Morgalogue

It was a chance piece of good fortune that took me to Nepal. Unfortunately this came at the expense of my cousin’s bad luck. My Indian visa ran out, as planned, at the end of March when I was due to join him on a road trip through Thailand and Cambodia. A week or so earlier however, a temple employee in a pick-up truck had mown down him and his brand new chopper at a junction and he now lay in hospital with a badly broken femur. I left the bedside manner to his mum and decided to show up once he’d got the hang of his crutches and needed driving to the pub. So, a chance to see the mighty Himalaya beckoned. To quote a Willie Nelson lyric: “Fate frowned on him and then turned around and smiled at me”.

After a torturous 36 hour bus journey from Varanasi to Kathmandu I practically needed crutches myself. I was captivated by the city though and made the most of what little time I had walking about till I had feet injuries too. I really don’t know much about Nepal. While in other posts I’ve at least tried to sound informed, I didn’t even have a guidebook, so most of what I write here is based on local hearsay and my own musings.

   

Somehow, I’d always imagined old Kathmandu to be a melting pot, like a rich, dark and spicy Himalayan broth. And it is. Whilst remaining isolated by its extreme mountain geography, it grew rich culturally and financially through trade with its powerful neighbours. It took a couple of days of wandering through old Kathmandu’s strange and beautiful architecture for me to make any sense of it.

Traveling from the French Alps through Switzerland to Austria or Germany is as you’d expect, a transition of cultures. Rustic, hardy French barns and chalets become more like chocolate box log cabins with flowery window boxes. Languages, food, music, all mingle to a degree. In this way Nepal does feel like the border between India and the Oriental or Mongol East. But much of the weird variety of buildings from Kathmandu’s golden age seem to come from somewhere entirely different. At each turn of a corner I would feel like I was in an Asian inspired France, Poland, Italy, Denmark or Holland. I assume this is coincidental and is more a product of the amazing skill and creativity of the Nepali craftsmen.

Walking down the narrow red brick streets I decide the best I can do for an umbrella description is an Asian Amsterdam. That place again. Like Amsterdam its grandeur isn’t a product of wide, imperially proportioned spaces but the rich detail packed into the brickwork of every street and alleyway. The pagoda roofs (which the Nepalis claim to have invented) of Hindu temples and Buddhist stupas slot neatly into residential courtyards like Dutch churches. The hot, dusty summers and monsoon rains might be familiar to South Asia, but the carved wooden shutters and pitched roofs with Alpine eaves are built for the harsh Nepali winter, again giving it a ‘European’ feel - maybe I’ve just been away to lon ! Wood carving is to Nepal what stone carving is to India, and everywhere you can see stunningly intricate window and doorframes, like the backend of old Spanish galleons.

   

While the woodcarving is apparently a dying art, I did see some evidence out in the ever-expanding Kathmandu suburbs that Nepalis are perhaps just inherently creative. In India and Sri Lanka 90% of all residential new builds are dull concrete cubes often with the reinforcement rods left poking through the roof to allow later addition of more storeys. Despite being no doubt as un-regulated, Kathmandu residents lavish an enormous amount of extra effort moulding concrete facades to resemble Greek columns, American woodpanelling or Spanish villa archways and verandas, often all in one home ! Not one of these bizarre architectural chameleons look alike. Some are actually pretty grand despite the cheap building materials used, yet most are not even served by paved roads, dotted about, in semi-urban farmland.

    

Outside Kathmandu there are few proper roads never mind cities due to the fact that only a minute amount of the country is not on a slope of at least 30 degrees. Valleys are so steep and narrow that rivers tend to take up most of the valley floor. Roads are forced to follow the death defying contours of the mountains, often thousands of feet up. Near misses are frighteningly common and apparently every week, the newspapers report at least one bus tumbling off the edge, killing all but a lucky few. Packing the roof with passengers is common too - best views and best chance of jumping to safety I was starting to think. But, it was these mountains I’d come trek in and inevitably it’s these sorts of risks travelers are forced to take. Unlike the poor locals, only once or twice.

I booked a guide for an extortionate price and picked up everything I needed for the trek in a few hours for buttons. Possibly not entirely to North Face’s displeasure, Nepal is a country that at times seems sponsored by the brand, with locals, guides, porters even remote mountain communities wearing their gear. It’s a funny sight - like arriving in Mongolia to find nomadic tribes kitted out with the latest camping equipment. While it might do wonders for North Face’s mountain credibility, I doubt they’re making a penny from it. In downtown Thamel, Kathmandu, shop after shop will flog you everything from hiking boots and walking poles to down jackets, expedition tents and sleeping bags and nearly all of it is cheap Chinese fakery. It will be Gortex but it will fall to pieces within a month - presumably the locals do their own stitching. My guide told me about some unwitting Tibetans who’d shown up trying to sell a mysterious brand called ‘Orth Face’. Anyway, more than good enough for the likes of me.

