The Heart of the World

by Ian Baker

  In the end, Kundu’s obscurity assured our passage. I faxed Gunn a sketch map placing the mountain much farther to the north and away from the political line of control than it actually lay. Gunn wrote back telling me not to worry; he would arrange everything. With this vague assurance I began assembling a team.

  I’D ADOPTED THE NAME Red Panda Expeditions, Ltd. to lend credence to my correspondence with the Chinese. When it came to communicating with prospective clients, Red Panda’s policies were as elusive as the animal after which the company was named. Beginning in 1994, I offered trips to Pemako with only provisional itineraries and word of mouth as the sole means of promoting the once yearly expeditions.

  I’d tried to convey the full spectrum of the upcoming journey in a letter to selected individuals who I thought might be interested.

  In Tibetan tradition, the mountain Kundu Dorsempotrang—the “Palace of Adamantine Being”—lies at the heart of a Tantric goddess who guides initiates towards enlightenment. Tibetan prophecies refer to the mountain as a Sachod Shingkam, a terrestrial counterpart of the Buddhist Pure Lands, reachable only with great merit and faith. . . . Following rediscovered Tantric texts (terma), we will travel for more than a month through dense rainforests and over precipitous snow-covered passes to the luminous peak that rises at the heart of Dorje Pagmo, the dakini-goddess who presides over the Tsangpo gorges. . . . As we move farther and farther into the unknown, the journey will be both literally and figuratively a passage from one order of being to another. . . . The region is said to abound in an uncataloged wealth of medicinal and psychoactive plants as well as tigers, leopards, red pandas, and takin. Travelers should be prepared inwardly as well as outwardly for torrential rains, leeches, and venomous snakes. Most important, participants should have a deep and genuine commitment to the spirit of pilgrimage—recognizing that the destination is ultimately not so much a place as a new way of seeing.

  In phone calls that followed, I actively discouraged several would-be participants who expressed doubts about their ability or sought assurances of any kind. I stressed the need for self-reliance, in no small part because of my and Hamid’s plan to break off after reaching the mountain and continue on into the secret valleys of Yangsang.

  Despite my admonitions and the uncertainty of the terrain, Pemako’s allure was inescapable. Laura Ide declined a return trip, but she put me in touch with her brother-in-law, Christiaan Kuypers, a Dutch graphic designer living in New York who was eager to break out of his established routine. Ken Storm initially planned to join the expedition, but in the end decided to wait until the following year when we agreed we would make another attempt at the still unexplored section of the inner gorge and lay to rest the legend of the waterfall.

  The first to commit to the expedition were two real estate developers from Phoenix, Arizona, whom I had met a year earlier in a hotel lobby in Lhasa—Gil and Troy Gillenwater. They had just returned with Rick Fisher from an ill-fated rafting trip on the Tsangpo 100 miles upriver from where we had scouted in 1993. Having rafted and kayaked extensively through the American Southwest—including a run through the turbulent Cataract Canyon on the Colorado—the two brothers were both seasoned adventurers, but the run they had just attempted with Fisher was more extreme than anything they had previously encountered. “The water was huge,”Troy said, “beyond Class VI.”They had roped through the worst rapids or portaged around them. When it became clear that it was too dangerous to continue, they stashed the raft under a rock and tried to climb out of the canyon. Rick had told them it would take only four hours, but in the end they walked for four days through the enchanting chasm often across narrow ledges in the cliff face. They subsisted on hard-boiled eggs that they bartered for with local villagers.

  Gil, the elder of the two brothers, had studied Buddhism at Vajradhatu, the center founded in Boulder, Colorado, in the 1970s by the renowned Tibetan lama Chogyam Trungpa. He told me that he had been disappointed that apart from their limited contact with Tibetans, their trip did not touch on Tibet’s culture or religion. Rick had been interested solely in the river and in gaining recognition for his achievements, Gil said. He and Troy were eager to return to Tibet and to learn more about its Buddhist traditions.

  I told the two brothers about the legend of Yangsang and the mountain that Hamid and I would be attempting to reach again the following year, a mountain no Westerner had yet visited and one that wasn’t on any map. They wanted in and eventually persuaded their younger brother, Todd, to go along as well.

