Himalaya (2004)

by Michael Palin

  A truck marked ‘Four Friends Transport. Live Long Friendship Nepal, India, China, Bhutan’ is at the head of a long queue of vehicles heading towards Nepal. There isn’t much room at the customs, and trucks, individuals, a bewildered-looking tour group and a flock of sheep are all trying to get through at the same time. Young, officious border guards in slack uniforms either push people around or ignore them completely. High up on the wall, and conveniently inaccessible, is a small box marked ‘Complaints about Immigration’.

  By the time all the formalities have been completed - and to be fair, a British film crew is a very rare sight in Tibet - it’s early afternoon. Our final departure is marked by a small ceremony at which the manager of the Bai Ma Hotel gives us each a white scarf to bring us good luck on our journey. He seems a decent man, doing his best, though I notice he doesn’t have a complaints box.

  As we drive out of Xangmu (with few regrets, in my case) the squash of white-tiled buildings eases and we can see the wooded gorge we climbed yesterday, plunging picturesquely down to Nepal. The road to Lhasa (now, inevitably, re-christened the Friendship Highway) continues to climb steeply, through forested slopes and past tumbling waterfalls, until it brings us at last to the edge of the Tibetan plateau. The Roof of the World was once a seabed. What lay beneath the ancient Sea of Tethys was heaved up onto the top of the world by the same collision of the Indian and Eurasian plates that built the Himalaya. It now rests at an average height of 13,100 feet (4000 m) and from its steep sides stream some of the world’s greatest rivers: the Indus, Salween, Yangtze, Irrawaddy, Yellow River and Brahmaputra.

  In the relatively short distance from Xangmu, we’ve made dramatic progress, vertically, if not horizontally. We’re only 20 miles from the Bai Ma Hotel, but 5000 feet (1520 m) above it. Apart from a few poplar groves, the tree cover has gone and on the mountainsides bare rock shows through tight, tussocky cover. At a cold, exposed little town called Nyalam we stop to have papers checked before entering a new administrative zone. Women in masks sweep the street, outside a modern building a prosperous-looking man makes two of his employees unroll a length of carpet, which he proceeds to examine with great care. Recently completed terraced housing runs along the side of the road, an early indication of Beijing’s plans to make Tibet a new frontier. This is a cheerless place, though J-P, never daunted, manages to find a shop selling wine and we roll across the River Matsang two bottles of Dynasty Red to the better.

  The road continues upwards, over long, undulating, brown hills, until we reach the prayer flag-bedecked pass of Tong La, over 17,000 feet (5180 m) above sea level and the highest place I’ve ever been on earth (coming in well ahead of my previous record, the hot springs in San Pedro de Atacama in Chile at 14,700 feet (4480 m)).

  Everything is bewildering, strange and wonderful. Running the length of the southern horizon is a chain of towering, white peaks and on the grassland below us a herd of yak, short-legged creatures, bodies close to the ground, their thick, black hair standing out against greeny-brown hills behind them.

  We stop and walk a little way from the car, every step feeling like 20 at this altitude.

  But that doesn’t dampen the exhilaration.

  It’s dark when we reach the town of Tingri and, after some initial confusion, find our way off the highway and into a capacious courtyard, which looks like that of a monastery, but in fact belongs to the Snow Leopard Hotel. Life centres around a big, low, woody room with painted beams and a brick parqueted floor, largely lit by the glow from a stove of burning yak dung in the centre of the room. This is what was lacking in those inhospitable Annapurna cabins: a fire, so simple and so intensely welcoming. We cluster round it and a lady with braided hair and rubicund, muddied face offers us yak butter tea. Nigel describes the taste as ‘liquid gorgonzola’, which is absolutely spot on. The rancid smell of the tea and the sharp aroma of yak dung smoke is not as horrible as it sounds. I find it odd, yes, but interestingly strange and unfamiliar, quintessentially Tibetan and proof that north of the Himalaya everything is very different.

  In the dim recesses of the room we’re served a very good meal of noodles with mushroom, pork, green peppers and lumps of soft, white, doughy Tibetan bread.

  We’re advised to break out the sleeping bags tonight. It will be below zero in our un-heated rooms.

