We Took to the Hills

Above: "hills" on the Tamang heritage trail

Below: on the trail between Langtang village and Kyanjin Gompa, mid-November. The walls are made of thousands of engraved prayer-stones.

Our long-awaited trip started out with a reconnoiter to the New Bus Park, a dismally chaotic transport hub on the outskirts of the city. After the usual bureaucratic hurdles--in this case, tracking down the ticket-sellers who had disappeared on the pretext of lunch--W and I procured our tickets for the next morning for Syabrubesi, the furthest you can drive North from Kathmandu. We had already scrounged, rented and borrowed all the necessary gear for 2 weeks at the foot (and perhaps up to the knees) of the Himalayas: warm sleeping bags, down jackets, a sci-fi water purification device that works by UV-light, the bare minimum of clothing (if you can’t wear it all at once, you packed too much). Our only reading matter—and it should go without saying that we're a couple of book fiends--was a tattered ghost of a Peter Dickinson novel that we ended up tearing apart page by page, so that the two of us could read it simultaneously without waiting for one another to catch up. Now that we had the tickets and the gear, our scheme started to feel like something that might turn into something outside of our heads, and we were light with excitement. Walking back along the grey and congested route from the bus park, we made small last-minute purchases: pieces of hard gudpak (a rich sweet confection with jaggery and butter) and a bandana for snot and blood; cashews to sustain us on the chilly mountaintops of our imagination; a dark chocolate bar. We were going to Langtang.

The next morning we jumped in a taxi to the bus park around dawn. it's worth noting that the 15-minute taxi ride cost 200 rupees, which while still less than US $3 was nearly as much as our 280 rupee bus tickets. We located our bus and somewhat hesitantly left our packs in a pile of things to be stowed on the roof. W glanced back nervously until she was sure our things were there, intact, on top of our bus. We tried to settle in as the bus rattled to a start. We sat on the side of the bus that had fewer missing windows, but still the morning air was chilly and the bony seats tilted forward at an awkward pitch. Soon the 'conductor' (more on the ingenious, informal systems of transportation management in a later post) came and asked us to move, since our tickets actually had assigned us to a different pair of seats. Reluctantly we repositioned ourselves just behind a missing, suited up in our windbreakers and wool scarves, and braced ourselves for a long ride.

Even with the prospect of a jangly 10 hours ahead of us, it was exhilarating to be moving, to be rising out of the Kathmandu valley and to find ourselves so suddenly in rural Nepal. It was W's first glimpse of a Nepal other than Kathmandu: of endless terraces carved into the precipitous hillsides, their crops of mustard and finger millet and rice in various stages of maturation and harvest; of long white Daikon radishes piled high by the roadsides; of village houses with thatched or corrugated tin roofs, Maoist slogans still blazing in bright blue paint from the elections last spring. Kids barely clothed, grubby, playing in the roads and running alongside the bus for a while, shouting with laughter. WIthout warning the brakes screeched a dreadful shrief of metal-on-metal, jolting us from our private reveries, and the bus hurtled to a stop. Pee break. Men lining up on the side of the road, women darting for the cover of the forest. 90 seconds and everyone was back on, the bus moving again. But where was my wallet? I had shifted it to a front pocket so as not to have to sit on the uncomfortable lump all day, and now it simply wasn't there. There was some searching, some wracking our brains and asking around, but by the time we stopped at Trishuli Bazar for mid-day dal-bhat it was clear that my wallet including cash and local bank card were simply gone. Then the inevitable flush of emotions: anger at myself for my carelessness, and at whoever would pickpocket me or simply pick up my wallet off the seat we'd moved from and disappear; frustration, and even a weird feeling of justice. I'd been pondering, from my wind-blown seat, the predicament of the majority of Nepalese, of rural poverty in an era of ever-more-glaring inequality. Nothing new, but hard not to think along these lines given the moving panorama framed by the bus window. Now someone (and someone who could probably use it) had 20,000 of my rupees (about US $250) and I was left with nothing, not a cent. A fitting reversal, in a sense, I thought with a wry smile, and a strange stand-in for my guilty feelings of a couple hours back. For the time being I would no longer be able to play the rich white Westerner tromping off to explore at leisure the pristine Himalayas, blessing the locals with my patronage only to disappear at midnight (the end of the tourist season) on a pumpkin-coach (taxi, hired jeep, or airplane). But what of our trip? W still had some money left, about 5,000 rupees. It might be enough to take a short trek, if we were thrifty, and still buy bus tickets back. We'd be forced to bargain hard, and to ask for more local hospitality, but then again we would see more of the Nepal that Nepalis live in instead of the tourist fantasyland that’s been superimposed on top in places like Langtang.

