NEPAL DIARY - 1990 - PART 2

Recorded on the trail while trekking in Nepal, the Diary continues.......

 

Up before dawn again.  It's a bit of a battle to see what is the first sound in the morning - is it the local roosters, or is it our cook boys rattling the pots?  They seem to stir about four-thirty - I'm instantly awake and stay that way.  But getting to bed at eight to eight-thirty means a tremendous amount of sleep, so the early rise is no problem.  Anne, though, hadn't slept at all well and was feeling very tired.  The weather's still fine.  A bit of cloud hanging around, but mostly sunny days; and we're all putting on sunscreen.  A few pink legs and faces.

 

We're always amazed at the amount the porters carry. 

On the second day, having left camp before they did we later saw them arrive into the campsite.  As one tiny figure pulled up, and lowered his three duffle bags, Andrew looked at him and with much feeling said:  "Fuck, that's awesome."

 

Day three of the trek was hard.  I think it was the hardest so far, very hard for me because I hadn't eaten for two days and was just weak.  We did a lot of climbing, and rough climbing, and the breathing was very heavy.

The legs are fine, they don't seem to be dragging, but great gulps of air have been necessary for much of the day.  Mohandra is very solicitous, and there's no doubt that all of the party will be well looked after by the leaders.  Obviously it's no joy for them if people become sick.  As it happens, quite a number of us now have the trots, but no headaches or nausea.  It's all been confined to a dietary situation - and they tell us this is a bit unusual. Normally there are not this many who get the trots, so they're a bit on their guard.  One extra precaution has been to put a pile of dirt inside the lavatory tent so that after every use we can scrape a bit of dirt over the top. Not that there's any flies.  It's an absolute joy to be in a place where there are no mosquitoes and no flies.  No blow flies. (The occasional fly, but they never settle on us or bother us.)  In Australia we'd be demented.  With the amount of filth and refuse lying around we'd be demented with flies.

 

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Lunch on day three came and went without me feeling in the mood for any more dictation.  So here I am at lunch on day four.  

 Day three ended with us still going upwards, and the tents had been pitched on a ledge overlooking a glorious valley.  In fact there was about a metre of dirt between the opening of the tent and the edge (precipice) of the hill.  Anybody doing any unwise wandering at night would have found themselves falling into the farmer's garden, tumbling away into the abyss.  Needless to say, a most spectacular spot.  Before we'd arrived the cloud had come in and it became very thick and foggy.  I wasn't the only one who had found it a hard day because, without exception, our people headed for their beds.  I think even if there'd been an opportunity for a small party people would have turned it down - it was a hard day and we were grateful for the rest.  Thank goodness Anne was able to sleep like a baby all night, and is much restored today.

 

While it's been a steady climb today, day four, it's been much easier and I've felt fit as a trout.  So that has helped.  The terrain has changed.  It's more open mountainside rather than hillside, although I know it's a travesty to call these uplands "mountains", given what lies ahead.

 

An interesting feature of the landscape has been the rhododendrons; and it's no exaggeration to say that we are surrounded by a rhododendron forest.  In spring it must be a glorious picture of pinks and reds and purples.  Because of the altitude, or perhaps just because they're very old, the trees are stunted and gnarled and broken.  Where we're sitting there's a small settlement and I suppose for two, three hundred, metres around where the huts are the rhododendrons have been cut off, and they've just left the stumps in the ground.  Obviously used them for firewood.  So you have to look a little bit further afield to see intact trees. Mohandra says that there are magnolias here as well, and that they make a glorious picture in spring-time too, although we haven't seen any yet.  And up the ridge where we've been walking there have been some magnificent specimens of some sort of pine tree, the ones that I described earlier as having very feathery leaves.  But they're grand old trees, and covered in moss and lichen; and given the altitude they could well be hundreds of years old. It's a great joy to see them when you know how desperate the local people are for firewood  They've left the big ones, and hopefully it will stay that way.

 

Before lunch they give us a cup of hot cordial, not something you'd think of drinking at home.  But I'm tucking into this hot lemon juice, and it's delicious.

 

The route up the hill was apparently laid out by Edmund Hillary and his associates. World Expeditions:  "The Classic Everest trek follows the old expedition route taken by Everest climbers in the 1950s when Nepal was first opened to the outside world and Everest could be tackled from its southern approaches. It is indeed a classic route which takes you from the Himalayan foothills of Solu, inhabited by the Sherpas, and the beginning of the Tibetan Buddhist culture in this area, to the base of Everest (Sagarmartha in Nepali and Chomolungma in the Sherpa language)."  In the old days there were tracks between villages and houses, but they didn't interconnect; and it was through the intervention of the mountaineers that a connected track was made all the way to the top.  But it's become a major commercial thoroughfare. Certainly in terms of this country. We're passing people all the time going up and down.  About eighty, ninety, per-cent of them would be locals.  All carrying baskets with goods, and even baskets carrying empty bottles down again.  Every place, every house we stop, every house we pass, has things for sale.  They have a small display of Coke, Fanta, Seven-up, some apples, some barley sugar, other bits and pieces, cigarettes.  Not a very large stock of Safeway standards but obviously the right range for someone to have carried up.  The price goes up the higher we climb the mountain because everything has to be brought up here by hand, by foot, on the track.  No canned drinks, and that makes sense: although bottles must be heavier to carry they go back for refilling, whereas the cans would trash the countryside.  Anne and I stayed off the soda pop for the first three days, thinking that it would make us thirsty.  But the stops that we make are so frequent that if you want to you can go from lemonade stop to lemonade stop and not suffer in the meantime.  We're each carrying two large water bottles, and we found yesterday, on day three, that we drank the lot.  So we didn't fill up fully last night and today we've been having Seven-up along the way; and it's not making us thirsty or feeling sticky or bilious, and we might continue that practice.  At the moment (at this altitude) the Seven-up and all the drinks cost twenty-five rupees for a very small bottle, about a five or six ounce bottle. Twenty-five rupees is a dollar, so it's not cheap.  Will be interesting to see how pricey it becomes.

 

Coming through the rhododendron forest has been quite eerie because the trunks are twisted and gnarled and covered in green moss; and completely soundless.  No birds. I don't know why.  No animals.  No transistors.  Someone said it would be great ......[tape erased]...... pass lots of trekkers, going both ways; those going the same way we seem to cross and re-cross each other each day depending where we stop and for how long.  Typically not many words are exchanged.  Most people's minds seem to be on their feet and the next step, but as you pass each other there's often a hullo and a bit of a grunt.  People don't seem to stop to compare experiences.  I suspect that sort of thing is saved for the evenings around the campfire, figuratively speaking, in the lodges, in the places where people put up for the night.  But we've got all our accommodation travelling with us. Most of the backpackers ........ they're not carrying tents and food because they stay in huts along the way.  Not all that salubrious, and I gather from speaking to a Canadian chap that where it's a two storey set-up the bunk room is in the upper storey; and because the fire is smouldering away down below them with no chimneys - none of the houses has a chimney - that the smoke just filters up through the floor and makes for a quite unpleasant place to doss sown.  Still, if that's the only choice you've got, then you take it.

 

We've been walking all morning in shorts.  We started out - it was quite chilly - and I decided to wear the shorts and the tee-shirt.  Most others had their strides and jumpers on, and within about ten minutes we moved out into the sun and everybody was peeling off.  

Here we're at our lunch stop.  The cloud has come over, although we can still see blue sky in the distance, but it's really quite chilly and I guess something of a foretaste of what lies ahead.  Everybody's now got a jumper on, and jackets of some sort.  I don't think I'll put my tracksuit pants on just yet because they're awfully hot to walk in.

