The Heart of the World

by Ian Baker

  I included résumés of my fellow teammates Hamid Sardar and Ken Storm. The Gillenwaters had opted out. They were on the cusp of a major real estate transaction. If it went through, Gil said, they might never have to work again. They were also concerned that the waterfall would turn out to be a red herring and did not want to backtrack on terrain they had already covered. “We’re Pemakoed out,” Gil told me over the phone.

  The per-person cost of our Pemako expedition decreased with the number of participants and, with the Gillenwaters’ withdrawal, the possibility of funding from National Geographic took on renewed importance. I had budgeted liberally in the application, requesting funds for camera equipment, high-tech measuring devices, and hundreds of feet of climbing rope. Some of it would go to film so that Hamid could complete the footage for the work we had begun through the Film Study Center at Harvard University.

  Several weeks later, I was in Tibet lecturing to a group of thirty people on the Smithsonian program when a fax arrived for me at the Lhasa Hotel from Rebecca Martin. She wrote that the Exploration Council had agreed to finance our entire expedition. She also informed me that National Geographic Television would be sending a cameraman to document our journey. Attached to the letter was an eight-page contract.

  As pleased as I was, I also felt a vague foreboding. The only sponsorship that I had accepted in the past was from a Colorado-based manufacturer of climbing equipment. In 1996, Black Diamond had supplied us with ropes, carabiners, and other climbing gear when we imagined that the only way into the depths of the gap would be to rappel down thousands of feet of vertical rock. They had asked for nothing in return. The multipage contract sent by the Exploration Council, on the other hand, bordered on the draconian, and National Geographic assumed all rights to our experience. When I called Ken to tell him the news, he was particularly concerned about the agenda of National Geographic Television.

  “This is our experience,” Ken said from his desk at Alladin Distributors in Minnesota. “How are we going to be able to control what they do? They may be a nonprofit institution,” he said, “but their focus is totally commercial. All the nuance will be lost.” In the end, Ken never signed the agreement, adamant about preserving his own right over his slides, images, and experience.

  Hamid was far off in northern Central Asia and unavailable for comment.

  AFTER RETURNING TO KATHMANDU, I began making preparations for the trip, putting together a team of Sherpas, organizing a supply truck, and laying in food. Due to work obligations, Ken would arrive in Nepal only two days before our intended departure date, with barely enough time to secure his visa from the Chinese embassy in Kathmandu. I had still heard nothing from Hamid. A month earlier, he had called me from Mongolia to say that he would be heading into remote parts of Tuva, a Central Asian state in the Siberian steppes, to investigate an isolated tribe of reindeer herders.

  Less than a week before our departure date, David Breashears called me from his home in Boston. He told me that this year had seen devastating floods on rivers throughout China and Tibet. Destabilized topsoil from torrential rains and excessive logging had washed into the rivers, raising their levels and diminishing their ability to absorb the monsoon rains. The Tsangpo had risen to unprecedented heights but, eager to stake their claim on this “Mount Everest of rivers” and with obligations to their sponsors, Wick Walker’s team had forged ahead. Within the first days of the expedition, one of the lead kayakers, Doug Gordon, a brilliant research chemist, had drowned in the turbulent waters. The rest of the party was pulling out, and we were asked to look for the body on our journey through the gap. I thought back to my grim prophecy to the chairman of the grant committee to which they had first applied.

  Other ominous signs proliferated in the days before departure. The Chinese embassy in Kathmandu, under new directives from Beijing, refused to issue visas to our key Sherpas because the surnames given on their passports was Lama, a common caste name in Nepal indicating no more than Tibeto-Burmese ethnicity. This meant finding replacements for Pemba, our invaluable cook, and several other loyal allies. Furthermore, a young and deferential Sherpa named Dawa, whom I had enlisted as an assistant to the National Geographic cameraman, had been jailed after a knife fight with a belligerent rickshaw driver. All attempts to spring him failed, and Bhakha Tulku offered to send a relative of his, Lekshey, in his stead.

