Chapter Three
To the Barun Valley
There was a truck for the loads, and a dilapidated bus with flea-infested seat cushions for the team. It took all day to load the truck. After five hours of bumping, grinding and swinging through hairpin bends out of Kathmandu, the infernal machine stopped at a smoke-blackened chai house where a green parrot squawked in Nepali until the cook gave it a red chilli to eat. The parrot held the pepper in one claw, crunching the fruit and chattering. I looked closely at the bird to see if it showed any signs of the searing pain that eating the chilli would have produced in me. No. No weeping eyes, no gasping for water. Strange.
I clutched the tiny enamel cup of sweet tea and watched two bantams screech and tear at each other with their karate heel-hooks, till one of them noticed a spillage of rice on the ground and began pecking. The other cock followed suit and in an instant the enemies were table mates. They were almost flattened as a bus-load of Catalan climbers arrived at the chai house, also bound for Makalu and racing us to Hille. The first expedition always got the pick of the porters.
We tried to sleep overnight in the bus; it was impossible. We might as well have been inside a tumble dryer. Even at night the air was hot and the flea bites had begun to itch. By morning we had left the plains of Nepal, the Terai, and had begun the long haul up into the foothills. We were heading for the Arun valley in east Nepal. Our route was to follow the lower reaches of this ancient stream.
From the Kangshung Glacier, under the East Face of Everest, the Kama Chu flows clockwise round the Makalu massif, cutting a deep gorge through the mountains to become, once across the border, the Arun river. As the mountains grew, so the river cut deeper, preserving a pattern of flow that predated the headlong and reckless crash of India into Asia, one of the few rivers to traverse the Himalaya.
As the sun rose the temperature inside the vehicle soared. It was more comfortable to ride with the luggage on top of the bus. Ulric discovered this possibility when a flapping tarpaulin needed fixing and the driver, laughing maniacally, could not be persuaded to stop.
The road ended in a muddy street lined with dark, sinister shop fronts and fly-filled chai houses. Hille. When the awful bus rattled in, the clouds parted briefly, long enough for Mike to see Makalu 100 miles away. Five miles high and ten miles wide. Had I seen it, I would have turned for home there and then.
The Catalan team had arrived at Hille before us. Their bus driver must have been even more lunatic than ours. Mike, Fanny, and Mr Khanal made a deal with their opposite numbers to fix the porter rates at 50 rupees per day, with a day's advance per porter. Two hours later the Catalan had settled at a daily rate of 60 rupees, with an advance payment of 150. Of course, we had to follow suit, and I saw Mike calculating on a sheet of paper. 'That's going to cost us another £200,' he said.
Our official head porter was a twenty-year-old called Pasang, who had the air of a well-mannered but slightly ineffectual junior officer. The man who made the whole thing work was Lapka Dorji, whom we had originally hired as a mail runner; he organised the men like an NCO. But they needed each other: Lapka couldn't write in English, and Pasang was reasonably fluent.
Meanwhile Kees was being educated by Ravindra Singh, a teacher of science who had been visiting Chainpur. Kees, a keen student of the Vedas, wondered if the visit could have been a possible pilgrimage. I looked on with interest.
Kees: Where do you teach?
RS: Solu Kumbhu, I teach in Solu.
Kees: Why were you in Chainpur?
RS: Yes, in Chainpur, then in Changwan.
Kees: But why?
RS: Why?
Kees: Yes, why in Chainpur?
RS: Then I go to Changwan and reach there at two o'clock .
Kees: But what reason did you have for visiting Chainpur?
RS: Reason? Ah, reason?
Kees: Reason - In - Chainpur? (He could not have put it more clearly, or slowly either.)
RS: Buddhism.
Kees: Buddhism? (Intriguing!)
RS: Because reason in Chainpur is Buddhism. Reason in Hille is Hindu. Reason in Changwan is Hindu. My reason is Hindu. Your reason is?
If it was difficult to sleep on the bus, it was almost worse in Hille. The so-called hotel was basic, and infested, but that was not the problem. We were used to that. What really surprised me was the rampaging pack of mongrels who began to howl and terrorise the street after dark. Sustad referred to them affectionately as 'disco dogs' but I noticed that he did not risk going out for a pee.