 

And as we've moved up the hill we've started to see large wood stacks.  I think I remarked that lower down they seem to be somewhat improvident about saving wood for their fires, but up here they've got large stacks - and indeed under shelter.  It could be that the wood is a lot more damp and takes many months and years to dry out, so they need to store it up and keep it out of the weather.

 

There are the occasional goats, not so many.  They look almost like pets rather than being there for their hair or their meat.  Wherever the people have goats they have to put some sort of protection around their vegetable patches, or else tether the goats.  So we see these sort of makeshift fences of wood, sticks, cross-members, and bits of branches - sufficient, apparently, to keep the goats away. There seem to be radishes growing, and lettuces.  Potatoes, but not everywhere.  You would think the potato would be more prevalent because it's nutritious and easy to grow.  One thing we've seen a lot of is chokoes - absolutely huge vines of chokoes growing from tree to tree and dangling all around the house.  But there are relatively few vegetables.  You see a settlement of two or three houses and there's not much of a kitchen garden at all, and it's surprising to think that the dozen or twenty people who might inhabit the settlement can live off that amount of food, because up in this high country there's no sign of them growing the millet and the grain crops they grow lower down.  Maybe they make their living simply from trade.  Those twenty-five cents bottles of lemonade might be enough to keep them sustained.

 

The nights are obviously very long here, because children, children, children.  

Every place we go to there's a crowd of children, and they're very young.  It's almost as though there's the grown-ups and there's the toddlers and nothing in between.  The figures that follow confirm that Nepal has a significantly higher birthrate than Australia, especially if you (mentally) eliminate net migration from the Australian figures:

            

 

Population (millions)                 1960                1990                2020

 

Australia                                  10.2                 17.0                 25.5

Nepal                                       10.1                 18.9                 29.1

 

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Well, here we are at lunchtime on Saturday parked on a lovely verge beside a rushing stream.  We've had our usual light (in quotes) lunch, starting with our hot cordial. And then we had hot salami, sliced with some sauce over it, spinach with a bit of carrot through it, sliced and chipped potatoes (very good), platter of sliced yak cheese (not so bad), and an enormous pot of pancakes.  More like flapjacks - quite thick, quite sweet.  And if we don't eat them with the meal proper, we've got plenty of jam, peanut butter, and honey to plaster them with later.  Then we've all finished up with peeled and cored apples.  The apples wouldn't get a Safeway contract, but very welcome.  And then the ever-present tea.

 

The balance of the walk yesterday, Friday afternoon, was superb, mostly downhill or gentle incline.  Extremely picturesque: we crossed a pass, lots of craggy rocks, and finished the night at Junbesi - far and away the biggest settlement since we left Jiri on Tuesday morning.  We arrived somewhat after four, so I think it was our longest day on the track so far. I asked Mohandra whether the town had been there before trekking became the local institution and he said "yes" and pointed out some old buildings, and said they'd been there for a long time.  On a prowl around the town we found, and looked over, a Buddhist monastery.  Quite a small affair, really just one large room where the Buddha and other ornaments are, with an upstairs where the monks .......

 

Tape 2 - Side 1

 

The proof of the age of the settlement came when we asked the monk the age of the monastery.  He said three hundred and fifty-five years: and then like a doctor proving the age of an old person, added that it was built in1636.  Spot on bar one year!  The interior was very gloomy.  This particular town, Junbesi, is lit by electricity - they have a small hydro plant.  But the power seems to come and go, and it wasn't until we were leaving the monastery some minutes later that the light was working enough for us to see the Buddha and the rest of the ornaments and the painted walls.

 

On the passes and the high places we've seen tall poles erected, and prayer flags - not always on poles, sometimes strung across the trail or strung into trees.  These are white fine cloth with words painted or stamped on to them, and small pictures.  The monks, it seems, paint these prayer flags as part of their routine.  Andrew bought one for two hundred rupees, about eight dollars; and then, as he was leaving, the monk gave him a small one on a tiny piece of fine paper as a gift.

 

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It's now Sunday lunchtime and we've stopped in a splendid spot overlooking a valley - surprise, surprise!  It's been a glorious morning - in fact a little bit hot - and lunch is being called on at ten-fifteen.  Really quite leisurely this morning, not much uphill, mainly following a creek valley.  The place we've stopped is quite sheer, and terraced, and the cook boys are about three levels  above us; and we've stretched out with our table and chairs, and our tarpaulin, on a little platform at the back or side of a house, just off the trail.

 

We've come through a most enchanting village where there's been some concerted attempt to grow a garden in the style that we would have it at home.  Great banks of flowers.  Anne amazed to see cleome everywhere. 

 Clumps of tree dahlia, and large clumps of bamboo - and large bamboo at that, with perhaps eight inch diameter trunks.  Tamarillo tree.  The usual marigolds, dahlias, and carnations.  I don't know why we're surprised to see these things, but it brings a shock of recognition every time we see a flower that we know.  The occasional rose - not many.  This particular spot has lots of creepers and vines. We're not sure whether one is a weed or something useful.  It could be a choko, which I've remarked on previously.  We've also seen banana passionfruit - which we could identify!

 

Saturday's walk was a lovely easy day.  Mostly level walking around mountainsides and, because the walk itself was easy, it was a long day and we didn't reach camp until around four-thirty.  It was our longest both in time and in distance - we covered quite a stretch.

Things in the domestic environment seem to have become more orderly.  The houses are neater.  There are wood stacks.  I remarked earlier that the wood was thrown in random piles around houses, and not much of it at that.  But at the height we're at now there are almost invariably stacks of wood, very neatly piled, sometimes under cover.  And the drying-out corn, instead of being slung from the eaves as it was lower down, is now piled in airborne stacks up bamboo poles.  Not a helpful description.  What did I mean?

 

We crossed another suspension bridge this morning and this time over quite a substantial stream, rushing very wildly. 

The water was the clearest greeny-grey.  This is the water that comes from a glacier - something I didn't know before, and something I'll be interested to find the explanation for.  The rivers are fed by glacial melting. Glaciers, in addition to melting, move (at glacial speed!) and this movement grinds the underlying river beds.  The melting water takes the pulverised rock downstream.  The process produces fine-grained particles, so fine that they remain suspended in the water, and the optical effect of sunlight on the stream results in the blue-green "glacial" colour.They say the Himalayas are a new mountain range, and I suppose that means that the rocks are mostly volcanic.  The Himalayas are not volcanic in origin.  They were formed, around 40 or 50 million years ago, by the northward movement of the Indian sub-continent - which was then a separate land mass - and its collision with the Asian land mass.  The Himalayas were thrust upward by the force of the collision, and are still slowly rising. World Expeditions expanded on the general geography of Nepal:  "The Great Himalayan Range, which runs from Pakistan through India, Nepal and Bhutan, is the result of the collision between the main Asian continent and the Indian sub-continent.  Nepal bore the main brunt of this collision, which resulted in the string of great peaks which run its 800 km length.  Of the world's 14 peaks over 8000 metres, eight are in Nepal.  Although Nepal is a small country of around 141000 sq km it contains the greatest altitude variation on Earth - from the Terai at near sea level to the highest point on earth, Mt. Everest (Chomolungma) at 8848 metres. From south to north you cross from tropical jungle through the terraced hillsides of the Himalayan foothills up through pine and rhododendron forests to the peaks and glaciers of the great Himalayan range which forms Nepal's northern border with Tibet."  The rocks seem to have been the same all the way along the trail. There were a couple of interesting features lower down.  The rocks had tiny black pebbles embedded in them, obviously harder than the base rock because they were sticking out.  Andrew tells us they were garnets.  There seems also to be an amount of mica - the rocks break up and flake, and the trail is often flecked with shiny specks.