    

After an 11 hour ‘adventure bus ride’ (as my guide called it), we reached Syabru Bensi, our jumping off point for our trek into the Langtang valley. Staring into the mouth of the valley in the late evening light, my first sighting of a snow capped Himalayan peak looked exactly as kitsch and unrealistic as the backdrops to psychedelic Hindu illustrations of Krishna I’d seen in India. Because of the hazy light filtered through dusty air, cascading silhouettes of mountains appeared as one dimensional as stage scenery. Crowning this enormous wall of ‘view’ was a single snowy peak, glowing pink in a hazy aura of light that appeared to come from another world. In reality the peak, Naya Kang, was 100km away and over 4000m closer to space - it is a different time of day up there. I apologised to the Hindus for my ignorance.

For the next 3 days we climbed up through the valley as it arcs its way round to Kyanjin Gompa, the last settlement before the valley turns to glacier. The region is populated by a mix of Tibetan exiles and the Nepali Tamang, who are traditionally yak and oxen farmers. As tourism increases, there are an increasing number of guesthouses and crafts for sale in their villages. Tourists are often outnumbered by porters however. What we are sold as ‘trekking routes’ are essentially roads connecting the galaxy of little villages that make up Nepal, each clinging to their own perilous mountain outcrop. Everything has to be carried by these guys (and girls) and most think nothing carrying as much as 120kg uphill for 8 hours a day. Like a procession of hermit crabs, I saw some bizarre and enormous ‘outsized baggage’ attached to these peoples backs - 3 colour TVs, an entire henhouse of live poultry and in a specially constructed metal cage to take the strain, 3 full gas canisters. I got twinges just watching. Many of them are carrying base camp supplies up to the high altitude expeditions or several backpacks of lazy tourists. One French group had laden a guy entirely with baguettes, wine and cheese. Ah … the French.

   

I was accompanied by a pretty wacky cast of characters. Sonam, my fiercely loyal but slightly unhinged guide. Bianca, a Dutch civil engineer with a chronic stutter, and her guide. And every so often a voice would boom out from the trees “My frieeend, Cap-i-tan Morgan !” signaling the arrival of Spanish surrealist painter, José de Léon.

José was a romantic creation. Rugged but slightly out of shape. A proud, manly beard and moustache. Round his neck a tangle of Catholic, Buddhist and Hindu regalia and a flowing silk scarf or cravat. And resting on a Victorian walking cane, one hand adorned with an enormous ‘Godfather’ ring. He carried himself like a companion of Picasso or Hemmingway with a penchant for introductions in the style of Zorro or some flamboyant Spanish conquistador - “My name … is José de Léon !”. He had a small chess set with him and insisted I play him each time we met, against some amazing mountain backdrops.

   

My guide, Sonam, was also a funny character. An energetic wee guy, not stupid but wildly idealistic with a tendency to get himself worked up about Nepal’s many injustices - perfect recruitment fodder for the Maoists or any other revolutionary army. Despite his many strange contradictions he was consistently honest and told me a number of interesting stories about himself and the Maoists.

He considers himself to be a reformed character. Now a vegetarian he told me with a high pitched laugh that when he was a child he was obsessed with killing animals. Strangling chickens and bringing an axe down into the skull of a yak being his enduring favourites. He is from the Gorkha region and like the Sherpas from Sherpa, with ancestral pride wanted nothing more than to fight for the British Gurkha army. He was rejected due to some unexplained psychotic episode and spent a short spell persuading the families of pretty young village girls they should send their daughters to promising jobs in Kathmandu, whereupon they were bundled into vans and sold to brothels in Delhi. Somehow his mother and young wife kept him from joining the Maoists (perhaps because none are paid or even fed) where his high moral sympathies now lie.

     

As I said earlier, I don’t know enough about Nepal to say anything objective about the Maoists but it is obvious that the King is a psychopath and his corrupt military-backed government have reduced the country to a political and economic mess that has tested the Nepali people understandably to breaking point. From what Sonam told me about the Maoists they sound a little like Marxists or even Leninists. At a village level, rich high caste families are forced to surrender land and sometimes money to the poor (sometimes with revolutionary guns being used to settle old scores). They also attempt to influence the agricultural economy by running village workshops educating people about crop diversification and market forces. Their ambition ultimately seems to be to defeat the King and become a Mao-communist state. The plight of Tibet, through Tibetan exiles eyes, can’t look particularly rosy.

Using Kyanjin Gompa as a base, we followed the valley round to the edge of the glacier at around 4000m. A huge wall of rock stretching up to almost 7000m marks out the border with Tibet. We also hiked up a small peak in an afternoon that, due to the altitude of the whole region, easily took us up to the height of Mt Blanc. The scale of the mountains felt alpine, but with this increased height, the whole range sits among darker blue, oxygenless skies.

