Adventures with Rajan: Trekking in Langtang

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Maybe I’ve reached that point where laziness gets in the way of blogging. But I would prefer to believe that it would be nearly impossible to accurately describe six days of trekking through the Langtang region in one blog. In actuality, every day merits its own essay—descriptions of fog-shrouded mountains, smoke filled tea shops, and women in woolen Thamang dress with gold and turquoise strung from their ears could fill pages. And still they would not really account for the great number of things we saw and experienced in Langtang. A meager attempt at review is all I can manage, coupled with my absolute insistence that this is just something you will have to see for yourself one day if you really want to understand it.

Leaving

On our way to Dhunche (the head of our trail into the Langtang region) we encountered two landslides and twice had to walk across almost a mile’s worth of impassable road. Between the two landslides we rode on the top of a bus (for lack of space in the regular compartment) and tried not to look as our bus skirted around blind corners and tottered over dramatic gorges. Sandwiched between containers of petrol and the little boy goat herders who had clambered on top of the bus at the last minute, we felt as if we were driving straight into the clouds into a mountain world very different from the one we had left in Kathmandu.

Day 1

Our first day was an introduction to local wildlife. Hiking out of Dhunche we spotted a langur monkey, his beautiful white rimmed and rounded face frozen just long enough for us to get a good look before he swung off into further trees. Down the road we stopped in our tracks to see a wild deer peer over its shoulder at us. But the most significant of the introductions was to the leeches. They found their way up our pants and into our socks for the next three days, sometimes disappearing with a flick or a light pull, sometimes yielding only to a dash of salt poured over their feasting grounds.

We arrived in our first mountain village (Thulo Syabru) just after a group of women singers. They were dressed in fashionably mismatched layers of their finest traditional Nepali, Thamang, and Tibetan clothing—indications that they had just returned from the end of the festival taking place over the pass in the holy lakes region. After five days of singing, dancing, and praying on the shores of the lakes held holy by Buddhists and Hindus, groups such as these were returning by various paths to their scattered villages.

As we peeled leeches off of our feet and hung out mud-caked shoes to dry we heard another such group coming down the mountain. Hidden by the fog crawling across the mountain side, they were at first only identified by drums and chants. One by one bodies emerged from the fog and travelled in switchbacks down the mountain until suddenly the entire group was upon us. The singers who had been lounging in front of our teahouse suddenly stood up and a casual sing-off between the two groups took place as the second group continued down the mountain, calling back to the first group and banging their drums more loudly as they cast backward glances and disappeared down into the fog.

Day 2

Over endless cups of tea and card games on the first night we began our Nepali lessons from Rajan and Arjun, our guide and porter. By day two our Nepali vocabulary included such useful phrases as “I see a waterfall” and “There is a landslide.” Although we had already encountered and climbed up and over a significant landslide on the first day, the latter phrase ended up being most useful on the second day. After hiking two and half hours down from Thulo Syabru to bottom of the gorge, we discovered that another landslide had reduced what was once the only viable passage to Langtang into a piece of metal walkway attached precariously by a few stray rods to the edge of a washed out cliff over a rushing river. To reach even this—the most damaged and crucial—part of the path we had to scramble over two short sections of boulders and gravel that had taken over the trail; in parts the footing was so uncertain that it was all I could do to not look down at the drop to the swollen and raging river below.

At the edge of the second landslide wash clung the remains of the pathway. No more than ten feet of flat grated metal walkway, it was all that stood between us and our destination of Kanjing Gompa and the Langtang Valley. We each checked it out independently, incredulous that it was really as bad as the last person had said until we saw it with our own eyes. Rajan and Arjun also tried to scramble up the landslides to find more viable passages up the mountain; they found only sheer cliffs and a waterfall that blocked the path. We squatted and pondered possibilities. We discussed ways to swim across the rapids (before we learned that Arjun doesn’t know how to swim). We talked about building a bridge (because a real bridge to the other side of the river didn’t exist for miles). We cursed the landslides and the rainy season.

In the end there was nothing more to do than turn around and hike three hours back up the mountain and through trails crawling with leeches. We had to spend the night in Thulo Syabru again, where we spent the evening drinking tea, eating peanut butter with a stick of bamboo, and devising our new itinerary: with no path to Langtang we would head for Gosaikund, the most important of the sacred lakes. Groups of singing festival goers continued to stream over the pass through Thulo Syabru from the lakes, suggesting that we would find Gosaikund quiet and peaceful.

Day 3

The views and scenery on our hike were beautiful, despite the fact that we had clearly come in the wrong season. We never got the mountain views that attract people to the region and we spent a significant amount of time wearing rain jackets and peeling leeches of our legs, but it was no matter. Because more than beautiful scenery we found in Langtang an incredible mountain life that we settled into quite comfortably.

Halfway up to the pass from Thulo Syabro we stopped for a tea break. The tea house sat on a small ledge carved out of the mountain side; an old Thamang woman sat on a bench at the edge of the fog and talked to herself as she sorted local berries.