 

As before, the trail is full of people.  We have been passing and re-passing pretty much the same characters day by day.  There's an elderly Swedish gent who's apparently been here a number of times.  He's travelling alone, with a very light pack, and obviously dossing down in the small hotels that we pass. Hotel is a word that's totally inappropriate - they're people's houses with a spare room or a loft or a place where you can throw down your pack.  In some of the larger settlements they boast of a shower, but we are abstaining from using such facilities because the showers are heated by the burning of fuel. This is a Nepali tragedy, that they're cutting down all their trees and will leave nothing for posterity.  When we get to Namche Bazaar we'll be able to shower because they have solar heaters there.

 

We've had two occasions, including lunch yesterday, when we were able to bathe in a stream and do our washing. 

As far as the bathing was concerned there weren't too many takers, and I gather from those who have bathed both times that the water yesterday was significantly colder than it had been two or three days earlier.

 

For some days now we've been travelling at heights much greater than anything in Australia, from anywhere from ten to thirteen thousand feet.  This morning we've had our first really clear glimpse of high snow-capped peaks, although yesterday we should have been able to see Everest for the first time but it was an overcast day most of the time and it was just lost in the clouds.

 

Washing.  What washing we do we attach with nappy pins to the back of our day packs and it swings in the breeze as we trek along.  The socks we washed yesterday weren't dry because it wasn't a sunny afternoon, and they're back on again today.  With any sort of luck with this sunny day we'll have them dry by nightfall.  No doubt we're all less fastidious than we were when we left home.  When the body washing options are between a small bowl of warm water in the morning and a frigid stream every third day it's easy to content yourself with the view that you don't smell all that much.  And I don't think anybody does, in fact.  We've been sweating a lot on the upward climbs, but we're not grimy in the way we would be at home with dirty collars.  Shaving is not something that attracts much attention.  I'm the only one of the whole group, including Mohandra our leader, who has shaved every day or indeed shaved at all.  And there aren't too many clean-shaven people on the trail.

 

In terms of the ethnic mix I think there are probably more English than anyone else that we've passed, followed by Swedish, and a few Swiss, one Canadian chap, one American.  The American was stranded at Junbesi.  He'd been booked on a trekking tour with the promise of ten or so people, and when he arrived at Kathmandu he found that there was just one other person, a sixty-eight year old lady, and himself, and one guide.  They then flew into Junbesi or nearby, and he immediately fell ill.  Because the lady had a tight schedule she had to go on with the guide, and he was left by himself in a very strange place without any of the language.  We had quite a chat with him: he was somewhat joyful to find people who could emphasise with him and speak his language. We saw him a day later.   He was on his feet, and on the trail; he'd found himself a new guide and was off.  But it must have been a very lonely experience for him.

 

Most of the tummy trouble seems to have left us.  But I've now developed cold sores from the sunburnt lips.   We had a nasty event yesterday, when Julianne fainted.  We were resting up after coming down a fairly steep slope, sitting around in a backyard, and she was on a log - and passed out cold and fell sideways, fell splat on the ground.  Quite unnerving!  She had no sensation of fainting, she was just gone.  Didn't take long to revive, but it was alarming for all of us. It obviously wasn't altitude sickness, but it was hard to find an explanation; probably that she had been walking at the head of the group and was a bit overheated and then sat there cold - because it was a cold afternoon - sat there cold, waiting for the rest of us to catch up. And she'd been sitting there for some time before we got there.  Maybe that, maybe some sort of shock or hypothermia; but we'll certainly be on our guard  to see that that sort of thing doesn't happen again.  Julianne, and Shannon her husband, are experienced bush walkers and have trekked previously, so it came as a double surprise.  

 

As I've said, there have been local festivals going on over the last few days.  There was the day of the cow, also the day of the dog.  Yesterday was the day of the brother and sister.  Dunbar, our first Sherpa, has a sister in the settlement we were at last night, and so very appropriate that he should party on at her place. After we were settled down for the night Mohandra our leader joined him, and a good time was had by all apparently.

 

When we got to camp last night the cook boys found that the pressure valve to the pressure cooker had been left behind at lunch time, and the porter who was carrying the cooker, the kitchen boy, was sent back to get it.  That's the rule it seems:  you leave something behind, you backtrack and find it.  Setting off in the dark over those treacherous trails is quite an ordeal. It wasn't until this morning as we were pulling out that the lad arrived back empty-handed - just in time to be loaded up to carry his share of the kitchen gear today.

 

Back in Kathmandu last Sunday - it seems an awfully long time ago - a party of us had gone down from the hotel towards the main centre and got ourselves on the trolley bus to a place called Bhaktapur.  It was quite a long journey really.  Bhaktapur was some few miles out into the country, and to see the trolley bus rattling its way out beyond the suburbs of Kathmandu was quite entertaining. Bhaktapur is an old city, and its principal feature is a series of temples around a square.  We had a most interesting day.  Lots of shopping - lots of shops anyway - and much to see.  The place was substantially devastated by a recent earthquake, and I guess these old temples have been rebuilt to an extent. They don't look rebuilt, they still look very ancient.  There's a small pavilion in the square which was donated quite recently by the West German government, and people talk affectionately of Helmet Kohl as the man who gave them the pavilion.  Kohl was the West German chancellor from 1982 to 1998.  The 1988 Nepal earthquake, magnitude 6.9 on the Richter scale, killed more than 700 people, injured thousands, and damaged perhaps 50,000 buildings throughout the country.  Poor Nepal suffered another devastating earthquake in April 2015, 7.8 magnitude. In Bhaktapur, population around 80,000, some 30,000 houses were destroyed and some 120 monuments significantly damaged. There were 9000 deaths country-wide.  There was an avalanche on Mount Everest, nineteen climbers perished, and others were stranded until able to be airlifted out. We were picked up by a small boy, a youth I guess, who offered to be our guide and was a very good one at that.  He had lunch with us, having first taken us to his favourite restaurant - some family venue no doubt - and then declined to take any money for his services!  He did see us right back to the trolley bus, however, and stayed long enough for us to take around the hat and press some money upon him; and we figured out later that the amount he received for his half day's guiding was more than our porters will receive for their three weeks.

 

It was a fairly drab day.  It had been raining quite a bit in the morning, not unpleasantly, but we had pulled out the el cheapo umbrella - which immediately broke a rib.  But it proved very serviceable later on on the trail in those first couple of days when it was unpleasantly hot; and, especially on the first day, when I'd forgotten to keep out the sunscreen, the umbrella was a godsend.

 

On the way back from the trolley bus terminal to the centre of Kathmandu Anne and I stopped at the central telegraph office and rang home.  It seemed awfully disorganised with a lot of people waiting around, and it wasn't clear who was doing the ringing out.  There were about five young chaps behind the counter, two of them just chatting and one of them seeming to do most of the work.  It was necessary, in order to make a call, to fill out quite a large form with your particulars and information, and who you were calling, and the number, and all the rest.  Because I didn't remember the country code for Australia I thought that there was going to be a problem, but apparently not - there must be plenty of Australians calling out.  Anyway, it only took about ten minutes wait and we were through and quite clear, although listening to Tom's voice on the other end it was obvious that there was one of those annoying time delays between speaking and hearing.  Tom, Dan and Laura, although not incapable, were being generally looked after and supervised by their uncle Bill, who had moved in for the duration.

 

On returning to the hotel we were given our duffle bags and proceeded to separate our gear into those things we were taking on the trek and those things which were being left behind in custody in Kathmandu. We're lucky in a way that the two suitcases we brought, quite by chance were of sufficiently different size that one fitted inside the other.  So we've effectively got one case only in the lock-up.

