I was better off than some: Ron had a pounding headache, Charlie had a headache and a racing pulse, Lucy was recovering from diarrhea. Only Gunther and Allison seemed to be a hundred percent, but who knows? It’s their nature to be quiet and uncomplaining.
As we climbed, several of the highest peaks of the Himalayas encircled us, like high lamas gathered for a secret meeting, wearing their ceremonial pointed hats. Snow, ice, and glaciers rose behind us, beside us, before us. What was not white or glacial blue was brown or gray, severe and harsh against the clear sky. We’d left the roaring Marsyangdi River behind to follow a smaller, whispering tributary as it tiptoed through this land of titans. We reached several false summits. We’d been warned about them, but knowing didn’t make me feel better. Each step forced me to question whether I could take another. I was exhausted nearly to tears, then beyond that to numb acceptance.
It was not fun. Yet I was deeply moved. These mountains. This suspended moment. This sense of the temporal confronting the eternal. As we rose, my soul swelled outward from some deep place, as if trying to merge with the strange beauty surrounding me.
Just before eleven, nearly five hours after setting out, we spotted a mass of multicolored prayer flags strung in several lines radiating outward from a post, like the dusty, ragged remains of a circus tent. At the sight, tears of joy swam in my eyes. We had reached the high point of the pass: 5416 meters (17, 769 feet). Looking around, I realized we’d truly arrived between a rock and a hard place: to one side, soaring brown rock, to the other, a soaring white hard place.
Like a bunch of high school seniors on graduation day, we rushed to the high point, where we hugged and jumped up-and-down and took photos. Faces that just a few minutes before had been grimacing in agony were now beaming with self-congratulations.
The celebration lasted fewer than five minutes. The wind whipped us with stinging nettles of freezing cold, and my bladder hit me with a blinding need to pee. There was no possibility of privacy in this barren, wind-blasted saddle. I rushed down-slope and behind the low-lying teahouse to squat with relief, still visible to anyone upslope who cared to look.
No, the teahouse was not a delusion brought on by exhaustion. A true entrepreneur knows no bounds. I bought a Mars bar and a cup of tea from the Tibetan who told us he lives at the Thorung La Teahouse for two weeks at a time, before trading shifts with someone else. He was a distinguished fellow, fortyish, wearing a fur cap and fleece jacket. The candy bar cost an exorbitant 110 rupees. That’s about $1.50, more than twice what it would cost in the States. But I figured I’d earned the chocolate and the Tibetan had earned the cash. He had to drag candy bars, biscuits, and tea up the mountain, then live at this frozen outpost for days on end—all to sell snacks and drinks to foreigners between the hours of nine and noon each day. Thorung La means “hearth god pass.” It is a bizarre place for a hearth, and a lonely existence for the one who keeps it.
After about fifteen minutes, we got ready to leave. Lucy and I were still putting on our packs when our companions tore downhill at full throttle. “I really hate that!” I shouted after them. “Can’t they wait thirty seconds?” No response. “Yeah? Fuck you too!” I don’t think they heard me. Then, while I was still buckling my straps, Lucy, who’d complained all along about people rushing off without her, tore after them without a word. I guess the whole “all for one” bit only applied to the way up, not the way down.
Yet the way down had some dangerous pitfalls. We had gained about 900 meters (nearly 3,000 feet) climbing from Thorung Phedi to Thorung La, but we would lose about 1,600 meters (more than five thousand feet) on our way down from Thorung La to Muktinath. The going was so steep it was hard to keep from pitching forward into an uncontrolled, breakneck rush. And there was quite a scary drop alongside the narrow path.
The terrain was a tilting moonscape of rock, with few changing sights to distract me from my anger at being deserted. Having eaten nothing since breakfast but a candy bar and tea, I was so ravenous I developed my first headache of the trek. This did little to improve my mood.
