The Road to Zagora Read online

  We stopped early again and checked into village guesthouse. We made love enthusiastically in the late afternoon. Then we became aware that we hadn’t drawn the curtains properly and that a young girl was watching us from the next door rooftop. It left us with an uncomfortable feeling as if we had done something wrong. I had vague worries, I can’t say exactly what they were, perhaps I imagined we would be confronted by an angry parent. I was relieved when we left the village the next morning.

  The next day we walked through a higher, steeper landscape and reached the village of Tal. For the first time we were in a Buddhist rather than Hindu world. There were prayer flags and prayer wheels, rough stone monuments known as chortens and stupas, mani walls with Buddhist mantras carved into the rocks. There was something very powerful and moving about the marks the religion made on the land. It may be only superstition (I’m sorry but that’s what I think it is) but somehow the expression of belief and connection between the physical and spiritual universe moved me. I think it was just the beauty of it all. And the feeling that these beliefs grew out of the mountains themselves.

  There was no electricity in Tal. We ate our supper by candle light and went to bed at eight to escape the cold. Outside the stars shone very bright in the gap between the steep sides of the valley. Flic wrote of humming birds sipping nectar from deep yellow flowers and of walking through villages that seem to be from the Middle Ages, dark and wooden, full of different smells and sounds and mules goats dogs chickens donkeys sheep and children. Women wearing beautiful coloured clothes and being so graceful. They walk the same paths as us but with sandals and bare feet and flip-flops and carry great loads. And a sentence that might give you an idea of the richness and intensity of our experience: now it is Saturday and Friday seems so long ago that I can hardly remember it.

  The next day we walked through a changing landscape: steeper and rockier and with pine trees and strange high altitude palm trees in place of the rice fields. We were stopped by Maoist insurgents at a formal checkpoint which consisted of two men sitting at a table by the side of the path. They were polite and unarmed and asked for a donation for which we were given a written receipt.

  It was the third day of the festival and the turn of cows to be decorated. We took a photo of one wearing a garland of marigolds. In the evening first a group of boys and then girls came to sing in the yard. Ram kept time on a drum while the children danced. Then they carried on around the village with call and response songs and dancing.

  We travelled gradually from semi-tropical farmland to pine forests to high altitude yak pastures and eventually, on the Thorong La, to snow and ice. Walking through these steadily changing physical and cultural landscapes felt worthwhile and meaningful.

  One morning we were walking through a landscape that I thought must be like that of Arizona. The valley had opened out and at times we experienced an eerie silence that came from being away from the noise of the river for the first time in quite a while. Instead of farmland there was a scattering of stunted pine trees through which we could see a massive sheer rock face with a crack running down its length and patches of snow clinging to the top edge. We met three children walking some distance to school. One of them, a girl of eight or nine years, was practicing her English spelling out loud: S T R A I G H T, straight. She said it over and over again as she walked down the winding trail under the crooked mountains towards the meandering river.

  At Pisang we took the high route to Manang through a dry mountain landscape of austere beauty. It was November, with very clear light and blue skies and now, after a week and a half of walking, we were surrounded by very high mountains, sharp peaks jutting out above the ice and snow. We stopped at the small village of Ngarwal where there were maybe forty flat-roofed houses built of rough stone and timber, most of them flying a single prayer flag on a tall pole. We sat on the roof of our very cheap, very simple guesthouse watching the light fade. At sunset the temperature dropped fast and Flic had to stop writing her journal. The ink had frozen in her pen.

  We were tourists, on a well-known tourist trail, with all the advantages and disadvantages of that. Accommodation was cheap and plentiful (as little as 70p per night for a double room, if you must know) and there was always rice and lentils (dhal baht) and sometimes chocolate cake. OK, there was no hot water and no heating so we didn’t take our clothes off for days at a time. And the nights were very long and dark. Doors and windows didn’t fit so the temperature indoors dropped close to freezing. But sometimes we were treated to a brazier of smouldering charcoal under the dining table. Everybody would tuck the heavy table cloth around their legs and we would be warm from the waist down at least.

