A white knuckle day

The temple at Muktinath is one of the most important pilgrimage sites in the world for Buddhists and Hindus alike.   The structure is also one of the oldest Hindu religious sites in the world and is held up as shining example of the harmony that exists between the two religions.  In the early 1990s, the town only had two hotels.  Today it has more than 15.  The growth is due not only to the rise of tourism but to the burgeoning number of pilgrims who visit the town from as far afield as southern India.  As we passed the temple the previous afternoon, I noticed dozens of motorbikes parked outside its walls.  They act as a shuttle service between the town centre and the sacred shrine and one often sees dignified Indian men and women clinging for dear life to the driver as the bike weaves its way up the dusty high street through the pedestrian traffic.

At breakfast I got chatting to a young English guy who we’d met back in Manang.  Jason had completed the trek from Thorung Phedi to Muktinath in 6 hours, including a 30-minute stop at the summit for tea.  He must have been supremely fit.  We were a far cry from this: our traverse from High Camp had taken our team nearly 13 hours and had exacted quite a toll physically.  The previous evening we’d thus agreed to proceed to Jomsom by jeep where we would travel south by bus to Tatopani.  Dreams of Annapurna Base Camp were now well and truly buried.

The decision also meant that we would be bypassing the ancient fortress town of Kagbeni, gateway to upper Mustang.  I was bitterly disappointed as I was eager to see the region’s unique geography and learn something of its legendary horse culture.  It would have been a poor man’s substitute for a trek into the fabled upper Mustang region itself – a highly sensitive and restricted area that very few people get to see unless they have a lot of time, luck and money.  The area is still, at least to some degree, shrouded in mystery and intrigue.  Politically, it was the setting for the last and tragic stand of the CIA funded Khampa Rebellion that sought to wrest control of Tibet back from China.  Culturally, many of its people continue to live under a highly conservative strain of feudal Bhuddism, very similar to that which prevailed in Tibet before the Chinese took over.  Ecologically, it is the last frontier for a variety of endangered terrestrial and avian species including the Lammergeyer and the Snow Leopard.  A two-week trek permit for this ecologically sensitive area is not only hard to secure but is currently priced at $700.  Visitors must complete a register of all consumables they are carrying in as well as show that they have sufficient butane canisters as an alternative energy source to wood.  Packaging for every item on the register must be checked back in with the authorities upon conclusion of the trek.

It was a short walk down to the western end of Muktinath where we joined the lines for a jeep to Jomsom.  While waiting, I examined a table of black, spherical rocks the likes of which I’d seen on sale the previous evening in the high street.  They turned out to be ammonite fossils, locally known as saligrams and considered by Hindus to be sacred symbols from Lord Vishnu.  The stones are kept in temples, monasteries and households while water in which they have been soaked is drunk daily.  They are also used ceremonially in marriages, funerals and house-warmings and the dying person who drinks saligram-steeped water receives absolution and the right to dwell with Vishnu for eternity.  This brazen selling of saligrams, particularly in such vast quantities, is not strictly compliant with Hindu tradition.  Moreover, when one considers the number of pilgrims and tourists who pass through, the impact which fossil harvest is having on the local environment must be significant.

Boarding the Jeep to Jomsom - everyone in picture crammed into that vehicle

Saligrams for sale in Muktinath

In order to fill our jeep, we’d mingled in the dining room of our hotel the night before and recruited trekkers who were as desperate as we were to take some weight off their feet for a day.  Our vehicle thus contained a motley crew of injured travellers and their retinue of guides/porters.  Amongst others, we made friends with an Israeli couple, Nadav and Dana Sherman.  Nadav, a developer for Google in Tel Aviv, was suffering from ITB after the intense downhills of the previous day and could barely alight from the vehicle without wincing in agony.  Dana’s knees weren’t much better.  Seven of us squeezed into the back of the jeep while the remaining 6 sat up front.  Crammed into this confined, tinny space and inhaling a nauseating swill of fine dust and diesel fumes, we rode the waves of motion sickness as the vehicle flip-flopped its way through the 1000 metre descent into the Kali Gandaki Valley.

Admiring the Mountain fastnesses of Lower Mustang - Kagbeni can be seen beyond the apple orchards in the distance

At a lookout point halfway down, we took a break.  Some retched uncontrollably into the bushes while others admired the stony immensity of Lower Mustang.  The river plain combined with its lush apple orchards and surrounding ampitheatre of snow-capped peaks and gravelly hills are so vast that the place almost swallows anything which ventures into its depths.  I felt desperately cheated to be seeing it so fleetingly.  I equally regretted our short stay in Jomsom, a clean and well-ordered town that rests in the shadows of the great Dhaulagiri group.  But we were in such a rush to catch our bus that there was little time to do more than have a quick bite to eat.

