Escape From Kathmandu

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  We let Kunga Norbu take care of the ordering, as he had more Nepalese than Freds or me. When he was done the Rawang stove keepers giggled and went to the stove, and came back with three huge cups of Tibetan tea.

  I complained to Freds about this in no uncertain terms. “Damn it, I thought he was ordering chang!”

  Tibetan tea, you see, is not your ordinary Lipton’s. To make it they start with a black liquid that is not made from tea leaves at all but from some kind of root, and it is so bitter you could use it for suturing. They pour a lot of salt into this brew, and stir it up, and then they dose it liberally with rancid yak butter, which melts and floats to the top.

  It tastes worse than it sounds. I have developed a strategy for dealing with the stuff whenever I am offered a cup; I look out the nearest window, and water the plants with it. As long as I don’t do it too fast and get poured a second cup, I’m fine. But here I couldn’t do that, because twenty-odd pairs of laughing eyes were staring at us.

  Kunga Norbu was hunched over the table, slurping from his cup and going “ooh,” and “ahh,” and saying complimentary things to the stove keepers. They nodded and looked closely at Freds and me, big grins on their faces.

  Freds grabbed his cup and took a big gulp of the tea. He smacked his lips like a wine taster. “Right on,” he said, and drained the cup down. He held it up to our host. “More?” he said, pointing into the cup.

  The porters howled. Our host refilled Freds’s cup and he slurped it down again, smacking his lips after every swallow. I slipped some iodine solution into mine from a dropper I keep on me, and stirred it around and held my nose to get down a sip, and they thought that was funny too.

  So we were in tight with the teahouse crowd, and when I asked for chang they brought over a whole bucket of it. We poured it into the little chipped teahouse glasses and went to work on it.

  “So what are you and Kunga Norbu up to?” I asked him.

  “Well,” he said, and a funny expression crossed his face. “That’s kind of a long story, actually.”

  “So tell it to me.”

  He looked uncertain. “It’s too long to tell tonight.”

  “What’s this? A story too long for Freds Fredericks to tell? Impossible, man, why I once heard you summarize the Bible to Laure, and it only took you a minute.”

  Freds shook his head. “It’s longer than that.”

  “I see.” I let it go, and the three of us kept on drinking the chang, which is a white beer made from rice or barley. We drank a lot of it, which is a dangerous proposition on several counts, but we didn’t care. As we drank we kept slumping lower over the table to try to get under the smoke layer, and besides we just naturally felt like slumping at that point. Eventually we were laid out like mud in a puddle.

  Freds kept conferring with Kunga Norbu in Tibetan, and I got curious. “Freds, you hardly speak a word of Nepali, how is it you know so much Tibetan?”

  “I spent a couple years in Tibet. I was studying in the Buddhist lamaseries there.”

  “You studied in Buddhist lamaseries in Tibet?”

  “Yeah sure! Can’t you tell?”

  “Well…” I waved a hand. “I guess that might explain it.”

  “That was where I met Kunga Norbu, in fact. He was my teacher.”

  “I thought he was a climbing buddy.”

  “Oh he is! He’s a climbing lama. Actually there’s quite a number of them. See when the Chinese invaded Tibet they closed down all the lamaseries, destroyed most of them in fact. The monks had to go to work, and the lamas either slipped over to Nepal, or moved up into mountain caves. Then later the Chinese wanted to start climbing mountains as propaganda efforts, to show the rightness of the thoughts of Chairman Mao. The altitude in the Himalayas was a little bit much for them, though, so they mostly used Tibetans, and called them Chinese. And the Tibetans with the most actual mountain experience turned out to be Buddhist monks, who had spent a lot of time in really high, isolated retreats. Eight of the nine so-called Chinese to reach the top of Everest in 1975 were actually Tibetans.”

  “Was Kunga Norbu one of them?”

  “No. Although he wishes he was, let me tell you. But he did go pretty high on the North Ridge in the Chinese expedition of 1980. He’s a really strong climber. And a great guru too, a really holy guy.”

