White Mountain

by Robert Twigger

  Always heartening to see a thatched roof, whether in rural England or, as here, in jungle Nagaland

  For all his bravado, the King seemed lost, waiting for the odd tourist to show up, not at home in the new world, and the old world long gone.

  6

  Another Visit to Arunachal Pradesh

  In the company of goats he says goa, in the company of sheep he says bea.

  Ladakhi proverb

  In the Himalayas it seemed right to end by visiting a monastery. To get to the one in Tawang took the usual long, long drive over windy roads from Tezpur. I was not looking forward to it. The shared Jeeps went from the same place, the Muslim section of town. The call to prayer reminded me of Egypt; it was good to hear. The area was near the bus station. No one knew when or where the buses were going, including the staff in the station. It was very early. I had bought my ticket the night before from a youth in a kiosk who looked slightly simple. He went to another kiosk for confirmation that what he was saying was correct. He came back grinning from ear to ear. I could see he was actually a good employee; this area bounded by the kiosks and a few tin-roofed restaurants was his world, a place where he was accepted.

  The next day, at 6 a.m. when it was barely dawn and chilly, he was nowhere to be seen. I went and got some puri (a fried bread), vegetable curry and instant coffee, my preferred breakfast at that time. The puri man had already made a great stack of puris and his hands were white with flour. So I accepted several freshly made, my reasoning being that if he didn’t wash his hands the previous hundred puris would be the infected ones, not mine.

  Then I saw the simpleton and he was very happy to see me. But he didn’t know when the Jeep to the north was coming. I had my permit to visit Arunachal Pradesh; it had been less costly and time-consuming to get than the last time, but I was just as impatient to actually get there.

  Then, all of a sudden, about five Jeeps arrived and my friend grabbed my bag and hurled it on top. This was the one. We were off. I had bought the window seat, second row – the least bumpy place to be – with good views out of the window. You get to be the first person out of the vehicle too.

  Across the Brahmaputra into Arunachal Pradesh, we drove through flat forested areas with military camps at regular intervals. In the late 1990s this was BODO liberation territory. Then we began climbing. The hills were well covered with trees. It was almost boring to see so many completely forested hills and so few buildings and people. Arunachal Pradesh is the emptiest state in north-east India. The road passed by shacks with restaurants and a toilet in a lean-to of corrugated iron. The people were Tibetan-looking, perhaps Monpa from the north. Kids and chickens crossed in front of the slow-moving Jeeps. Hour after hour, the vehicle trudged north.

  Army vehicles hogged the road in parts. Trucks turned up big plumes of dust that reduced visibility. There was something both exhilarating and irritating about having to wind up each valley in turn just to make northward progress. There was no straight road that could run directly, you had to go in and out of every valley issuing into the main valley; and then after a while you’d leap up and over some range of hills into another valley system. And all around were the conifer-forested hills.

  The Jeep stopped for the night, or rather I got off, at Dirang. I had been recommended to stop here by a young Frenchman I met in Guwhati. There was something about his manner that was most earnest and convincing. Normally I am fairly wary of traveller’s advice, but from him I accepted it. There was a brand-new monastery in Dirang that the Dalai Lama had visited in 2012. There was also a new nunnery on the other side of the river. Buddhism may have been pushed out of Tibet, but it is thriving here.

  I stayed in a government rest house that was like a cross between a multistorey car park and a hotel. You actually entered the building up concrete stairs from the basement car park. There was one room in the basement constructed by simply fencing in some concrete roof-supporting pillars with plywood. From this enclosed hut came the sound of loud music. When I was leaving, I stuck my head round the rudimentary door. Inside it was thick with smoke. It was the cave of the taxi drivers, whose cabs I had seen outside; they had a ghetto-blaster, plenty of beer, a blue pool table and two were playing pool. They all looked up and grinned at me. The rest of the hotel was completely dead by comparison.

  Like everywhere in Arunachal Pradesh, the streets were lined with beer shops. I walked out of town and on the way back in I met a local man who spoke very good English. He was weaving up the road and was completely drunk. ‘I do not want you to think ill of me, so I will forget this conversation. But I welcome you to my country, I welcome you! I have been travelling myself and that is why I have been drinking, this is not what I do every day, this is not my habitual state.’