In the end our consternation and uncertainty were for naught. Once bus pulled in to Syabrubesi, after a jolting final 4 hours along narrow, bumpy roads, across landslides and streams, and down a vertiginous set of switchbacks to the Bhote Koshi river; after thousands of ear-splitting brake-squeals and one episode of spontaneous window-shattering into the lap of the poor Scottish lass behind us (the conductor took one look and nonchalantly tossed the two pieces of the tinted pane out the now-empty windowframe)--when we finally disembarked, bruised and jangled and rather demoralized, we quickly made friends with an energetic Austrian named Michael who lent us 10,000 rupees as soon as he heard of our predicament. He too had had money stolen, while doing the Annapurna circuit, and figured it was his turn to help out some strangers in need. We were back on track, just on a slightly tighter budget than originally planned. We finally felt we could relax, once I'd taken care of canceling my ATM card, and we settled into the smoky kitchen of the Sherpa/Tamang family who ran the budget guest house we found ourselves in that first night. Some tongba was procured, and for once I enjoyed the stuff immensely: red millet fermented whole for weeks or months, put in a wooden vessel and covered with hot water, left to steep, and sipped through a bamboo sippy straw. Every batch is different, and this one hit the spot: not too sweet, nicely acidic and fruity, with a clean taste. None of the chemical overtones or the nauseating breadiness that immature tongba can yield. Sitting by the family's hearth, helping to chop vegetables or dinner, and learning a few snippets of the Tamang language, I thought to myself: the bus ride was worth it already.

Butter tea. Silky, reviving, hot comfort in a cup, and one of three or fore defining tastes of the Himalayan region. Tamang, Sherpa, and Tibetan woman make it in a tall quiver-like device braced against one leg. In go boiling water, a hunk of more-or-less rancid yak butter, some Chinese brick tea, and salt. The plunger (English terms fail miserably here) churns the stuff as it steeps, emulsufying the butterfat, so no one of the endlessly forthcoming cups of tea has too much or to little. In Gongang, a Tamang village of perhaps 30 houses (one turned hotel, i.e. they have an extra bed), the butter tea was smooth and delicate, but at the Yeti guesthouse in Syabrubesi whence we set off it was as funky as blue cheese.

Hills. Anywhere else these hills would count as mountains. They rise and fall thousands of feet with brutal abruptness, the slopes often so steep that even the rugged farmers can't terrace them. Landslides, when they happen, can wipe out entire villages. But the true mountains rise behind them, gleaming perpetual white, cheating the hills out of their otherwise deserved geological category. These mountains, the proper peaks of the Himalaya, are too big. It challenges the smooth flow of cognition to sight them from almost any distance; they seem to hover in the sky.

Weather. Central Nepal is temperate, I suppose, but only on average: during our summer months monsoon rains beat the hills mercilessly, while for more than half the year chances are no rain at all will fall. The sun is strong year round, especially at altitude, so that the south-facing slopes of the hills are all but scorched. They harbor hardy grasses and spiny cactus-cousins and not much else, at least not so’s you'd notice in the winter. Meanwhile the north-facing slopes are lush with deciduous trees, pines higher up, in the full subtropical spread.

