Himalaya (2004)

by Michael Palin

  Wongchu rolls off a list of unlikely but intriguing facts. The best way to catch a yeti is to get him drunk. He likes tea and he likes alcohol, and people used to trap yetis by putting out a dead dog full of alcohol. It’s the people who have hunted the creatures down.

  ‘And now, one only left yeti.’

  Beyond Hinko a sheer rock face rises to one side of the path, steep, smooth and sheer. A thin, white plume of a waterfall drops from way above, glancing off the rock and ricocheting down towards us in slow motion, it seems.

  When the snow comes these rocks turn lethal. This is the high-risk avalanche area and Wongchu has seen people killed here. The only possible chance you have to avoid a fall is to have a sense of hearing acute enough to pick up the very first sound. The avalanche sound, Wongchu calls it. Then, as he puts it, ‘Quick run.’

  We reach the Sangri-La (sic) guesthouse at lunchtime and decide to go no further today. It turns out to be a good decision. By 2.30 swirling, vaporous cloud has descended, bringing the temperature down with it. Out of T-shirts and shorts and into scarves, hats, gloves and eventually thermals. We have a grandstand view of Machhapuchhre, revealing itself in tantalizing Garboesque glimpses between the drifting cloud.

  It’s a holy mountain. It is forbidden to slaughter any animal within its sacred valley, and Wongchu says his attempts to obtain permission to climb it have always been refused.

  As the conditions become increasingly cold and inhospitable, the only members of our expedition who look at all cheerful are the porters. Released from their loads half a day early, they spend the afternoon noisily gambling away their take-home pay. A coin is thrown on the ground and where it lands it’s replaced with a stone. Players then have to hit the stone with their coins. If you hit the stone, you pocket all the coins that have missed. It’s a game that has apparently come down from Mongolia and is played throughout the Himalaya.

  It’s very much a participation game and the porters come alive, greeting every move with raucous shouts, jeers, groans and laughter. I’ve rarely seen so many people having such a good time for so long. It’s quite depressing really, and brings on a prolonged bout of coughing.

  We eat early, sitting on wool-covered benches round a rectangular table that is usually heated from beneath by a kerosene stove, but it isn’t working tonight. Freshly made Gurung bread, thick, yet light and filling, then anodyne vegetable noodle soup and fried rice. The staple diet of the mountains is dal baht, lentils and rice, but our cooks seem unwilling to offer us this and instead try manfully to provide us with what they think Westerners want.

  The night is cold. I take Nurofen and hope that it will help me sleep. It knocks me out for two-hour periods, tames the coughing but provides little relief from an increasingly angry, sore throat. One word repeats itself in my disordered dreams. Descend! Descend! Descend!

  Day Fifty Two : Derali to Machhapuchhre Base Camp

  At breakfast Wongchu asks me how I am. I give him quite a detailed progress report on cold, cough, sandpaper-like throat and general collapse of system.

  He ponders this in a Harley Street sort of way, before narrowing his eyes like Sherlock Holmes confronted with a new and unexpected clue.

  ‘You have beer last night?’

  I try to cast my mind back.

  ‘A little.’

  Wongchu nods gravely.

  ‘No beer.’

  The sun is still out of reach, setting fire to the crests of the mountains, but still a long way from delivering us from this bitter morning chill. We fall to reminiscing about the good old days in the heart of the Sahara desert.

  The porters, so ebulliently happy yesterday afternoon, are quiet and subdued. They crouch, huddled together for warmth, waiting to be called out, helped on with their baskets and sent on their way. They’re Tamang people from Loswa district close to Kathmandu, all of them slight and wiry, as if honed down to the lowest body weight for the work they have to do. They will be paid $8 for each day on the mountain.

  Though we have only about 1000 feet (300 m) to climb today, the path rises and falls in a frustrating switchback.

  I’ve given up saying ‘Namaste’ to everyone who passes, but I’m momentarily cheered when I plod up to the top of yet another stone staircase and come level with two middle-aged American ladies. I see a look of recognition on one of their faces and hear a gasp of excitement as I pass.

  ‘Oh, my God!’

  I nod appreciatively, straighten my back and move on.

  ‘It’s Eric Idle!’

