by Dom Joly
Mingmar woke me up early the next morning and we had a breakfast of eggs and black coffee. I broached the subject of the horse slowly with him. I told him that, as he knew, I was a leading scientist here to do some serious investigative work and I couldn’t have my injured foot prevent me from reaching my goal. I told him that I’d come across the lady with the horse and had rented it for the day. He seemed totally astounded by this but nodded politely and said this was fine, although I could almost see the words ‘You total wuss’ appear on his forehead. Once breakfast and my embarrassing admission was over, we packed up and I prepared to meet my horse.
The horse was walked through the village to the guesthouse, as though for an execution, by the lady owner. Her name was Tiza (the horse, not the lady) and she had one look at this large foreigner and took an instant dislike to me. Undaunted, I hopped on and grabbed the reins. I’m a pretty good horse rider. I did quite a bit as a kid in Beirut and I’ve ridden all over the Atlas Mountains so I was certainly going to show Tiza who was boss. I urged her on but she refused to move. I gave her a couple of prods with the stirrups but she ignored me and wouldn’t budge. I did the weird ‘click click’ sound that horse riders around the world have variations of. Nothing, Tiza was going nowhere.
The horse’s owner meanwhile, a thin scary lady, was sizing me up and already regretting her decision to rent me the horse. There are temples in China on top of steep hills where lazy pilgrims can be carried up the innumerable stairs in hammocks suspended on a bamboo pole between two porters. The only catch is that the porters charge per weight of the pilgrim. While very sensible on the porters’ behalf, this is rather humiliating for the larger pilgrim when being put on the scale and having their fee shouted out for all to hear.
Scary Lady had had enough of my equestrian demonstration. She grabbed the reins off me and set off ahead leading a still, reluctant Tiza.
Great, I was going to be led all the way up the Himalayas like a fat child at pony club. I’d envisioned more of a macho riding role for myself. This really made me look seriously Kenton Uncool.
Off we trod through the street of Monjo. Trekkers were preparing for the day ahead, sorting out their poles, stuffing their backpacks. All to a man just stopped what they were doing and stared at me as we trudged past. I could hear snickering from some and words in many languages that didn’t sound complimentary. I looked straight ahead as though thinking about some great mission ahead of me but it was no use. It was a little like being paraded through the streets with the word ‘paedophile’ slung around your neck. The sense of general disdain was palpable. Thankfully we were soon out of the village and going along the path.
We came to a gate where there was an army checkpoint that wanted to see our papers. As the soldier took my passport he said something to Mingmar, looked at me and laughed. Mingmar laughed as well. As the soldier started to carefully peruse my passport I got off the horse and wandered towards a sign I’d spotted on the gate. It was in English and welcomed visitors to this ‘special area’. It then went on to urge visitors to:
1. Refrain from taking life
2. Refrain from anger
3. Refrain from jealousy
4. Refrain from offending others
5. Refrain from taking excessive intoxicants
Bugger: this place was going to be no fun if I couldn’t take lives and offend people. I decided to rely on a sensible amount of intoxicants.
On we plodded until we came to another wobbly metal suspension bridge that crossed the raging torrent below. UK horses would have been literally shitting themselves looking down through the thin metal lattice. Tiza, however, was made of sterner stuff and crossed over without a hint of concern. Once over the bridge the path climbed steeply up the mountain through thick pine forests. Mingmar told me that this was a new path: just three weeks ago massive winds had knocked down hundreds of trees in the valley and left the old riverside path impassable. I was amazed at how quickly it had been built. Since this was the only way up the valley and eventually to Everest, the livelihood of the whole valley depended upon it -and this was a powerful incentive. We climbed and climbed and I could feel Tiza breathing very heavily so I made us all stop and take a breather. I offered Tiza some Eccles cake but she wasn’t interested. I was convinced that she was plotting about how best to chuck me off the vertiginous slopes to our left.
We rounded a corner and came across the Aussie/Brit and the German. They had left far earlier than us and were therefore unaware of my equine conversion. We passed them as they struggled up the steep hill. I waved an embarrassed hello. They were sweet enough to wave back but you could see that they thought I was a total arse.