 

We also, next morning, left our valuables with the tour company.  We didn't have many valuables, really; the only things we've left behind have been travellers cheques, credit cards, and a bit of Australian currency.  Anne had had the good sense to leave her rings at home.  In the end we decided to take our watches with us.  It was a tempting thought to think we could go for three weeks without knowing or caring what time of day it was, but in the end we didn't believe that would make us very comfortable.  

So having packed our gear, a few of us then caught a taxi to the Monkey Temple, so-called.  This is on a quite steep hillside overlooking Kathmandu.  Not far out.  And the taxi took us around the back way so that we were dropped right at the temple, the temple being a series of buildings, Buddhist.  The view of the city is very spectacular.  We were there just at sunset and it was most picturesque. They call it Monkey Temple because the buildings are covered in monkeys.  Little monkeys climbing and jumping all over the place, off the bits of stone that stick out, or off flags - they don't require much to make a toe-hold, believe me.  Also packs of dogs around the place, which are less attractive.  They're all fairly unattractive, really.  The place has a high stench from all the animal droppings; and we'd been warned to have nothing to do with dogs or animals in this part of the world because sometimes they can be rabid.  It wouldn't be a very pleasant end to your holiday or your life to go down with rabies.

 

It was a lovely way to spend an evening as it fined up, and we stayed there till well after sunset; and then made our way down the steps at the front of the temple area, steps which went all the way down towards Kathmandu itself.  And we struck a road and after, I suppose, about half-an-hour of walking we arrived at the Thamel where we'd been the day before, this time coming at it from another angle.  We found it was really quite vast, much bigger than we'd imagined, and a different variety of shopping, different sort of shops in the part that we went through. We found a couple of squares where there were produce stalls.  It's a place absolutely bursting with life, and a place that we'll be going back to again and again when we return to Kathmandu.

 

Monday morning it was up bright and early, stow our valuables, put our cases in line for the lock-up, and put our duffle bags in line to be thrown on top of the bus.  The bus wasn't just a bus for the thirteen of us plus our leader and the two Sherpas, but also for the number of porters who had been engaged already - not the full complement of porters by any means.  But we had a bus full, and a few rode on the roof.  

Moreover, there were a couple of little boys one of whom was effectively hitching a ride back home. He'd been to Kathmandu to have glasses prescribed - in fact one of the few sets of spectacles I've seen in our travels - and he tagged along as a "boy Sherpa", and later peeled off when he reached his home town.  His principal task, apart from carrying his own small backpack, was to carry one of the portagas lanterns so as not to break the filament.

So we piled into the bus and set off for Jiri.

 

The whole of our trekking journey is more or less north to northeast, and the road from Kathmandu to Jiri is generally in that direction.  The first several days of the trek have been generally in an east-northeast direction.  Later on we start pointing more north towards Everest itself.

 

The bus was a pretty old bus, with a large cabin area; and in with the driver at any time there were a couple of girls and three or four chaps.  All seemed to be having a great time, and the driver - although he would flick his eyes left occasionally to share a joke with his friends - was the most attentive and expert driver I've ever seen.  His double-declutching and the swinging of the wheel, which had three-and-a-half full turns from lock to lock, was really a pleasure to behold.  He kept at it all day - we didn't get into Jiri until after dark, and then the porters had to unpack, and to pitch camp for us.  This was our first experience of living in the tents.  While we were waiting for this to happen we holed up in a teashop and had drinks; also discovered the two dollars bottles of rum.

 

The journey was brilliant.  Hairpin bend after hairpin bend, but without any sensation of unease.  It started to rain late in the day and the boys who'd been on the roof climbed in through the windows - they kept climbing in and out through the door for most of the journey; and there were quite a number of spots where the bus had very carefully to manoeuvre around a hairpin bend, so they would run out along the side, or hang right over the edge, to see that we had enough clearance, then whistle or bang on the roof to indicate to the driver that all was clear.

 

The road is sealed most of the way.  It suffers from landslides and washaways, and there is a most amazing amount of work that's been done along the roadside.  The road has been built up in many places, and there are great stone walls made of piles of thinly sliced pieces of stone that are all wrapped in heavy gauge wire netting; so they sit there like pallets of stone, and sometimes they're fifty feet long.  And you can see they're there to stop further wastage of the roadside.  Sometimes you can see the road is actually built on top of these retaining walls; and everywhere there's a gully where there's concern about erosion they've built these great stone revetments way up the gully and way down the gully beyond and below the roadside so that the water is being directed and coursed down without gouging more of the hillside away.  We could see this all the way along - even quite unassociated with the road there was this sort of retention being done to prevent erosion.  Quite remarkable work.  Not sure whether done by the national government (you would presume so) or whether by local communities.  No sign of the wire mesh rusting away, although you would think that it wouldn't have the life of the stone (!), and if it's a necessary part of the structure then they're in for trouble in future years when the wire starts coming away and the stone begins to shift.

 

Jiri is emphatically the end of the road. Thereafter everything is on foot. Jiri has one main street, a wide street, and on either side there are buildings side by side just like any town - two and three storeys high.  Nearly every building is a shop, with a number of them selling fabrics, great bolts of cloth.  Full of stock.  So business must be brisk, although no sign of it that evening when we were there. Here was our first encounter with the filth, and the smell of human excreta.  Our little campsite was really just a vacant block more or less in the middle of town very close to a creek, and the stench was not inviting.

 

After the rain it was a surprisingly cold night, and I was up early - around five-thirty - and went for a stroll down the main street; and it was alive and bustling.  Every one of the shops was opening for business, and we're clearly among a people who live by the sun.  I guess, put very simply, once the rooster crows it's time to be up.

 

While Jiri was a big settlement compared with what we've since been seeing it would still, in the precincts of the town, have had no more than two or three hundred people.  But looking from Jiri the hillsides were dotted with farmhouses.  Big.  Big farmhouses.  And so within the general area there would be quite a substantial population and it's clearly a road-head, an important focal point for trade.  It's from here where everything sets off, on back, for the remoter parts east; and it's the place where people come through when they're heading for Kathmandu.  I was so wrong. Jiri's population circa 1990 was around 3,900 - although this is in the Jiri district, not the town alone.  For the faint hearted the natural hazard risk factors for Jiri, out of ten, are:  landslide 8, drought 7, flood 10 and earthquake 9.9.

 

As we discovered next morning, the end of town is actually just an end of a town.  At the end of the street there's a wide area, a sort of turntable where buses can turn around, and beyond that it just falls away into a track.  And the track is where the trek commences.

 

To be continued.........

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NEPAL DIARY - 1990 - PART 1

 

Preamble - 

 

In October and November of 1990 Anne and Gary Andrews trekked in Nepal.  We were part of a group organised by World Expeditions - their "Classic Everest" tour.  The group gathered in Kathmandu, and after a 200 kilometres bus ride to Jiri, the staging point, the trek commenced on 16 October. We arrived back in Kathmandu 22 days later.  After two days R & R the party dispersed: some home, some on to further Nepal adventure, and Anne and Gary to Delhi for a few days in north-west India.  The Andrews arrived home on 18 November after a memorable 38 days away.

 

There were 13 trekkers, from widely scattered parts of Australia -

  from Brisbane - Brad Greentree

  from Sydney - Maryanne and Shannon Kinsella, Geoff Bonney,  

         Kay Johnson, Ray Saunders, Owen Jensen

  from Lorne - Ian Ridgeway

  from Melbourne - Anne and Gary Andrews, Pam Debney, Naomi                    Mathews, Andrew Wilson. 

 

In addition, the trekking party included a leader (Mohandra), two Sherpa assistants (Dunbar and Tendi), seven kitchen staff, and a large number of porters. Plus Cheering, "the boy Sherpa".