  We met and got to know some of our fellow trekkers, people from all over the world and with a wide range of ages. We met a tough retired German woman who had trained as an engineer and had worked at CERN, home of the hadron collider, near Geneva. She was trekking in the Himalayas while waiting for a heart bypass operation. She had been very ill in the Everest region and had been carried down in a basket on the back of a Sherpa. Now, having recovered, she was trying the Annapurna circuit. We met a couple of guys with mountain bikes: a young, clean-shaven Dutch man and a younger Nepali who was his country’s junior champion. Not only did they carry the bikes much more of the way than the bikes carried them, they also had a porter carrying their personal gear. He would arrive at their accommodation, on foot, well ahead of them. We met a young Swiss woman who upset the locals by wearing tiny shorts and a Scotsman who amused the locals by wearing a kilt. We spoke to a young Korean woman travelling alone through the countries that shared her religion – Buddhism. And we met, of course, quite a few more.

  After twelve days of walking we arrived at Manang, a small town at 11,500 feet. On the way into town there was a wall maybe thirty yards long in which there were niches containing prayer wheels, actually brass cylinders, marked with Tibetan script. An old woman was making her way along the wall, keeping it on her right as is the custom, setting every wheel in motion to send prayers up to heaven. Another tiny old lady came past with a huge bundle of firewood on her back. And at the entrance to the town was a metal sign bearing two images: a young man galloping on horseback and another man on foot leading his horse by the reins. The first image was struck through with a red line signifying prohibition. It seems that boy racers are a problem even in a society without cars.

  We spent a few days in Manang acclimatising to the altitude so that we might cross the Thorong La safely. We stayed in a tiny, primitive guesthouse with notched tree-trunks for staircases and stupendous views across the valley to the Annapurnas. The people were friendly and kind and pious. Two older men of the family spent the entire day on the roof chanting and praying and reading from religious texts. Across the road a brown cow kept trying to enter through the door into a hotel.

  After leaving Manang we walked for three days through a steep and empty steep landscape of high pastures. We caught sight of a herd of thar, a sort of wild goat, and we saw yaks for the first time. I had some scary intimations of altitude sickness but I didn’t tell anyone; I wanted to carry on. At one lodge Flic insisted on going out exploring alone on the mountain-side as night fell and temperatures sunk down way below freezing. I was worried that something like a twisted ankle would be enough, at that altitude and in that cold, to result in tragedy. I was relieved when she came back.

  Then we arrived at a place called High Camp. Now we were high above and far away from inhabitable land. This was just a squalid overnight stop before crossing the Thorong La. Just before nightfall a fellow trekker showed me the route that we were to take the next morning. It was an icy path cut into a steep snow slope that ended, I think you could safely say, in oblivion. You could see the path higher up winding back and forth across scree slopes and snow fields. I went indoors and told Flic that I couldn’t do it.

  Remember that I had Parkinson’s disease, was unsteady on my feet, and had a very reasonable fear of falling. Added to that
was the fact that we had to start at four in the morning, in the dark and cold, to make it across the pass safely. Flic was quietly furious that we should have gone so far and then have to turn back. Ram said something like don’t worry – I will take you. He was completely understanding, kind and confident. I trusted him.

  It was scary but not as bad as I anticipated. Ram held my hand crossing one or two dodgy slopes early on and then I was OK. But it was a tough climb up to 17,000 and something feet. There is, at that altitude, not enough oxygen in the air. You have to take a few steps, rest and breathe, then take a few more. As it got light and we got higher I felt that I would faint before reaching the top of the pass. Take, dropped our stuff off at the top and then came back and walked beside me looking very concerned, ready to catch me if I fell. Of course, we made it. The top of the pass was bleak and unspectacular but there was a café serving hot drinks (yes, it’s true). We both felt quite ill and soon went down the other side.