  Oblivious to these proceedings, Hamid called me from a crackling phone at an airstrip in Tuva. He had traveled by boat up the Shishget Khem River with a local guide, a carton of ammunition, and a case of vodka, the only valid currency in the areas into which he was traveling. Due to contaminated fuel, the boat engine had died. The Russian boatman left Hamid and his Tuvan guide on the riverbank with a rusty fishhook and a shotgun and ten shells as he floated back downstream to make repairs. His last words, Hamid reported, were, “Be careful, the pine nut harvest has been bad this year; the bears are aggressive.”

  As they waited for the boatman to return, it began to snow. They kept a fire going to ward off the cold and predatory wildlife and shot grouse until they ran out of ammunition. (They kept two shells in reserve in the event of a bear attack.) Five days later, the boatman still had not returned, and they survived on an ancient species of trout called leenok that they ate raw with vodka, salt, and onions. Valodya, the boatman, never materialized, and a Tuvan shaman called Ak Boghadan, the White Old Man, eventually discovered them while tracking a wild boar that he and his two sons had wounded with a primitive Russian rifle. They led them back to civilization on the backs of reindeer.

  Hamid appeared in Kathmandu only a few days before our scheduled flight to Lhasa. It was mid-October and the height of Kathmandu’s festival season. Nepalis feasted and, to ensure prosperity after the harvests, made blood sacrifices to ancient Mother goddesses—Durga, Bhagawati, Mahakali—at street-side shrines. Even the wheels of Royal Nepal Airlines’ fleet of Boeing 707s had been splattered with goat’s blood. A month earlier the living goddess Kumari—an incarnation of Taleju—had anointed the king, investing him with divine power to rule. The weather was also at its height; the Himalayas glittered on the horizon above emerald fields of rice.

  In early June, I’d returned from our previous trip to the Tsangpo gorges and found that my house, built atop what had once been a rice paddy, had been flooded by monsoon rains. My cook and housekeeper, knee-deep in water, were bailing out the front hall when we returned. Before my trip to Washington I had moved into a new house.

  My landlord, a Tibetan who had settled in Nepal after the Chinese invasion, had transformed a turn-of-the-century cottage into a fantastical multistoried structure of stained-glass windows, elaborately carved rosewood panels, and Victorian era mantelpieces salvaged from collapsed Rana palaces. A water buffalo head hung above the back stairs; an art nouveau lamppost held up the living room ceiling. A spiraling wrought-iron staircase ascended into an upper salon—curtained with heavy velvet drapes—that felt like a cross between a monastery and a maharaja’s palace. Hamid kept the original apartment downstairs; outfitted with an elaborately carved fireplace, six-foot-high Belgian mirrors, and broken chandeliers, it had once served as a playhouse for dissipated Rana princes. Rental costs in Kathmandu are cheap, and we paid less than $500 a month for the entire house.

  WHEN BRYAN HARVEY, the thirty-one-year-old National Geographic Television cameraman, arrived in Kathmandu, he wanted to start filming immediately. He shadowed me through the streets as I bought additional gear in trekking shops in Thamel and sat me in front of a tree in a hotel garden to ask me to describe on film the purpose of the expedition. What could I say? Over the past fifty years, Everest and K-2 and most of the world’s highest mountains had all been climbed, men had walked on the moon and explored the ocean’s trenches, but the final five miles of the Tsangpo gorge remained a complete mystery. Ostensibly, we intended to close the gap and resolve the enduring issue of a phantom waterfall in the world’s deepest gorge. Inwardly I was
in search of something beyond the parameters of geography, but I could only frame it in terms of the Tibetan myths of Yangsang.

  Departure for the Gorge

  ON OCTOBER 26, 1998 , the night before our flight to Lhasa from Kathmandu, Hamid and I were invited to a black tie soirée at a certain Princess Malla’s, where a Hollywood action hero turned incarnate lama would be present in his Tibetan silk brocade robes. I declined the invitation and stayed home to mix tsampa with ground almonds, concentrated goat whey, and assorted Himalayan herbs.