  Leaving the fire is the hardest thing, but once across the yard, beneath a bracingly clear night sky, I’m into a pretty little room, so different from last night. Proper curtains, a colourful wall with a frieze of painted flowers. Beside the bed I have a wooden cabinet, also very charmingly painted. By the light of a very dim bulb I can make out leering gods, dragons, clouds, waves and what look very much like flying teeth.

  The only setback tonight is that the bottles of wine from Nyalam proved undrinkable.

  Day Sixty : Tingri to Rongbuk

  Though perfectly comfortable in my congenial little room, sleep was light and fleeting and broken by twinges of headache and nausea. The zero temperatures with which Mr Tse Xiu threatened us didn’t materialize and when I should have been sleeping I was engaged in an energy-consuming nocturnal striptease, peeling off the various layers of clothing I’d gone to bed in and dropping them out of my sleeping bag one by one.

  Open the curtains to find a yak calf helping itself to a bowl of water which has been put outside my room.

  Wash in what’s left of it and join the others for breakfast. On the way there I notice a big satellite dish in one corner of the courtyard. There’s no evidence of a television anywhere about the place.

  This is my first chance to have some time with Migmar, who has so far been preoccupied with getting us into China. He’s 27, the son of Tibetan nomads who were enlightened enough to send him to school, from where he won a place at Lhasa University. He read Chinese (the Dalai Lama would have approved) and English, which, despite the fact he’s never left Tibet, he speaks pretty well.

  I’m impressed by the richness of the decoration on almost every inch of the timber columns, beams and ceiling boards, and Migmar explains that in the 9th century a Tibetan warlord tried to eradicate Buddhism and the only way that the culture survived was through a pictorial code. The Buddhist heroes were depicted as animals: dragons, tigers, even sheep. What began as a cipher developed into a rich tradition of imaginative painting, a particular target during the Cultural Revolution, when a renewed and virulent attempt was made to destroy Tibet’s Buddhist past.

  Instead of continuing along the Friendship Highway to Lhasa, we turn south on a dirt road, towards the heart of the Himalaya. Apart from the occasional four-wheel drives like our own, traffic consists of horses and carts trotting between isolated settlements, usually of low, whitewashed houses with prayer flags fluttering from poles at each corner of the roof. The harshness of life up here in this dry and windy rain shadow of the Himalaya is etched on the faces of the farmers and their families. Skin is weathered and faces prematurely aged. The children, noses running and cheeks red and rough from the sun, cluster round as soon as we stop, asking us to give them something.

  At one stop the villagers are celebrating with music and dancing. Music seems to lighten the load, and getting out the three-string guitars is a popular move. Soon a circle is formed and the dancers are moving slowly round with a step that doesn’t seem to vary, though, judging by reactions, the words they sing have been brought up to date. The women wear big, coral earrings, flower pattern shirts and the traditional Tibetan chuba, a long, sleeveless dress tied with a sash at the waist. Some of the men wear their version of the chuba, big, wide-sleeved coats, and one or two are in sheepskin jackets, leggings and heavy boots of the kind I haven’t really seen since the pop festivals of the late sixties.

  Migmar says that at times like New Year dances like this can be spun out for several days.

  We move on, through desert scenery, with minimal vegetation but every kind of eye-catching rock formation: deep gullies, bluffs with soaring, scree-covered slopes, exposed synclines
and anti-clines, red and angry, as if freshly split from the cliffs around them. A brisk wind creates the only movement in this dead landscape, sending dust devils spiralling across the track in front of us.

  A military checkpoint, beside a big, modern PLA (People’s Liberation Army) barracks with a red-tiled roof, stands at the entrance to the Qomolangma National Park, and a metalled road, recently upgraded, leads us smoothly up to the next big pass, Pang La. This is the high point of our day’s journey, in every respect. At the summit, a smooth, wide hill at 17,000 feet (5180 m), one of the finest views in the world is suddenly, almost abruptly, revealed. The full, majestic spread of the central Himalaya is laid out before us, like white-topped waves in a frozen ocean. It’s an horizon full of giants: Cho Oyu, a huge massif that peaks at 26,928 feet (8210 m), Makalu 1 at 27,594 feet (8410 m), Lhotse 1 at 27,883 feet (8500 m) and the monumental pyramid of Everest, rising serenely above them all at 29,021 feet (8850 m).