  As we descended views opened up over a vast arid mountain landscape of great beauty. We walked down and down until we reached the town of Muktinath, a holy place and pilgrimage destination for both Hindus and Buddhists. It felt, I must say, pretty damn good to get there. The town is famous for its shrine, built around a cleft in the rock where there is a little jet of natural gas, the eternal flame of Muktinath. I will always remember the town for something else. Early the next morning I washed some clothes by hand and put them out to dry. Not a single drip fell from them to the ground and I really couldn’t understand why. I touched a t-shirt with my hand and understood: my clothes had frozen, stiff as boards, the moment I hung them up.

  Before leaving Muktinath we visited the temple compound with its temples and shrines, the hundred and eight water spouts under which the devout would bathe, and the eternal flame, which was the size of a pilot light on an old style gas cooker. Outside of the compound was the sacred helicopter pad, used by rich Indian pilgrims who need to fit their moment of spiritual enlightenment into a busy schedule.

  From Muktinath we carried on down to the valley of the Kali Kandaki river and followed its course for a few days. Then we cut up into the hills again before reaching a road and taking a beaten up old taxi to the lakeside town of Pokhara. This return section of the Annapurna trek was busier, with a small airstrip at Jomsum adding to the numbers of visitors. Sometimes we followed jeep-tracks rather than footpaths and sometimes we would actually see a jeep or a tractor. There wasn’t the feeling of being so remote from the twenty-first century. But it was still beautiful and interesting; we were still a long way from home in a very foreign landscape and a very foreign culture.

  Near a village called Jarkhot we saw a man ploughing with oxen, probably dzos, crosses between domestic cattle and yaks. He was far away in the valley below us but we could hear him singing as he worked. People seemed happy and they worked without machinery in an unspoilt land of great beauty. On our trek we saw lots of farming activity. We saw rice being harvested with sickles and spread out to dry in beautiful patterns. We saw it being threshed by being beaten with sticks and winnowed by being tossed into the air from woven baskets. We met teenage girls walking down the track, laughing and joking, carrying baskets of manure on their backs. We were aware that farming was a sociable activity, with whole families taking their meals together out of doors, in the sunshine.

  It sounds, and it seemed, an idyllic lifestyle that the people led there. We can’t know what it feels like to lead that life. It includes high illiteracy, short life expectancy, limited choices, and there are preventable (to us) illnesses. Most houses were without chimneys and the smoke from cooking fires fills the rooms and just leaks out between the roof tiles. This leads to eye problems and chest complaints. Perhaps much of the beauty that a visitor sees is merely commonplace to those who spend their whole lives there. It is, to us, picturesque poverty, but it is poverty all the same. Or is it? The local farmers where we live in Wales don’t sing at the tops of their voices as they drive their multi-thousand pound tractors alone, through a relatively unpeopled landscape. So who is poor? That’s a big question.

  And how should we feel taking time out from our affluent lives to walk alongside people who have none of the wealth and opportunities that we have? All I can say is that our being there contributed directly to the local economy. We bought food and paid for accommodation so the people we dealt with, and their communities, benefited. And it was trade not aid, they sold us goods and services with, as it were, their heads held high. We saw a trekker trying to barter with a woman who had carried apples high into the mountains to sell them at a better price. Five rupees, she said (or something, I can’t remember now) and the trekker, trying to be clever by bartering, asked, but how much for two? She looked at him as if he was stupid. Ten rupees, she said, and laughed in his face as if to say can’t you count?

  And the issue of hiring someone to carry your luggage; isn’t it a bit like having a servant? I don’t know. In a world without cars portering is normal job, not one of high status but perhaps no different from being a taxi driver in our world. And a porter earns a livelihood and feeds his family.

  In the valley of the Kali Kandaki we looked for fossils and found a yak’s horn. We saw the Dhaulagiri Icefall high above us. We saw the wind blowing fiercely down one side of the valley and fiercely up the other side at the same time; that is to say that we saw the trees being blown about by the two winds. At Poon Hill we watched the sunrise over the Himalayas accompanied by some, I don’t know, fifty or so other tourists and listened to their conversations about mobile phone networks and first cars. And then, too soon, we were at the end of the trail. In front of us was a road with buses and lorries and taxis passing by. Another world.