  The next day I went looking for tigers in the hills. Arunachal Pradesh is probably home to more tigers than any other part of India. I went along the river, past the fluttering lines of Buddhist flags. I crossed over the flat alluvial river and walked past farms where everyone was using flails to thresh their barley on a giant tarpaulin laid out on the ground. By everyone, I mean every woman. No men were around. I watched through my zoom lens. One flailed for a while and when they were tired the daughter, or mother, took over. They had piles of cut barley waiting to be threshed.

  The farms were all tiny, no more than ten or twenty acres, and they all bordered each other on the land by the river, the broad strip of green that was good, and then suddenly you were up in the forest where the tigers were supposed to be.

  I had heard that tigers are rare in daylight and not at all likely to eat you unless they are man-eaters, but that was extremely unlikely. I hoped for a cough or a roar. What I mainly wanted to do was to get to the top of the hill, which was very much higher than I thought when I actually emerged from the farmland and into the forest.

  There were no real paths. I followed a cut line, a kind of ditch of red earth and stones, hot in the sun and very steep. It became too strenuous, so I branched out and found another dry stream bed to climb. Every so often I clambered up what would have been small waterfalls in the rainy season. I kept an eye open for snakes and scorpions, but it was hard to keep remembering as the woods all looked like dry pine forests in Scotland. I picked up various cones to take home for my children.

  It was getting steeper and lonelier and I was still no nearer the top. I had seen and heard no wildlife. Then, through a break in the canopy, I saw an eagle riding a thermal with its spread wings, fingers of feather unruffled and unmoving, still blue air behind and circling in wide lazy circles, looking down. That was the way to travel in the mountains. I carried on, but my mind was on that eagle.

  It was a new place and I will never forget it, but I knew I would have to turn back. It was one of those stillborn adventures that you have to have from time to time. I took a leak against a tree and listened. It was winter and though warm there were no flies or mosquitoes. It was the best time for such walking. I then waited for long minutes in case some creature should eventually lose its shyness and emerge, but none did. It is always the way with real wilderness – usually you see nothing, sometimes for days, and then you see an abundance of wildlife in one concentrated burst. I looked for the tiger, face bars blending with the shadows, but I saw none. I turned and gratefully made my way back to the farmland and the security of the wide shallow river and the people threshing their barley.

  The driving continued all the next day. We went over the pass where the Chinese came in 1962 and valiant Indian troops stopped them. It is hard to know why the Chinese are so keen to take this land. It’s the other side of several very high passes. It could not be controlled from Tibet if they overran it. Perhaps they simply want to take Tawang Monastery, because that’s where the Dalai Lama fled to in 1959. Symbolically home, despite being in another country.

  The high pass to Tawang, above the clouds

  The Jeep went ever higher; the pass is 4,500 metres and I felt fine. Maybe it would catch up with me later,
but because I only got out of the Jeep and took a picture and then got back in again, I wasn’t really straining myself. I had also spent a day at Dirang getting acclimatised to some extent. Tawang itself was shrouded in mist, and lower than the pass at about 3,000 metres. I made the foolish mistake of running about the town with my luggage to find the best hotel at the best price. This contradicted my self-given advice to take it easy at altitude for the first few days, even at the relatively low level of 3,000 metres. But all the hotels were similarly grim and expensive, and only with serious bargaining and asking for a new lightbulb to be thrown in as a sweetener did I get a half-decent room. Panelled with stained pine, it was like a cold ship’s cabin.

  I went down to the obligatory booze shops and bought some dodgy-looking rum and an extra-strong Kingfisher lager. None of the restaurants served alcohol, but no one minded if you brought your own. The best restaurant was also wood-panelled and above the ground up a flight of rickety outdoor stairs. The owner was proud of his food and it was good and also not expensive. I had been long enough in India now to have become a typical back-packing tightwad, begrudging spending more than a few hundred rupees on anything at any one time. The Himalayan parts of India are more expensive than the plains, though cheaper than the cities, and it was the memory of cheaper meals elsewhere that always drove me to find a bargain.