  This precipitates serious psychological collapse. A half-hour later, exhausted by the pain of swallowing and the increasing effort required to pull in oxygen at this height, I finally yield my backpack to Wongchu. He takes it with a quiet smile, as if accepting the surrender of a garrison after a long siege.

  Shedding the weight doesn’t make things any better. Whereas I was out in front with the leaders yesterday, I can only watch the gap between us widen as they disappear ahead and leave me leaning on my climbing pole, heaving for breath, Nawang and Wongchu standing solicitously by.

  Stagger into Machhapuchhre Base Camp around lunchtime. It’s a much more open, jollier place than last night’s guesthouse, full of infuriatingly happy campers sitting outside their tents, spraying each other with a water hose, hanging clothes on washing lines and generally having the time of their lives.

  Even the majestic scenery - shapely Fish Tail and chunky Annapurna - fails to lift my spirits. I feel completely busted. The merest movement, to take food, to peel off a coat, to unpack an overnight bag, requires major physical effort. After a cup of garlic soup I decide there is nothing to do but take to my bed. Because of my condition, I’m upgraded from tent to room. It’s standard mountain lodge accommodation, a stone-walled cell, eight foot by ten foot, with a flagged floor that traps the cold and damp like a cheese store, and a wooden bed frame on which is a thin mattress and a pillow. There is not much else to do but turn my back on one of the finest mountain panoramas in the world and climb, fully dressed, into my sleeping bag until whatever it is passes.

  ‘You eat,’ orders Wongchu when I surface a few hours later. ‘Need food. ‘

  No-one else says anything. I think I must frighten the crew a bit. They’ve never seen me quite like this: glum and unresponsive.

  Force down some garlic soup, enlivened with shards of spring onion and green pepper. My neck and forehead are feverishly hot, and once I’ve finished, all I want to do is to go back to bed. Wongchu and Nawang deal with me most tenderly. Despite all my protestations, they prepare a bowl of steaming inhalant and insist I use it. Nawang gets fresh hot water from the cooks and helps me bathe my feet. Then they guide me into my sleeping bag, with Wongchu applying massage as I go. I feel rather as if I’m being laid out, and I must say at this moment the Grim Reaper would not be an unwelcome visitor.

  Wongchu wants one of the Sherpas to come and sit with me through the night, but I dissuade him, and, watched over by an inanimate but impressive array of tablets, tissues, ointments, creams and sprays, I close my eyes and wait.

  Day Fifty Three : to Annapurna Base Camp

  I wake up, wrenched from sleep by some chest-wracking cough, and am seized by near panic. Everything is pitch black, silent and cold as ice. I have no sensation of where I am. Perhaps Nawang and Wongchu have found me a flotation tank. I scrabble around for my head-torch, sending a bottle of pills clattering across the hard stone floor. For a few minutes I simply lie there, staring up at a circle of slatted, paint-peeling board above me and waiting for my heart to slow down.

  All sorts of things go through my mind. The one thing I can’t dismiss is that I might have to think the unthinkable. That, for the first time in any of my journeys, I may have to face the possibility of failure. I’m 60, after all, and there has to be a point at which the body puts its foot down, as it were.

  For a depressing hour or so I can’t escape this profound feeling of being defeated, physically and mentally, by the Himalaya.
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  When I next wake, though there is absolutely no physical sign of time passing, I know, even before I search for my torch, that I’ve been out for a while. And in that time some sea change has taken place. I’m no longer hot and feverish, and the sense of survival seems stronger than the sense of doom.

  With some effort I pull myself up and take sips of hot water from the thermos Nawang insisted I keep beside me. It’s four o’clock in the morning and as sure as I was three hours ago that I wouldn’t make it, I know now that there can be no question of turning back.

  This morning, I feel I’m emerging from hibernation. Last night was winter and this is spring.

  I leave the camp, with Nawang and Wongchu, climbing due west. The snowfields of the Annapurna Himal lie dead ahead, shining and brilliant in the rising sun. It’s an adventurous morning’s filming too, off the main track and clambering very slowly through the thick grass, with the camera catching our silhouettes against the hard glare of the mountains.