  A MONTH BEFORE OUR DEPARTURE, Hamid and I met a Thai naturalist of royal descent at a party in Kathmandu. Oy Kanjanavanit had received her doctorate from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and had done pioneering work in Thailand in habitat preservation for the country’s endangered tiger population. She later found her niche as a popularizer of natural sciences, focusing on the hidden life of plants.

  Hamid led her outside to the veranda where jasmine flowers and night-blooming datura the color of moonlight spilled over a carved wooden trellis. He began telling her about the lush forests and goddess mythology of Pemako. She told him about a bestselling Thai novel called Pet Pra Uma (Uma’s Diamond) that had captivated her as a child. The book describes a secret land that, like Pemako, lies on the border of India and Tibet and is presided over by a beneficent goddess. The book follows the adventures of a hunter who receives directions to the fabled land from a Tibetan lama wandering in Thailand’s western jungles.

  The site of Oy’s research in the Huai Kha Khaeng Wildlife Sanctuary lies along the route to Tibet described in Uma’s Diamond. One of the last remaining wilderness tracts in southeast Asia, the preserve lies within a range of mountains—the Tanasserim—that arcs northwestward through Burma and merges with the Himalayas. Oy had found inspiration in the novel’s account of an enchanted land on the borders of Tibet but, she told Hamid, she never imagined that such a place might actually exist.

  The next morning Hamid went to her hotel with translations of the Pemako neyigs and showed her a photograph of the gilded temple at Rinchenpung, set in subtropical jungle and arched over by a double rainbow. Two weeks later, Oy called from Bangkok. She’d determined that the Tsangpo gorges contain the northernmost extent of tropical and subtropical rain forest in Asia. The region was certain to harbor undiscovered species. But scientific interest aside, she couldn’t pass up the opportunity to travel to the land of Uma’s Diamond. “It seems like some kind of a dream jungle,” she said on the phone.

  One of Hamid’s high-born girlfriends, a blond English aristocrat named Sophie, had been eager to join us and had offered to help sponsor the expedition through a British whiskey manufacturer. On principle, we’d avoided all forms of sponsorship, including the Explorers Club, of which I was a member, on the basis that it was a conflict of interest with our own idiosyncratic sense of pilgrimage. With Oy on board, Sophie would be a conflict of interest of another kind, and Hamid dwelled on the impending hardships until she decided to withdraw. He would meet her afterward, he promised, at her home in Not-ting Hill.

  In the week before departure it rained continuously. My home, built on top of an abandoned rice paddy, had become so damp and flooded that Hamid and I had taken rooms in the dilapidated Shankar Hotel, a former Rana palace a few minutes away. Hamid entertained a lithe Korean dakini who had come back with him from an island in the Gulf of Thailand, and I made daily runs back to the house on my motorcycle to check for faxes from Gunn.

  Gunn finally faxed from Chengdu that the permits had come through, although closer inquiry revealed that permission had only been given for areas on either side of the great tract of wilderness where Kundu Dorsempotrang was actually located. Nonetheless, Gunn was optimistic. He assured me on the telephone that once we had entered the forests there would be no one to challenge our passage.

  True to Red Panda tradition, whose motto was “confuse and elude,” we would be
journeying without real permission to a place that did not exist as far as governments and maps were concerned. What we would find there was even more uncertain.

  ON JULY 25 OY ARRIVED on an afternoon flight from Bangkok. That evening, Christiaan and the Gillenwaters flew in on a Royal Nepal Airlines flight from Hong Kong. When I met them at Kathmandu’s international airport, I reflected that perhaps my warnings regarding the expedition had been too extreme. The brothers emerged out of the customs area like a team of Navy Seals. All three of them had shaved their heads, and the tattooed dragons across Gil’s biceps made him look like a cross between a World Wrestling Federation contestant and a Shaolin priest. Christiaan had spotted them on the plane, but he originally gave them a wide berth, even though he too had coincidentally shaved off his hair.