  The highest point of the earth’s surface, which I am seeing today for the first time with my own eyes, is known to the Tibetans as Qomolangma (pronounced ‘Chomolungma’), Goddess Mother of the Earth, to the Sherpas as Sagamartha and when the Imperial Survey of India first determined the mountain’s precise height it was known on British maps as Peak XV. It was given the name Everest in 1865, in recognition of Sir George Everest, the man who pioneered the mapping of India. (To add to the confusion, what we call Everest should really be called Eev-rest, which was the way Sir George’s name was pronounced.)

  None of these things goes through my head as I stand at the top of the pass, unable to take my eyes off this stupendous panorama.

  Like K2, the world’s second highest mountain, which straddles China and Pakistan, Everest is divided between two countries, China and Nepal. In the 1920s and 1930s Nepal was a closed country and the pioneering expeditions of George Mallory all came in from Tibet and concentrated on the North Face.

  When expeditions resumed after the Second World War, it was Tibet’s turn to be closed off, after the Chinese Communist invasion of 1949, whilst Nepal opened up at around the same time.

  The main bulk of Everest ascents, now running at around 100 a year, are made via the South East Ridge from which Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing had conquered the mountain in 1953. The North Face remains the more mysterious; aloof, daunting and much more dangerous. It was first climbed by a Chinese expedition in 1960. They laid a dirt road to transport their equipment up here, which is why we are able to drive up to Base Camp. The track bounces over impacted, corrugated earth strewn with small boulders, but the four-wheel drives don’t find it too difficult, and by late afternoon, after winding our way through valleys fed by glacial melt from the slopes of Everest, we turn past the Rongbuk gompa, the highest monastery in the world, and in to the walled courtyard of the guest-house, administered by the monastery.

  It looks, for a moment, like the most wonderful place in the world. The same long, low, Tibetan-style layout as the Snow Leopard in Tingri, but with a hugely more spectacular location. This turns out to be its only redeeming feature. From the filthy, littered courtyard to the soulless concrete rooms with broken windows and the foul, doorless lavatories, Rongbuk Guest House is pretty much a hell hole.

  The redeeming feature, however, is not to be underestimated. There is only one mountain to be seen from here and that is Everest. It stands, massive, grand and solitary, only a few miles away across the end of the valley. It is the horizon.

  Day Sixty One : Rongbuk

  Last night was desperately uncomfortable. A fierce wind blew, occasionally gusting with such ferocity that I feared it might tear the windows out. I lay awake, mouth dry despite regular swigs of water, listening to the village dogs fighting and detritus in the yard being flung about by the wind. As soon as I drifted off to sleep my breathing slowed and within moments I was wide awake, gasping for breath. I need the sleep so much, but I find myself fighting it, forcing myself to stay awake and breathe slow and deep.

  The latrine is almost subhuman. It’s hard enough to aim through a hole reduced to a slit by the calcified accretions of many previous visitors, without at the same time having to flash a torch to warn other guests and extract thin sheets of Boots travel tissue in a freezing, force 8 gale. Many years ago, encountering similarly appalling conditions in a boat on Lake Tanganyika, I took Imodium to prevent me having to go to the toilet ever again. As I squat in this howling tempest three miles up in the sky, I think cyanide might be the better option.

  One advantage of this fierce wind is that when daylight comes it is clear and pristine. The summit of Everest trails a plume of spin-drift, blown off the mountain by winds which, at that height, must be in excess of 100 miles an hour. The rest of the mountain, including the long, flanking shoulders below the arrow-head peak, is crystal clear.

  The remainder of the guests who were here last night - Spaniards, Norwegians and a group of Australians - all leave today. They can’t believe we’re here for three nights, and whoop with joy as they’re driven away.

  Our cooks are making yak butter tea, which the Tibetans call Bo Cha, in the traditional, long, thin, cylindrical churn. It’s a mixture of yak butter and tea leaves, with salt and milk added, and is a taste I’ve yet to acquire, and I’m sure I shall have plenty of opportunity to do so.

  We had hoped to move up to Base Camp today, but with the wind still strengthening the decision is taken to stay down here and acclimatize. With atmospheric pressure about half that at sea level, everyone is suffering to some degree and Mr Yang, our minder, and John Pritchard, our sound recordist, are particularly uncomfortable.

