Annapurna

Non-Fiction
Location - Nepal
Written - May 2008
[One of my current goals is to get one of my more upbeat pieces out there. So far it’s only been the more depressing ones, and I like to think I can capture other moods than just the shitty ones. I’m particularly fond of this particular piece, partly because I’m writing about one of the most beautiful times in my life.]

Amy doesn’t even like to walk. She’d rather catch a cycle-rickshaw than walk to the bazaar. But for whatever reasons she has, she says she wants to walk with me into the Himalayas. I don’t ask her reasons. I don’t question my own reasons, either.

We busy ourselves with the eager minutiae of preparation. We think we’re ready. We catch the wrong bus and end up at some windy village in the Himalayan foothills. The driver shrugs his shoulders at us. From his broken English and sweeping gestures we establish that we’ll have to walk down the valley, to a main road in the distance. There we can catch a bus to Nayapul – our starting point. The driver follows us for a few minutes, and points the way one last time before vanishing back up the path in long, swift steps. So we walk.

We’re headed to the Annapurna Base Camp, about 60 kilometres’ walk north of Nayapul, in Nepal. No-one knows the exact distance, because no-one has ever measured it. Our route will be longer than most. At the main road we’re told the bus union has called a strike against the new Maoist government, so we hitch a ride on the back of a tractor to Phedi. My map tells me we can start from there instead.

Amy struggles. The path climbs steeply through terraced rice paddies and fields of corn. The farmers have dug wedges out of the hillsides to create flat ridges, and on each ridge is a crop of glowing vegetables, in humble little patches that complement the countryside, rather than detract from it. Amy wipes at the hot sweat that drips into her eyes. At a juncture I start up the stone steps – the tractor driver told me it’s a shortcut. Amy wants to take the jeep track, which isn’t as steep. She’s being difficult. There’s a tyrant in me without an empire, but Amy represents my balance of power. We take the jeep track. Amy plods along slowly, stopping frequently to rest or take a photograph. She begins turning red from the sun despite lathering on sunscreen. I’m worried about how she’ll survive the next eight days of this. By the late afternoon we’ve only made it as far as Dhampus – no more than four kilometres. We find a room for the night at a guesthouse. We discuss it calmly. I say that I doubt she’ll be able to make it all the way. I’m happy to go on alone. I say we can wait to find a group heading back down, and she can join them and bow out now, if she likes. We resolve to see how she goes tomorrow. It doesn’t occur to me at the time that doubting her ability is the surest way to spur her on.

In the morning the sunlight comes out to dance. It plays upon the rocks. The rocks used to make the steps of the path are infused with flecks of mica, and the path glitters before us. The path rises up and over a ridge. When the sunlight strikes it the steps glint, as if sprinkled with celestial dust. This glint becomes entrancing, hypnotic. It reassures me for no good reason, like heavenly breadcrumbs along our way.

The light is different up here. It’s brighter, somehow. Clearer. I’ve spent the last few months under the smog-haze of India, without realizing it until now. Every now and then we come up over a small rise to be greeted by a stone cottage, with smoke rising from a small cooking-fire. I pace an empty cobbled street. A gust of wind is blowing through. I saunter into the small village feeling like I’m in the Wild West - only my slow saunter is borne less of a gunslinger’s sense of supreme self-confidence than it is of the rising fatigue in my legs. The mountains are whispering to me. They first invite, and then demand that I move to their rhythm, to the rhythm of the mountains. Not to any other pace that our minds might prefer.

I look up to see a Nepalese man. He walks hunched over like an ancient one. He has two full backpacks on his back, their shoulder straps are wrapped around his forehead in the Nepalese style. He must be a porter. He’s overloaded, he’s been made into a beast of burden. He doesn’t respond to my ‘namaste!’ as he trudges up the steps with fifty kilograms or so on his back. His chest heaves with every breath. The image stays with me. Ten minutes later, we meet the couple who’ve overloaded him. They’re Americans, maybe fifty years old. They’re on a package tour, they tell us, and they seem entirely oblivious to their porter who trudges up ahead of them. I will them to see. I don’t want them to come to a particular conclusion, or feel bad, I just want them to feel the earth at the end of their spiked walking poles.