  Kunga Norbu looked across the table at me, aware that we were talking about him. He was short and skinny, very tough looking, with long black hair. Like a lot of Tibetans, he looked almost exactly like a Navaho or Apache Indian. When he looked at me I got a funny feeling; it was as if he were staring right through me to infinity. Or somewhere equally distant. No doubt lamas cultivate that look.

  “So what are you two doing up here?” I asked, a bit uncomfortable.

  “We’re going to join my Brit buddies, and climb Lingtren. Should be great. And then Kunga and I might try a little something on our own.”

  We found we had finished off the bucket of chang, and we ordered another. More of that and we became even lower than mud in a puddle.

  Suddenly Kunga Norbu spoke to Freds, gesturing at me. “Really?” Freds said, and they talked some more. Finally Freds turned to me. “Well, this is a pretty big honor, George. Kunga wants me to tell you who he really is.”

  “Very nice of him,” I said. I found that with my chin on the table I had to move my whole head to speak.

  Freds lowered his voice, which seemed to me unnecessary as we were the only two people in the room who spoke English. “Do you know what a tulku is, George?”

  “I think so,” I said. “Some of the Buddhist lamas up here are supposed to be reincarnated from earlier lamas, and they’re called tulkus, right? The abbot at Tengboche is supposed to be one.”

  Freds nodded. “That’s right.” He patted Kunga Norbu on the shoulder. “Well, Kunga here is also a tulku.”

  “I see.” I considered the etiquette of such a situation, but couldn’t really figure it, so finally I just scraped my chin off the table and stuck my hand across the table. Kunga Norbu took it and shook, with a modest smile.

  “I’m serious,” Freds said.

  “Hey!” I said. “Did I say you weren’t serious?”

  “No. But you don’t believe it, do you.”

  “I believe that you believe it, Freds.”

  “He really is a tulku! I mean I’ve seen proof of it, I really have. His ku kongma, which means his first incarnation, was as Tsong Khapa, a very important Tibetan lama born in 1555. The monastery at Kum-Bum is located on the site of his birth.”

  I nodded, at a loss for words. Finally I filled up our little cups, and we toasted Kunga Norbu’s age. He could definitely put down the chang like he had had lifetimes of practice. “So,” I said, calculating. “He’s about four hundred and thirty-one.”

  “That’s right. And he’s had a hard time of it, I’ll tell you. The Chinese tore down Kum-Bum as soon as they took over, and unless the monastery there is functioning again, Tsong Khapa can never escape being a disciple. See, even though he is a major tulku—”

  “A major tulku,” I repeated, liking the sound of it.

  “Yeah, even though he’s a major tulku, he’s still always been the disciple of an even bigger one, named Dorjee. Dorjee Lama is about as important as they come—only the Dalai Lama tops him—and Dorjee is one hard, hard guru.”

  I noticed that the mention of Dorjee’s name made Kunga Norbu scowl, and refill his glass.

  “Dorjee is so tough that the only disciple who has ever stuck with him has been Kunga here. Dorjee—when you want to become his student and you go ask him, he beats you with a stick. He’ll do that for a couple of years to make sure you really want him as a teacher. And then he really puts you through the wringer. Apparently he uses the methods of the Ts’an sect in China, which are tough. To teach you the Short Path he pounds you in the head with his shoe.”

  “Now that you mention it, he does look a little like a guy who has been pounded in the head with a shoe.”
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  “How can he help it? He’s been a disciple of Dorjee’s for four hundred years, and it’s always the same thing. So he asked Dorjee when he would be a guru in his own right, and Dorjee said it couldn’t happen until the monastery built on Kunga’s birth site was rebuilt. And he said that that would never happen until Kunga managed to accomplish—well, a certain task. I can’t tell you exactly what the task is yet, but believe me it’s tough. And Kunga used to be my guru, see, so he’s come to ask me for some help. So that’s what I’m here to do.”

  “I thought you said you were going to climb Lingtren with your British friends?”

  “That too.”

  I wasn’t sure if it was the chang or the smoke, but I was getting a little confused. “Well, whatever. It sounds like a real adventure.”

  “You’re not kidding.”

  Freds spoke in Tibetan to Kunga Norbu, explaining what he had said to me, I assumed. Finally Kunga replied, at length.

  Freds said to me, “Kunga says you can help him too.”