  Nawang stays beside me all the way, making sure I take regular slugs of water. Wongchu, who, reassuringly, seems to think I no longer need his personal supervision, walks ahead, looking like Geronimo and pausing occasionally to chat to some descending female trekker, preferably Swiss or Austrian. These encounters really seem to cheer him up, as well as making up for my dawdling.

  So it is a tired but unrecognizably happier band that pulls itself up the last, agonizingly long and steep flight of steps to Annapurna Base Camp.

  Appropriately enough for Annapurna, the Hindu goddess of fertility, a dal baht lunch is waiting, and on the sun-filled terrace I can sit and enjoy a combination of relief and release. For the time being, at least, I don’t need to go any higher.

  There’s quite a crowd of trekkers already at the camp and, with a captive audience, Wongchu is in his element. Like many climbers I know, he has an inexhaustible supply of disaster stories. He points out a small Buddhist shrine just outside the camp, which marks the spot where Anatoly Boukreev, a Russian climber, was killed by an avalanche. Annapurna I has taken the lives of some 15 people. Some, he adds mysteriously, have died because they offended the mountain gods.

  ‘By eating meat?’

  ‘Eating meat, yes. But also having sex.’

  ‘Having sex?’

  He nods knowingly. It happened to a climber he knew on one of his Everest expeditions.

  ‘He had sex with many different kind of women in the Himalaya.’

  He pauses until all heads are turned in his direction.

  ‘He was the one who died on that expedition.’

  As there has been absolutely no question of my having sex on Annapurna, the gods seem to be positively smiling. For once the sunset is not lost in the mist, and at six o’clock, 40 or 50 people from all over the world gather to watch the light show on the peaks of Machhapuchhre. A small act of homage to the Himalaya.

  Day Fifty Four : Annapurna Base Camp to Pokhara

  Last night my chest and lungs were better behaved but I was kept from deep sleep by an avalanche of images that roared through my brain, unbidden and unstoppable, for most of the night, making it feel like a video stuck on fast forward. At least I had no recurrence of the sensory deprivations of the night before. My room has two windows and I can see the cold mountainside in the moonlight. I can hear my neighbour through the wall. It’s Basil, with a cough so fierce and bronchial that it sounds dangerous.

  We’re due to be taken off by helicopter some time this morning. I must be honest and say that, for me, it’s not a moment too soon.

  I think back to the enthralled group silent in the face of the majestic beauty of Machhapuchhre last night and I wonder if we aren’t all in danger of falling into the romantic delusion that by staring at these great massifs of rock and ice we achieve some form of communication with them, as if something so forbiddingly colossal must somehow be friendly.

  The mountains are far more likely to be enemies than friends. We take them on at our peril and, despite all nature’s warnings, long to go higher. And the higher we go the more the mountains tighten their grip, squeezing the life out of most people, gently in some cases, more severely in others. The locals who see the mountains as gods to be appeased are only translating pragmatic experience. Human beings are not meant to live at these heights and they should expect trouble if they do.

  If there is a reward for reaching this height (13,400 feet (4080 m)) it is the exhilaration of the immense. Because we’re that much closer to the top of the peaks, the sunlight reaches us earlier than it did below and the dazzling clarity of the light sharpens and intensifies every detail of this mighty bowl of mountains. My scepticism thaws a little with the sun and as we walk beyond the camp and look out over the monumental sweep of the glacier that unwinds from the Annapurna Ridge, gouging a valley from the sheer rock, I realize how extraordinarily lucky I am to have seen all this.

  And how much luckier to have a helicopter to take me away from it.

  Our magic carpet arrives on time and, anxious not to hang around in these unpredictable conditions, takes off as soon as we’ve strapped ourselves in. Below us, in the slipstream, our porters spread-eagle themselves on their tents to stop them blowing away. I feel embarrassed and a little ashamed. We could have got down without a helicopter, but we certainly couldn’t have made it up the Annapurna trek without our porters.

  After circling the massif, we turn due south, following coiling glaciers, until they melt into streams that cross the spiky grassland and grow into small rivers, which disappear first into coniferous then tropical rain forest, re-emerging where the trees have been cut back to make room for cultivated clearings. Then the first isolated settlements appear and the clearings grow into terraces and the settlements grow into mountain villages with marked tracks, and the terraces become rice paddies in all shades of green and yellow and the marked tracks become paved roads, with power lines running beside them through the tin-shack slums around the airport. And the rivers become a lake.