  It was a long walk up to the monastery. The roads were not straight, nor straightforward, but all led there in the end. On the skyline to one side was an enormous Buddha, as big as a church with a high steeple. You felt far from India here.

  The monastery is one of the oldest still running; it dates back to the seventeenth century. Because the style of building is square and modernistic, it doesn’t look like some hoary old fantasy monastery; rather it has a freshly whitewashed, red-and-yellow-painted aspect that at first belies its great age. But away from the open central square it is ancient and labyrinthine. Dogs and chickens roam the tiny alleys where the monks live. In the main meditation hall, a cavern of polished wood and chanting monks, a bell, as big as a bucket, hung with its short tail of rope right above the entrance. As the little boy monks left, each lad gave the bell an almighty swing, trying to make the loudest noise possible. Some jumped to reach it and timed their smash with aplomb. It was all tolerated, unlike school, where such obvious high jinks would have been curtailed for sure.

  Young monk and puppies, Tawang Monastery

  I went up to the museum of the monastery and an elderly monk gave me a ticket. Inside were photos of the young Dalai Lama when he arrived dressed as a Tibetan soldier in 1959. There were also pictures of him, a little later, wearing what looked like a white fedora hat and a brightly patterned robe – and why not? I once met a wealthy banker who denigrated the Dalai Lama for wearing tailored suits and Italian shoes. It was the double hypocrisy of a man guilty of his own materialism, projecting it on to another. The Dalai Lama owns nothing – in a sense – his life is spent doing his best to serve the Tibetan people. Unlike the banker, he has no wife, no kids, no fancy town house or country pad. He lives in exile and deserves all the pairs of Italian shoes he can get.

  You can’t nail the Dalai Lama down, he isn’t one thing or the other, he’s managed to twist and turn and keep the spirit of Tibet alive despite the crushing pressure of the Chinese occupation. To mention his name or to hand over a photograph of the Dalai Lama in Tibet is an arrestable offence. Even one like this. Leaving the Tawang Monastery, I met a young monk – only twenty – who asked me if it was true that the time in London was different to the time in India. I said it was and he marvelled at that. Then he asked me more questions. He was walking with a small boy – no more than twelve – who had a dental appointment in the town. The monk was cheerful and smiling like most Buddhist monks. And, like the Dalai Lama, full of curiosity about the outside world. It is as if, having been locked up for so long meditating and chanting, they are like prisoners tasting with joy anything on the ‘outside’. We have grown decadent, have we not? I found myself thinking. Or have I simply buried my curiosity under veneers of politeness? Though I have to say, he didn’t exactly answer my questions as fulsomely as I answered his. He wasn’t going to waste his time with this foreigner.

  Museum picture of the fourteenth Dalai Lama wearing hat

  In Tawang town every other shop, pretty much, is a booze shop. They certainly like drinking up there. The shops are run by Indians who trade for a living at 3,000 metres altitude, far from home, making a healthy profit on Godfather lager and super-strength Kingfisher, my preferred Himalayan tipple.

  At the Swiss Cottage restaurant – a pine-panelled cosy eatery lit with a central stove – I shared a six-pack of Kingfisher with a drunken monk, as he described himself. A ruddy-faced Monpa who had learned English in the monastery school, he had left to ‘get laid and see the world, but I ended up getting laid and not seeing the world!’.

  ‘Nobody likes to think they screwed up in their life so we invent nice stories to tell ourselves – but really there is no need! It’s impossible to screw up, I found that out!’ He was on his third Kingfisher by now and spluttering a little, but I got the gist: we take our own paths too seriously. ‘There is many many path, as many as people on the planet – no right path, wrong path. One door close, another open. All that matter is you stay alive and not get your spirit killed by worry and false thinking. Drinking is good – except it make you alcoholic like me! Smoking is good too – except it’s bad for your body. But they say a man who desires tobacco is a man who desires wisdom.’

  ‘That’s a lot of people!’

  ‘Yes – but desire is not enough, you have to do other thing.’

  ‘What sort of thing?’