I didn’t catch up with my friends until the next teahouse, and by then I was in such a snit I couldn’t speak. I let them assume I was too worn out for words. Deep down I knew I was being petty. The only risk we’d discussed when we’d planned to stick together was AMS. We were on our way out of that danger, and it was presumptuous, I suppose, to expect anything we hadn’t specifically agreed upon. Some silent time with a bowl of noodle soup improved my point of view considerably.
As the hours of downhill pounding went on, my boots pulverized my toes into a mashed clump of tenderized meat. My legs felt like spaghetti. Once, my foot gave way, twisting my ankle into a tuning fork of pain. Then I fell on my ass for no apparent reason.
I walked the final stretch with Lucy, both of us lagging well behind the others. As we wobbled down the final rocky stairway into the village, we were taken aback by a seeming mirage: a patch of luminescent green farmland in the center of the valley. After hours of stone and dust, ice and snow, we could hardly have been more surprised to see a chlorine-blue swimming pool full of bikini-clad women.
The others had stopped at the first guesthouse they saw, too exhausted to investigate further, and Lucy and I arrived to discover they’d reserved a room for us. This time Lucy didn’t complain that she wasn’t consulted. It was about four in the afternoon, ten hours since we’d set out. It felt like days. For a time, I wandered about the lodge in a stupor.
One by one, we gathered in the dining room, slumped in our chairs, and fell into an inexorable Annapurna daze. Then Nat entered in a Tazmanian Devil whirl, as loud, charming, and obnoxious as ever, and we couldn’t help but laugh. He looked different, and it took me several minutes to realize it was because he’d shaved and showered. He’d arrived in Muktinath yesterday. Zack had moved on.
When I came to my senses, I took my first shower since Manang, four days ago, and washed my hair for the first time since Chame, eight days ago. It was a relief to feel clean again. But the glow of accomplishment I’d felt atop Thorung La was gone, replaced by an anticlimactic weariness that penetrated every last nerve, from my outermost skin to the bottom of my soul.
***
This time Charlie’s rant was about religion. “Before I came to India and Nepal, I heard about the devotion of the people to their Hindu religion. I’m not impressed,” she blew the words out in a disdainful huff of air. “I think this idea of reincarnation is nothing but an excuse to accept fate and do nothing to improve life, just throwing your hands up and saying it’s your karma, waiting for the next life to make things better. The caste system is disgusting, this idea that the poor deserve their fate. This system only helps the higher castes keep their privileges.”
I considered arguing that the fallibility of human institutions didn’t disprove the existence of the divine, but disagreeing with Charlie is an invitation to apoplexy. While she derided the beliefs of Hindu people, I knew that her opinion was born of compassion. Charlie wants all the disenfranchised people of the world to be as strong as she is, to learn to say “no.”
An equal-opportunity humanistic atheist, she doesn’t like Christianity either, or any religion, “Although, at least Christians only have one God—or maybe three, I still can’t figure that out. Well, do you know the Hindus have 3000 gods and goddesses? That is ridiculous. Just imagine how long it would take to study them all! And how can you decide which god you want to pray to? I mean it’s a logistical nightmare, isn’t it?”
We were walking to the nearby holy site of Muktinath. For the six of us—the girls, Gunther, and Ron—it was an intriguing way to mark our completion of the passage over Thorung La. But for Hindus and Tibetan Buddhists, Muktinath is the final destination of a sacred pilgrimage. Muktinath means “Lord of Salvation,” another name for the Hindu god Vishnu. The site also goes by the name Chumig Gyatsa, a Tibetan phrase meaning “A Hundred Waters.” People
come from all over the world to bathe in Vishnu’s sacred waters and see his sacred flame. Many of the faithful are Indians who walk hundreds of miles to get here.
At first glance, Muktinath is a humble collection of temples, shrines, and gardens, remarkable mostly for its location. Its strings of prayer flags—red, green, white, yellow, and blue—look festive against the brown and white rain shadow of the Annapurnas. When we entered, I walked up to one of the pagodas and rang the small bells that dangled before the shrines. As I passed into a temple courtyard, I met a venerable sadhu in saffron robes. He told me he spent 180 days walking here from India. His English was limited, but I learned that he was a true sadhu who had renounced all worldly things, not one of those fake sadhus who hand out wildflowers to surprised tourists then demand money from the befuddled recipients.