  Frustrated by the pretensions of the evening’s gathering, Hamid had left early for Dutch Bob’s, the infamous watering hole and home of one of Kathmandu’s most-storied old-time expatriates, a dealer in antique Tibetan carpets, furniture, and silver artifacts. Bob’s house sat in view of the towering Boudhanath stupa and felt like a cross between a museum and a lavish if somewhat dissolute temple. Visitors congregated around a low eight-foot-long central table that presented a shifting still life of antique skull cups, exquisite burl wood bowls, and bottles of Famous Old Grouse and Old Smuggler whiskey that Bob poured for his guests into silver and ivory drinking cups. Often, a bevy of attractive young Nepali women would be sitting around the table on colorful Tibetan carpets.

  Toward midnight, Hamid returned to the house with a winsome new acquaintance named Monsoon, whom he had ostensibly recruited to help him pack. He retired to his quarters as I measured out my fortified tsampa into gallon-size Ziploc bags, and stashed it along with other food into locking waterproof duffel bags. When the van arrived at 5 a.m. to take us to the airport, we were still in disarray, but the disorientation seemed strangely correct. And when Monsoon rushed off to attend a Pentacostal church service, it felt like a scene from The Canterbury Tales.

  AFTER CLEARING CUSTOMS at the Tribhuvan International Airport, we soared high over the Himalayas in a Chinese Southwest Airlines airbus, the luminous walls of Everest and Kanchenjunga mantled below us in autumn snow. In Lhasa, we checked into the Kyichu Hotel near the Barkhor market, where we changed money with Khampa traders, their long black hair wrapped around their heads with flaming red tassels.

  Pilgrims from all parts of Tibet had converged on the pilgrims’ track around the Jokhang. Bright-cheeked nomad girls, their pleated hair braided with turquoise, amber, and coral, strolled alongside leather-jacketed entrepreneurs with cell phones pressed against their ears. Others cast armfuls of crushed juniper and cedar into smoldering censers in front of the Jokhang’s heavy gilded doors, sending clouds of fragrant, karma-cleansing smoke into a bright, azure sky. We joined the stream of pilgrims flowing toward the Jokhang’s inner sanctum and offered prayers for the success of our journey.

  As in Kathmandu, all the ordinary routines of an expedition were now self-conscious events as Bryan Harvey’s high-resolution video camera infiltrated our most private moments. An energetic blond-haired surfer, Bryan rode the wave of every moment and badgered us at every opportunity for some spontaneous on-camera utterance as to what we were doing, and why.

  Bryan had singled me out as the film’s bridge between his American audience and the exotic world of Tibet and the Himalayas. He had filmed me in Kathmandu from the back of rickshaws and zoomed in on my face as I circled the golden Buddha at the heart of the Jokhang. Ken, Hamid, and I all shared similar concerns that National Geographic Television’s character-led approach would overlook what each of us had hoped to achieve in filming the Tsangpo gorges. Our vision was not that of great white explorers penetrating the earth’s last blank spot of virgin territory, but a self-effacing evocation of the hidden landscapes of mind and nature: Pemako in all its otherness.

  WE SLEPT FITFULLY, due to an all-night construction team working outside on a new wing of the hotel. The Sherpas had left before dawn, and we followed soon after. The bridge leading north out of Lhasa was draped with prayer flags and framed by massive incense burners. The early rays of the sun backlit the aromatic smoke that hung across the bridge like a luminous veil.

  For the first hour the road was paved and smooth, but it quickly devolved into a rutted, marginally navigable track. The “highway” east out of Lhasa had been “under improvement” for several years, but it was now unquestionably at its worst, paved with sharp rocks as a foundation for tar and asphalt. Short sections of the road had already been paved but, in between, the surface was so jarring that the tape playing in the cassette deck of our Toyota Land Cruiser jolted continuously from side A to side B, from the reveries of Van Morrison to Tuvan throat singing that Hamid had recorded on his journey into Central Asia.