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It is the work of a moment to look at the map and say: “it looks like we can take public transport down to Tatopani – and it shouldn’t take much more than half a day”.  The first time visitor should not be criticized for this:  the road, on the map at least, looks fairly straight and the distance appears short.  

But all this is to ignore the fine print of the contour lines, the seed, (once again in our case), for gross miscalculation.  You’d think we’d have learnt from our grinding ordeal on the trip from Khatmandu to Syange.  In truth, we remained howlingly naïve.  We thus blundered into our rest day blissfully unaware of the adventures that lay ahead of us – of the almost seismic shift in altitude between Jomsom and Tatopani (about 2600 metres over a linear distance of 40 or so kilometres).  Of the inconvenient fact that we were at the tail end of a particularly generous Monsoon and that the hills were as saturated as a wet chammy leather.  Of the woefully slim choice when it came to choosing public transport…

Nepali busses, besides their gay and garish exteriors, must surely rank amongst the most nefarious inventions known to man.  Egregiously maintained, their interiors have been built with the stature of the locals in mind.  On the way to my seat I counted (through painful experience), at least 6 points of interruption between the ceiling and my head.  Furthermore, the coaches have the most rudimentary of sound systems that pipe an incessant and grating cacophony of weird and wonderful Hindi and Nepali music into the cabin.  

Our bus trundled out of Jomsom at about 11 o’clock heading South into the ever-deepening Kali Gandaki valley to Marpha – where we stopped to buy freshly picked apples.  Marpha’s chief export is apple brandy and I was impressed by the town’s quaint distillery.  As we left Mustang behind us, the barrenness was quickly replaced by imposing stands of pine and juniper.  At three, we experienced the first disruption to our journey.  The road ahead was so bad we would have to disembark, retrieve our luggage from the roof and hike two kilometres to the next town where we would find another bus.  Everything about this changeover seemed fairly routine until we got caught in the mad scrum to board the new bus.  Let’s just say it nearly got violent.

Apple stop at Marpha

Bus change in the Kali Gandaki - The World's deepest Gorge

The second bus journey was a terrifying ordeal.  Though a considerably shorter leg, a vehicle designed to hold no more than 30 passengers now held upwards of 60.  Moreover, the road now descended into the business end of the world’s deepest river gorge.   Often hideously close to the void, our bus seemed to defy the laws of physics as it hared through the bends and switchbacks.  When we disembarked half an hour later I noticed that one of the back tyres had shrugged off its re-tread and was down to the canvas.

What you see here is not dirt but canvas

The relief of terra-firma was short-lived however.  It was nearly five o’clock and the last bus of the day was due to leave the next village in 20 minutes.  If we missed that, we would be forced to camp in the open.  This triggered a desperate footrace through the gorge in which all 70 passengers of the previous bus participated.  The field arrived in the next hamlet more or less as one though just in time to see the bus in question disappearing around the next bend.  A collective groan rose above the village though hopes were restored somewhat when a local trader said he thought another bus would be through at any moment.  

An hour later we were still waiting.  The crowd slowly thinned out as locals returned to their houses and a few trekkers shouldered their gear and headed off down the road to the next village.  We said goodbye to Nadav and Dana.

At 6.30, just as we were entertaining thoughts of our own night hike, a jeep in hideous state of disrepair laboured noisily up the hill.  There was a grinding of gears as it stopped in front of the store.  As the driver emerged, Raj flew hastily into action.  After an animated conversation our guide and the driver disappeared around the corner for a few minutes.  I cannot say what went on there but I imagine a lot of money must have changed hands.  Ten minutes later, the jeep was loaded and we were ready to go.  A pair of young Israeli girls joined us, one of who was suffering from a ruptured eardrum.  We left the settlement much relieved.

As is usual with the roller coaster nature of road travel in Nepal, there were more thrills in store.  I peered through the windshield, seriously obscured by tassels, trinkets, carpeting and stickers of Bollywood actresses.  The night was closing in quickly and visual perception for the next hour would be confined to opportunistic glimpses, mostly as the vehicle tilted to one side.   What I do remember was a waterfall so colossal that I thought I was hallucinating.  If it weren’t for Martin’s cry of amazement at seeing the same thing I would still think it a mirage.  Will I ever behold such an awe strickening sight again I wonder?  It consisted of at least 4 separate cataracts, the last of which thundered into a pool through which the road passed.  From there, the river turned downhill and followed the road.  We drove with water up to the wheel bolts for nearly a full kilometer.