As we walked on, Gunther told me the well-known story of another sadhu, known as Lotan Baba, “The Rolling Saint.” A few years ago Lotan Baba spent six months rolling 2500 miles across India to reach a shrine in the foothills of the Himalayas.
“Rolling?” I said, “You mean like doing somersaults, head over heels?”
“No, he rolled while lying down,” Gunther said. “They say his body was covered with blisters when he arrived.”
“And this was supposed to prove what?”
“It was his way of showing his humility and dedication.”
“But what benefit is it? Does rolling lead to enlightenment?”
“I think it depends on your intention. It’s like chanting a mantra—”
“Or kneeling to repeat prayers with rosary beads, or sitting in Buddhist meditation. I think I get it. It still sounds weird.”
“Yes, it is weird. But I also think it’s very impressive.”
“I guess it’s no weirder than doing anything else. I mean, what’s the point of walking for three weeks through the Himalayas?”
“Riiight,” he said with a gratified nod, as if pleased to be understood.
Leaving the sadhu and Gunther behind, I wandered into the outer courtyard with Ron. There stood a stone wall with 108 spigots shaped like the heads of boars, all pouring water from their mouths. Hence the name Chumig Gyatsa, “A Hundred Waters.” The water originates from a mountain spring. According to tradition: once upon a time, a guru came here with 84 siddhas, holy men with special powers. Each siddha made a hole in the ground with a stick, and water appeared in all eighty-four holes. Today, it’s considered a blessing to bathe underneath all 108 of the fountains fed by the holy spring.
When we entered, a woman wearing a bathing sari was standing at one end of the wall, steeling herself for the shock of cold water. She then rushed along the wall with mincing steps, passing under every spout, shivering. At the end she turned my way, and when our eyes met we both laughed. As she bent over to wring the icy water from her long dark hair, Ron and I moved on in search of the other element that makes Muktinath holy: fire.
At the Temple of Jwala Mai, the Temple of Miraculous Fire, there burns an “eternal” flame. The flame is fed by a natural gas source in the mountain, and it floats atop the spring at a place where the water rises through the earth. That flame, combined with the spring, is what makes Muktinath so uniquely holy, because it combines all four sacred elements: earth, water, air, and fire.
We asked several people where we could find the fire, but some didn’t understand what we were talking about, and others said it wasn’t possible to see the sacred flame. It became clear that our problem was the language barrier. I felt a stab of regret, knowing that language is a key to culture and I was standing at a locked door.
Ron and I gave up on finding the miraculous fire. As we started to leave, I spotted a long procession of mani walls lined with prayer wheels. I told him to go on without me, while I stayed to spin the wheels. When I reached the end, I spotted a plain, whitewashed building inside a courtyard. Just as I decided there was nothing much to the place, a young woman sitting on the balcony of another structure told me to step inside the unremarkable building. So I opened the door and walked in.
It took my eyes a moment to adjust to the darkness. The nearly empty room was just as humble inside as out. Several candles burned before an altar. A few fresh candles sat nearby, so I donated a coin and lit one. As I stared at the flames and tried to let my mind go, the young woman from the balcony entered. She pointed out a box near the floor, just under the altar. Its opening was covered with a mesh screen. She indicated I should look inside. And there it was: a pale blue flame hovering above unseen shadows.
In response to my excited spluttering, the woman verified that I was, indeed, looking at the holy fire that “never goes out.” Like the men who expected the Holy Grail to be made of gold and precious jewels, Ron and I had made the mistake of trying to find the flame in a place of auspicious appearance. Now that I’d found it, I was both awed and amused. Awed because, well, here it was, the thing all these Hindus and Buddhists trudged hundreds and thousands of miles to see. Amused because, as I told the group when I caught up with them, “It looked about as awe-inspiring as a pilot light for a gas stove. The Eternal Pilot Light of Muktinath.”