  Once assembled at the Shankar Hotel, we spread out our gear for final packing. The food and heavier equipment would go overland with a crew of Sherpas and Tibetans. We would take the rest with us on the hour and a half flight to Lhasa. We packed everything into rubberized drybags. We would be entering one of the wettest places on the planet, a region that often receives more than thirty feet of rain each year, most of it during the summer.3

  Having run out of food on their last trip in Tibet, the Gillenwaters had stocked up on energy bars and gourmet items such as oysters and assorted patés. Christiaan had brought jars of almond butter from New York. In Kathmandu, I’d bought brown rice from a local organic farm called Lotus Land, a twenty-kilo wheel of yak cheese, tins of tuna fish, walnuts, and freshly made black sesame paste. I’d stayed up late the night before mixing ground almonds and flax seed into bags of muesli. Hamid and I had also stocked up on yogeshwar, a Tantric formula made from purified gold that siddhas of ancient India had reputedly used in place of food.

  Apart from standard items such as antibiotics, our medical kit included Tibetan rinchen rilbu, or precious pills, that contain sixteen metals and minerals including gold, silver, crushed pearls, and lapis lazuli, along with seventy other ingredients that have, in theory, been purified of their toxins so that only their therapeutic properties remain. The kit also included traditional Tibetan preparations made from musk to protect against venomous snakes. (The standard antivenom needed refrigeration.) I brought codeine phosphate and other drugs for emergencies and lots of aspirin for the inevitable requests for medical intervention.

  Bhakha Tulku had asked me to deliver two large Buddha statues to his monastery in Powo. We slipped them in amid ropes and climbing gear. He also gave me wax-sealed letters for monks at his monastery. The letter to the acting abbot, Sangye Tenzing, requested that he help us by arranging porters for our pilgrimage to Kundu.

  AFTER THE LOOTINGS and mutinies that had occurred on earlier trips, I had hired a Sherpa named Pemba to organize local porters in Tibet and to work as head cook. He arrived at the Shankar Hotel with a six-by-ten-foot dining tent that I had specially ordered for the journey. Lama, a monk from the monastery of Thubten Choling in Solu Khumbu who had given up his vows to marry Pemba’s sister, showed up with him carrying bamboo pack baskets filled with pots, pans, spices, and a jerry can of cooking oil. Pasang, a half-deaf yogi from the Tibetan borderlands, trailed behind with coils of prayer flags and his eighteen-year-old son, who had been a novice monk in Chatral Rinpoche’s retreat center in the mountains above Kathmandu. Other Sherpas would be arriving the following day.

  I’d selected the crew carefully. Known for their reliability and innate skills in mountaineering, Sherpas have been recruited for Himalayan expeditions since the beginning of the twentieth century. Originally from Kham in eastern Tibet, Sherpas migrated to Nepal in the sixteenth century, settling in the high valleys near Mount Everest, which they revere as a sacred mountain called Chomolungma, Mother Goddess of the World. Although Sherpas’ skills in climbing and camp etiquette have become legendary, it was equally important that they share our sense of Pemako as a sacred land. I thus bypassed the usual agencies and recruited friends from mountain villages and renegade Sherpa monks and yogis who would join us not simply as hired hands, but as fellow pilgrims. Pemba had recently returned from a Kalachakra initiation given by the Dalai Lama. On his return from Pemako, Pasang planned to use the money he would earn to build a village stupa and undertake a prolonged meditation retreat.

  THE EVENING BEFORE LEAVING KATHMANDU, Bhakha Tulku came to my house and performed a Tantric fire offering in the garden. Hamid dragged a tiger skin out of the living room for him to sit on, and blazing flames soon cut the dampness of the moss-covered stones and dripping bamboo. As Bhakha Tulku recited from the text of the riwosangchod, we each cast handfuls of juniper twigs and fragrant leaves of a dwarf species of rhododendron onto the smoldering fire. The pungent smoke curled through the damp air and misty rain, carrying prayers and aspirations for the success of the journey.

  In Tibetan tradition, the rites of riwosangchod strengthen the life force and reveal a path where none is perceivable. Dudjom Rinpoche, the lama from Pemako who had initiated me into Vajrayana Buddhism on my first visit to Nepal in 1977, had composed the text that we were now reciting, the same one the porters had repeated each night on our journey through the gorge, two years before. Outwardly the prayer seeks to remove obstacles in opening the way to hidden-lands, while inwardly it seeks to burn away all limiting perceptions.

