The plane circles through the March haze, dropping lower and lower until you break through the smog haze of a Kathmandu afternoon to see the terraced hills, sprawl of breezeblock apartments and houses that carpet the convoluted valley. A topography that resembles crinkled aluminium foil, It requires rather tight banking to eventually bring you down to land. Then you pass through a calm and cheerful immigration process that carries you sweating, but accompanied by easy smiles, through to the muggy air and the taxi rank outside. You’re now in Nepal and it only gets better as you continue.
We
had ten days to spend in the country.
Only a cruel tease, really. Just
enough time for a sneaky peak at a couple cities and a four day trek. To that end, within a couple days we, myself
and a colleague and a Nepali friend, were let off at the side of the main road
west from Pokhara to start hiking up into the Gurung hills – home, strangely
enough, to the Gurung hill tribes - that lead to the Annapurna range.
The
Gurungs’ origins are Mongolian. About
sixty nine percent of them are Tibetan Buddhist, following a mixture of that
religion and Bön, a shamanistic Mongolian forerunner of Buddhism. The rest are Hindu, with some converts to
Christianity. They live a largely
pastoral and agricultural way of life, growing rice, wheat, maize, millet and potatoes on
their terraced mountain slopes. Apart
from that they also make some living from sheep breeding for meat and
wool. However, some also rely on the
salaries and pensions of family members serving in the army – the Gurkha
Regiment being one branch they are represented in. They speak their own language ‘Tamu Kwei’,
which is considered a Tibeto-Burman dialect.
A
guidebook I read before leaving was kind enough to point out that mountain
views in March were often obscured by haze, but, as consolation, the
rhododendrons were in full glory at that time of year. To be honest, I’d come to look at mountains,
not rhodendrons, but ended up seeing more of the latter. Still, they are beautiful and they’re
absolutely everywhere. Apparently
they’re quite edible. We mostly stuck to
noodles, dhal bhat and muesli bars from the Pokhara supermarket.
Of
course the Gurung hills don’t permit cars or anything that doesn’t move on anything
between two to four legs. It’s a place
that has missed the invention of the wheel. The trails are very well kept,
often paved with slabs of shale or cobbles.
It’s not been done for tourists either – these paths are the highways
that connect all villages to each other and allow the passing of goods. All trails pass through the main ‘street’ of
a village where cafes, souvenir sellers and cake shops vie for your trade. Housewives sit weaving in the shade of their
patios and greet you as you pass, or shyly avert their heads. Aside from the hordes of foreign trekkers,
there’s a constant traffic of porters carrying impossibly heavy burdens of
building materials, tourist rucksacks or foodstuffs on their short, but sturdy frames.
Too
often they are carrying up to three overloaded backpacks strapped together so
that their owners – foreign trekkers, often in perfect physical health - can
stroll up swinging only their cameras. This makes it possible for tourists to carry
huge shampoo and toiletry stocks, tonnes of unnecessary clothes and laptop
computers. A suggestion: it’s simply not good enough to bring loads of
un-needed crap then chuckle at your bad packing abilities while some poor
porter sweats it up and down thousands of metres on your behalf for a pittance
granted to him through the agency you booked your trek through, which wildly
overcharged you, but shortchanged him.
If you’re too lazy, or simply not able, to carry it yourself, at least
have the decency to make the porter’s lot a bit easier and carry a minimum of
stuff – put yourself in his plastic shoes. Just a thought.
‘Namaste’ means hello, roughly. It comes to your ears in many versions throughout
the trekking day: the most often heard one is the breathless whisper from the
overloaded and underpaid porter still sweating his way up one side as you
stroll down the other; then there’s the tourist one between foreigners getting
into the role; there’s the sing-song lilting one of children and ladies that
starts on a high note and swoops down at the end, carried off on the loveliest
of smiles you’ve ever seen… It’s the
sweetest greeting I’ve ever heard and it never gets old.
Moaning
about having to walk uphill in Nepal is like going to Egypt and complaining
that there’s too much sand. But very
soon you start to mumble under your breath when you’re told the next part of
the trail is the oft-heard oxy-moron ‘Nepali flat’: in other words, ‘a little bit
up, a little bit down’, as it says on the t-shirts. Everything being relative, in Nepal almost
nowhere is flat – apart from airport runways and lakes, but hearing it does
raise hopes of about five minutes of gentle hills before the next sweat-wringer
of a switchback uphill trudge. I also
heard distances mentioned as ‘Nepali 5 minutes’, which is anything but, erring
on the side of excess in all cases.
We
arrived in Tadopani as evening fell. We
found a guesthouse, run by smiling ethnic Tibetans from the autonomous northern
region of Mustang, settled in and decided.
We were all well scrubbed by nightfall when dinner was ready. We decided to forgo the ‘dinning hall’ (sic) and eat in the smoke-blackened
kitchen where everything was prepared and local friends dropped by to drink and
chat. We were made comfortable at a big
table and Dorje, our Nepalese friend, had arranged for one of the chickens that,
an hour previously, had been enjoying life’s twilight moments in the courtyard
to be added to the pot. It was a lovely
meal in the gloom of the poorly lit kitchen.
We complimented ourselves on our wonderful performance in getting there
during the day while the Mustangi girls chatted and giggled as they cooked and
cleaned. Every hiking day should finish
like that.
I
live in a country where shepherd dogs are evil, big and violent, and love to
attack hikers. Imagine my delight upon discovering
that most of the dogs in Nepal were peace-loving and lazy, more interested in
sleeping in shade. A few stroppy corgis
did, in fact, try to intimidate me in the odd village, but then seemed to lose
their nerve…or maybe it was simply the canine version of namaste…
My
trip to the Gurung hills has made me look at pot noodles in a whole new
way. Our first lunch on the trail was
one of those oft-copied–but–never-equalled concoctions of cheap packet noodles,
local herbs and curry that was a religious experience. It was magnificent. Wherever you go, there always seems to be a
sure supply of the stalwart brands - Mayo
or the catchy-named Shakalaka-Boom
instant noodles - and a dash of local flair for turning the mundane mulch into
something epic.
….and
when it’s all over, you get some form of public transport to get you back to
the, relatively swinging, lakeside city of Pokhara. Next to its calm waters you can rest your
weary parts and wander the tourist shops, buying ripoff North Face gear or
carpets. You could stay at the ‘Lubbly
Jubbly Guesthouse’, but I would recommend the Celesty Inn, where we stayed and
were treated very graciously. There in
the garden we ate breakfast and drank tea as lunatic tourists flew over in
microlight aircraft, trying to catch a lazy, but risky, glimpse of the
mountains to the north. Life rarely gets
better than this…
