The Road to Zagora

by Richard Collins

  I really didn’t want to stay the night in Gorakhpur or the vicinity and planned to go from Delhi to Kathmandu in a day and a half’s travel. I had arranged for a car to meet us at the border and so we were met by our new trekking guide, Keran, and a young driver, a man called Susan. We drove for, I don’t know, maybe seven hours and got to Kathmandu at nine thirty in the evening. After a couple of days sorting out trekking permits and hiring sleeping bags and down jackets we were off to Giri and the start of a twenty-eight day trek. We were headed for Namche Bazaar and then Gokyo and the hill above it, Gokyo Ri, from where we would be able to see Everest.

  There are no roads in that part of the country and the main trail from Giri to the regional centre, Namche, runs at a right angle to the grain of the land, crossing high passes (two of them, I think, over 10,000ft) and deep valleys. It was hard work for us but much harder work for the porters who carried food stuffs, building materials and so forth up to Namche. These porters carried huge loads up and down steep slopes wearing cheap plimsolls. Some of them carried kerosene, which, being a liquid, sloshed about in containers on their backs. They were often young and sometimes female and came from very poor neighbouring areas. They carried little walking sticks that doubled as pack rests. On a steep slope they would stop regularly and prop their pack against these things to take the weight off their backs. Their progress was very slow. What was to us an adventure was to them, I believe, a living nightmare. We shared the trail with them but were in different universes. It felt wrong of course. But they were carrying goods up to supply the tourist industry without which they would have no work and be poorer.

  One porter functioned as a sort of shop on legs. The outside of his huge pack was festooned with brightly coloured wools. We asked him if we could take his photograph and he stood up straight and proud for the camera. We bought some sachets of shampoo from him at a minute price.

  I can’t say much about our guide, Keran, or our porter, Take, because we never got to know them well. Keran spoke quite reasonable English but, like all Nepalis, was reserved, never asking us about ourselves or talking about himself and his life openly. Take had been with us on our first trek and we were pleased to see him but he spoke little English and was shy. They were both handsome young men in their twenties, quite small, with high cheekbones, narrow eyes and no facial hair. Keran talked to us in a friendly, casual way but something distanced him from us as time went by. For some reason he grew more reserved but I never understood why. Perhaps it was something that we said or did that was inappropriate in that culture.

  Flic was carrying a sketchbook, of course, and also watercolours. She wrote and drew and painted every day. Here is some of her writing from that first part of the trek, the endlessly up and down route to Namche:

  Went down to Bandar and found a quiet lodge. I painted and drew a crowd of children who wanted eyes noses mouths painted on their hands. Their clothes are grubby and so’re their hands but they are all outside playing in the monastery garden along with monks playing interesting music and a man repainting the stupa.

  Left Bandar at 7 am. I had had a terrible night not sleeping and a sore throat queasy feelings anxious dreams so next day didn’t feel much like going far. I told Richard and Keran that I was exhausted and they decided to stop nearby in Kenja. The man there was protecting his bees by standing guard by the hollowed tree trunk with a stick and killing bad giant bees that wanted to kill his honey bees. He showed us his garden – growing ginger, curryfruit vine.

  From Goyam we had to keep climbing to cross a high mountain pass. The rocks here are full of mica and its dust gets carried into the air and makes it sparkle.

  Just over the pass were lots of blue gentians then down through pine woods and rhododendrons and thick lumpy moss distorting the shapes of trees, which were enormous. And there were maple trees turning orange. Past the forest the path straightened out we stopped to eat at a house but it was too smoky to eat inside with Keran and Tek. There were beautiful rocks – very big covered with Sherpa lettering. Then on through farmed land and cattle cows bulls yaks.

  Jumbesi seems an amazing place so sophisticated and prosperous glass in windows paved streets Buddhist temple water powered prayer wheel and mill. The beautiful powerful river rushes along around rocks where people wash clothes.