I turn to wait for Amy. We pass through another village. A large flock of mountain goats trots around the corner like a living avalanche of fur and feet and horns. As they flow past Amy picks up a baby goat and cradles it a moment. The mother bleats – she’d halted when Amy picked up the infant – and only proceeds when the infant is safely beneath her once again. We stop in a small valley to rest. The old Nepalese bloke who lives there beams, and says, ‘today is a very lucky day for me.’ He says his goat just gave birth to two baby goats. An hour ago. We ask if we can see them, and he leads us down some steep stone steps to a wooden stable. There we find the mother and its two newborn infants. They stand unsteadily, and the old Nepalese man props them up on their feet, helping them to suckle. He grins at us and says again, ‘today is a very lucky day for me.’ His face ripples with lines when he smiles, like contours, the sort of lines that some would cover up, or operate upon, yet which others wear joyously, and with unblemished radiance. ‘Yes,’ I smile back in agreement, ‘a very lucky day.’

These moments are the breadcrumbs of food for Amy’s spirit, as the mica is for me. She’s always been a people-person, more so than myself. She’s looking strong and determined now, she’s found her own steady pace. There aren’t many tourists on the path, but when we come across a group of professional-looking trekkers Amy strikes up conversation. They have walking poles made from the same material they use to construct the Space Shuttle, and that sort of thing. Amy and I approach them with towels and shirts wrapped around our heads to keep the sun out. We’ve been getting very badly burned, very quickly. We’d picked up some SPF-50 sunscreen in Pokhara, but it isn’t working. One of the professional-looking trekkers - the sort of tall German you can imagine marching into Poland - tells us that this particular brand of sunscreen is a common Indian scam. It’s nothing more than cheap moisturiser, he says. We bond over this piece of Indian trickery, it kindles an animated exchange of subcontinental experiences that we recall with the weighty solemnity of soldiers, recollecting some terrible battle. I offer the story of a Nepalese man I met, who was fond of acronyms. He told me that N.E.P.A.L. is an acronym for ‘Never Ending Peace And Love.’ I.N.D.I.A, he said, is an acronym for ‘I’ll Never Do It Again.’

We awake to the sunrise. The last remnants of cloud waft away to reveal the Himalayan peaks, away in the distance. I’ve been observing the weather closely for several days now, watching the patterns. The air is at its clearest in the early morning - all but free of clouds. Then the mid-morning haze begins to settle, culminating in mid-afternoon rains that last until early evening. The monsoon is coming. It’s best to do the bulk of your walking before midday. And with each new day our legs get a little stronger.

We meet a pair who walk at a similar pace to us. A Swiss Jew, and his Nepalese guide. The man from Switzerland is twenty years old, not long out of high school, and he’s going home in a week to study Literature and Philosophy. My ears prick up – we might have something worth talking about in the silence of the mountains. Adrian was born in the mountains, and has been walking and climbing in the Swiss Alps since he was a kid. He has a watch that tells you the altitude. He takes a no-nonsense attitude towards it all. His sensibility is only tweaked by the impish influence of Ram.

Adrian met Ram on a dope-deal in Pokhara. And, travelling alone, Adrian was on the lookout for a guide to take him to Annapurna Base Camp. Ram is a thirty year old Nepali from Kathmandu, who has five years’ trekking experience. He tells us this with a tiny smile, and the slightest glimmer of pride in his eyes. He’s doing exactly what he wants to be doing with his life. I listen carefully to his tales of trekking in Nepal, Tibet, Mongolia, and Ladakh. At the memory of these treks he puts two clasped fingertips to his lips, kissing them, as if recalling the taste of a rare delicacy. ‘Beautiful, my friend,’ he says. Ram’s other great love is for heroically strong hashish. At every other stop he silently rolls up a number, smokes, and has passed it to you before you even realize what’s going on. ‘No problem,’ he says, with somnolent eyes, ‘hashish is meant to be smoked in the Himalayas, my friend.’

