by Rob Binkley
“You’re being very un-Zen, Rob,” Brian said looking at his map, which was upside down. “It’s gonna be fine. C’mon.” He put it away and pretended like he knew what he was doing. “Let’s just have fun with it.” And he kept walking in the wrong direction.
After hiking a steep ascent for nearly two days, we had somehow descended into a marijuana field on the wrong side of the mountain. “This is how people get shot for trespassing,” I said. “Keep watch while I go pick some weed.”
Brian ran off further into the abyss. I scanned the mountainside for signs of life while Brian stole marijuana. In the distance, I saw someone coming up behind us on another trail. It was a pregnant mother who was hiking her kids up the mountain.
Brian returned out of breath. “Now our vice pack is fully loaded.”
“Look, there’s a lady!” I said. We yelled for help and motioned for her to stop—which she did. We told her we were lost. She said to follow her.
“Thank God for mothers. They’ve got that nurturing gene.” I said, “Any man would’ve let us die to thin out the pack.”
“You’re such a Darwinist,” Brian replied.
I started chatting with the mother while we hiked. She noticed we had no camping gear so we told her our theory of packing light and relying on the kindness of strangers. She said we were foolish, but she also said she owned a teahouse on the Chamrong side of the mountain where we could stay the night. “You pay to stay.”
I looked at Brian. ‘Kindness of strangers’ … That’s Tennessee Williams, by the way. And you say I never read.”
“You’re not illiterate, congratulations. Here, have a protein bar.”
Back on the trail, we couldn’t keep up with the pregnant mother, either. She left us in the dust with two kids on her back. It was a torturous six-hour uphill battle to Chamrong; I was limping in agony uphill on bloody heels while leeches were attacking Brian again. We were a mess; we had blood all over us when we finally made it.
We clamored to the only “guesthouse” in the village, which was some person’s ramshackle home.
“Wonder if this is that mother’s place?” We walked up to the front door and saw the same pregnant mother we met hours earlier. She was outside scooping Yak dung with her bare hands. She waved a handful of dung at us and invited us inside. She said they use dung for “cooking.”
“Can we order takeout tonight?” Brian asked.
“Think she means they burn it like wood.”
“Sure she does.”
We paid her sixty cents apiece for one night’s stay in a little wooden back room attached to her house. Before dinner, we drank tea in her kitchen and watched her kids run around the house swatting each other with uncooked chicken legs, which we would later have for dinner.
After dinner, I hobbled around the village and bought a pair of flip-flops off a local vendor. They’re not ideal footwear for a fifty-mile trek in the Himalayas, but I was done with my boots and the stores had nothing else to offer.
“So, you’re going from boots to a pair of cardboard slippers?” Brian was not impressed.
“Beats going barefoot.” I showed him my heel, which was worn down to something resembling the bone.
Brian shook his head. “Always be prepared, Rob.” I stared at him blankly.
“You were never a Boy Scout, were you?”
“No.”
“I can tell.”
The third morning on the trail, the mother served us lemon pancakes for breakfast, then we took off full of energy again. We tried to keep pace with the locals and my flip-flops were working better after I cut some toe holes into my long socks and tied plastic bags around my feet to keep them as watertight as I could.
We thought we were making good time until we saw an old Nepalese man blow past us carrying a fifty-pound bag of rice on his head. “The rice head guy is a monster,” Brian said puffing for air. We couldn’t catch up with him for eight miles. He was amazing. Later, a little Nepalese girl passed us with the customary namaste greeting while hiking straight up!
We tried to at least keep up with one of them. Trailing the old rice head and the kid, we heard faint crying coming from the kid’s straw backpack; it was a baby. “We just got passed by an old man carrying a bag of rice on his head, a little girl, and a baby!” Brian said.
“I used to be a soccer stud,” I moaned.
“Try not to think … it saps energy. Focus on improving.”
A little later Brian said, “Aren’t there supposed to be monkeys and tigers up here? They must be freezing … Haven’t seen one Yeti yet.”