  “I think I’ll pass,” I said. “I’ve got my trekking group and all, you know.”

  “Oh I know, I know. Besides, it’s going to be tough. But Kunga likes you—he says you have the spirit of Naropa.”

  Kunga nodded vigorously when he heard the name Naropa, staring through me with that spacy look of his.

  “I’m glad to hear it,” I said. “But I still think I’ll pass.”

  “We’ll see what happens,” Freds said, looking thoughtful.

  II

  MANY GLASSES OF CHANG later we staggered out into the night. Freds and Kunga Norbu slipped on their down jackets, and with a “Good night” and a “Good morning” they wandered off to their tent. I made my way back to my group. It felt really late, and was maybe eight-thirty.

  As I stood looking at our tent village, I saw a light bouncing down the trail from Lukla. The man carrying the flashlight approached—it was Laure, the sirdar for my group. He was just getting back from escorting clients back to Lukla. “Laure!” I called softly.

  “Hello George,” he said. “Why late now?”

  “I’ve been drinking.”

  “Ah.” With his flashlight pointed at the ground I could easily make out his big smile. “Good idea.”

  “Yeah, you should go have some chang yourself. You’ve had a long day.”

  “Not long.”

  “Sure.” He had been escorting disgruntled clients back to Lukla all day, so he must have hiked five times as far as the rest of us. And here he was coming in by flashlight. Still, I suppose for Laure Tenzing Sherpa that did not represent a particularly tough day. As guide and yakboy he had been walking in these mountains all his life, and his calves were as big around as my thighs. Once, for a lark, he and three friends had set a record by hiking from Everest Base Camp to Kathmandu in four days; that’s about two hundred miles, across the grain of some seriously uneven countryside. Compared to that today’s work had been like a walk to the mailbox, I guess.

  The worst part had no doubt been the clients. I asked him about that and he frowned. “People go co-op hotel, not happy. Very, very not happy. They fly back Kathmandu.”

  “Good riddance,” I said. “Why don’t you go get some chang.”

  He smiled and disappeared into the dark.

  I looked over the tents holding my sleeping clients and sighed.

  So far it had been a typical videotrek. We had flown in to Lukla from Kathmandu. My clients, enticed to Nepal by glossy ads that promised them video Ansel Adamshood, had gone wild in the plane, rushing about banging zoom lenses together and so on. They were irrepressible until they saw the Lukla strip, which from the air looks like a toy model of a ski jump. Pretty quickly they were strapped in and looking like they were reconsidering their wills—all except for one tubby little guy named Arnold, who continued to roll up and down the aisle like a bowling ball, finally inserting himself into the cockpit so he could shoot over the pilots’ shoulders. “We are landing at Lukla,” he announced to his camera’s mike in a deep fakey voice, like the narrator of a bad travelogue. “Looks impossible, but our pilots are calm.”

  Despite him we landed safely. Unfortunately one of our group then tried to film his own descent from the plane, and fell heavily down the steps. As I ascertained the damage—a sprained ankle—there was Arnold again, leaning over to immortalize the victim’s every writhe and howl.

  A second plane brought in the rest of our group, led by Laure and my assistant Heather. We started down the trail. For a couple of hours everything went well—the trail serves as the Interstate Five of the region, and is as easy as they come. And the view is awesome—the Dudh Kosi valley is like a forested Grand Canyon, only bigger. Our group was impressed, and several of them filmed a real-time record of the day.

  Then the trail descended to the banks of the Dudh Kosi river, and we got a surprise. Apparently in the last monsoon a glacial lake upstream had burst its ice dam, and rushed down in a devastating flood, tearing out the bridges, trail, trees, everything. Thus our fine interstate ended abruptly in a cliff overhanging the torn-to-shreds riverbed, and what came next was the seat-of-the-pants invention of the local porters, for whom the trail was a daily necessity. They had been clever indeed, but there really was no good alternative to the old route; so the new trail wound over strewn white boulders in the riverbed, traversed unstable new sand cliffs, and veered wildly up and down muddy slides that had been hacked out of dense forested walls. It was radical stuff, and even experienced trekkers were having trouble.

  Our group was appalled. The ads had not mentioned this.