Amy never touches the stuff. But she says that when I smoke it helps us to harmonize our walking pace. I keep my eyes on the path and take things just a little slower. Since yesterday the path has taken us north through a long, steep valley. For some time we have followed the western face of this valley. There’s a strong-flowing river at the bottom, full of fresh melt-water from the mountains, and its constant hush wills us to be silent, and listen. I assume the path follows the western face of the valley because it’s slightly less steep than the alternative. The path follows the smoothest, flattest contours of the mountains. And this means that the path cannot, for mere human convenience, rise in a slow and steady incline to base camp. It must follow the places where the mountains will permit us to go. Up and down – in a brutal rollercoaster of steps.

The slightest glance to the right, over the low-side of the path, is greeted with a drop. Sometimes this drop is twenty metres. Sometimes it is several hundred - sickening - metres down. At other times the drop is obscured by dense vegetation, until a break in the undergrowth reveals the abyss once again. It isn’t just the size of these mountains which is staggering. It’s also their style. Back home I’m used to rolling hills that rise upon each other, gently. But these mountains are sheer bolts of electricity that flash upwards from the ground. And, sometimes, a mountain will not let us wind around it, it blocks our path and demands that we must go up, and over it. This is no ordinary walk.

As we approach Chomrong, the last village along the path, we’re already tired. We’ve walked for seven hours today. The map tells me we must ascend 500 metres into Chomrong. That’s five hundred metres, up. One eminently careful footstep after another. I’m not sure of how I can describe something like this. The Rialto tower, in Melbourne, is 250 metres high. We have to climb twice the height of the Rialto Tower, on zig-zagging steps about the same steepness and width as the staircases in a high-rise building. Only our steps are large, loose stones, and grey earth. Now picture this climb up the Rialto staircase is done without walls surrounding you, and with the occasional gust of wind ruffling your hair. At times I foolishly glance down, and become dizzy for a step. For just an instant my mind goes completely limp. Back to the path. We have to haul ourselves up each step. Slowly, slowly. On a small plateau Amy begins dry-retching. We stop and drink some water. When she recovers I make her laugh by saying, ‘now, I’m not a genius, but couldn’t they have thought of a better spot to build their fucking village?’ On the opposite ridge are vast landslides, open gashes of grey rock against the green of surrounding trees. I begin to wonder just what we’re getting ourselves into.

We stop in Chomrong for the night. A few times during the evening I step outside and spend a few moments alone, gazing up at what lays ahead. The valley just keeps...rising... into the unknown. These mountains are unimaginable - and I use the word deliberately. In the last year, and in all my imaginings, I didn’t come close to picturing their true scale. I understand now that this is because their scale is so vastly beyond anything in my experience. The first time I saw the Himalayan range from a distance, I said to Amy that it looks like the exaggerated, painted-on background scenery of old Hollywood movies. As we get closer, slowly, they begin to seem more real. And for the first time, I feel the icy touch of fear. Just how insane is this path going to get? Are we acutely stupid to be attempting this walk without a guide?

The other night I asked Russ – the Aryan Superman who’s knowledgeable about mountaineering - whether it’s possible that a Nepali might have climbed Mount Everest, hundreds of years ago, seeing as people have since done it without oxygen bottles. He said it’s unlikely, as before the onset of ambitious Westerners, traditional Nepalese culture held the peaks as sacred, as places of the Gods, and they stayed away from them. Looking above that inhospitable ice-line, I know exactly where they were coming from.

The ascent to Chomrong has drained us of energy. But I have an idea. I watch carefully, and I order the same thing that the guides and the porters eat. ‘Dhal bhat’: an all-you-can-eat Nepalese feast of rice, dhal, pickles, and curried vegetables. I eat several rounds. Every mouthful brings new energy to my body. I’m getting fitter. My body is no longer the water on which my mind floats - it is the rock on which my mind rests. A miraculous machine, so poorly neglected, which my mind can now rely on, and so devote its awareness solely to that next step. To that next rock.