  All the water is polluted you can see pipes coming from the bottom of wooden toilets straight into the river. With no road it would be impossible to build a sewage works unless reedbeds could be used. So it isn’t as heavenly as it seems – people can’t have good health without clean water.

  Down down down from Nunchello to where the crickets start to sing and people grow more food, over the long chain bridge over the Dudhcosi – the milk river which flows from a glacier, then along a bit through a very fertile valley growing yams and sugar cane, pumpkins, sweetcorn bananas pears chilli tomato cucumber tomato trees white radishes winter wheat millet potatoes. I felt quite hungry and we stopped and ate some food with some children – we peeled it with our fingers yams sweet potatoes, soya beans and roast sweetcorn and squash.

  One day we came across some people with a freshly killed water buffalo. They covered it in dry grass which they set fire to in order burn off the animal’s hair. It may well have been this same animal that we met with again several times in the form of a carcass cut up and carried in baskets (all uncovered and bloody, as Flic noted) on the backs of three porters. It grew smellier as time went by and we would overtake the porters to get well away from it.

  We walked for ten days over this corrugated landscape seeing very few other trekkers and not coming close to the big snow-capped peaks. The days were good but in the evenings I tended to think about the future, about my ill health and the restrictions it placed on me. The truth is that my day to day life at home tended to be marred by the incapacities and discomforts of my illness. I could walk (sometimes with a limp, sometimes without) and I could look around at the world but very often I could do little more; my body just didn’t co-operate. But now I was at the start of a wonderful adventure and it was stupid of me to be negative. And when we got to Namche and the big mountains things began to get truly impressive. I stopped dwelling on the future and became immersed in an amazing present.

  Namche Bazaar is the trading and administrative centre of the Khumbu region. It is also a very popular tourist destination, at least for a certain kind of tourist. But it is more than 11,000ft above sea level, and sits in a steep-sided basin scooped out of a precipitous mountainside. And can only be reached on foot. There are no vehicles in Namche and there aren’t going to be in the future; the landscape is too steep. Most trekkers and climbers fly to the airstrip at Luckla, two days walk away.

  We stayed a couple of nights in Namche to acclimatise to the altitude and we walked up above the town. Here we were in the most dramatic mountain landscape we had ever experienced. To look at the summits around us we needed to crane our necks up and when we looked into the valley below we could see clouds halfway down. Such is the steepness and scale of those mountains.

  This trip to Nepal and India was a big challenge and a big unknown. The trek was tougher than the Annapurna, and India loomed ahead. A certain fellow traveller by the name of Mr Parkinson made things more difficult often enough. And so it was that from the very start I decided that if we made it to the top of Gokyo Ri, at 17,500 or so feet, then the trip was already a success. But we took an indirect route to Gokyo through the vast dramatic landscape of improbably steep, snow-capped mountains and barren valleys populated only by yak herders and the occupants of isolated monasteries. The lack of oxygen made us walk slowly. The nights were very cold and we were sleeping with all our clothes on. But the beauty of the mountains sustained us; it made it all worthwhile. The day before we reached Gokyo we saw a body being carried down on a stretcher, as Flic put it: completely covered so it must be dead.

  We walked up the final stretch of the Dudh Kosi valley to Gokyo at something like half a mile an hour, snow al
l around us and snow and ice underfoot at times. We passed some small, shallow lakes and finally caught sight of the sparkling turquoise water of Gokyo Lake itself. And then we arrived at the little cluster of trekking lodges and yak herder’s huts that make up the village.

  The following morning we got up at five and walked up Gokyo Ri. Near the summit we were walking three or four slow paces and then resting to catch our breaths. The view from the top was stupendous. Below us was Gokyo Lake, a vibrant blue-green colour, glistening in the morning sunlight. Beyond that the long grey ridge of glacial moraine fringing the glacier itself. All around very high mountains, masses of snow clinging to steep slopes. A deep blue sky and an astonishing clarity to everything, near and far. It’s a challenge to properly describe it. You have to go there. Really, you must.