Walking along a sandy trail up the Bhote Koshi river our first morning out we came around the end of a large wrinkle of the land and spotted our first house: modest, solitary, built roughly from stone. In front of the house the ripening fields of millet, buckwheat, mustard formed three broad stripes like a great flag spread over the ground: gold, brown, green.

In Gongang, our first night after a day of walking up the river, we sat with our Tamang hosts around the earthen hearth, warming ourselves and watching as the evening meal slowly came together one pot at a time over the coals. What emerged, finally, was the most satisfying dal-bhat I've ever had. Every ingredient locally grown except the salt and a couple of spices: nutty, slightly sticky rice, black dal, potatoes with cabbage and beans, cut up meticulously into thin strips. A simple fresh daikon achar. I've never eaten rice so slowly, savoring every bite, nor felt so at home in a stranger’s house. Our host, when asked the next morning how much we owed him for lodging, dinner, and a breakfast of flatbread and butter tea, said, “three hundred rupees” with a smiling shrug. “Why ask for more?” (We’d paid that much earlier in the day for two cups of ginger tea and a plate of chowmein that I’d ended up cooking myself).

Amongst other remarkable flora, the marijuana growing wild on the sunbaked hills near Tatopani caught my attention. Its buds looked candied, in the way that one candies ginger: colors concentrated, sticky, glistening in the sun. The heady scent wafting along the narrow trail and alerting you to its presence before your eyes catch sight of it. Seeing my admiring one such specimen, a couple of women sent a 4 year old boy over to me with gifts: a grubby fistful of finger-sized sticks of homemade hash. (Thanks but no thanks, kid, I’m on a government scholarship!) For this kindness we shelled out a measure of our own most precious goods: cashews, dried coconut, dark chocolate.