“I’ve been telling everyone a Yeti ate my hiking boots.”
We took a long hike through a rhododendron forest and finally saw a gang of monkeys and they did look cold, but no Yeti yet. We descended to a suspension bridge over the Chomrong Khola and hiked through the villages of Sinuwa, Kuldiha, and Bamboo to the village of Dobhan, where we came upon a shrine that was the sacred home of the deity Panchhi Baraha.
Next to it was a spectacular view of a waterfall. From there on, the trail was a steep incline all the way to the Himalaya Hotel, where we would stay for the night. An hour away from the hotel, we stopped at the Hinku Cave, a popular camping shelter that’s a landmark for many mountaineering expeditions. It was a cool place to rest my aching feet and trade our vice pack for more supplies.
After Hinku Cave, we crossed several streams before entering the Annapurna sanctuary. By nightfall, we made it to the Himalaya Hotel where we ate bad pizza and warmed our sweat-soaked clothes by the fire. It was so extremely cold that we had to beg, borrow, and steal extra blankets to sleep with at night.
The next day, we started to notice two blokes from England on the trail who quickly became our comic relief. They didn’t look like they belonged here at all. Brian took one look at the overweight one and said, “If we stay at the same guesthouse as that dude, he’s buying the whole pack.”
We hiked all day then checked into our teahouse for the night. A few hours later, the front door swung open and in dragged those two blokes, completely gassed and about to die. “We need beer!” one of them shouted, then they both laughed and literally collapsed on the floor by the front desk.
Brian looked at me, smiled, and patted his pack. “We’re not the sorriest souses on the hill, after all.”
We ended up befriending these two maniacs for a few days. They turned out to have great senses of humor. Paul was the unfit, chain-smoking one from London and Ted was a huge guy who was a bit more fit but had no stamina. At night, we’d spend the evening drinking beers and joking around with them. They chain-smoked and cursed incessantly.
Each morning we started off together (after our customary lemon pancakes) and Brian and I would try to get them to hike hard with us. But after a few hundred paces, Ted would start swearing at us, telling us to “piss off” then he’d just lay down panting. Paul was never far behind and would always collapse on top of Ted.
Brian and I just stood there watching them rolling around cussing at us. They smoked even when they were on the ground gasping for air. The juxtaposition of their polluted bodies and the beautiful natural surroundings was hilarious. “Those cigarettes are glued to your gasping blowholes!” Brian cackled and took pictures of their failure. “You both need immediate medical attention!”
After four nights with these characters, we’d developed a good friendship.
While we were hanging out one night, some backpacker who was on the way down the mountain told us a secret. He said there was a MBC base camp up at four thousand meters that had a hostel where you could get a double room or go on the cheap out in the common area for one dollar.
“What’s so cool about that?” I asked.
“The funny part is—if you stay in the common area, there is this old Nepalese woman who works there who will come out late at night and try to screw you. No shit.”
“No farmer’s daughter?” Brian frowned.
“More like the farmer’s grandmot
her. Talking post-menopausal here,” the backpacker said. “You gotta check it out.”
Despite her purported age, a loose woman on the mountain still interested Brian, but I could tell Ted had a much higher degree of interest. “That’s where we’re going then!” Ted said, puffing on a cigarette.
Some kind of immoral game was afoot.
Still hiking long days up steep dirt paths. It was a bit slippery wearing flip-flops, but feasible. After rope-crossing two glaciers, we finally reached the legendary MBC base camp and checked in at the infamous Yeti Guest Home. Brian and I weren’t interested in getting molested by the old Nepalese women, but we wanted to make sure she wasn’t hot, so we hung out at the lodge and after a while out came an old, squat little lady.
“That … is no mountain angel, my friend,” Brian said. We looked at each other and immediately secured a double room; we had no intention of having sex with this borderline elderly Nepalese woman. When Ted finally made it up, however (chain-smoking slows him down in many ways), he went straight to the lodge area and spread out his sleeping bag! He was a better man than we would ever be.