Then just as I fell asleep, there was the most god-awful noise. I awoke dreaming that a rusty cow was refusing to be slaughtered, but it was only the local lama and his assistants blowing on horns and dispelling evil spirits at each door. 'The last time we were here the lamas banged their drums all night,' said Sustad. I wondered if in some way he embodied the evil spirit they were trying to ward off.
We were already outflanked on the daily porter rates, but the men of Hille had an even better scam. Not only did they play off the expeditions in town against each other, but there was the giant-Korean-expedition-arriving-next-day trick. The Koreans would be needing no less than 600 porters, and if we did not settle with the Hille contractors at a favourable price, we'd get no porters at all. 'It's just like the stock market,' said Calvin. 'We'll have to start a counter-rumour. How about the-Korean-expedition-permit-has-just-been-cancelled?' Soon after this particular rumour began to circulate, our first porters announced themselves.
My job for the morning was to note the name and village of each of our prospective porters. I was struck by the variety of ethnic groups. Some described themselves as 'tribes'; these groups were mostly Hindu, and included the Rai, Chetri, Bishukarma and Bavus. The Buddhist groups tended to describe themselves as a 'people'; they included Sherpa, Bhotia and Tamang. The Newari men described themselves to me as being either Buddhist or Hindu or both or neither. Each man I asked gave a different reply. I couldn't quite make it out, perhaps they thought it was fun to tease us. Ulric had his own theory, thereby revealing the bizarre world inside his head.
'The uncertainty principle states that if you know they are Newari, you can't know what religion they are, and the converse must be that if you do know what religion they are, you can't be certain they are Newari.' He paused a moment, leant his head to one side and said, 'Have you asked all the others if they know they are not Newari?'
Meanwhile Stephen pointed to Annie the Nanny and Tsering walking through the village holding hands. 'It looks like Nati is out of luck,' said Stephen, observing the first rule of gossip: always leap to conclusions.
From Hille we walked for three days along the river banks, a walk which Hugh Swift's Trekker's Guide describes as unpleasantly hot and humid, so hot, in fact, that in order to sleep, we were forced to take midnight swims and lie naked on the river banks under damp towels. In this part of the Arun valley, the Rai villages resembled the Malayan kampongs of my childhood, and the women wore spectacular nose and ear jewellery.
There were chai stops every half-hour at first. Here the Rais were dark-skinned Hindus. They lived in simple dwellings, framed with two-storey-high poles. Americans call this system of building balloon framing. The roof was a thatch made from rice stalks. An open-weave bamboo matting formed the walls. The ground floor was defined, like a kampong, only by the stilts, and provided rudimentary shelter from sun and rain for the animals. The living area was raised an arm's reach above the head and supported on round beams.
This is the archetype, and exists at the 500-metre altitude. Above 1000 metres, on the ridges above the river, the bamboo matting at first-floor level is covered with mud to give it a little weather resistance. At 2000 metres the open 'ground floor' area acquires weather resistant wattle and daub. Finally at the highest villages the space between the posts is filled with dry-stone walling.
The base of the Arun is too hot for leeches, but above 2000 metres is prime leech country. As the path climbed higher the chai stops became rarer, and Mani wall and prayer flags indicated the Buddhism of the population. At the village of Bhotibas we found Ongyal our cook being scolded by his mother. When he saw us he looked studiously away from her, and talked to us pretending his mother was just some woman passing by. But they were in fact standing at the entrance to the family house and to Ongyal's obvious embarrassment his mother brought out chang. All round his house bright green rice terraces were cascading down the hillsides; transient vapour clouds drifted through the narrow valleys. We took time to watch the view, stunned. So beautiful. What a place to live. No television, no videos. No Walkman, for me at least. I wanted to hear the sounds of the forest. At night I lay awake and listened to the rain on the tent, the distant torrent and the wind in the trees.
The fourth day stage, to Chichila, was to take the team six hours, and the load carriers ten hours. The path ran through jungle for a few miles, then out into slash-and-burn territory again. The burnt zone was fended off with bamboo matting and turned over to grazing. Later the tree stumps would be grubbed up and the hillside terraced for agriculture. Although the forest, and all it contained, was thereby reduced, there did not seem to be much obvious...