A few minutes past that cannabinoid seductress, the hotsprings at Tatopani were a sight to behold: under the gushing pipes stood Nepali men and women of all ages, most of them people who I imagined had never enjoyed the luxury of unlimited hot water in their lives. Families walked for days to come here, loads hoisted on a tumpline around their foreheads, and camped out at this strange little village for days to be near the hot water. But aside from a warm exchange or two with fellow travelers, Nepalis and a lone, stoned Frenchman, we found the place standoffish and hit the road after a soak and a plate of dal-bhat. (We were getting used to cabbage potatoes by now.) Mid-afternoon found us in Brindang, an eerily quiet village of Tibetans or Tamangs perched high on a ridge above Tatopani and where little Nepali was spoken. An old woman conveyed the direction of our trail, towards Thuman, and off we set along the high dry slope in the waning hours of the day. The trail was lightly worn and uncertain, and soon we were doubting our way on and worrying about where me could find shelter for the night. There’s something about being high up on a hillside with the sun about to dip behind a ridge . . . our vision tinged with panic, we spied a shape bobbing about a few hundred feet below us. Man gathering scrappy firewood. No answer to our shouts, so down we go, small quick steps over the tricky terrain, to catch him before he too disappears. Catch him we do, and he turns out to be an old man, hard of sight and hearing, a Nepali-speaker (thank God) and the caretaker of a small gompa tucked away in a clump of pines a few hundred feet below us. Shelter there for a couple of lost travelers? Sure. Not knowing whether to lead the man or follow him, and still a little trembly with the adrenaline of running straight down a mountainside with packs, we ended up lending him a headlamp and beating him to the gompa. How romantic—a chilly night in a remote Buddhist monastery—but not to be. The man lives there alone but for a small child whose mother has recently died. Another man, of similar stature and nimbleness of foot, arrives just as night is settling in and tells us of the caretaker’s misfortune, of how alone cares for the child while living largely off of the charity of nearby townsfolk. This man has come to borrow a drum from the gompa. He tells us to follow him to his village, just a few minutes he says, where we can find shelter for the night. Well. He straps the drum onto his back and down we go, as in the deepening moonless dark the stars come out by the scores. I notice for the first time a sharp shooting pain on the outside of my left knee, and am glad we’re close to rest. Finally, after another hour or more of descending steeply over all but invisible paths, we arrive in a village. We find ourselves in the main room of a house, in the midst of some commotion. The family, it seems, is preparing for a puja to be held in the morning. We lay down our packs, trying to keep them out of the way yet in our sight, hurriedly change our sweat-soaked base layers, bundle back up, and settle ourselves gingerly on a stiff bed. The room has been cleared, and the men of the house, all teens or twenty-somethings, bustle back and forth attending to the work at hand. We are too tired and dazed to realize it at first, but the man seated near us is the Lama who will perform the puja and who is overseeing its preparations. No one is terribly interested in talking, which is fine with us, but all seem to accept our presence without so much as a sidelong glance. Some lost white people, OK. Before long we are brought steaming bowls of filtered tongba, far and away the best tongba I’ve ever had; it was a year old, and worth the wait. The evening takes on a dreamlike quality from this point, not so much from the drink as because I was falling asleep. W has been quiet, but speaks with understated alarm in her voice when my head hits first her shoulder, then her lap. ‘I need you to stay awake.’ This situation is novel for both of us, but unlike me she has no precedent for how to act, what is expected of her. I force myself awake and notice what everybody is working on. Tomorrow’s wood and bamboo altar having been completed, the boys have made an enormous ball of whole wheat dough and are kneading it in batches. Soon everyone is greasing up their hands and rolling and shaping pieces of the dough into tapered cone-like shapes, sticking these in rows on boards. The lama takes part as well, and his playdough shapes are the most elaborate. In the flickering candlelight I see macabre sandcastles, crooked teeth, dream images. The illusion only heightens when one of the sequestered women of the house appears with a saucepan of nutty-smelling butter infused with a local root to make a potent red paint, and a brother starts dabbing it onto the dough spires. The lama fashions a bull without fuss, and it is reddened. Next come dabs of butter that he flattens into disks and deftly attaches to each piece. At some point I lose consciousness, asleep sitting up, only to wake to a plate of hot rice. I’d been so hungry after our afternoon that I’d eaten some nuts, thinking we’d missed dinner, but no, the dictates of Himalayan hospitality know no such bounds. The rice is delicious, even better than the previous night’s in Gongang. In the dark I guess from aromas and textures that the accompanying dish is dried yak meat and potatoes. I don’t realize until too late that the dal is spiked with hot peppers, and I douse my rice with it. Eating greedily, my mouth suddenly explodes with fire. There is nothing at hand to quench it, so I take another and another handful of soothing rice. Soothing, napalm-soaked rice. Soon my plate is empty, my entire head burning, and I stumble outside for some cool air and to clear my sinuses. Back inside we pull out our sleeping bags and fall asleep side-by-side amidst the quiet bustle in the big dark room.