That night, we all sat around drinking beers and staring at this infamous “mountain cougar.” I don’t know if I was more horrified at the idea of Ted getting molested by this old Nepalese woman, or by the fact that he was excited about it. We were so tired from hiking all day, Brian and I didn’t even have the energy to stick around and watch.
The first thing next morning, we were about to leave but had to see if Ted was still in the grasps of this legendary cougar. When we finally saw him at breakfast, he had this big smile on his face. “So??” We couldn’t stop laughing. Ted told us it “was great!” over a double stack of lemon pancakes. How that could be was beyond me … Ted went up very high on my admiration list.
We started our trek down later that morning, which was more dangerous this time of year with the glaciers and the rain. If you fell, it meant instant death. We had seen LOST photos of hikers that have never been found at every guesthouse on the mountain.
Hiking back down over iced glaciers in flip-flops was challenging, especially with the thousand-foot drops. Still, we made it in half the time it took us to get up. “Do you see the face of God in these mountains?” I asked Brian while we stopped to take in the view.
“I do,” he said, and smiled that Zen smile of his. “God has a snowy white beard,” he said, and pointed to a mountain peak, which did look like a bearded man’s face.
We were at peace but we missed our buddies Ted and Paul, who we lost on the trek down. “I hope they don’t end up on the ‘Lost Hiker’ billboards,” Brian said.
It took us five days but we finally made it down to the Captain’s Lodge, where we stayed for fifty cents a night. We actually had a hot shower, which was our first in two weeks. It was orgasmic. That night, we went to bed contented. I would have felt better but I was attacked by a tick and Brian had to cut into my chest and pull the little sucker out.
On our last day, we hiked back down through several villages with cornfields coming out of the mountains and into Pokhara. We finally completed the hike. We had met many beautiful people on the trail and somehow survived by bartering vice goods and relying on the kindness of strangers who let us stay in their teahouses and with their families. It was moving to experience how nice the Nepalese people were to a couple of strangers like us.
We spent two nights at Hotel Oslo in Pokhara recovering our beleaguered bodies, then we took the bus back through the mountains to Kathmandu where we saw two more buses flipped over.
“Not to alarm you, but … those weren’t here on the way up,” Brian rightly noticed.
Back in Kathmandu, we enjoyed two nights back at the Kathmandu Guesthouse, where we prepared for our next adventure: exploring the Royal Chitwan National Park, one of the largest jungle preserves in Asia.
I was nervous about the drive since the locals said the road from Kathmandu to Sauraha was even more dangerous than the drive to Pokhara. Brian was not afraid. “Someone is watching over us; can’t you feel it?” Brian said. “Why stop now?”
“Exactly,” I said. “Why stop now?”
We left for Sauraha the next day on a bus and arrived in a Jeep. The bus got stuck in a flooded river, so we abandoned it. No one was hurt, which was a blessing. Seven of us backpackers piled out of the back of this little Jeep to check into the Rainforest Guest House, which had elephants on the property. That night, I bonded with one outside my window. He came up to say hello; I fed him two bananas. It was incredible to look into his eyes and wonder what he was thinking.
“He has wise, kind eyes,” I remarked to Brian. “You can sense a deep understanding.”
“I wouldn’t mind being reincarnated as one in my next life,” he said.
We checked in and walked around Sauraha, which is a tropical village on the outskirts of the park. The villagers here lead a simple life, raising corn and rice. They were all beautiful and had many children trailing them. The women have pretty dark complexions and slender bodies. “I think I’m in love,” I said when a few of the young women walked by us.
“I’d keep your distance, or their fathers will string you up,” Brian said, pointing to two frowning elders who were watching us gawk.