We came to another bridge. This one was built by Edmund Hillary, who had clearly done a lot for the people of this valley. Mingmar had been educated at the Hillary School in Khumjung, which was how he learnt to speak such good English.
At the bridge I got off, as the exit from it was a ludicrously steep drop straight down which then immediately started to climb back up again. This was the beginning of the arduous three-hour climb up to Namche. The first bit had just been a warm-up.
When I say arduous, I know that I was on a horse and that any keen trekker reading this is poo-pooing it as a Sunday stroll. Well, my Sunday stroll is up the hill to the pub – a distance of about 300 yards with an altitude differential of about 13 feet. This was a three-hour steep climb going up more than 2,000 feet while already nearly two miles in the sky. We were already approaching the height of some of the highest peaks in Europe. Rant over.
I got back on to Tiza. I was totally out of puff from my five minutes on foot. This was pathetic but it also made it clear that if I wanted to see this Yeti scalp I was not going to do it without Tiza.
Up and up we (Tiza) climbed. The path took a sharp zigzag pattern with very little let-up. Tiza was clearly finding it quite tough as she had started farting profusely. Every time she did so Scary Lady looked back at me with an accusing glare. I smiled back, assuming she would recognize her own horse’s farts. By the third such instance, however, it was obvious she was convinced it was me.
‘Not me: horse . . .’ I said, pointing at Tiza’s arse. Scary Lady just shook her head in disgust and trudged on.
We passed a descending pair of German trekkers. They looked at Tiza and then they too looked at me in disgust. I tried to indicate that I had a broken foot but they continued on down, confident in their moral superiority. After an hour and a half’s steady climb we reached a tiny plateau where a lone Sherpa woman sat with a bowl of tangerines for sale. I dismounted and bought one. Considering the effort she had made to get them there, it was the least I could do.
‘You want to see Everest?’ enquired Mingmar, as though he was showing me an interesting bird.
I walked past the tangerine lady and there, through a gap in the pine trees, was the tallest mountain on earth, the roof of the world. We were unbelievably lucky: it was another clear day and the peak was clearly visible, with a thick plume of cloud being blown off the summit towards Lhotze, the fourth-highest mountain in the world. I was dumbstruck. Everest is so much part of schoolboy folklore and here I was standing next to my flatulent horse looking right at it with my own eyes. I just stood and stared for about five minutes. Suddenly there was a new arrival on our little plateau. It was an Australian who had been on the same flight as me up from Kathmandu. He was crazily fit and had been full of talk about all this being quite easy compared to ‘two weeks in the Bush’. He’d set off from Lukla at the same time as me with a Turkish guy he’d met. They’d gone at breakneck speed and told us they were aiming to get to Namche Bazaar in the same day. Mingmar looked very doubtful and warned them about altitude sickness and how long the trek was. They hadn’t listened and set off confidently. The Aussie had even strapped a heart monitor on to his chest and he had a watch that constantly beeped at him to relay various medical information.
Now, halfway through the next day and here he was: alone and clearly
not in Namche Bazaar. He looked extremely surprised to see me ahead of him. I didn’t tell him about the horse for a while and asked him where the Turk was. He told me that he’d got terrible altitude sickness just out of Monjo, the village where we’d spent the night. He’d felt dizzy and was vomiting and they’d been forced to return to Monjo and overnight there. The Aussie had left the sick Turk and headed on alone that morning. I showed him Everest and he completely freaked out. He started filming himself and narrating at the same time. I left him to his video diary and clambered on to my horse. As I said goodbye, the Aussie looked up from his camera and noticed the horse. His face told me that our brief bonding period was over.
We climbed for another hour until finally we rounded a corner and I got my first glimpse of the curious village of Namche Bazaar. Set in a half-bowl on the mountainside, its multi-coloured buildings cling to the steep slopes in symmetrical rows. I rode into town praying that no Westerners would see me. A German couple did, but they looked the types to have several prisoners incarcerated in their basement back home. We locked each other in mutual stares of contempt. They changed tack and tried to give me a condescending look but I’d figured that the attitude to take now was that you only walked if you couldn’t afford a horse. I was a king riding into town saluting his poor pedestrian subjects.