  We had walked for twenty-one days through a landscape of both man-made and natural beauty and our only regret was that we had gone too fast – we should have taken longer. Then we spent a couple of days in Pokhara and a few days in Kathmandu.

  It was in Kathmandu that on our last day we visited a Hindu temple complex by the side of a dirty river. There were sadhus dressed in saffron robes and monkeys coming down out of the nearby trees. There was strange music and chanting. We saw corpses being cremated on huge pyres and their ashes being swept into the river. A group of boys played football on the river bank while others waded into the water and searched around with their hands for... for what? We didn’t know. We spent two hours there just looking, only taking in the extraordinary sights. We felt that we could have been there a much longer time. It was, we believed, the end of a trip of a lifetime, a never to be repeated, wonderful experience. But we were fascinated by what we saw on that last day. We wanted more.

  D is for Damp 2000 (Germany)

  A little way further down that longer trail that I mentioned (I was something like 26 years old) I got to visit a place called Damp 2000 on the Baltic Coast of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. It consisted of a number of 1960s style apartment blocks and a yachting marina stuck in some dreary flat farmland by a grey sea. It must be one of the least beautiful places I have ever visited. I remember looking around with incredulity and asking who could have been responsible for the hideous architecture. One of the people I was with muttered the name Hitler and there was a ripple of awkward laughter.

  I was helping out with a holiday for disabled old ladies from the East End of London. One of the other volunteers was a middle-aged woman who told me that all her family were professional criminals. Her husband had once been a driver for the Kray Brothers. As it happens I was a driver on this trip, driving a sort of ambulance minibus. And I was asked by a dodgy friend in London to bring back a large amount of cannabis and make us both some money. Who would search an ambulance full of argumentative old ladies? he said. I decided against it.

  I had gone along at the request of a friend, a young woman for whom I had, let’s say, warm feelings. She had a hard time running the trip and was rightly quite focused and not romantically inclined while we were away and was very cool t
owards me. Then, back in London, she and I were invited to supper by two of our fellow volunteers. Janet (there you are, I’ve said her name) and I found ourselves to be the only straight people present among what turned out to be a gathering of ardent lesbian feminists, eighties style and complete with dungarees, short hair and dangly ear-rings. I’m enough of an ineffectual wimp of a guy to be acceptable in such company and I had a good time. Hard drinks and soft drugs came our way in large amounts and we got wrecked. And so it was that there came a point in the evening when Janet and I fell backwards off our chairs onto the floor and into a passionate embrace. After a short while we made it to our feet, staggered through the door and headed off to her bed.

  We spent some time together over the next few months; most of it sober and often with our clothes on. It was fun.

  5

  The Sex Bus

  Memory is the story we tell ourselves to make sense of the past.

  I heard a psychologist say something like that on the radio many years ago and the words stayed with me. There are so many ways to tell a story and sometimes mere chronology has its limits. Memory doesn’t work like that, it drifts backwards and forwards in time, sometimes sticking with a theme rather than a time or a place. Sometimes I like to remember bus journeys.

  I am now convinced that the best way to travel abroad is by public transport. On a bus, for example, you can look out of the window and watch the world go by as you would in a private car or taxi. But you get much more than just that; the world, in the shape of your fellow passengers, gets on and off the bus, meets old friends, gossips, laughs, argues, eats and drinks, buys and sells, and gets on with life in all its extraordinary foreignness. The world squeezes up close. Sometimes it sits on your lap.

  Our worst and best bus journey started in Tansen, in the central uplands of Nepal. We were on our way from the hot lowlands of northern India to Pokhara, a lakeside town close to the Himalayas. There had been no rain in the Tansen area for months but that morning it was raining heavily as we walked down to the bus station. So far so good; they needed it badly. There was a bus ready to leave and we asked a young man if it was going to Pokhara. He answered yes as Nepalis do (out of politeness) when they don’t understand what you’re saying. We got on and travelled along winding roads between the hills, down and down and down – almost as if we were going back the way we had come the day before yesterday. We asked a fellow passenger, is the bus going to Pokhara? He smiled and answered yes as Nepalis do when they don’t understand you but wish to be polite.