  When we stopped for a road crew to remove boulders that had tumbled onto the road, two dust-covered monks prostrated their way through the fallen rocks, marking the ground with the length of their bodies, their foreheads calloused and yak skin padding armoring their elbows and knees. Tibetans believe that these repeated movements combined with mantra recitation and elaborate visualizations comprise one of the fastest methods to acquire sonam, or spiritual merit, the elusive quality essential for escaping the endless rounds of birth and rebirth—both literal and symbolic—that characterize worldly existence. In their joyous transcendence of distinctions between pleasure and pain, these threadbare monks put our own journey into sobering perspective. They looked radiant, zealously pursuing their goal of reaching Lhasa before winter snows would make the route even more demanding. We offered them alms, with unvoiced prayers that our own hardships could be borne as lightly.

  Over lunch at a primitive roadside restaurant, Bryan asked for more background on the expedition and its objectives. I had purposefully played down the waterfall in my application to the Exploration Council, but I now gave Bryan the historical perspective that he needed to shape his film.

  As accurate as my account was, I felt I was falsifying my deeper intention: the search for an understanding of the paradoxical links between landscape and perception and the whole riddle of Yangsang. When the French Tibetologist Alexandra David Neel ventured into Tibet in 1923-24, she had blackened her hair with Chinese ink and disguised herself as a Tibetan mendicant. The Pundit-surveyors of the British Raj had also disguised themselves as pilgrims, as did Richard Burton when he surreptitiously circumambulated the Kaaba in Mecca. Even Bailey had perfected the art of disguise when, after his journey to the Tsangpo gorge, he served as a secret agent in Central Asia. I wondered if I hadn’t inadvertently done something similar, albeit from another direction. My interest in Pemako was less the falls than what lay beyond them, yet in my presentation to the National Geographic Society I had focused strictly on geography. If we found the legendary falls, it would no doubt be gratifying. But as a lama in Kathmandu had said of the commotion surrounding the summiting of Everest: “Why all the excitement? Isn’t it just another place?”

  As we resumed the bone-jarring drive, we crossed high passes and left our lumbering supply truck far behind us. Shortly before dark, we hit a wall of backed-up traffic. The Chinese equivalent of a Mack truck, called a Dong Feng, or “Eastern Wind,” had broken its clutch and sunk into deep mud where the road crossed through a steep defile. At 11,000 feet, the temperature plummeted with the setting sun, and to ward off the cold we took turns helping to dig out the axle with crude spades. At 2:30 a.m. I finally retired to the Land Cruiser. I slept fitfully, too cold and exhausted to forage through the back of the supply truck to extract my down sleeping bag. The following morning, a bulldozer eventually pulled the stalled Dong Feng to the side of the road and leveled a passage sufficient to allow the remaining trucks and vehicles to continue on their way. The town of Kongpo Gyamda to which we had been headed lay less than twenty miles away, but it took us more than two and a half hours of mobile purgatory to reach it.

  After chicken and cabbage soup and wok-fried greens in a Gyamda eatery, we drove four more hours on roads sporadically paved with freshly laid concrete. Road crews were still blasting away boulders with caches of dynamite, and we stopped at a roadblock beside a re
d Mitsubishi jeep teeming with Chinese girls of questionable repute. They hailed from Xian, they told us in broken English, and had come to Tibet as “entertainers.” They invited us to a cabaret show that they would be staging that night in Bayi, our common destination.

  A less pleasant fate awaited us, however. After the road reopened, we proceeded directly to Bayi’s Public Security Bureau where Nima, our Tibetan guide from Wind Horse Adventure, presented our assorted permits. Tashi Choezod, our friend the chief detective, greeted us once again in his spartan office. He reminded Hamid and me that more than a year earlier we had promised to bring him a videocassette of The Godfather. He was visibly disappointed that we had shown up empty-handed. He then told us that he had just returned from a three-week survey tour through Pemako. After his experience, he was even more incredulous than before that we undertook these journeys for pleasure.

  That year Nyingtri and Medok counties were inundated with record levels of rain, he told us, and rivers had swollen to unprecedented heights. He had counted 183 landslides on the route between the Doshung-La pass and Medok, and the passage had been extremely hazardous. An American tourist had died falling into a stream, he told us, referring, we suspected, to Doug Gordon, the kayaker on Wick Walker’s expedition who had drowned on the Tsangpo somewhere below Gyala.