I was eager to try this new approach on others but it was Saturday and everybody was at the bazaar, of Namche Bazaar fame. People come here from as far as Tibet to barter and trade their goods. I got off Tiza gingerly and walked down the main street giving the distinct impression that I had a cucumber stuck up my arse. I found a place that would give me cash off my credit card and I paid Tiza’s owner. It was money I would never regret spending.
We checked into the Yak Hotel and I had lunch, some momos (Tibetan dumplings) and a bottle of sugary Orange Fanta. As I sat alone in the wooden dining room, I spotted a photo on the wall of the Dalai Lama. He was being led through some snowy mountain pass while seated on a yak. Not only that, but he was carrying an umbrella to keep the sun off him. This all made me feel a little better about my horse problem. If it was good enough for the Dalai Lama then it was certainly good enough for me.
I still felt absolutely fine, although I was very aware of the thin air and how it makes you behave a little like an old man. I shuffled around Namche to have a look at the place. It was the biggest village in the Khumbu but there was still not much to do. As in everywhere on earth and no doubt, when we eventually get there, on Mars, there was an Irish bar. I have no idea how the concept of global Irish bars started. Was there somewhere in the world an enormously rich Irishman who kicked all this off? Who was behind this worldwide conspiracy?
The other staple of world travel is, of course, the Kiwi. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was an Irish bar run by a Kiwi on the summit of Everest. I hadn’t been in Namche for more than two hours when I spotted my first one. He was wearing his All Black rugby shirt (it is illegal, as a New Zealand citizen, to wear anything else abroad) and wandering vacantly down a little alley. He spotted me.
‘Excuse me, mate – do you happen to know a spot selling toilet paper? I’m bloody desperate and the guesthouse doesn’t provide any. I think – pardon my French – if I don’t find some soon I’m going to drop the kids off right here in the street.’
I pointed to a little shop down some stairs that I had just climbed up. It seemed to sell everything. He thanked me and ran towards the place in a cautiously desperate manner. I continued on toward the far end of town, where very little was going on. The day of the bazaar, always a Saturday, is also a holiday in town so lots of places were shut. I started back towards the Yak Hotel. Every step was a bit of an effort and I felt a little like an asthmatic pensioner. I shuffled into the street of the Yak Hotel and bumped into the Aussie/Brit and the German. They were both looking remarkably chipper. It had taken them only four hours to do the trek. I had clearly completely underestimated their stamina. There was no mention made of my horse; it was the elephant in the room.
I suddenly felt very tired. Just the walk around town had wiped me out. This is one of the symptoms of altitude sickness and the reason that I needed to acclimatize there. I spent the afternoon in bed, sleeping and reading. At six Mingmar knocked on my door and came in. He asked me if I was OK. I said yes but he didn’t believe me and told me that it was important to tell him if I wasn’t. I insisted that I was fine, just sleepy, and we went down to the wooden dining room, very like a European-style ski chalet. Two climbers were watching Touching the Void. Although a brilliant film, it really isn’t the one I’d watch before going climbing. In five days’ time the Everest climbing season (March and April) would start and there would be several expeditions going through Namche.
I still felt fine but incredibly lethargic – everything was a bit of an effort and I went upstairs and got into my sleeping bags and read some more Michael Palin. He was now in Tibet and his soundman had been hospitalized with acute altitude sickness. I felt very lucky and drifted off to sleep but I had terrible dreams. A Yeti smashed my window and dragged me outside. He put me over his shoulder like a rag doll and bounded up the mountainside. I didn’t seem overly concerned about the Yeti’s intentions but I kept shouting at him: ‘I must acclimatize! I simply must acclimatize.’
The Yeti didn’t seem interested and we eventually ended up in a cave covered in blue ice, where he threw me down in a corner and started to watch Downton Abbey on a television. When Downton finished the Yeti was weeping loudly and he came over to my corner and started shaking me . . .
I awoke to find Mingmar shaking me and looking concerned.
‘You OK?’ he asked. I nodded, blinking in the bright morning sunshine. ‘You were screaming.’