  The evolution of human settlement in 22 minutes. At Pokhara, the joys of hot water, shower, bed and the excellent news that Adrian Griffith and his fellow Gurkha officers were released, unharmed, after 48 hours in the forest.

  Day Fifty Six : Kathmandu

  Post-Annapurna elation will be short-lived. Higher mountains and tougher conditions are forecast for the crossing into Tibet, but for now we have breathing space in one of the most intriguing cities of the Himalaya.

  My guide to the Nepali capital is Kunda Dixit, editor of the Nepali Times, an English weekly with a circulation of 8000. It’s crisply laid out and well designed and has a sharp, well-informed, provocative style. The most recent edition carries the latest World Terrorism Index, which shows that, despite the Maoists, Nepal still comes below the UK.

  So I’m not entirely surprised to find that Kunda Dixit is an urbane, elegant figure with a shock of prematurely silver hair, dressed immaculately in a pale grey labada and knitted tunic. I am surprised to hear that his real love is flying and his fantasy is that, with a pilot suddenly taken ill, Kunda takes control, lands the plane perfectly and is asked to take over the national airline.

  We meet up in Patan, once one of three independent kingdoms in the valley, and now almost a suburb of Kathmandu.

  The jewel at the heart of Patan (pronounced Parton, as in Dolly) is Durbar Square, a dazzling collection of buildings dating back 350 to 500 years, to the days before Prithvi Naryan Shah, king of Ghorka, unified the kingdoms of the valley in 1768 and created modern Nepal. There are temples, palaces with golden gates, a huge bell suspended between two pillars and a lion on a column. Nepal was never colonized, so the architecture has no Western derivative and its distinctive fusion of Indian and Tibetan influences was created by the Newars, the people of the valley, and craftsmen of the highest order.

  As we wander through the colonnades of the Krishna Mandir, a stone-built Hindu temple topped with a shikhara, the characteristically Indian, curvilinear spire, we can look ac
ross to the Royal Palace, in a completely different style, refined by the Newari architect Arniko in the 14th century. It has powerful horizontals of brick and timber with deep, overhanging eaves, projecting balconies cantilevered out over finely carved, timber supports, and, inside, an elegantly proportioned chowk, or courtyard.

  Kunda tells me that the Kathmandu Valley, once a lake, is rich in fertile, alluvial soil. The kingdoms, grown fat from consistently good harvests, ploughed their surpluses into religion, festivals and fine buildings, competing with each other for the tallest tower or the biggest bell.

  ‘They used to say there were more temples in Kathmandu than houses and more gods than people.’

  The buildings are not purely for show. A family arrives to do a puja at Krishna Mandir, unsettling a flock of pigeons, who create a sharp gust of wind as they take off, circle and descend en masse a few feet away.

  The most dramatic building in the square is the five-storeyed pagoda of the Taleju Mandir, with a bronze stupa at its apex. The pagoda, a tapering succession of roofs symbolizing the various stages of enlightenment, was perfected here in Nepal, and it was Arniko who took the design to the Ming court at Peking.

  One of the pleasures of meandering round Durbar Square is the immense amount of carved and sculpted detail. In the Royal Palace there are stone slabs called shildayras that carry historical records from the Lichavi period, 1800 years ago. On the beams in the chowks are intricately worked and painted lotus flowers, dragons and swastikas, and the stone walls of Krishna’s temple are adorned with athletic, erotic couplings.

  ‘Krishna is the god of love,’ explains Kunda. ‘He’s a young guy with a flute and girlfriends all over the world.’

  I’m rather envious.

  ‘Our gods don’t tend to have girlfriends. It’s something we’ve rather missed out on.’

  The smallest of the old kingdoms was centred on Bhaktapur, seven miles east of Kathmandu. On our way out there we’re waved past a police checkpoint set up since the Maoists recently brought their attacks to Kathmandu itself. They’re searching all the buses that run out to the country areas in the east. According to Kunda, journeys that took 12 hours can now take 48.