We wake at dawn. I eat muesli with hot yak’s milk. It has become clear to me what the greatest danger is. It isn’t landslides, that distant crack of falling rock you hear sometimes. It sounds like long thunder, mixed with the sound of rock splitting apart. Ram has been close to one, once. It killed a Frenchman in his group only ten steps behind him. He doesn’t lead tourist groups in the monsoon season any more. The landslides are caused by rain loosening the earth, but you can’t waste your time being paranoid about the unlikely event of being caught under one. You’d have to be unlucky. And the greatest danger isn’t altitude sickness, either. If you begin feeling the symptoms – headaches, dizziness, nausea – then you go back down in altitude a few hundred metres and rest, if you’re sensible. The greatest danger, so far as I’m concerned, is simpler and less grandiose. It is a misplaced footstep. A lapse in concentration that leads to a slip and a broken leg. Or, a slide and a long fall that ends up breaking your everything. We’ve been walking for four days now. Help is not so easily available out here, at this time of year you have the path to yourself for long stretches of time. And so you watch every footstep. You test rocks to see if they’re loose. You step carefully over the suspension bridges. And, most of all, you stop before gazing up at the hypnotically epic view. Sometimes the path turns sharply.

On day five we prepare to make our final ascent to Annapurna Base Camp. I've started calling it ‘A.B.C.’ by now, just like the in-crowd of trekkers and guides. At first I disliked what sounded like a gimmicky acronym, preferring the sweetly rounded sound of ‘Annapurna.’ Now I call it A.B.C. It saves breath.

We’re at an altitude of 3,270 metres, according to my map, about a kilometre higher than the tallest mountain in Australia. And certainly higher than I’ve ever been. But we’re headed up, baby, we’re headed up. I let Amy set the pace, walking a step behind her. We set a good pace to the outpost at Deurali, through rhododendrons and jungle foliage. The jungle gives way to barren rocky landscapes. When I pause for breath I simply gape at the walls of rock on either side of us. I’ve learned that photography is almost entirely inadequate for capturing this landscape. The tiny frame of a photograph cannot do justice to the epic panorama before us. I crane my neck to see wispy waterfalls that etch their way down the sheer cliff-faces. We cannot see the peaks, for the peaks are above the clouds. Every now and then a break in the clouds will reveal tantalising glimpses of their jewelled-white grandeur. It’s almost impossible to over-estimate how high they are – you crane your neck to some ridiculous angle, some impossible height, and it is only the still, jagged permanence of the things that reminds you that they are of the earth, and not of the heavens.

We reach the ice. At the base of a waterfall a tiny glacier has formed, no more than ten metres across. It’s flat, no problem. Further along, we come to a big one. The glacier is sloped at a 45 degree angle at our height, steepening to a drop further down. It’s about a hundred metres across. I’m genuinely scared. Ice is not my element. Even at heights there’s something reassuring about the firm crunch of my hiking boots into dirt, or rock. But ice is, of course, the very epitome of slipperiness. It’d be easier to climb the sloped glacier, but skirting across it feels unnatural. I take a diagonal route up and across it, kicking my boots into the ice for decent foot-holds. It becomes too steep and I walk on all fours, the biting cold of the ice reminding me of exactly where we are. As frightened as I am, I am infinitely more terrified to glance back at Amy. There’s little I can do to help her, other than kick in some decent footholds for her to use, and this feeling of powerlessness makes my legs shake. I say ‘slowly! slowly!,’ feigning control. But she seems less fazed than I. She has her walking stick, and digging it in helps her to retain her balance. I admire her, wordlessly, her raw gutsiness helps put me at ease. We make it across and pause, panting. We pass on in silence. My boots and hands are streaked with a slushy mix of mud and ice, and, when it dries, the tiny flecks of mica glint in the sun. My boots and my hands are like jewels.