Further up the mountain we entered a forest where tall and brilliantly green moss-covered trees pierced through the fog in neat lines. We stopped for a break at a small Buddhist stupa and suddenly out of the forest came a Thamang man that we had met at our tea break. He had started our ascent with us carrying a bag of local berries to be used for making achar (pickle) but had quickly surpassed us in his mission to scavenge more from the forest for the local market he was heading to. Now he walked out of the foggy forest carrying huge plastic bags of white mushroom. The mushroom had once been a huge plant bigger than the man’s outstretched arms could indicate. He had had to break the fungus up to put it in more manageable portions, which he explained enthusiastically as he offered pieces of the wavy and layered mushroom for us to feel. The smell of the mushrooms was incredible and by far the most beautiful thing I experienced in our week of wanderings. An incredible fusion of damp and woody forest smell with a very subtle floral undercurrent. Somehow magical and clearly quite indescribable.

We took dozens of photos of the mushroom man as he further expounded on the medicinal uses of the mushroom (for heart troubles and fever). He was giving us so much: time, smiles, photos, mushrooms to feel and smell. As he turned to walk up the mountain again we said thank you and he accepted our thanks easily with a smile, asking only that we send a photo of him back with the next guide to come through this region. It was a moment I was grateful for: an opportunity to feel like I was able to give something (if only a photo) back to the people of this region from whom I am constantly taking.

Our day only got better when we reached the pass. We found yet another gorgeously picturesque tea house surrounded by colorful flower beds, where again we made our way from the designated dining area into the crammed kitchen. We sat around the cooking fire and drank tea as the guides and tea shop boys prepared our food. Heather recorded as Rajan, Arjun, another guide and the two tea shop boys sang Nepali folk songs for us, and an hour later the most amazing meal we had on the trip (mushroom soup and apple pancake) was presented to us as an extension of these same serenades.

An hour past lunch and through a forest of twisted rhododendron trees shedding pink bark we reached Sinh Gompa. It was the most charming of the villages we encountered, with two and three story brightly colored tea houses. At the entrance to the village we were met by the cheese factory, where we bought a half kilo of fresh yak cheese. Past the local gompa (monastery) we found the Lhasa hotel, a trekking lodge run by one of the same boys who had prepared lunch for us at the previous stop.

In the afternoon we changed our usual routine of tea and cards and instead drank tongba: a local drink prepared by pouring hot water over fermented millet. Heather and I shared a portion, sipping the hot alcohol out of a bamboo straw from the kind of small plastic decanter that is usually used in bathrooms.

At the end of the evening Heather and I tucked under our layers of blankets and did our nightly recordings of the day’s favorite moments (ultimately Heather will post these recordings and pogs, or pod cast blogs; I will link them to my page). Although we both talked about the mushroom man as the most memorable moment of the day, we also both situated that moment in the context of a day that was generally, and for reasons we couldn’t really explain, our favorite. We agreed that we had crossed some invisible line and entered a territory in which our daily routines with Rajan and Arjun were in themselves a thing to be cherished. Tea breaks, time spent around the fire, inside jokes, meanderings through foggy forests—each were times that we shared with our two friends in ways that made even small interactions seem incredibly fulfilling. As the boys went to sleep in their room just next to ours we whispered “shubh ratri” (goodnight) through the thin planks and curled into another night in the mountains.

Day 4

Inevitably our most incredible day was followed by our most difficult. Through rain storms that bordered, at times, on sleet storms, we worked our way up the steepest elevation gain we had encountered yet on our way to Gosaikund. By the time we reached our lunch break everything we owned was soaked, so we made our way to our usual spot by the cooking fire trying to regain warmth and dry off layers of damp clothing. The young woman making our lunch—an independent spirit who had travelled all over India and Nepal, and who clearly knew how to speak her mind—asked Rajan and Arjun if Heather and I were their wives. From the comfort with which we all huddled on the same bench it may have seemed so, and Heather and I were not just amused but touched that the comfort that we had found with these two was evident to others.

We lingered by the fire as long as we could but knew that if we were to make it to Gosaikund we would have to brave the rain. We put our still-wet layers back on and headed back out into the sleet, mist and wind. When, halfway up the mountain, tiny Heather told us that she couldn’t feel her left foot anymore from the cold and lack of circulation, Rajan scooped her up in a big brotherly hug. “You look like you are disappearing into the cold,” he said to her as he squeezed her little body into his. And I believe that some warmth was restored to all of us in that moment of true concern and affection as we stood on the ridge of the mountain and the wind swept past our wet bodies.

From that wet point on the mountain ridge Rajan told us that we still had three hours to go, but only forty five minutes later we encountered a pilgrim returning from the lakes who promised us that we were just a half hour from our destination. We knew that in Nepali time half an hour could mean anywhere up to an hour and a half, but this information coupled with the slowing of the rain proved to be the uplifting that we needed: a promise that soon we would be out of the rain and sitting by a new cooking fire in a tea house near a sacred lake.

Heather and I took out our last store of chocolate from Kathmandu and broke it into four pieces to celebrate our imminent arrival. I called to Arjun, who had already trekked ahead in his eagerness to get to the lodge, to give him his chocolate.