‘Bad dream, but I’m good . . .’
I really was feeling OK and a lot less lethargic than the day before. I had another full day acclimatizing in Namche ahead of me before we set off for Khumjung. Mingmar wanted to take me to the top of the mountain behind Namche to visit the Sherpa Museum. We walked up a set of steep steps that seemed to go on forever. Every step in this thin air was torture. Eventually we got to the top and I was rewarded with an epic view of Everest. Once again the sky was swimming-pool blue and a thick plume of wind roared off the peak like a mini-tornado. Mingmar told me that I was very lucky to get this sort of weather in February.
We visited the Sherpa Museum, a lovely place commemorating all things Sherpa and especially their climbing achievements. Mingmar introduced me to Lhakpa Sonam, his cousin. He ran the museum and was a veritable fount of knowledge. He was, however, very deaf – something very common among the Sherpa people and put down to iodine deficiency. He asked me to write down any questions I had about the Yeti.
I started asking him any questions I could think of. He told me that the name Yeti was a Sherpa word, ‘ye te’, meaning ‘mountain monkey’. He was convinced of its existence as so many people had stories of encounters. The Yeti, he said, was supposed to have huge breasts – so if you came across one you should run downhill, as these breasts tended to knock it off balance. If you ran uphill the Yeti would sling the breasts over its shoulder and could climb very fast. It was supposed to have brown hair and be very similar to a large monkey. Sightings by locals all claimed it was bigger than a gorilla and he said that it existed on both meat and berries. He also repeated what Mingmar had told me about there being two types of Yeti: one that attacked yaks and another that attacked humans.
The vast majority of footprints and sightings were found between 16,500 and 19,500 feet. He said that when Hillary found footprints he became fascinated in the whole story. I asked him about the Khumjung scalp. He said Hillary had negotiated its loan from the monastery and it was taken to London to be examined. There it was ascertained that it was definitely not a bear. They said it had to be a very large creature but they did not know what it was.
I had to see this scalp.
I walked back down into Namche Bazaar and spent the rest of t
he day sitting in the sun outside my hotel, watching people go by. I saw the Aussie/Brit and the German again and we agreed to meet later for a drink.
Come five p.m. we headed for the Irish bar, but it was closed. Instead we went to a nearby bar from which ear-splitting house music was coming. Inside, the walls were festooned with T-shirts signed by visitors from around the world. Nearly all were friendly and funny – except the British ones that were invariably of the depressing ‘Lads on tour’/ ‘Smash it up!’/ ‘Foreign bastards!’ variety.
There were two locals playing snooker and a hectic international field-hockey match on the blurry TV. We sat at the bar and I must plead guilty to taking excessive intoxicants. The German told me that they’d climbed up the steps to try to take photos of Everest but when they’d got to the viewpoint they hadn’t been too sure which peak it was. This was hardly surprising as it turned out they’d based their identification on a comparison with the mountain on the Toblerone packaging -they were convinced that was Everest.
I had to tell them that it was actually the Matterhorn.
We said our goodbyes and I wished them well. They were heading off towards Everest tomorrow and I was off to Khumjung. I’d spotted another horse for rent and hadn’t been able to resist. I didn’t tell my new friends.
I headed back to the Yak. That night was the coldest yet and I slept with my hat on with only my nose peeking out from beneath my two sleeping bags and three blankets.
I was awoken to the sound of very loud Buddhist chanting from one room next door and the heavy smell of dope from the other. Some trekker was clearly having a rest day. I felt on top form, particularly knowing that I had a horse on hold. My new steed was a lot better-looking than Tiza and went by the unusual name of Hermann. Apparently Hermann used to be owned by a German baker who plied his trade in Namche to hungry trekkers. Whatever, I was very pleased to mount Hermann as the route out of Namche was a veritable Kamikaze climb. I had given up all embarrassment about riding a horse: anything that got me to where I wanted to go without killing me was fine by me. A helicopter back to Kathmandu was the ideal scenario the moment my investigations were over. Sadly, this was not an option unless I fell off a mountain. It looked like I was going to have retrace my steps all the way back to Lukla.