  We were well enough acclimatised to spend over an hour on that summit and enjoy it immensely. It was a tough day: three and a half hours up and two down. I had a high altitude headache when we got back to the village but I didn’t mind. In the evening we could clearly hear the voices of three Canadian trekkers in their room next to ours, separated from us by a thin plywood wall. They didn’t know we were next door. That English guy, one of them was saying, you know he’s got Parkinson’s? It took him three hours to get up to the summit but he did it. Now that’s what I call ballsy.

  I understood that the expression ballsy was complementary; it implied that I had guts and determination. I look it up now in an online dictionary and find the word courageous, among others. Is that me? I’m not so sure. At the beginning of this chapter I described my unwillingness to commit to a friendship with someone who wanted to share their difficulties. It needed a different type of courage and I wasn’t up to it. I’m just a person who is trying to make the best of a life that has its limitations. I have had the time and the money, and most of all the support of a loved one, to undertake a few moderate adventures. Alongside my difficulties I have had great good fortune. Not ballsy then. I don’t think so. Looking back at the last few years I’m inclined to come up with a different word. I would describe myself as, among other things, lucky. I hope to be able to use that word for quite a while longer.

  F is for Fort William (Scotland)

  The first time I visited Fort William was with Phil, a school friend, whose life has since followed a straighter path than my own. We were taking a short holiday together in Scotland after finishing our A levels. He let his hair grow long that summer and I remember him standing under a sign in Edinburgh Castle that read Way Out. He wasn’t way out for long and felt the pressures of conformity to a life in pursuit of material gain – the rat race, we used to call it. But wait, I’m assuming too much. Apologies, Phil, if you’re currently building compost toilets in Tahiti or researching mind-altering drugs in the Ecuadorian jungle. And while we’re speaking, do you remember staying in Fort William and walking up Ben Nevis? I can’t remember it very well but I think we had a great time.

  I was in Fort William another time on the way to a sailing trip among the firths, sounds and sea lochs of the west coast of Scotland. Out on the water I learnt about the way the sea flows back and forth and around and through and over the corrugated land. Great tidal races, eddies, currents and standing waves come and go under the influence of the moon. I learnt to study the air, the prevailing winds and the flukey breezes coming down out the hills and the marks they make on the water. And we navigated by land, taking bearings off lighthouses and beacons and hilltop cairns. That’s what I remember of the trip – that increased awareness of the elements and their inter-actions. And the wild beauty and the cold and the rain.

  7

  The Road to Zagora Starts Here

  It is sometime early in 1986. Flic, her father, Robin, and I are standing on the terrace of the Avon Gorge Hotel in Bristol under a grey sky out of which a fine drizzle has begun to fall. Somehow I have persuaded them that it is better to be outside, in the open air, despite the weather. Above us and to our right Brunel’s suspension bridge crosses the gorge; to our left the land drops away and we can see the old red-brick warehouses and the terraced streets of south Bristol. Down below us the brown river flows between banks of grey mud.

  Robin is wearing an agreeably scruffy old jacket, a bow tie (as always), and a lopsided smile. This would be a good place, he says, addressing me, for a young man to ask a certain question of his girlfriend’s father. Flic is pregnant and I have written to Robin and Catherine (Flic’s mother) to explain that while I’m not in favour of marriage I am very committed to Flic, our long term relationship, and our future child. He’s hoping for something more. I don’t take the bait but Robin doesn’t seem to mind. And I’m pleased that he has brought the subject up with such charm and good humour.

  Robin seemed to me in those days rather posh and a little intimidating, as were the rest of Flic’s family. But I liked his joie de vivre and his sense of humour. In those things, if in nothing else, he was similar to my father who, when I introduced Flic to him, asked does he snore? as a cheeky way of finding out if we were sleeping together.