“Arjun-bai!”

In the Nepali language, a younger brother is always addressed as “bai,” though frequently this term is also used to delineate status and address workers and people on the street who are clearly younger (or in Nepali society, lower in the social hierarchy) than you are. Foreigners often quickly adopt the “bai” and “dai” (for older brothers) formula, and I myself am quite fond of using these terms for addressing friends and strangers alike. Typically I use the term “dai,” as most of the addresses are usually older than me and because the term connotes an equality of status (despite age) that can’t be achieved by using “bai.” As I shouted after Arjun, our twenty year old giggly porter whom I had come to develop a strange sisterly affection for, I realized that this was the first time I was genuinely using the term “bai” to mean brother. I ran down the path with his piece of chocolate in my hand and thought about how lucky Heather and I were to have found—in the total crapshoot of guides and porters—Rajan and Arjun to spend a week in the mountains with.

I handed Arjun his chocolate and he flashed his goofy weasely grin before saying thanks and heading further down the trail.

Eventually the rain slowed to a stop and we rounded a bend to find the first of the lakes in view (in fact our first views of anything but fog all day). By the time we reached the tea house at the edge of Gosaikund we found a blazing stove and a place to hang all of our wet clothes, and it wasn’t for several hours that we left the fireside. Several coups of tea and a few more recordings of Nepali songs later, we sat around on the benches that surrounded the fire. After dinner our positions changed from seated, to slouched to reclining, until all four of us were curled up in a line of exhausted friends and travelers, huddled together against the cold and the altitude. The photo of this moment that is on Heather’s camera is, by far, the best one we have from the trip.

Day 5

At five o’clock the next morning we rolled over under our heavy blankets and managed to creak out “shubh behani” (good morning) through the boarded walls to Rajan and Arjun. We had planned on leaving early that morning for a trek to one of the peaks surrounding the lake. On a clear day the peak would have provided views of stunning Himalayan peaks in all directions. But on that morning the peak itself wasn’t even visible through the fog and rain. “Shubh behani,” Rajan replied. “It’s raining.” And we all turned over and went back to sleep.

Before breakfast we went for a walk around Gosaikund, past the Shiva temple where Hindu worshippers had left piles of red powder and rice in offering. Refuse from the festival littered the banks, and everything from old pairs of underwear to left over coconuts (for Shiva) dotted our path. At the far end of the lake scores of rock piles dotted the shallows as another manifestation of offerings from pilgrims. We walked across a bridge of stones submerged in the lake and found, on the other side, a small cave sanctuary used by Buddhist pilgrims for meditation. Outside the door to the cave were the remains of decades of pilgrimages: blackened tea pots used to prepare tea for tired pilgrims, packages of masala and butter left for the gods, old waterbottles and other small offerings. Several pairs of shoes outside the door told of a small morning gathering inside the cave. Inside an old man chanted a mantra breathlessly and almost frantically.
We had the option that day of hiking all the way down from Gosaikund (at 14,500 feet) to Dhunche, our initial starting point. But when we reached Sinh Gompa I realized I wanted nothing to do with that plan—I wanted to stay in Sinh Gompa and drink tea and look out into the fog and prolong our mountain life for as long as possible.

We spent the afternoon in our usual cards and tea routine, breaking it only once to dash into the rain and buy more yak cheese.

Day 6

Although by day seven my clothes smelled permanently of all variety of ungodly things and I desperately needed a shower, it was still with some reluctance that I left Sinh Gompa that morning. We said goodbye to the incredibly charming pair of boys who ran the lodge and began on our four hour long downhill. We had one last tea stop—where Rajan re-adjusted the wrap that he had tied around my sore knee and we teased Arjun about the cute girls serving tea—before we left the mountain life behind for good and walked back onto the main road of Dhunche.

Day 8

As if to taunt us and remind us of how unfortunate we were to have to leave this life behind, the day we left Dhunche was the most beautiful we had seen all week. The sky was brilliant blue and clear enough to reveal snow covered mountain peaks in several directions. “Now you can see mountains,” said Rajan, who had previously insisted that we were only hiking through Himalayan “hills.”

Again we took three bus rides and encountered two landslides to leave Dhunche, and again we had to sit on top of a bus for lack of space. This time we drove through clear mountain sunshine and looked enviously back at the Langtan region, free of fog and showing all the mountains that we would have to visit again on another trip. “Aur ko samay,” we repeated almost in unison, laughing at the mantra that we had invoked repeatedly in the last few days in the hopes that we would all be able to come back and do this trip together again. “Next time.”



P.S. as usual I took all of my real photos with my non-digital camera. unfortunately this time they are all in black and white, and the place where I process b+w here in Kathmandu doesn't have digital capabilities (so I won't be able to put the photos on cd and upload them). those of you whom i will see in the next year will probably be subjected to my many photo albums, at which point you will see endless photos of foggy forests, the mushroom man, and Gosaikund. in the meantime, I will upload Heather's photos before she leaves Nepal next week and post them on my blog (with her permission). more photos from the trek can be found there.

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Photos

The saucy tea house woman
who thought the four of us were married