There’s no stone steps now, just a narrow path. We reach a sharp incline before Machhapuchhre Base Camp. We’re up around 3,500 metres and climbing. I keep my eyes on the path. The path is dotted with round, red insects. Ladybugs, I think distantly. Or are they called Ladybirds? Or is it Ladybeetles? My mind is going just a little…strange. The question obsesses me, crazily. Ladybugs, ladybirds, or ladybeetles? My mind can't find purchase on the question, as if scrabbling on ice. I avoid stepping on the insects. They’re the only source of colour in this place, and to see other life up here is reassuring. Ladybugs, ladybirds, or ladybeetles…?

I look back to see that Amy is still behind me. She is. It looks like she’s walking in slow motion. It reminds me of footage I’ve seen of astronauts, walking on the moon. One step, one breath. We walk at our own pace now. We’re over 3,800 metres and everything becomes blurred. I’m shaken from my robotic stumble. A mist descends all around us, cutting visibility to twenty metres. The rocky landscape is completely silent. Only scattered patches of bright purple flowers enliven my senses. We cannot see the mountains, we can only see the path in front of us. And I realize, like a glint of mica in the greyness, that this isn’t mist. I’ve been gazing up at these peaks for the last five days, and I've seen what happens at this time of day. They’re clouds. We’re walking in the clouds.

I smile at Amy as if we’ve walked into each other’s dream. We’re here. Amy doesn't even like to walk. Ordinarily.

We walk together into Annapurna Base Camp, at 4,130 metres. The clouds obscure everything. There’s a couple of permanent buildings and scattered tents. It isn’t just a destination for trekkers like ourselves, it’s a functioning base camp for mountaineers - particularly mountaineers with their eyes on the south-face of Annapurna One. All 8,093 metres of it. As I’m smoking a foolish cigarette, a hulking figure emerges from the clouds and asks to bum a smoke. I guess from his frost-bitten hands and cracked voice that he’s a climber. I sense it best not to ask too many questions, the man looks as if he’s just seen his own ghost. I’ve read that forty percent of people who attempt to climb Annapurna One die. I’m later told that his party made it up to 7,000 metres before coming down, due to the bad weather.

There isn’t much to see outside. It’s too cloudy. It’d be anti-climactic if I had the energy to be disappointed. I have my faith that tomorrow morning the sky should be clear at dawn. I go to our dorm room to rest. I read some Krishnamurti. There’s a knock at the cabin door. It’s Adrian who beckons me outside, and I can tell by the look on his face that he’s serious. The floor is icy cold in bare feet. I put on my boots once again.

The clouds are clearing. We can see where we are, and we are among the Mountain Gods.

There’s no paths up here. I half rush, half-stumble around in our vast, natural amphitheatre, surrounded on all sides by the peaks of the Himalaya. As high as we are, the peaks tower four kilometres above us. I laugh out aloud, a crazed, wild laugh. Unashamed tears of joy come to my eyes. I wipe them away out of a distant concern that the icy temperatures will fuse my eyelids shut, and I’ll miss out on the living, breathing canvas that unfolds around me. The clouds are clearing, and I see the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in my life. And I can’t bring myself to say it’s ‘like’ anything, there’s nothing I can compare it to. It’s like the Himalayas, baby, it’s like the Himalayas.

I come to a grave, covered in Tibetan prayer flags. It’s a monument for the Russian mountaineer, Anatoli Nikoliavich Boukreev, who died on the south face of Annapurna One. On it are etched his words:

‘Mountains are not stadiums where I satisfy my ambition to achieve,
they are cathedrals, where I practice my religion.’

We have fifteen minutes among the cathedrals, these cathedrals in the sky. Then the clouds descend once again, and in the whiteness I am transfixed by the sight of Amy. Amy, with a doona wrapped around her and her head tilted up, savouring the air of this place. Amy, floating upon the clouds that waft past us with steady, inexorable speed. Amy, who has a fundamentally different style of walking to myself - she likes to walk slowly, soaking in the scenery as she walks, I walk fast, only to stop and sit and imbibe a particular scene - but it doesn’t really matter too much because we always meet up again, just a little way down the path. Forever alone, and yet forever together, at the same time.

The mountains stand silent. Outside of the thin web of meaning which we call our lives, outside of ourselves, our being here is of no significance.

It only takes us three days to walk back. I’m grinning for most of the way.