 

What follows was taped by Gary during the trek.  The tape ends on the last day in the mountains, before the light-aircraft return flight to Kathmandu.

A few weeks later, after we'd all returned to Australia, most of the trekking group were able to spend a weekend of reminiscence and fellowship at Anne and Gary's home in Melbourne.  We were able to choose from each others' photographs, and prints were later exchanged.  This Blog contains but a few snaps from the combined trove.

 

The Diary -

 

Tape 1 - Side 1

 

It's Tuesday lunchtime.  We've stopped on the trail.  Yes, we're on the trail, and waiting for lunch to be served.  Our day officially started around seven, although I was out at five-thirty poking around the town of Jiri. Jiri is the starting point for the trek to Everest.  My diary started with a big lie.  We were not trekking to Everest, but - if we could make it - to Everest Base Camp, the staging point for the mountaineers.  There is a world of difference between trekkers and climbers!  Five-thirty it was just getting light and the shops were all open for business. Not that there was any business, but the town was alive with people getting  ready for........whatever they do.  Seven o'clock we had our morning tea served to us in the tent, and hot water for washing.  Made a late start, around eight, because there was a lot of organising to do with the new group of porters who were recruited - mostly the night before, after we arrived in Jiri.

 

It's a brilliant sunny day, although there's lots of quite heavy cloud.  Strangely, we haven't passed under it. We've caught our first glimpse of snow-capped peaks, although they're really only hills compared with what we will be seeing later. 

 

The first three days we climb up reasonably-sized hills and then down the other side to camp.  We're on the trail for about five hours each day, but it's very leisurely paced. We've stopped several times for a long smoko and a cup of tea from one of the tiny settlements along the track, and now we've stopped for lunch - and it's barely ten past eleven.  It's all down hill this afternoon, and I'm sure we'll be reaching our camping spot in about an hour-and-a-half after lunch. This, I suppose, is acclimatisation in the early stages - testing us more for leg and aerobic fitness than for the altitude difficulties which we'll confront later.

 

There are thirteen of us in the group, and so far we're all having a jolly time.  Our group leader, Mohandra, is in fact not Nepalese - he comes from Darjeeling

  

 - but he's done this trek many times, along with a number of other treks through Nepal. Darjeeling is in West Bengal state, north-east India - on the Nepal border. With the party are two people they describe as Sherpas, but are really the guides.  Sherpas are a separate racial group, of Mongolian origin, living in the Solu Khumbu valley of Nepal.  They don't carry big packs, nor does Mohandra, and they're responsible for keeping us on the trail and getting us to our destination each day.  In addition to that there are seven kitchen staff.  The chief cook doesn't carry a pack, but all the others carry the kitchen on their backs - and the food.  And then there are twenty or so porters who carry the tents, and our duffle bags - which contain all our clothes, medical supplies, spare film, muesli bars, sleeping bags, you name it.

 

Since arriving in Nepal things have been absolutely splendid, but it didn't start out too well.  On Friday we awoke to the news that there was an air re-fuellers' strike, and it took me two or three hours to ascertain that in fact the international flight was still going.  The strike was confined to Melbourne, and the airline had the good sense to touch down in Adelaide to refuel so that we could get to Sydney.  But there was still quite a delay, and then a delay in Sydney also, and we arrived in Bangkok several hours late.  I must break here because tea has arrived.  Tea, it seems, will be a necessary prelude to every meal.

 

***********

I was wrong.  It wasn't tea, it was warm orange cordial.  Surprisingly pleasant.

 

The flight to Bangkok was very good.  Thai International.  There were quite a number of spare seats, and they had left the central section fairly vacant, and a number of people were able to relocate themselves and sleep across the seats.  Anne was one of them.  Anne wasn't too happy with the flight, but it was better than a number she's been on, and she was able to sleep a fair bit.  I read every magazine and paper available, and somehow managed to fill out around ten hours doing pretty much nothing.  Tried not to eat too much, as we're told, and succeeded pretty well. Although staying overnight only in Bangkok we still had to clear through Customs, and that took quite a while.  We were collected by the World Expeditions representative there (who was also gathering up people for other trips) and taken to our hotel - very immodestly named The First Hotel.  Not bad.  Probably rated around three star, and certainly not roughing it in the style that we'll be roughing it later on.

 

It was late, around ten-thirty, which because of the time difference was equivalent to one-thirty back home.  Since you can hardly do justice to Bangkok with one hurried look around town at that time of day we decided, instead, to go to bed. No sooner in bed than a feverish knock on the door from two of the other group - two chaps who'd found themselves billeted together in a room with a single bed only.  Much hilarity; and we did a quick swap with them.  When I say "single" bed I mean one double bed. Very comfortable though.   Before the swap we had had two singles.

 

Next morning: although we're making an early start we were up much earlier.  Had plenty of time for a stroll around the local area.  Just a short way from the hotel we found a local market and spent half-an-hour or so prowling around there.  Notable absence of health regulations, but an abundance of produce. The hardest ones for us to accept are the meat stalls, and the fish stalls, where everything but everything seems to be for sale for some purpose or other. A very few of the stalls had piles of crushed ice, but mostly the food was just lying on the bench, frequently covered in flies.

 

Back to the hotel.  On to the bus.  Into the airport.  Again flying Thai Airlines.  Direct to Kathmandu, around three hours. Another good flight, although the plane absolutely packed.  Kathmandu Airport is a new building, and in many ways rather grander than they need to have.  Something of a waste of money.  With the size of the queues at the immigration checking counters, it would be smarter for them to have spent the money having more officials than to have spent it on grandiose brick colonnades.  If you're travelling alone you would want to get local currency straight away - as we found out later, there was no exchange counter inside the barrier, only outside.  Fortunately, being with a conducted tour we didn't have to worry about paying for taxis or any such things.

 

****************

I've just gathered a group of interested Nepalese who've been walking along the trail as I was recording, who stopped to watch. So I replayed the tape for them. Yes, they knew it was a cassette - they used that word - and they knew there were Eveready batteries in it.  But I'm sure they'd never seen anything of this size before, especially the miniature cassettes.  I've also realised that the wind that's blowing around me up here on the trail is picking up on the tape and making it rather noisy.

 

The cook and his six assistants have been at it for quite some time and no results yet.  So clearly lunch, and everything about this trek, I think, is going to be a very leisurely affair.

 

After clearing through Immigration there was a long wait before our bags emerged, and then the queues again to go through Customs. All our bags were carrying World Expeditions tags and, not surprisingly, would be able to be identified by their porters who - we thought - would come up, grab our bags, and offer to see us through Customs rather more quickly than we were achieving by standing in the queue. I fell for it - Anne didn't - and assumed that they were indeed from World Expeditions' local office, and that we were getting the fast track treatment.  Not so.  Having put the bags up on the reverse side of the Customs desk they then asked for money to pay them for their services.  Not only wouldn't I have paid them but I had no local money anyway.  When I said that, they offered to accept any currency at all. So back into the queue, and through Customs!  One of the bags was opened, but a fairly cursory look - with Anne all the time saying: "Oh my goodness.  It was so hard to get everything in there we'll never be able to close the case again."  Outside the gate we were met by the official World Expeditions people, piled on a bus, and taken to our hotel - the Hotel Kathmandu.  From the World Expeditions notes:  "Kathmandu airport can be a confusing place so we will briefly explain the routine here.  Once you have passed through Immigration at Kathmandu airport please collect your baggage from the baggage belt and proceed directly to the Customs officers.  Once cleared go out the two sets of doors where a World Expeditions staff member will identify you from your baggage label and show you to the area in which your Group Leader will be waiting.  Airport porters are usually very quick to pick up your bags and head out the door.  Don't worry - just keep the porters with you and the porter fee will be paid by World Expeditions staff outside the terminal."  It wasn't quite that easy!