Unlike a climb up Mount Everest, a trek around the Annapurna Circuit does not lead to a single, ultimate destination, but instead takes people in a circle. In a circle, beginning, middle, and end are arbitrary designations. We merely pass through various points and let them mean whatever we want. Even if we want to forget that it’s not about the destination but the journey, the circle won’t let us. Whether we’re on a spiritual quest or simply crave new experiences, here we discover that everything we seek is only part of a journey without end.
pokhara, nepal
After eighteen days, today all of us were ready to quit walking, maybe for the rest of our lives. So, with dogged purpose, we booked downhill toward Birethanti, a nearly 1700-meter (5600-foot) plummet in altitude in just four hours.
The terrain was radically different from everything we’d seen since the first day. It was a superfluity of tropical madness: Tarzan jungle, monumental trees, and careless mosses, all bisected and re-bisected by waterfalls. The forest hemmed us in like a shadowy, wet, green cocoon.
Then came the extreme downhill push. The pull of gravity was intense. My left foot twisted out from under me no fewer than four times, wrenching my ankle until I feared one more twist would sprain it. A Spanish trekker came by and walked backwards for a few steps, just for a change in the muscle strain.
“Muchas escaleras!” he said, grinning up at us.
“What did he say?” Gunther asked me.
“Many stairs.”
Lucy and I soon fell far behind the group . When we reached Birethanti, she was like a horse that’s smelled the barn, swinging her walking poles like tiny galloping hooves, clack-clack-clack-clack. As I chased Lucy down the long cobblestone street, the large village of Birethanti flew past me in a blur of cookie-cutter stone houses, cafés, and souvenir shops.
We found the gang waiting for us at a café above the river. Our final stop. There were uncontainable grins and irrepressible laughter and a flurry of congratulations. “You did it, Cara!” Nat said, slapping me on the back so hard I almost tripped.
Gunther sat on a bench nursing his ankle. The thing I’d feared would happen to me had happened to him: he’d fallen on the unforgiving rock stairs and sprained his ankle. It was already swollen. I offered him the instant cold pack I carried in my first aid kit, but he turned it down, insisting the pain wasn’t that bad. He wasn’t convincing. As we rushed to catch the bus on the edge of town, Gunther limped to keep up.
At its edge, the pretty town of Birethanti unraveled like the ends of a cheaply made skirt, giving way to pitiful hovels made of wood, tin, and paper. Women wearing stained dresses and long hair-scarves held babies with wide, staring, liquid brown eyes.
A stairway up a dirt slope led to the bus stop. As I climbed the s
teps, a tiny girl, maybe two years old, smiled down at the passing trekkers from the window of a wooden shack and shouted in a voice twice the size of her tiny frame: “Namaste! Namaste! Namaste!”
I shouted back, “Namaste!”
So she shouted louder, “Namaste!”
So I shouted louder, “Namaste!”
So she shouted at the top of her lungs, “namaste! namaste!”
We exchanged silly grins.
When I reached the top and saw the bus, I felt the disorientation of culture shock—experienced in reverse. It was the first motorized vehicle I’d seen since Besisahar three weeks ago. Part of me wanted to shrink back from its imposing metal and rubber, its smell of petrol and hubbub of activity.
The bus was pretty full, so about half our group climbed onto the roof. The three German girls and I squeezed inside with dozens of Nepalis, a handful of other trekkers, and a baby goat. The German girls and their packs sat wedged into the back seat, next to an old woman who was falling-down drunk. The old woman was also nursing a rattling cough, which prompted all three young women to lean as far away from her as possible, pressing together into a tighter clutch.
The smelly, crowded, coughing bus could not check our high spirits. We couldn’t stop grinning at each other. Even Lucy was infected by the same exuberant cheerfulness as the rest of us. However, when she attempted to lead a sing-along, Charlie kindly browbeat her until she gave up.
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