View from the front seat of our jeep

Just as it got pitch dark, our driver stopped the car, turned to me and said: “I’ll on the lights!”  Why, I wondered, the need to stop the car?  It turned out that the lights in question had to be actually fastened ON to the car.  A roll of masking tape was produced and our porters got out to offer advice.  One of our Israeli friends commented that on a previous jeep ride in Chitwaan Game Reserve, the headlights had been so weak that the driver asked his passengers to climb onto the roof and use their headlamps to light the way.  At least in our case it never came to that.

At 8 o’clock, the jeep stopped in the midst of a heavy downpour outside our lodge in Tatopani.  We were too tired and shell-shocked to even feel relief.  At 1100 metres, we were now firmly back in the tropics.  The air resounded with the shrill chirruping of cicada beetles and the angry roar of the river.  The contrast with the past five days was surreal.

Three hours later a bus descending from the village of Rupsecchhahara (where we’d commandeered our jeep) failed to negotiate a decisive bend in the road and sailed headlong into the inky darkness of the Kali Gandaki.  Miraculously the occupants, a driver and his conductor, escaped with their lives.

It could so easily have been us.

The Thorung La

Though 5416 metres above sea level, the Thorung Pass is sill about 400 metres lower than Kilimanjaro.  In spite of this the climb has its unique challenges, the biggest of which is the profusion of “false summits” that play havoc on the trekker’s morale.  The stone halfway house one encounters at dawn for example, looks very much like the structure at the summit though it is still several hours shy of it.   In addition, the undulating hillocks and saddles are so shapeless and void of definition that one can easily become disoriented.  Indeed, I have only dreamlike memories of that morning. 

In an attempt to assess ideal fitness requirements for this leg of the circuit, I had spent hours sifting through online reports and blog postings of people who had done it.  Much like the endless speculations that circulated on how to deal with altitude, I found there was no consensus on the toughness of the climb or just how much physical training was required for it.  Some younger, fitter trekkers minimised the physical demands while others – lulled into a false sense of security by their fitness levels - had gone too fast and found the day torrid.  Older trekkers had a more sober-minded approach and while they made no bones about the toughness of both climb and subsequent descent, they at least made it sound possible.  With hindsight (but with plenty of training behind me), I would describe the traverse of the Thorung La as challenging but fun.

A 3/4 moon hung high in the western sky as we fell into the shuffling procession of trekkers heading up the pass.  There was none of the cheerful banter that characterized the previous mornings, instead only laboured breathing and the squeak of boots on powdery snow.  The moon cast just enough light to pick up the faint outlines of the neighbouring peaks but to stay on track the use of a headlamp was essential.  When I stopped at the top of the first rise to look back, the bobbing line of tiny lights looked like a giant Christmas decoration on the move.  This was the first time in days that our team walked as a unit, checking on and encouraging one another, each reminding the other to drink.

The smiles didn't last much beyond sunrise!

Memories of the four-hour climb, such as they were in that shapeless moonscape, have collapsed into a vague though heady collection of highlights: golden clouds boiling up darkened valleys, coppery mountain peaks penetrating the milky predawn darkness, desolate boulder strewn draws encrusted with snow.  Two hours out from High Camp, the procession had fragmented somewhat and for extended periods, we walked in solitude.

Soon however, our slow and fairly deliberate pace seeded us with a number of trekkers that were more or less in our age group or fitness level.  Most were struggling but were philosophical enough to know that the strain could be leavened by a liberal dose of humour.  Occasionally we would encounter someone who was clearly suffering from mountain sickness.  One such person was a Chinese lady who had become separated from her husband and who was staggering upwards, heavily burdened with camera equipment.  Possibly because of the language barrier but maybe because of delirium, she was impervious to our encouragements to rest and drink.  One got a slight insight into the heart-rending dilemmas faced by climbers in the Death Zone who can do little or nothing for ailing comrades.  While I would never say that 5400 metres warrants an “every man for himself” attitude, helping a sick person without compromising one’s own chances would have been very difficult indeed.  Mercifully, the Chinese lady prevailed and seemed to be doing fine by the time we reached the summit. 

One person who wasn’t doing well was Sandra.  By now she was quite unresponsive though complained periodically about a cracking headache.  At one point, on hearing that the summit was still two hours away, she had sat down in the snow and wept with frustration.  Thus, when we reached the summit at about 9am, we resolved to make our stay as brief as possible.  