 

*************

Our head Sherpa has just been washing his hair under a water pipe.  Everywhere you look there's water running down some hillside, and whenever there are people living nearby they seem to have diverted some of the stream through a pipe which is generally running out over the trail or across a rock.  And while we can't drink the water I don't see any reason why we can't use it to wash our hair.  It's a little hard to do that in the mornings in one small basin of water, crouched on your knees inside the tent with your head out, or vice-versa. The water has just been poured off the rice so I think lunch must be imminent.  World Expeditions: "A bowl of warm water for washing is provided each morning, and often we will camp or have lunch next to a river where you can bathe or wash clothes.  We highly recommend you bring bio-degradable soaps, shampoos and washing liquids/soaps (try your local camping or health food shop)."

 

**************

Well here we are on the second day of our trek. We've stopped for lunch. 

Yesterday our lunch stop was a large grassy clearing on the brow of a hill.  We could spread ourselves around and lie on the grass recuperating.  But today we're perched on a tiny bank, sitting on rocks and logs beside a stream. I'm sure you can hear it running. The mechanical noise you can hear is a water driven mill wheel.  Not in use, but turning nonetheless. We've had a steady climb since leaving our overnight camp.  Quite a reasonable degree of difficulty, but the Sherpa is taking us very slowly, and we've paused a number of times for long breaks - ten minutes or so.  And paused at two-or-three-house settlements where we can buy tea or hot Coke or Seven-up.  We're not interested in trying the soft drink, not just because it's warm, but because it's sure to make us more thirsty.  We haven't really been thirsty, but we're drinking a lot of water to accustom ourselves to the requirement later on at higher altitude where we have to drink four litres of liquid a day to combat the dehydration that occurs there.

 

One of the girls is causing some amusement by trying to take her tee shirt off, claiming that there's no privacy around here. Well, privacy is something in these mountains that you very soon learn to live without.  Not only do people take a leak wherever they feel like it, but they take a bog anywhere too.  Little piles literally everywhere.  No sign of toilet paper, so the bum-wiping left hand is an institution in these parts. As we're climbing up these slopes we tend not to look upwards, rather concentrating on our feet and getting a firm footing. But we can always tell within about twenty metres that we're coming upon a house, or a small settlement, simply because of the smell of human excreta.  No such thing as a lavatory, and they just seem to walk out the back door, down the trail a bit, and let fly.  I hope they have dung beetles to carry the waste away, but I suspect not.  What we have seen........plenty of times when the chooks have been poking around in the general vicinity.  Makes you wonder about the eggs!  Dung beetles are a sub-family of the scarab beetle, of which there are some 3000 varieties. Dung beetles are scavengers, feeding on decaying vegetation or on the dung of grazing animals.  Most lay their eggs in underground chambers supplied with dung, on which the larvae feed.  The burrowing process not only fertilises the soil but achieves aeration.  Australia's 250 species of dung beetle have evolved to process the dung of native animals, and do not cope with the moister dung of cattle.  It was a scientific triumph of the CSIRO to import some 55 varieties of African and Mediterranean dung beetles between 1967 and 1982 to dispose of cattle dung.  All very interesting, but I've been unable to ascertain whether Nepal has any dung beetles of its own.

 

The strength of the porters is amazing.  We set off before they did yesterday morning so we didn't know which of the group that had gathered around were actually the porters; and we didn't see them until well after we'd arrived at our campsite yesterday afternoon.  We were staggered.  They're the very smallest of people that we've seen anywhere.  All under five feet, and not particularly muscly looking.  But the load they can carry is prodigious.  Our instruction from the outset was to make sure that our duffle bags didn't exceed fifteen kilograms each.  It's a pretty respectable weight, and we expected to see the porters carrying one bag apiece.  Don't you believe it!  Each of these tiny men was carrying three of our duffle bags.  Others who were carrying the kitchen equipment were carrying great baskets full of potatoes and onions, or the metal tables and chairs that we sit around on - forty-five or fifty kilograms being toted up these hills is really something to behold.   

They don't seem to puff, although they do sweat a fair bit.  They stop frequently. This morning we passed our porters quite early on the trail - they struck camp, and set out before we'd finished breakfast - and, despite our several stops, they haven't caught up to us.  So they'll obviously arrive in camp well after we do.  It's a bit distressing to see them all smoke, but they do.  It's also a bit distressing to inquire of their age. The one who arrived with our particular duffle bags on his back last night had a small, wizened face full of creases and wrinkles.  He's thirty-two years old.  Mind you, when he smiles about ten of his years fall away.....and he looks a mere fifty-five to sixty.  It's a tough life. 

The vegetation is interesting.  This is the home of the rhododendron and we've gone through large areas of them.  Conditions are harsh, and the trees look gnarled and stunted.  This isn't the time of year when they're in flower.  If we had them in our garden at home I suspect we'd grub them out and buy new ones.

This also seems to be the home of the canna.  I have a recollection that they might otherwise be known as the Indian lily. Wrong!  The canna indicais native to the tropical regions of the Americas. Many garden plots have them; glorious colours.  And they grow quite a bit taller than they do back home......as do many plants.  We've seen some sweet corn crops where the central stalk would be about ten feet tall.  The marigold seems to be the favourite flower, but they're not a low bedding flower as they are back home.  They grow tall like a dahlia.  They have some religious significance, I think; we've come across a couple of dogs with collars made of marigolds.  Plenty of dahlias too.  They grow tall.  Anne's been thrilled to see the mauve open flowers that she calls the "windflower".  Down at the level of the weeds I'm standing on a patch that's covered in turnip weed - just the sort of thing we dig out of the back lawn - and there's some rather nasty looking ground-hugging thistles here that I'm sure are a proclaimed noxious weed back home.  Otherwise, in these hills there are dozens of little creeping plants, lots of flowers even though this is autumn, and many types of tree that we can't identify; and the higher up we go the trees tend to have parasitic ferns hanging from under their branches.

 

Although Nepal has a massive deforestation problem it's not been apparent to us so far.  Most of the hillsides have been covered with pine trees of some sort or another, at least that's the hillsides where the terracing isn't present.  Most of them, I think, are radiata pine, although there are some other species.  Right on the tops of the hills there are some magnificent firs, specimens of which I'm sure I've seen in botanical gardens back home.  Very tall, with fine feathery leaves.  I suspect these are indigenous and that the radiata are not.  Pinus radiata, known as Monterey pine, is native to North America.  The radiata are difficult for me to identify because they're mostly high pruned.  High pruning in our part of the world is a technique to allow sunlight to get into grazing land, so it's used only where pine-growing is carried on in conjunction with grazing.  Here, I think, the high pruning has been done simply for firewood.  It's hard to tell because, as I said, there is plenty of timber in these lower reaches; and in fact houses and settlements don't seem to have large wood piles.  I get the impression that they gather wood on a regular basis and live rather more like grasshoppers than ants.  Any wood we've seen burning has been small sticks about an inch to an inch-and-a-half diameter.  So maybe that's proof that they're not cutting down the big trees, and are foraging firewood from low branches.

 

The stream is crystal clear, very tempting, but there's no way any of us will drink from it.  It's a sad commentary on Nepal - almost a motto - that no matter how high up you go there's always someone higher.  Given their personal habits, even the clearest of mountain streams will be polluted - certainly containing the sort of germs that visitors like us will succumb to.  Doesn't deter the porters though.