  Flic’s family are so different to mine in regard to wealth, education and social class, and the differences were very big for our parents’ generation. They did, however, live through the same world war. They had extraordinary experiences of terrible times that our generation have been fortunate enough to escape. Robin was brought up as a Quaker and was a conscientious objector. He spent the war years in China, which was fighting Japan, working with the Friends’ Ambulance Unit, as the Quaker Volunteer Service was known. Still a pacifist in his seventies he was proud of having been dragged away by police in the protests against the erection of a statue of Air Marshall Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, who had been responsible for the bombing of Dresden.

  My father was an ordinary working class man who was a motorbike dispatch rider throughout the war. He hated the army and was nick-named the static corporal in honour of his failure to rise through the ranks. He found it difficult to obey orders and when he got promoted from time to time he soon suffered demotion for being where he shouldn’t. He never saw the enemy and spent most of the war accompanying convoys of military vehicles in the UK. Sometimes he would slip away to visit my mum in London where she was working as a clippie, a bus conductress. A frequently told story has him following her bus on his army motorbike and waving to get her attention. She flirted with this seemingly unknown young soldier not recognising that he was her husband. At some point he took off his helmet and she got a shock, if not a disappointment. That was one of his few war stories.

  My father did spend a little time overseas towards the end of the war. He was in newly liberated Holland where the people were hungry to the point that children were suffering from malnutrition. British soldiers, including my father, found themselves sharing their rations with the locals. Dad felt great sympathy for the Dutch people, was greatly respected by those he came to know, and made friendships there that lasted for many years after the war.

  My mother spent some of the war years working on the buses in London until she gave birth to her first child, my sister Pam. Flic’s mother gave up her history degree at Oxford to work in the Land Army, in which women replaced agricultural workers who had become soldiers. My mum has been dead for many years but as I write this Flic’s mum, Catherine, is still alive at ninety-four. She is the last in her family of her generation, marooned in the twenty-first century, a world so different from the one she grew up in.

  Before Kit, our first child, was born Flic’s parents drove down to Surrey to meet their future in-laws (out-of-laws?), my mum and dad. I choose not to be there; the embarrassment would have been unbearable. Robin and Catherine lived in what I can only call a grand house in Corsham, Wiltshire. Flic denies that it was grand. What can I say? Only that it stood in several acres of land and was big enough to house two adults and five children and still have the top floor (of three) rented out as a flat. It was, and is, a handsome Georgian building constructed out of Bath stone. I ca
n’t really imagine what Robin and Catherine thought of my mum and dad’s council maisonette in Cobham. It consisted of four tiny rooms which added together might take up the space of the rarely used front sitting room in their house. Flic, again, wants to correct me. Your parent’s house wasn’t so small, she says. It’s just that the walls were very close together. No matter. I know that my mum and dad liked and respected hers and I hope that the feeling was mutual.

  The truth is that Flic and I started on the road to Zagora from somewhat different places. We have different backgrounds. My mum and dad were working class Londoners born and brought up in what we would today call poverty. Mum was the oldest of five children and she spent much of her childhood looking after her younger siblings (three girls and a boy) because her mother worked in a café in the day and did cleaning jobs in the evening. Mum left school at fourteen and went, as they called it then, into service, leaving home to work as a scullery maid in a grand house. It wasn’t her choice, she wanted to stay on at school but uniforms were expensive and it just wasn’t possible.

  Dad was born to a young woman working as a servant for a middle class family. He was fostered and looked after by someone who he always referred to as Mrs Kettle. He never knew his father and, as illegitimacy was a source of shame in those days, had a tough start. He left school at fourteen too.

  My parents had three children and lived in a council flat in south-west London, Dad working night shifts for London Transport. Then, in 1956, he got a job as a chauffeur to a rich architect, they moved into a tied cottage in leafy suburban Surrey and I was born. There was a ten year and more gap between myself and my brother and sisters and they all left home early and I grew up as a single child.