tried to sell me anything until I turned into the lower square to find it completely surrounded by as amazing an array of temples and pagodas as anything in Kathmandu. Every building, even the shops and dwelling-houses, was a perfect example of beauty and dignity: there was no discordant note. I ordered a pot of tea in a three-storied restaurant in the square and sat back to absorb the unique quality of the place.
The upper, Durbar, square was of even greater magnificence, though here there were a few tourists - but there was plenty of space to accommodate them. Recalling the crowded squares of Kathmandu, I thought it incredible that so few visitors took the trouble to make a twenty minute bus trip to this haven of peace - no noise but the occasional tolling of bells - and centuries-old grace and beauty. I savoured a leisurely lunch in the Marco Polo restaurant, itself another example of distinguished eighteenth century architecture and craftmanship, enjoying a rich soup, fried rice and lentils with meat and tomatoes, followed by a dish of sikarni (yoghurt, fruit and cinnamon) and a cup of cinnamon flavoured coffee.
I left Bhatakpur with regret, but with satisfaction that I should have been there for my last day in Nepal. Like Jaisalmer in Rajasthan, it will always be a very special place for me, and I carried its memories with me as the bus drove back to the capital through the fertile fields of the Kathmandu valley.
.As I needed to catch a taxi at 6, 30 next morning to reach the airport in time, I ordered a cab, and an early call, from the desk at the Snowlion, Never confident of the success of such arrangements, I would in any case have slept uneasily. In the event I hardly slept at all, as the next room to mine had been taken during the day by three Indians - leaving empty all the other rooms in the hotel - who must have been meeting together for the first time in years, for they spent virtually the whole night in loud conversation just the other side of the paper-thin partition that divided us. Some time after midnight I began a loud and angry argument with myself, assuming one deep and one high-pitched voice, if only to demonstrate to my neighbours that sound carried rather well from one room to the next. It made not the slightest difference to them.
The taxi arrived on time, The hotel staff apologised for underestimating the cost: it would be eighty rupees (one pound fourty) instead of the seventy they had told me. With the cost of a taxi to Heathrow in mind, I saw no cause for recrimination. The Kathmandu fog was thick, and to my relief the driver treated it with respect and drove slowly and carefully. At the airport there was little sign of organization and a lot of milling around, but I attached myself to a middle-aged Englishwoman who seemed to know what was going on, and where it went on, and soon I was in the right queue. She was Fiona, a senior medical officer of the Save the Children Fund, and was seeing off Emma Frank, an eighteen-year old who had been staying with her for a few days.
Having grossly underspent my budget, I had over a thousand rupees in cash as well as a lot of travellers' cheques. Nepali rupees, like Indian, cannot be taken outside their country of brigin, and I would have had to change them at the airport, probably at an unfavourable rate. With relief I handed over my rupees to Fiona for Save the Children, and took Emma under my wing as we boarded the plane. Not that. she needed any protection; she had completed three tough treks in Nepal and had travelled extensively alone. This was her year between school in Devonshire and Edinburgh University where she would read anthropology, She was good company throughout the fourteen hour journey, and I soon lost all awareness of the difference in years between us, except when I noticed that she still bit her nails.
As we climbed above Kathmandu and flew to the south-west, the whole panorama of the Himalayas could be seen to our right, glowing bright in the early morning sun. It was a fitting farewell -- no, au revoir - to Nepal.
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