 

Four of us have had tummy troubles so far.  Andrew was actually sick after our first night in Kathmandu.  We had some sort of banquet - I use the word advisedly - at the hotel.  They turned on a sort of floorshow with some ethnic dancing which we couldn't see, and which was not music to our ears, and accompanied that with a smorgasbord.  Clearly Nepal didn't yet have me in its thrall, and I was being a touristic grouch.  It was something that Andrew ate there, we believe, that gave him the collywobbles for the next day.   And the first night out of Jiri Geoff was very ill..........having been to the toilet tent for the umpteenth time he came and sat in the mess rent, and turned ghastly white.  So his wasn't just a tummy problem but a general malaise.  And then all day yesterday Ray had the trots and generally didn't feel too good, although not bilious.  And then last night yours truly developed the trots.  Had a couple of quick dashes through the night.  Standard treatment is to eat no food, simply water or flat lemonade, for twenty-four hours, and that usually fixes it; if not then some medication is called for.  I'm crossing my fingers that the problem has gone away because I've had no discomfort today and I really feel very fit.  They say everybody gets ill, so those of us who've had our bout already are hoping that that's it and the worst is behind us. Unintended pun.

 

This really is an odd spot where we're perched at the moment.  They've spread a tarpaulin on the only flat area and half-a-dozen of our number are stretched out on that.  The rest of us are just wandering around, or sitting on nearby rocks. 

 

 

 The cook boys are up a rise some thirty metres away and they'll be bringing our food to us course by course.  We've already had the lukewarm cordial, very pleasant it is too, and we're wondering what comes next.  Not for me, of course.  They're a happy and delightful bunch.  The utensils we use are all aluminium.  So we have aluminium plates and.......no, correction, the mugs are stainless steel. The plates are aluminium. There are big cooking pots, and a couple of very large aluminium dishes that they do the washing up in.  The kettles......every meal  they give us a kettle of tea and a kettle of boiling water and a kettle of hot milk and a large tin of Nescafe.  Surprisingly (to me) most people are drinking the tea.  It's very good.  Somewhat weak.  Not aromatic. The locals drink it with milk. There are cows around here, so it's cow milk, but later on we could be getting yak milk.  Except it isn't correct to call it yak milk because the yaks are the males and the females are called narks, would you believe?  So we'll have tea with nark milk and sugar.  They all have lots of sugar, so the tea is very sweet. Most of us are preferring to have it black. 

 

World Expeditions, the organisers of the tour, adopted a policy some time ago of abandoning wood fires - that's in deference to the wood shortage that exists - so the cooking is all done with portagas. The sad thing from our point of view is that this means we can't have campfires, and that one of the more pleasant aspects of a group trek is lost to us.  World Expeditions: Nepal's environment is extremely fragile.  Its rapidly increasing population is putting Immeasurable pressures on the country's environment and resources and it is our responsibility as visitors to minimise the impact of our presence.  Deforestation is Nepal's greatest environmental problem and World Expeditions pioneered the use of kerosene as an alternative to wood on all expeditions. We do not have campfires and we strongly discourage trekkers from buying wood-fuelled hot showers in lodges along the trail.  We recommend that each trekker keeps a small plastic bag in their daypack, and in camp, to collect personal rubbish during the day.  Each morning a small fire will be made for burnable rubbish.  Any non-burnable or non-biodegradables - e.g. batteries and plastic bottles - should be kept, and taken back to Kathmandu.

 

The campsite consists of a number of two-man tents with flies.  The flies are very necessary because, quite apart from rain, the clear skies produce rather dewy nights, and every morning - there have been two so far! - every morning the flies are drenched.  They're packed up in that condition, and I guess we all hope when we pitch camp at the end of the day that it's nice and sunny so that the tents can dry out before we climb into them.  There's a cooking tent; and there's a dining tent that's made up of a single large (almost seven feet by seven feet) table comprised of a couple of collapsible units that knit together, and we all have small folding aluminium camp stools; and it's just the right size.  We are thirteen in number, plus Mohandra our leader - he eats with us - so the fourteen of us can sit around this quite comfortably.  The food is such (so far, anyway) that we don't use a knife and fork in the usual fashion, thus we're not needing to use the table to eat off.  The evening meal has been a long drawn-out affair with the arrival first of - as in every meal - the arrival of the three dishes with soap and treated water and fresh water and a kettle of hot water: and we all must wash our hands before we touch food.  Water is treated with iodine.  Iodine is the standard purifying ingredient in this part of the world. Anne came equipped with Puritabs but we've been told that they don't work here because they're not strong enough to kill the amoebae that produce the dysentery.  Even with the iodine it needs to be left in the water for half-an-hour, I think, before

 

Tape 1 - Side 2

 

the water can be drunk.  The problem is that water boils at a much lower temperature in higher altitudes and the germs simply aren't killed.  So it's iodine for us. It's all to do with atmospheric pressure.  At "normal" atmospheric pressure (sea level) water boils at 100 degrees celsius. At 10,000 feet, water boils at 90 degrees celsius; and at the top of Everest - if you wanted to boil the billy - the water would boil at around 75 degrees.

 

*************

Later, on the trail.  Yes, in case you've been wondering, iodine tastes just like iodine, so when we get to that stage the water will be laced with cordial or Staminade. Everybody has been told to bring something to add to the water for reasons of flavour.  

 

The final tent for the campsite is the loo tent, simply three fixed sides and a zippered front, and inside the porters have dug a small pit. 

The depth of the pit, we're told, varies according to the amount of rock they strike. The first night at Jiri it was very shallow indeed.  Last night it was adequate to the task, and we had a touch of luxury in that they've placed two flat stones on either side for us to perch on. Diarrhoea is a blessing in a way because you don't get to stay long enough for your knees to seize.  We've each been issued with a roll of toilet paper, and there's one hanging in the toilet tent.  But with fourteen of us, including five females, it doesn't necessarily last the night, so the rule is BYO.  Geoff found this out last night and raised a cry of "help", until someone brought him some paper.  The toilet pit is filled in each morning, and each morning the cook staff make a small pile, we throw any trash on it, and after dousing in petrol we have a little bonfire to clean up our mess.  World Expeditions:  At each night's camp a hole will be dug and a small toilet tent erected over it. You must always use the toilet tent when it is available.  During the day ensure that toilet stops are made far off the trail and that all toilet paper is burnt or buried.  We recommend that you bring a cigarette lighter for this purpose.  Sanitary napkins and tampons should be kept in a plastic bag during the day andonlydisposed of in the toilet tent at night.

 

Nearly everyone has been travelling in shorts and tee-shirts.  Hats of course.  And we have our day packs.  We soon had the hang of what we should include in the day packs and what we should put into the duffle bags for the porters to carry.  Our water flasks are absolutely necessary.  If we're travelling in summer gear we need to have something to keep us warm later in the day - poncho or jumper, parka, something that we can put on when we reach the campsite; because the porters might be an hour or two or three hours behind us, and it'll be a long time before we can get into our duffle bags and find something more substantial.  In our daypacks we're carrying our cameras, and our sunburn cream, and spare film, a pocket knife (which each of us doesn't need - we could get by with one knife between the lot of us), and a book to read. I think only Ian has been reading so far; the rest of us have just been mooching around. 

Coming up today's pretty steep hills it dawned on me that I've got in my daypack a large notepad and a file to do with the trip, neither of which I'm going to be using, and tomorrow they're certainly going into the duffle bag.  And a couple of hip flask-sized bottles of rum which we bought in Jiri.  We went into a small tea shop there and not only does it sell tea but soft drink and rum.  Very nice in black tea it is too.