  The Sherpas also attended, uniting us on our common venture. As the fire subsided, Bhakha Tulku ladled out amrita from a human skull bowl lined with silver. Christiaan, the three brothers, and Oy, her black hair flowing around her face like a Khmer apsara, drank deeply from the blood-colored elixir that Bhakha Tulku gently poured into our open palms.

  Afterward, Bhakha Tulku spoke about pilgrimage; how the journey to sacred places opens a path of heart and mind and removes the veils of ordinary vision. He talked about pilgrims who had died while journeying to Kundu Dorsempotrang, content in their knowledge that they would be reborn in the realm of the Buddhas. When I asked whether this was really true he just laughed, as if to say that doubt itself was the surest barrier.

  Into Tibet

  OUR EIGHT SHERPAS were originally to travel overland with the bulk of our gear and meet us in Tibet. In the heavy monsoon, rocks and mudslides had blocked the road between Kathmandu and Lhasa, and at the last minute I had to arrange seats for them on the twice-weekly China Southwest Airlines flight to Tibet. The Sherpas arrived at my house at 6 a.m. to load the duffel bags and other gear into a van and take it to the airport. They had already picked up Christiaan, Oy, and the Gillenwaters from the Shankar Hotel.

  Traveling light on journeys to Pemako was never easy. In addition to tents, sleeping bags, and other personal gear, we had food supplies for six weeks; plastic tarpaulins for local porters; climbing gear for ascending cliffs and crossing rivers; and ritual thigh-bone trumpets, cats’ eyes, and other semiprecious stones to give away to Pemako’s villagers. Hamid had been out late, escorting an ex-girlfriend from Nepal’s former ruling family to the Kathmandu Valley Heritage Ball. He was still madly packing in the black caftan he’d worn to the party. As the van waited outside, he stuffed Gore-Tex pants and capilene shirts, gaiters for mud, snow, and rain, a machete and an umbrella into a Patagonia Black Hole bag. At the last minute he rolled up a leopard skin to sleep on in place of his punctured Therm-a-Rest.

  In the chaos of departure, the Brahmin pundit who tutored Hamid in Sanskrit arrived in the rain and stood outside the house under his umbrella as we loaded the last of the gear into the van. Hamid paid him for the last week of classes, and the Brahmin held up his hand in benediction as we drove off over rutted roads toward the airport.

  We flew over the Himalayas through thick clouds and descended onto a rain-swept runway. Gunn, once again our guide and liaison officer, met us at the Lhasa airport with two Land Cruisers and a flatbed truck for the Sherpas and our gear. Since I’d last seen him, he’d grown a sketchy moustache and sported brand-new tennis shoes that he
had bought for the expedition. His freshly cut hair looked blow-dried from the back forward. We piled into the Land Cruisers for the two-hour drive to Tibet’s capital city.

  After checking into the Snow Lion Hotel, we dispersed into the Barkhor, the pilgrims’ circuit and ancient market surrounding Tibet’s most revered temple. We joined the throngs of Tibetans that were pressing through the Jokhang’s dark corridors toward the jewel-encrusted image of Sakyamuni Buddha that lies at its center. According to the Pemako prophecies, a single circuit around Kundu Dorsempotrang is equal to thirty-nine visits to this seventh-century temple, the Lourdes of Tibet. Outside, we changed money with swaggering Khampas and bought final provisions—apricot kernels, tsampa, and dried yak cheese. Christiaan bought a green Hapsburg-style felt hat from one of the stalls to shield him from rain. The next morning we began the long drive eastward, crossing high passes, washouts, and landslides to Kongpo Gyamda, our first stop on the road to the Tsangpo gorges.

  The following day we continued east along a tributary of the Tsangpo until we reached Bayi, the administrative center for the Kongpo and Powo districts of Tibet. Its cement buildings rose like mistakes against a stunning backdrop of mountains and forests. Built by the Chinese military on a strip of land along the Nyang Chu river, Bayi means August First in Mandarin, named in honor of the foundation day of the People’s Liberation Army. By coincidence, we’d arrived on July 31, the eve of their annual celebration. We needed road permits to continue, and the chief officer was out of town preparing for the festivities. He would be back, Gunn reported, some time the following evening.