  The porters ran ahead barefoot to reach the next tea break, and the clients began to bog down. People slipped and fell. People sat down and cried. Altitude sickness was mentioned more than once, though as a matter of fact we were not much higher than Denver. Heather and I ran around encouraging the weary. I found myself carrying three videocameras. Laure was carrying nine.

  It was looking like the retreat from Moscow when we came to the first of the new bridges. These are pretty neat pieces of backwoods engineering; there aren’t any logs in the area long enough to span the river, so they take four logs and stick them out over the river, and weigh them down with a huge pile of round stones. Then four more logs are pushed out from the other side, until their ends rest on the ends of the first four. Instant bridge. They work, but they are not confidence builders.

  Our group stared at the first one apprehensively. Arnold appeared behind us and chomped an unlit cigar as he filmed the scene. “The Death Bridge,” he announced into his camera’s mike.

  “Arnold, please,” I said. “Mellow out.”

  He walked down to the glacial gray rush of the river. “Hey, George, do you think I could take a step in to get a better shot of the crossing?”

  “NO!” I stood up fast. “One step in and you’d drown, I mean look at it!”

  “Well, okay.”

  Now the rest of the group were staring at me in horror, as if it weren’t clear at first glance that to fall into the Dudh Kosi would be a very fatal error indeed. A good number of them ended up crawling across the bridge on hands and knees. Arnold got them all for posterity, and filmed his own crossing by walking in circles that made me cringe. Silently I cursed him; I was pretty sure he had known perfectly well how dangerous the river was, and only wanted to make sure everyone else did too. And very soon after that—at the next bridge, in fact—people began to demand to be taken back to Lukla. To Kathmandu. To San Francisco.

  I sighed, remembering it. And remembering that this was only the beginning. Just your typical Want To Take You Higher Ltd. videotrek. Plus Arnold.

  III

  I GOT ANOTHER BIT of Arnold in action early the next morning, when I was in the rough outhouse behind the trekkers’ teahouses, very hung over, crouched over the unhealthy damp hole in the floor. I had just completed my business in there when I looked up to see the big glass eye of a zoom lens, staring over the top of the wooden door at m
e.

  “No, Arnold!” I cried, struggling to put my hand over the lens while I pulled up my pants.

  “Hey, just getting some local color,” Arnold said, backing away. “You know, people like to see what it’s really like, the details and all, and these outhouses are really something else. Exotic.”

  I growled at him. “You should have trekked in from Jiri, then. The lowland villages don’t have outhouses at all.”

  His eyes got round, and he shifted an unlit cigar to the other side of his mouth. “What do you do, then?”

  “Well, you just go outside and have a look around. Pick a spot. They usually have a shitting field down by the river. Real exotic.”

  He laughed. “You mean, turds everywhere?”

  “Well, something like that.”

  “That sounds great! Maybe I’d better walk back out instead of flying.”

  I stared at him, wrinkling my nose. “Serious filmmaker, eh Arnold?”

  “Oh, yeah. Haven’t you heard of me? Arnold McConnell? I make adventure films for PBS. And sometimes for the ski resort circuit, video rentals, that kind of thing. Skiing, hang gliding, kayaking, parachuting, climbing, skateboarding—I’ve done them all. Didn’t you ever see The Man Who Swam Down the Zambesi? No? Ah, that’s a bit of a classic, now. One of my best.”

  So he had known how dangerous the Dudh Kosi was. I stared at him reproachfully. It was hard to believe he made adventure films; he looked more like the kind of Hollywood producer you’d tell couch jokes about. “So you’re making a real film of this trip?” I asked.

  “Yeah, sure. Always working, never stop working. Workaholic.”

  “Don’t you need a bigger crew?”

  “Well sure, usually, but this is a different kind of thing, one of my ‘personal diary’ films I call them. I’ve sold a couple to PBS. Do all the work myself. It’s kind of like my version of solo climbing.”

  “Fine. But cut the part about me taking a crap, okay?”

  “Sure, sure, don’t worry about it. Just got to get everything I can, you know, so I’ve got good tape to choose from later on. All grist for the mill. That’s why I got this lens. All the latest in equipment for me. I got stuff you wouldn’t believe.”