 

As we get further up the mountains we won't be allowed to have alcohol, so for the next few nights those who've bought some rum will be sharing it around the group and adding to the conviviality.  It's locally made rum, local meaning Nepal - I'm sure they don't make it up here - and costs the equivalent of two dollars for these small bottles.  Amazingly cheap, but almost exactly the sum that our porters receive for their daily wage. So the rum in the tea shop is for the trekkers, and the local people drink some sort of local bombo - which Mohandra describes as very powerful. I have subsequently realised that the slang term "bombo" refers to cheap wine.  The Nepalese mountain liquor is most certainly not wine.

 

I'm missing out on something here, because Mohandra has pulled out a map and most of the group are clustered around.  I guess he's showing the route through to Everest and where we're likely to be each day.  We're sticking pretty close to the schedule put out by World Expeditions but there will be one or two changes.  Mohandra's idea is that we shouldn't have rest days in the lower reaches, and should confine our rest days to the very high country where we need longer time to acclimatise.  None of us is going to disagree with that.

 

The pace so far is very leisurely.  I suspect that the Sherpas and Mohandra are testing us out, looking to see if there are any weak links, anyone who needs special help during the weeks ahead.  The first several days are up hill, down hill, up hill, down hill, and things become somewhat flatter later on as we reach high plain country.  I don't think it's a good idea to know too much about what lies ahead, just be pleased that we reach the end of each day without mishap, and feeling good.  A number of us have bought copies of the map that Mohandra's working from.  It was written up in the literature and it's from a place called Lamosangu, to Everest.  It starts from part way along the road where we travelled in the bus on Monday and takes us all the way on our journey. Mohandra's version of the map has the route marked in texta colour, and I'm sure we'll all be doing that at some stage. Andrew, ever resourceful, has already done it.  He borrowed a texta colour back at the hotel.   The rest of us will have to wait until we return there.  Mohandra gave us an interesting statistic yesterday: he said that if you count all the ups and downs and the distance of the trekking that we'll be doing, we will have covered the equivalent of the height of Mount Everest - that's 29000 feet.  I'll have to think about that.  I think he's sold us short: I read somewhere that in linear distance we'll be covering around two hundred kilometres.  Mohandra was clearly wrong......29000 feet is somewhat less than six miles.

 

I've mentioned our first night in Kathmandu. That's when we had the banquet. Anne and I were pretty tired, in fact, and we didn't hang around, and went to bed early.  Some of them went down into town - certainly the shopping areas are open till all hours.  In the afternoon, after our arrival, we'd walked down to the Thamel area, which is the major shopping area, full of small shops.  Narrow streets bursting with character. We had to get one pair of snow leggings, which we did.  We had intended to hire them but they were about twelve dollars equivalent to buy, and it seemed a bit silly to commit ourselves to returning them when we got back to Kathmandu.  So we bought.

 

We also bought me a colourful jumper.  The woollen goods on sale are spectacular; and this quite splendid jumper was also around twelve dollars.  As Anne said, if I never wear it again at home - which is likely to be the case - she'll be glad to.  We left it behind for the porters! And we bought some postcards and sent them off the next day, and some stamps from the postcard seller.   The postage is really quite cheap, four rupees. There are twenty-five rupees to the dollar.  We had to pay the boy five rupees - as he said, four for the government and one for him. We came back from the Thamel in a rickshaw, bicycle rickshaw.  Negotiated what we thought was a reasonable price of eighty rupees.  The Hotel Kathmandu is quite a distance, I suppose two miles, from the Thamel area and at one part along the way the road is really quite steep.  So we took pity on our rickshaw man and said we'll walk the rest of the way.  As it turned out we still had about a third of the journey to go, so he would be laughing all the way.  He started to laugh even more when he said it was eighty rupees each.  We'd already taken pity on him and decided to give him a hundred and call it quits.  So when he touched us, or tried to touch us, for a hundred and sixty we were less than amused; so we gave him the hundred and walked away.  Then we ran into Pam and Ian who'd had exactly the same experience.  They'd got to that very spot, taken pity on their rickshaw man, and his fee had been fifty rupees for the two of them!  So a bit of local knowledge doesn't do you any harm.

 

We arrived back just in time, at four o'clock, for our briefing session with Mohandra.  This was the first time that the whole group had been together.  Brad had found his own way to Kathmandu.  He'd come via Borneo.  What a wonderful thing for a young man to do: not content to go trekking in Nepal, he'd taken a side excursion on the way there.  And we were joined by Naomi and Geoff.  They'd completed a different trek for the previous three weeks and were so enchanted by it all that they'd booked in and were joining us to go to Everest.

 

The instructions are not very complicated, the principal message being to be on guard against mountain sickness - and all of that's to do with not ascending too quickly.  The rule of thumb seems to be that we're not to ascend overall more than three hundred metres a day.  When we're at higher altitudes we can go up more than that during the day but we must come down to spend the night within three hundred meters of the altitude where we dossed down the night before.  That's why the trip is such a long and extended one.

In addition to health warnings World Expeditions had previously provided us with an extensive memorandum, a warning really, on Nepalese cultural "considerations":  "Nepal has been opened to the West only since 1950 and despite the veneer of westernisation if is still a very traditional and religious society.  As guests we must respect this and respond sensitively.  Whilst the Nepalese will never rebuke you for unknowingly offending them it is always desirable to try to respect as many of their customs and beliefs as you can.  During your stay in Nepal the following, at least, should be observed:

*  Women and men should not wear high cut shorts.  Long, baggy shorts are acceptable to local people; and we advise women to wear lightweight skirts or trousers.  Tops which expose the shoulders are similarly unacceptable.

*  Nudity is totally unacceptable, so please wear a swimsuit or sarong when bathing.

*  Overt public displays of affection are discouraged.

*  When entering any Nepalese home, monastery or temple always remove your shoes.

*  Most Hindus cannot eat food that has been touched by a foreigner.

*  It is extremely offensive to throw rubbish into any cooking fire.

*  For religious reasons Nepalese people are offended by being touched on the head; and, similarly, never direct the soles of your feet at a person or a religious shrine.

*  Many Hindu temples may not be open to non-Hindus, so always ask permission.

*  Begging is a harsh reality of life in the Third World but it is something which the Nepalese believe should not be encouraged, especially with Westerners who do not understand the occasions when it is appropriate.  Giving money to street beggars should always be avoided.  Handing out pens, balloons and sweets to children in the villages only decreases their respect for us and is to be strongly discouraged.  Tourists, albeit with the best of intentions, have created this situation.

*  Last but not least, remember that in Nepal punctuality has little meaning, and patience and a sense of humour are great assets.  Leave your watch at home and take things as they come!  Once you have become acclimatised to the pace of Nepal you are likely to re-asses your frantic Western schedule!"

 

Back to day two of the trek.  There was some climbing to do after lunch, but the walking was done by about two-thirty in the afternoon.  We came gradually down into a wide valley.  One of the features on the landscape was a Buddhist shrine, shaped like a bell, painted white; and because there's been a local festival on for the last few days the place was garlanded with flags and prayer flags; and marigolds had been threaded into loops and were hanging on strategic spots.  Through the day, in fact, marigolds were handed out by the local children to some of us as we walked along.  In 1990, shortly after our visit, Nepal adopted a new constitution - under which it was recognised as a Hindu kingdom, although Hinduism was not established as the state religion.  Under the present constitution (from 2015) Nepal is a secular state.  The dominant religions are Hinduism (82% of the populace) and Buddhism (9%).

 

Our camp spot was a square between the usual two or three houses, and was actually marked up as "camp site". Quite flat, and very pleasant.  I still had the trots and was staying off the food.  Anne hadn't slept well the night before and tried hard to get to sleep, but a bit of a party had started up, with the locals singing songs and some of our people joining in with them.  So, after twenty minutes of trying, Anne got up and joined in the party.  I, true to form, went straight to sleep.

 

To be continued...............