The morning was a morning of intestinal distress, and I’ve had one too many of those to want to recount it. I relieved myself inappropriately and urgently in the yard next to a slumbering buffalo just before dawn for lack of any evident toilet, and tried to ignore the cramps and sulphur-reeking giardia belches and go back to bed. But everyone was up, including W who was hyper-conscious of being in the way. The was puja about to begin a few feet from our bed. Someone brought more hot tongba, this time laced with sugar; W graciously accepted and I graciously declined. Too weak to think of walking anywhere for the time being, I sat next to W in the early morning light and watched the ritual. Now we could see the night’s work properly, the intricately shaped tiers of dough figures on the makeshift altar. The lama sat cross-legged on the other bed, sipping his tongba, surrounded by the instruments of his trade: the drum brought down from the monastery, a brass bell and dorje (thunderbolt), carefully wrapped Tibetan texts, a straight horn, cymbals. The heavenly racket soon began, and it is to the aesthetic credit of that venerable B’on or Buddhist tradition that I could sit there at all in my state. After an hour or so I tucked 4 or 500 rupees under a cup and we made a quiet exit, thanking the family and apologizing for not spending the day with them. It was only then that I noticed the Maoist slogans painted on the façade of overhanging second story; if these people held Maoist ideology, it didn’t prevent them from treating a couple of bourgeois interlopers like comrades for a night.
That day took us back to Syabrubesi, for we had strayed too far off our trail during the evening to think about trying to rejoin our proposed route. I was in a pitiful state what with my knee and my bowels, and the short trail back to our starting point took half the day. A little guiltily we snuck past our faithful Yeti guesthouse, home of the blue cheese tea, in favor of a more comfortable-looking place with a garden and rooms with real walls. We inquired about a chessboard and spent the day playing, drinking tea, wondering what to do next. It seemed a pity to turn tail and take the early bus back to the Valley, but then it again it was pure foolishness to think about heading up a glacial valley with a bum knee, even if my guts took care of themselves in the meantime. In the end we woke early, took a test walk after switching packs and shifting around weight (W now taking the lion’s share) and decided to give it a go for a day. My knee felt less than stellar after an hour’s walking, but soon the trail towards Langtang steadied into an upward grade and I could forget about the pain of stepping down onto my left leg.

In the end we did the whole Langtang trek, up to Kyanjin gompa and back, and did it in four and a half days. My knee was fine, and there were no more mishaps. Somehow the stories from that second half of our trip feel less poignant than those from the Tamang trail, though. Partly this must be because we were now on the beaten track, a well-established tourist route. We spent nights at lodges with woodstove-heated dining rooms and laminated menus, all alike except for the prices (which increased exponentially with altitude and distance from the nearest road). There was a nice one at Rimche, the Moonlight guesthouse, that we returned to on the way home. There was a little co-operative cheese factory in Langtang, the only actual town on the trail, where we had yak gouda and both immediately came down with head colds. The views were extraordinary, the air rare, the terrain rugged. Barberries hung like tiny waxy red lanterns, and bright yellow sea buckthorn berries blazed against the deep blue of the sky. Silver-faced langurs played in the trees, and higher up hundreds of crows picked the last dried rosehips clean off the bushes. The climax of the trip, altitude-wise, was the cluster of tourist lodges near tiny Kyanjin Gompa at 3700 meters or so. We were slightly depressed by the sight of dozens of these ugly concrete buildings all crammed together in that rugged place, I think, and by the way that every other lodge-owner solicited us. Offending at least one friend from the morning’s road, we settled on a small, out-of-the-way place where we were the only guests, and talked with the owner for a while about business and opportunity over bowls of Syakpa, the hot Tibetan-style noodle soup. Next day we headed early back down the valley, retracing our steps at nearly double the pace on the downgrade. In Langtang we skipped the yak cheese but sought out some yak butter to take home, some roasted barley flour called tsampa, and were rewarded by an amused old Tamang woman with some tsampa-cakes she had used in a puja. The hearty lumps were painted with a familiar red infused butter and dotted with sticky gobs of jaggery.

Our only remaining ambition was to spend some of our last funds on the weirdest item on the ubiquitous tourist menu, the “snicker momo.” Momos, in this context, are pastry turnovers, much richer than the meat or cabbage-filled steamed dumplings of the same name in Kathmandu. The Snicker part, of course, refers to the candy bar that (along with the inferior Mars bar) was bizarrely prominent on the Langtang trek. But when we arrived for the second time tired but happy in Syabrubesi, no one seemed to be able to locate any Snickers. We contented ourselves with an apple momo and milk tea at our fancy garden hotel (200 rupees a night), then chowmein, then an omelette--our appetites suddenly insatiable after 9 days on the move. But to sleep we returned to the Yeti lodge, where a comfortingly lukewarm welcome and a hard bed awaited. The bus ride back to the city was if anything longer than the first one, though less terrifying. Somehow arriving back in crazy Kathmandu felt like coming home.