  Apart from the guesthouse and a new, red-brick hotel nearby, ready but tantalizingly un-opened, Rongbuk consists of a line of low cottages and the monastery, which looks old but was built less than 20 years ago to replace the one destroyed, along with thousands of others in Tibet, by fanatical Red Guards in the 1960s. Outside it stands a sizeable chorten topped with a small, black pyramid and hung with prayer flags like ribbons on a maypole. I walk into a courtyard of two-storey buildings with a painted balcony running round for access, and I follow the sound of chanting up a flight of steps on the far side of the square and into the temple. There are 30 monks and 30 nuns here at the world’s highest monastery. With their shaven heads and loose robes, it’s difficult to tell them apart.

  After prayers they gather outside and I present them with a thangka (from Kathmandu). It’s accepted by the abbot, a big, amiable man with a very dirty, cherry-red duvet jacket over his robes. The monks gather round and study it with great interest.

  By evening the wind has dropped as forecast. I sit in the room I share with Basil and make my notes as Everest, now completely clear of the cloud, turns pink in the dying sunlight. Apart from the very top, Everest is not one single, symmetrical shape like a Kilimanjaro or a Machhapuchhre, its outline being composed of a series of huge blocks.

  Suddenly my view is obscured by two women banging on the window, staring in at me and holding their hands out. They’re some of the saddest people I’ve seen and for a moment I feel a sense of frustration that the monastery can do so little for them.

  Getting in and out of my sleeping bag are the most uncomfortable moments of the day. The cold snaps at my heels and yet dressing and undressing cannot be hurried at this altitude.

  Day Sixty Two : Rongbuk to Everest Base Camp

  Last night I slept. Indeed, I slept so long and so deeply that Basil thought I might be dead.

  What a difference it makes to everything. The sky looks bluer, the food tastes better, the yak butter tea is like nectar and the prospect of a trek beyond Everest Base Camp and up towards the Rongbuk Glacier is the only thing I want to do with the rest of my life.

  It takes us 20 minutes to drive the eight miles from Rongbuk to Base Camp, passing on the way the remains of the old monastery.

  Some of the walls still stand, but it’s little more than a skeleton, barely distinguishable from the rubble-covered slopes on which it
stands. Above these desiccated ruins a flock of blue sheep are nosing some nourishment out of the rocks.

  Everest Base Camp is nowhere near as romantic as it sounds. Part of it is protected by a 100-foot-high moraine, a wall of stone and shale, carried down and dumped by the glacier that has gouged out the valley. A stream trickles through but any standing water is frozen solid. In high season, between June and August, this area and the rock-strewn valley floor beyond are packed with mountaineers and trekkers. This year there were 32 separate expeditions.

  Now, in early November, the camp is all but deserted though the legacy of the summer lies around: discarded brandy bottles, playing cards, batteries and bits of sodden, scrumpled clothing.

  A couple of motorbikes are parked beside a caretaker’s tent, outside which a young man sits in the sun, having his hair cut by two ladies. Nearby, the yak herders with whom we shall be walking up to the glacier have set up two or three small tents of their own, while the yaks graze nearby, nibbling at the scatterings of wheat and dry grass laid out for them. One has made a small hole in the ice and is drinking from it. Their hair is mostly black, though some have white faces. All have the soft eyes of cows and the same sad, long-suffering look, as if resigned to whatever’s going to happen. Despite looking eminently embraceable, they don’t seem at all interested in my friendly advances, and I’m warned that they can turn very truculent.

  I learn, too, that though yak is their generic name, it refers only to the male; a female is called a dri and a yak crossed with a cow is a dzo (this is a useful word to know when playing Scrabble, as my ever helpful Bradt guide points out). They are the preferred carriers at this height, stoical and persistent, sure-footed on the rocks. They thrive at altitude, protected from the cold by a thick saddle of insulating fat across their backs, and the big expeditions rely on them to transport heavy equipment up as high as 21,500 feet (6550 m). It’s on the lower slopes that the yaks suffer. Anything below 8000 feet (2440 m) can be very uncomfortable for them, as they tend to overheat.