   

Although the predominant religion in the Langtang region is Tibettan Buddhism, on the whole Nepal is largely Hindu. It’s interesting to follow a religion through a continent and see how it changes when assimilated by a different culture and crossbred with the roots of ancient beliefs that existed before. I read a strange article in India by a guy with ‘Borat syndrome’ about ‘Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom’s depiction of Himalayan India as blood sacrificing, child enslaving savages. Pah ! he went on, with pent-up rage from 1984, the West wouldn’t dare do that now with our burgeoning economy and reputation for high-tech software development. Of course not. What surprised me (aside from the fact that it was supposed to be set in a real country at all) was that Kali worship, though exaggerated and villainised to Bollywood proportions, does exist. Kali, a scary looking female goddess with a long tongue and a necklace of skulls, can exorcise evil spirits from people believing themselves to be possessed, in exchange for a few litres of blood (normally animal). A book I read later claimed that in Calcutta, until 1835, when it was outlawed by the British, a young boy was beheaded every week for Kali !

   

Before Hinduism and Buddhism, the Himalayas were animist, appeasing the spirits they believe lived all around them. Perhaps this is why Kali and her reincarnation Durga are so popular here. Tibetan Buddhism too, absorbing the ancient Bon animist customs seems so superstitious and ritualistic compared to the gentle, pragmatic Sri Lankan Theravada Buddhism. The aesthetic of the religions too is different - Wood carved pagodas replace the towering Hindu stonework of India. Prayer wheels, prayer flags and purple rather than orange denote Buddhist monks or lamas.

I’d chosen the Langtang trek partly to see some of the ‘traditional village culture’ which tourists like me had kind of eroded. On the route back I persuaded Sonam to take me through a lower level valley that sees far less white faces. It was a good move, for the last 2 days we wandered among beautifully still, quiet forests, through farming communities with their terraced, hillside fields, along rivers and gorges and met barely a handful of tourists. The real highlight was staying with a Tibetan family in the picturesque village of Briddhim. While the local tourist authority have definitely trained them on how to cater for tourists, there’s nowhere near enough of us for them to rely on it, so it feels like a working (though not particularly active) village.

   

Inside the dark, carved wood interior of Nangsa and Pieche’s home, the only trace of the 20th century was a radio and a colour photo of the Dalai Lama in a small shrine. Nangsa, a big and at times stern lady in colourful costume, busied herself making tea over an open fire in what, to me, looked like a fairytale kitchen. Huge blackened pots and pans hung amongst an armoury of hand beaten spoons and ladels. Intricate metalwork of brass storage pots and vessels glinted out from the darkness of a ship’s larder. We sat on the beds on thick, woven blankets and watched.

   

Like in India, men are ultimately the boss and are not expected to lift a finger at home. To me this at times makes them look ironically dependent and powerless as most are not able to do much by themselves. Unlike India however, ‘power’ seems to be less of an issue and society is far less segregated. Women sit next to men on busses, do a wider range of jobs and on the whole seem perfectly comfortable laughing, joking and arguing in male company. Whatever bizarre, repressive force that makes Indians spend their lives huddled together in giggling same-sex groups, doesn’t seem to exist here.

We left Nangsa to prepare dinner as Pieche took us on a tour of the village. Again, this is no doubt something they were advised to do by the tourist authority but have adapted it to suit the locals. For Pieche it was a pub crawl with free drink and for the friends and families whose homes we stopped by, a chance to flog crafts to the foreigner. I liked it. I’m used to being seen as a dollar sign and would take up the chance to stroll into a streetful of houses in any country in the world. Each family lit their fire and heated us up a glass or two of millet wine. ‘Wine’ is a bit of a euphemism for a drink fermented in less than a week and suffice to say, when we rolled home 2 hours later, Nangsa was less than happy with us. Pieche in particular was in the doghouse. He’d neglected to mention his wife’s weaving abilities. On seeing the scarf and trinkets (I’d at least had the sense to try and conceal), she spat out several angry mouthfuls of Tibetan at him as he grinned sheepishly, swaying on the spot.

      

Immediately after wading through a mountain of dahlbat (the Nepali staple diet) we all got under the covers and went to sleep. Nangsa’s deaf old auntie clattered about washing the dishes and preparing a meal for the animals for another hour. I drifted off to the sound of flames licking at the pots and her belching up dahlbat.

On our last day we walked to Timure, a few kilometres from another stretch of the Tibetan border. A small army camp just outside the village restricts most outsider access to the region by way of a funny little door erected on the path, manned by a couple of bored soldiers. I arrived just as a man with two Chinese TVs on his back was being waved through. Like many borders, it was a strange, surreal sight given our location. It marked the end of the road for us however. And just as well, we underestimated the grueling walk back to Syabru Bensi and arrived just before nightfall.

   

Back in Kathmandu, my trip ended with a flight over Everest with Buddha Air (a Birthday present to myself) and a dose of food poisoning at the hands of Sonam’s beautiful wife - the first meat I’d eaten in months. Vegetarians. A small price to pay for an amazing trip.

   

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