  He started to laugh, filling his face with bread. ‘Be like this’ – he made open welcoming hands. ‘And this.’ Now his hand was flat, fingers pointing forwards, as if to say Don’t fear to be straightforward. Then he rocked it from side to side – ‘Get good feeling for the balance in everything. And find the thing you like doing.’

  ‘Anything else?’ I may have sounded flippant. His face was suddenly stern.

  ‘No.’.

  Acknowledgements

  The first acknowledgement is to all the Himalayan residents and travellers I met on my various journeys, who helped me in numerous ways: they are the core of any trip. Some I have mentioned, some not, all were important.

  A book is made from other books, to be sure, but it is at least as dependent on colleagues, friends and family: a thousand thanks to Dahlia Twigger for her excellent illustrated maps; Bea Hemming, Holly Harley and Elizabeth Allen at Orion; Andrew Kidd and Matthew Hamilton at Aitken Alexander; Jason Webster, Bijan Omrani, Rich Lisney, Jean and Tony Twigger, Piers Moor Ede, Adrian Turpin, Shaun Bythell, Tahir Shah, Christopher Ross, Ramsay Wood, Gill Whitworth, and John Blashford-Snell.

  A special extra thanks to Tarquin and Anu Hall who put up with me over Diwali; Pete Royall at keadventure.com, who hosted me on one of their excellent treks in the Garwhal Himalaya; and Dhanraj Gurung in Yoksum, Sikkim who also did a great job in outfitting a ten-day trek with his highly recommended redpan-datreks.weebly.com.

  Also thanks to Rigzin Skalzang, Michael and Caroline Sterling, David Benson, Stephen Slater, Peter Holmes, Christine Stewart; Andrew Bond for maps, guides, inspiration and stimulating conversation at the Alpine Club and elsewhere.

  Andrew Duff’s book on Sikkim was most welcome as an introduction to this fascinating place. And Sarnia Hosny, as always, for being such a stalwart support.

  Select Bibliography

  Charles Allen, Ashoka (Little, Brown, 2012)

  ____, A Mountain in Tibet (Abacus, 2003)

  Alexander Andreyev, Soviet Russia and Tibet: The Debacle of Secret Diplomacy (Brill, 2003)

  Michael Aris, ‘Sacred Dances of Bhutan’, National History Magazine (March 1980), 38–48

  Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, 1620

  Phil Bartlett, The Undiscovered Country (Ernest Press, 1993)


  C. M. Beall, D. Laskowski & S. C. Erzurum, ‘Nitric oxide in adaptation to altitude’, Free Radical Biology and Medicine 52(7) (1 April 2012), 1123–34

  Charles Bell, Portrait of a Dalai Lama: The Life and Times of the Great Thirteenth (Wisdom Publications, 1957)

  Herbert Benson, ‘Body temperature changes during the practice of gTum-mo yoga’, Nature 295 (1982), 234–6

  Edwin Bernbaum, The Way to Shambhala (Anchor Books, 1980)

  Scott Berry, A Stranger in Tibet (Kodansha International, 1989)

  Paul Bert, Barometric Pressure: Researches in Experimental Physiology, trans. Mary Alice & Fred A. Hitchcock (College Book Company, 1943)

  Zeff Bjerken, ‘Exorcising the Illusion of Bon “Shamans”: A Critical Genealogy of Shamanism in Tibetan Religions’, Revue dEtudes Tibétaines 6 (September 2004), 4–59

  Chris Bonington, The Climbers: History of Mountaineering (BBC Books, 1992)

  Anatoli Boukreev & G. Weston DeWalt, The Climb: Tragic Ambitions on Everest (St Martin’s Press, 1998)

  Garma Chang, The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa, 2 vols (University Books, 1962)

  Frederick Spencer Chapman, Lhasa: The Holy City (Chatto & Windus, 1940)

  Bruce Chatwin, Utz (Jonathan Cape, 1988)

  Clement of Alexandria, The Stromata, Book 1, Chapter XV

  Peter D. Clift & Jerzy Blusztajn, ‘Reorganization of the western Himalayan river system after five million years ago’, Nature 438 (2005), 1001–3

  Aleister Crowley, The Confessions of Kleister Crowley: An Autohagiograhy, eds. John Symonds & Kenneth Grant (Arkana, 1989)