Crossing The Himalayas #2 / トラウマの大ヒマラヤ山脈横断記#2

Crossing The Himalayas – Nepal Article #2   By  Justin “Trauma” Lichter

We didn’t realize we had hired a rally car driver to drive us up the windy, bumpy dirt road along sheer cliffs. He seemed to be the only one having any fun with the ride. Other locals in the Jeep were vomiting in paper bags or leaned out the open window like a dog with their tongue hanging out. We were happy to be alive after a ridiculous 16 hour day sitting in a cramped jeep with 10 other people, I was finally able to straighten my neck and peel my seemingly permanently bent legs off of the metal bar attached to the seat in front of me as we arrived at Taplejung, our eastern terminus.

Normally, we stay clear of guides by any means possible. We are not the typical clients. However, Robin Boustead had strongly recommended having a guide for the entire trip and it seemed like a good idea since we didn’t speak the language and were heading into unfamiliar terrain with some technical passes. We had made the decision to hire a guide for the first three weeks through the Nepalese Himalayas while in Kathmandu. The guide we ultimately hired didn’t speak much English but from what we could tell, he was telling the truth about having done the technical passes. He also seemed willing to push himself when we told him our typical daily mileage and hiking hours. We planned on using him for about 200 miles, approximately one tenth of the trip, but in reality he was with us for only about 100 miles.

From day one we were making concessions. We had already told him our usual hiking schedule and routine of hiking for three hours and then taking a 45-minute break and repeating that until it got dark. I’m not sure if it was the language barrier, sheer stubbornness, or bad business practice but he never learned to adjust to our schedule. His pack was laden with heavy equipment and he wasn’t even carrying any food. Our packs were stuffed with 10 days worth of food and our pace was going to pick up as our packs lightened every day. His pack would always be heavy. This was going to be a problem. We needed to give him a “sherpa shakedown”, but we had significant moral hesitations about asking him to leave some of his only possessions behind. He had sweat pants, jeans, extra shorts, and tons of extraneous clothing and equipment. The Nepali meal schedule is different than our Western meal schedule and with his lack of food, we had to stop at random intervals, usually around 10AM, 2PM, and 7PM, as we passed people’s homes to ask them to cook him some food which usually set us back for over an hour. Our breaks were staggered and it was burning a lot of hiking time. Often, he would make arrangements to stay at somebody’s house during a break when we had planned to hike on. It was frustrating.

On top of the schedule delays, we were ascending passes above 4700 meters (15510 feet). We were postholing for miles and navigating through white outs. The guide had clearly never been to these passes and he was following in our tracks; never volunteering to lead or break trail and he had no idea where we were or how to read a map. When we pulled out the map to navigate, he would point to a river when we were on a pass or point to a village we had passed the day before. When we got to one village prior to our first pass over 5000 meters, he decided to hire someone from the village with his own money to help us find the pass. This was completely unnecessary since we were doing all of the navigating anyway, but we assumed he probably wanted some Nepali company. We later learned the reason that led to his desire to hire another guide. The night before the pass, we had to camp at a high camp and he was scared to camp and sleep in the tent by himself.

Being behind schedule the next night because we postholed for hours over the Lumbha Sambha La Pass we had to camp again. This time, after we set up his tent for him, he woke up screaming at three in the morning. Pepper and I woke up and asked him what was going on. Not understanding his broken English, we went back to sleep with his headlamp illuminating what was left of the night. When morning came we asked him again what had happened. He said a Yeti had unzipped the door of his tent, then stood on his chest and started to strangle him while another one watched from a few feet outside the tent. We were suspicious. He was adamant about it. He said that Yetis were all over the area and that they had tried to come back a few times during the night after he had woken us up. He had apparently stayed awake the rest of the night and had been lucky enough to have scared them off. I asked him what they looked like and he described little black, hairy creatures about two feet tall that walked on two legs. The next few days he told all of the villagers what had happened. Each time, Pepper and I laughed hysterically.

Making matters worse, his body was hurting from his pack. He started looking for excuses to stop early and at times we had to carry things for him. Other times he hired locals to carry some of his gear. We had become his porters and his guide and we knew we had to get him out of the backcountry for his own safety.   

We finally got ‘our guide’ back home to Kathmandu and things immediately started to go more smoothly, with the exception of classic Nepali hiccups. 2011 was supposed to be a big tourism year so they were promoting “0 strikes in 2011.”  That definitely wasn’t the case. During the 2 months we were there, they had at least 3 or 4 strikes. Often we would lose days because we couldn’t get back out of town after resupplying. It took 47 hiking days to get across Nepal but an additional 21 days of resupplies, waiting for permits, and waiting around for strikes to end. As a comparison, we normally only take about 1 rest day per month. Despite the added waiting time, we were breaking into hiking shape and picking up the pace now that we were guideless. We routinely did 2000 meters of climbing and descent in a day, sometimes over 3000 meters. We started referring to these days as “Double-Doubles,” since we were also dreaming of In-N-Out Burgers. Our pace picked up after we returned the guide and we averaged about 22 miles per day through Nepal.

After resupplying in Kathmandu and leaving the guide we quickly progressed on the popular Everest Base Camp trek. After visiting the tent city of Everest Base Camp, which was slightly off our route but a necessary side trip, we made our way over three stunning high passes in the Everest region. Each view was better than the next and with views of Mt. Everest, Lhotse, Nuptse, Annapurna, and Cholatse. It was like walking through a The North Face catalog since all of their products are named after these Himalayan icons.

After spending about six straight days above 4200 meters for the first extended period of time on the trip, we were both feeling drained from the rugged terrain and the accumulated effects of the altitude. We both had headaches, stomachaches, muscle fatigue, and sputum. It was a tough stretch but we knew after the final pass in the stretch we would drop to under 1000 meters elevation and then stay below 3500 meters until our next resupply point.

After 10 days of difficult terrain with thousands of meters of elevation gain and descent we came to the only paved road we would cross in Nepal. We grabbed a bus back to Kathmandu for resupply since none of the towns in the mountains had enough high calorie food for us to purchase.

In Kathmandu we ate like we hadn’t seen food before. It was great to be able to get cold drinks, pizza, and ice cream. In the mountains most people and teahouses do not have refrigerators. It is hard to get many of the luxuries that we are accustomed to when we get to town. All of the local food is low calorie food. As hikers busting out high mileage days with lots of elevation gain we were ready for any calories we could get. In the next couple of days we got our permits for the rest of Nepal, swapped out shoes and technical gear that we would no longer need, and naturally got held up leaving Kathmandu because of another strike day where the bus system shut down. This was our last chance to access our stored duffel bag in Kathmandu and get some of the city life amenities – we made the most of it and then were excited to head back out to the trail a couple of days later.