There was a certain elation associated with getting to the top…countless photos were taken interspersed with plenty of high-fiving.  Afterwards, we crammed into a small stone house for a hot cup of tea.  Judging from the number of customers, I imagined the owner was making a small fortune from this venture.   But the place was so crowded, the smell of gas so overwhelming, I made a claustrophobic dash for the door.  It was pretty cold outside: twenty minutes later when we were getting ready to leave, I discovered that the pipe of my Camelbak had frozen solid.  We also discovered to our horror that someone had stolen Martin’s trekking poles, a disaster considering that the worst part of the route still lay ahead of us.  In light of Martin’s knee injury, the implication was that one of us would have to surrender our own poles.  As the crowd of summiteers thinned out however, it appeared it wasn’t a case of theft after all but rather one of mistaken identity.  We took a seemingly unclaimed set and after checking that the owner was nowhere, appropriated them.  This was a huge mercy – without them the walk down would have been close to impossible.

The summit at last - from left Rissam, Ram, me, Raj - kneeling is Kisna

I started this piece claiming that traversing the Thorung La was “challenging but fun”.  As we began our descent, it quickly became clear that the fun part was behind us.  While blogs described the descent as tough, many were quick to point out that it was a lot better than negotiating the pass in a clockwise direction i.e. from Muktinath to Thorung Phedi.  Only two categories of people, it seems, do this – local traders on horseback and the certifiably insane.  One reason is the absence of any suitable lodgings so acclimatization is nearly impossible.  Another reason is the unrelenting steepness of the path.  If the descent seemed endless, I shudder to think what the 1500m ascent might be like.

A look back up the trail

Buoyed up by the euphoria of having reached the summit, we began the walk down in a cheerful mood.  It wasn’t until midday however that the desperate nature of the retreat began to dawn on us!  Though the snow gradually thinned out and the pathway became less slippery, the steepness intensified.  We took a rest on a remote pasture, a brief “landing” in the unending staircase of switchbacks.  From this vantage point, we looked down into the arid swathe of the Kali Gandaki Valley, to Muktinath and Kagbeni, gateway to the fabled region of Mustang.  In the distance stood the imposing bulk of Dhaulagiri, the world’s 7th highest mountain.  

Our destination still seemed miles away.  And though we’d descended at least 900 metres, the dangers of altitude had not diminished in the least.  High on the path above the meadow, I watched Lil staggering downwards, retching uncontrollably, clutching her head and complaining that she must have caught a bug.  Had we been more attentive to the talk on AMS at Manang, we would have known that many cases of altitude sickness present several hours after leaving the summit.  Also, we would not have lingered in this exposed position.  Ignorantly however, we sat around for nearly an hour trying to get Lil to swallow Super C’s and headache tablets.  Imagining that he would be welcome the money, we asked a passing horseman if he would escort her down on his pony.  Strangely he was hesitant – the path was too steep and either she would fall or the horse would stumble and hurt itself.  Instead, the man opened his bag and produced a bread roll.  “Perhaps if she eats she will feel better”, he said in Nepali.  We declined but were touched by the simple gesture.  With Martin, Sandra and Lil on the brink of exhaustion, we redistributed their packs between the three of us and resumed the bone jarring descent, stopping only to eat at a grimy establishment in Charabu.  A photo taken there shows the sorry and mostly humourless state of the team.

This section of the descent was probably the toughest - the path was surfaced with stones the size (and shape!) of a rugby ball and played havoc on the ankles

A humourless lunch at Charabu

By now I was impatient with our slow progress and itching for a hot shower.  After lunch I shouldered the packs and powered down the slopes.  As I approached a suspension bridge over the Thorung River, I saw Ram, Rissam and Kisna moving up the slope towards me.  Earlier that day, they had rushed on to Muktinath to secure hotel rooms.  Now, freshly showered and dressed in casual clothes and flip-flops, they were retracing their steps to help us down the mountain.  It must have been a tough day for them too but they were showing none of the outward signs.  A half hour later I was luxuriating in a hot shower at the North Pole Hotel in the sacred town of Muktinath, a sublime relief after 5 days of not bathing.  Two hours later, the rest of the team limped down the high street – shaky but in fairly good spirits.

Martin and Lil limp into Muktinath, sans luggage

That night, we celebrated the crossing over a meal of sizzling Yak steak and a shot of the region’s famous apple brandy, served hot alongside a cup of ginger tea.  It was a memorable end to an even more memorable day.  In truth, it was a half-hearted celebration.  The pass had taken its toll and it was doubtful we could proceed with the journey as planned.