Ghorepani

Shortly after we took occupation of our newly built house on Simbithi Estate, we discovered that, in addition to being homeowners, we were the proud new proprietors of a burgeoning dagga plantation.  When I asked a friend in the building trade where he thought it had come from, he said it was not uncommon to have dope growing in the gardens of newly built houses.  It is the builders themselves who apparently sow the seed when they carelessly discard their joints.  Naturally we never harvested any of it but for a time it was the biggest concentration of weed I’d ever seen.

Until, that is, I went to Nepal.  The groves of marijuana that thrive in the Ghar Khola Valley are so dense and prolific that if this biomass were to spontaneously combust for some reason, the only thing which wouldn’t get high would be the mountains themselves.  The weed, so far as I could tell, is traded with dealers in Kathmandu, sold independently to trekkers and even used by the lodges to spice up the local cuisine (by request naturally).  There was a lot of other vegetation too – fantastic forests of Rhododendron and blue pine, exquisite orchids and other species the names of which now elude me.

A friend who’d done the circuit in 2010 told me that this side of the mountains (Chapter 2 as I referred to it earlier) had not really impressed him.  “It’s not the real Himalaya and is too much like the hills on the outskirts of Durban,” he said.  While I don’t agree with him, I use it now as a provocation to define the unique differences between the two sides of the mountain range.

Chapter 1, the trek from Syange to Jomsom was, at least for me, less a place than it was a state of mind.  As an impressionable 9 year old, I remember reading and re-reading Herge’s “Tintin in Tibet”.  The comic strip made me drunk with dreams of my own Himalayan adventure.  A small rocky hill behind my grandparent’s house in Salisbury served as the ideal prop for this fantasy.  After school I would shoulder my canvas rucksack and head out on my own imaginary summit missions.  Though the summit of Annapurna is invariably tackled from the southern side of the circuit, the proximity to those great mountains made Chapter 1 a fruition of those childhood fantasies.  This was the world that had seduced the likes of Bonnington, Lachenal, Herzog and other intrepid climbers.  It was the world of Yak trains, high mountain meadows and the exotic animals that graze upon them.  It was also the world of Tibet, or at least of Tibetan influence – a fair facsimile for the vivid portrayals which Heinrich Harrer so beautifully captured in his classic book, “Seven Years in Tibet”.  If the area wasn't in the flight path of such massive change, I would have no problem describing it as a sort of Shangri La. 

Chapter 2 on the other hand – the stretch from Tatopani to Nyapul – was an anthropological immersion in the ancient ways of a people.  It was about charming bucolic hamlets, ancient rice terraces and cobbled walkways.  Of people living cheek by jowl with their animals – goats, cattle, chickens, ducks and buffalo – of the sweet homely smell of dung.  For 5 days, it was as though we had been parachuted into an exquisite diorama, the life’s work of the world’s greatest anthropologist.

These young guys were pretty good volleyball players - though the ball kept disappearing down the slope

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As we headed up the valley, we heard the telltale whup-whup of helicopter rotors echoing in the distance off the valley walls.  We watched as the red and white Bell Ranger chopper descended in every tightening circles into Tatopani.  Ten minutes later, we were on tenterhooks as the machine laboured sluggishly up the Ghar Khola.  The six of us raced to the top of a nearby shrine and raised our poles in final salute.  Hemmed into the valley without a cell phone signal, it would be nearly three days before we could learn of Sandra’s condition.

Two hours later we stopped for lunch at a teahouse in Ghara (Nepali for “beehive”).  It was a tiny shack with a lovingly maintained garden and a God’s eye view of the Kali Gandaki River.  The air throbbed with the humming of bees and we ate piping hot cornbread and freshly harvested honey.  Raj, who had stayed behind to supervise the evacuation caught up with us there.  He had been trekking hard uphill for the last three hours without a break.  That night we slept half way up the valley in a tiny village called Shikha.  We were the Lodge’s only guests so each was assigned their own room, a fantastic luxury even given that mine had a resident chicken.  The view from my window offered sweeping views of the valley through which we’d climbed and was a great vantage point to observe the unhurried ebb and flow of village life.  After dark we climbed up to the rooftop and gazed up at the Milky Way.  To see the night sky like this is becoming an increasingly rare treat these days and with the moon still to rise, it looked a lot like someone had spattered the black ceiling of space with a white paintbrush.  

The following day, we continued our ever-steepening climb through the valley.  Here, women in traditional dress were harvesting crops and feed for their animals.  There, men and boys as young as 13 were hefting massive head loads back to their primitive storage areas.  With the seasons quickly changing, the community was locked in a unified effort to lay up enough food for winter.  It was late afternoon when we arrived in the tourist hub of Ghorepani, a village arranged precariously around the intersection of two valley ridges and which sits in the lee of the famous Poon Hill.  

We arrived in Ghorepani as the trekking season kicked into high gear.  The area (2860 metres) is immensely popular with people who don’t have much time to spare and who aren’t keen on the hardships of altitude.  A 4-day circuit out of Pokhara affords tourists good exposure to these exquisite valleys and the mandatory dawn patrol up Poon Hill offers one of the region’s most spectacular Himalayan panoramas.  The age profile of trekkers here is considerably older than it is on the other side of the mountains while ethnically, Chinese and Korean visitors predominate.  

We stayed in a large boarding establishment that slept nearly 200 people – but which had only two toilets and showers.  This inconvenience was countervailed by the lodge’s excellent restaurant whose kitchen staff even went as far as preparing a delicious birthday cake for Lil.

I spent the afternoon browsing the town’s book exchanges.  No matter where I looked, I was interested to see that the same titles kept cropping up.  I concluded that most travellers come to Nepal on some sort of search.  The nature of the search is often hinted at in the books they read.  Very crudely and in no particular order, the most popular titles are as follows:

1. Into Thin Air – John Krakauer

2. Into the Wild – John Krakauer

3. The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho

4. Shantaram – Gregory David Roberts

5. The Shack – William P. Young

6. The Snow Leopard – Peter Matthiessen

7. Siddhartha – Herman Hesse

8. The Long Walk to Freedom – Nelson Mandela
9. Seven Years in Tibet - Heinrich Harrer

10. Anything by the Dalai Lama

We had a miserable night.  The walls between our rooms were paper-thin and the raucous splutter of farts and throat clearing could be heard from as far afield as three rooms away.  Unrested, we awoke at four o’clock and climbed the trail to the crest of Poon Hill.  This, if the groups of puffing trekkers were anything to go by, was an ordeal for most.  For us however, having recently descended from 5500 metres, it was a complete breeze and we were amongst the first to reach the summit.  

By 5.30am, the grassy hillock and observation tower was thronging with an excited crowd of nearly 300 people.  A great cheer went up as the sun peeped over the horizon and the clear morning air crackled with the ecstatic whirr of cameras.  As the veil of night lifted, we were treated to a nearly 50 kilometre long panorama that consisted of two of the world’s 10 highest mountains (Dhaulagiri 8172 and Annapurna at 8091m) and a staggering concentration of subsidiary peaks including Gangapurna, Annapurna II, III and IV, the Lamjung Himal – and the curiously shaped Machapuchare (also known as Fish Tail Peak).  Rising from the obscurity of the valleys below, the great white barrier of mountains seemed to float in the delicate morning light.

Besides the fact that we’d lived amidst this splendor for the last nine days, even we were impressed.