Later that evening, we sat around the campfire outside our hostel, talking and smoking some of the pot that we picked in the Annapurna field. We got on the topic of how to delay orgasms. My method was thinking about my grandmother (which was effective), but some of the other guys’ ways of doing it around the world were fairly disturbing. One guy from Germany thought of the Holocaust, and the other guy, a Spaniard, thought about the Crucifixion.
Brian explained he never holds his orgasms. “I’d rather die than block my chi, man.”
We moved over to the Hotel Wildlife Camp that was inside the park the next morning. Brian and I hired an elephant to take us on an excursion into the jungle. It wasn’t the most comfortable ride, but it was energetic and fun. It didn’t take long to notice that a giant elephant crashing through the jungle tends to scare off any other animals. We didn’t see much except for a rhinoceros, which was exciting but it was only a fleeting view.
The next day, we hired a guide to take us on foot into the jungle in search of tigers, rhinoceros, and whatever else was lurking. We went in quietly this time. I asked our guide what kind of defense we would have if we were attacked; our guide assured us we would be safe, even though he only carried a stick.
“That stick better be an enchanted wizard’s staff, or we’re screwed,” Brian said.
We trekked through tall elephant grass and ran into a bunch of monkeys. Then we met some rhinos. Every time one appeared, we scampered up a nearby tree since rhinos can’t see very well and will charge any movement. We’d stay up in the tree for a while until the big fellas waddled away.
The next thing we knew, we stumbled on two fully grown tigers. What an adrenaline rush it was to see them face-to-face. Everyone says to stand your ground, make a lot of noise, and slowly back away—but the reality is you’re shitting your pants and it’s every man for himself. After freezing for a second, Brian and I panicked and took off running, which was probably the worst thing we could do. Sprinting away, I looked back and saw one of the tigers jogging toward us, but it stopped.
“Must be full!” Brian said in full sprint.
“Keep running!” I shouted.
We ran ahead of our guide all the way back to the village, and didn’t stop until we were inside a little store where we bought some beer. Amped up, we told our tale to the villagers. The village elder smiled at our excitement. He told us spotting a tiger is very rare and that we were “blessed to have that experience.” We took it as an omen of good things to come.
That night we sat by the campfire and watched the elephants eat fruit from the trees by our guesthouse. “Well, Rakow, we dodged another bullet from the death gun.”
“If those tigers were hungry, we’d be so dead right now,” Bria
n said.
“Or our guide would. How many lives do you think we have left?”
“Enough to get us to the promised land,” he said. “It’s time.”
9
Turning Point in Tibet
BRIAN WAS PLAYING mind reader again.
Once the thrill of the chase died down it occurred to me that spiritual nirvana was on the northern horizon, and here we were bragging about getting barely chased by a fat tiger like a couple of wide-eyed tourists when we were so close to doing something real. What were we waiting for??
The adventures of the past few weeks had tested our bodies and our spirits, but Brian and I decided over our post-tiger beers to stop screwing around once and for all and test the sanctity of our souls already by visiting Nepal’s neighbor, Tibet—once home to the Dalai Lama and still the epicenter of the Buddhist world.
We were coming to the party a few decades late. The Chinese, threatened by the influence the Dalai Lama, govern over a hundred million of his Buddhist countrymen after they forcibly took control of Tibet back in 1959 and committed genocide on a million plus Tibetans who dared to passively protest their invasion. So what we were about to experience is a communist-controlled, watered-down version of Tibet. Still, we had to see “the roof of the world” for ourselves. The Chinese may have taken over their land, but they could not kill the Tibetan spirit.
“It occurs to me that our entire lives have led to this moment,” Brian said, eager to start our bus journey north through the clouds into the highest elevated country on earth, a whopping average of sixteen thousand feet. “I have a feeling when we leave Tibet, we’ll be changed forever.”
Brian had no idea how prophetic his statement would turn out to be.
It took our bus five hours to get to the Nepal–Tibetan border, where we were to begin a steep ascent. Brian and I were on a tour with eight other travelers, which was the only way the Chinese would allow us into “their” country.