NEPAL--The Dhaulagiri Trek Continues
The
Dhaulagiri Ordeal -- Day Six
The short day began with a little climb up a mountain. Five hours
later, we stopped for lunch. Five hours of climbing, the Austrians,
Swiss Italians, and French yodelling far ahead of us, not winded
by the climb. Five hours! And the trail, it was not a trail,
it was a path for goats, Sherpas, and fools. The veritable monkey
trail! The mountain side was nothing
but long grass and landslides, shifting pieces of thin shale,
rocky steps with uneven, unbalanced stones, deadly, I say, deadly.
One slip, and you would find yourself plummeting off the side
of the mountain down to the river 1,000 feet beow, by yourself
or taking one of the many porters around with you. And the porters
would have to clammer over us, around us, on the trail since
they were so much faster, and we played a game of tag. They could
clamber over us, and while resting, we would pass them, and then
they would have to leapfrog over us again, and so on and so on.
We clung to the trail when it didn't slide out from underneath
us, sweating and praying to Himalaya for kindness, thinking that
the trail, the goat path, would level off.
This was our rest day! This was our short day! Vishnu preserve us! The heavens were silent, and we climbed up and up. At each hour, Wongdee would ask if we wanted a break, and Laura would grimly say, "I want to reach the top." At each hour, Dawa would offer food, and Laura would hollowly murmur, "I want to be finished with this madness." We climbed for hours, took pictures when the goat path, I dare not call it a trail again, looked impassable, and finally we lunched at one in the afternoon, alone on the mountain, the porters, Austrians, Swiss Italians, French, all in their camps near Bulgara, resting on their short day. Wongdee, pensive, asked if we had ever seen a goat path like the one we had climbed that day. We both shook our heads emphatically. Wongdee, still pensive, said that the only goat paths he had seen that treacherous were the paths he used to climb in the jungle near his village to find bamboo. We voiced the trekking company's, "just a little harder" refrain, and Wongdee frowned. After the climb up, we had to do the climb down, and Laura's only consolation was to empathize with other death marchers before her, the Jews marching to Auschwitz, the Cherokee to Oklahoma on their trail of tears, the various death marches of prisoners-of-war in the far east during world war two, et cetera. We camped in a field that night, with a lovely view, but Laura and I agreed we needed to talk with Wongdee. We were being forced to keep up with the European mountaineering groups, and we were neither European nor mountaineers. Together, we relooked at the itinerary to lengthen the number of days the trek would take, but Wongdee had another group to pick up, the company had booked him back to back with treks. We were two days from Italy Base Camp, but we were several days to our rest day at Dhaulagiri Base Camp. Also, Wongdee wanted to try the French Pass with another group, as he had not done Dhaulagiri but once, and that was five years in the past. And so, the trail of tears would continue. Wongdee promised the trail would get easier, that the so-called short day would be the hardest.
The
Dhaulagiri Ordeal -- Day Seven
Laura began to cough in the morning, an ominous sign. We washed
in the hot water provided, but it had been days since we had
had a proper bath. We started up, again, and I started the Chinese
propaganda early, but Laura would have none of it. She had hung
her hopes on Wongdee's promise, the short day yesterday would
be the hardest. Up we went, and at the top of an ascent (that
in truth was not at all as hard as the ascents we had made earlier,
or if the Chinese propaganda proved true, we were stronger) we
found our first tombstone, and the second ominous sign of the
day. A German couple the year before never made it passed the
top of this mountain where the marker lay. The young woman had
looked over the edge, had slipped, and in an unlucky attempt
to pull her back to safety, her boyfriend had toppled off the
cliff face with her. Dhaulagiri had claimed them as martyrs,
and the marker, complete with picture, was both a memorial and
a warning. The Dresden couple, for that was where they were from,
were the same age as Laura and I, one born in 1968, the other
1970. We shivered, and continued along the path, the views astounding.
Waterfalls fell at every gap into first one pool, then a ribbon
of water, then another pool, then a ribbon of water, down to
the gushing river below where I had washed two days earlier.
Wongdee, at this time, began his lecture in his wonderfully accented English. "We never do like this", he would say, meaning we never stand so close to the edge, we never look over too far, we always stand on the inside of the trail next to the mountian, we always stop walking when we want to take in the views, and we are careful when we take pictures. Having a keen mind, Wongdee had taught himself English, and his English proved to be very good, even with it's flaws, and maybe because of them. For a low lying tree over the trail, he would say, "Careful your head." When the path became a mudslide, he would say, "Careful, it's slipper." We coined these phrases as being 'Wongdeeisms'. When talking about the psychological aspects of trekking, he would say, "we are never thinking like that," and I pointed that out to Laura many times to which she called me a Beijing communist. Other Wongdeeisms, "Dawa, shido" as we have said, or "okay" stretched to be several syllables long, and he said "welcome" in the same way after we thanked him, which we did throughout the entire ordeal. When asked if we would make the pass, he would say, "why not?" with such a flip to the words.
Since we
had gone up to the tombstone, we should of course start down;
there was no Eisenhower Tunnel, as on I-70, to smooth the way.
But as we started down, we stopped abruptly at a traffic jam,
and we had thought we had left California's 101 far behind us.
The trail had slipped off the mountain, revealing Himalaya's
rocky bones. Two Nepalese were working on the trail, lashing
sticks together with bamboo strips, tying the whole mess to exposed
roots and grass and trees. They asked for a little baksheesh
(tip, bribe, payment, the ubiquitous exchange of money for services
found in Nepal & India) for the work, and we gave them some,
thinking it was such a waste of money for such a little walkway.
On the other side of the little bridge, we saw their real work,
a crude ladder that stretched down the ridge to the very bottom!
It was a monkey trail, and we swung like primates all the way
to the bottom, snapping pictures of this unlikely path. Wongdee
chirped, "Just like Annapurnna" and we laughed like
chimps. The trail then turned into jungle, and before, when Wongdee
had said we would walk through jungle, we had pooh-poohed him.
After all, we were seven thousand feet above sea level. But jungle
it was, thicker and denser than the rain forests we had hiked
through near Mendicino in Northern California. The ups and downs
were softer, or we were stronger if you could believe the communists,
but the path was a little more slippery, and at times, we were
walking just a few feet above the tumultuous, frigid river that
had carved the valley a millenia before. If one were to fall
into the curious blue-gray frothing water, death would be quick
and cold.
We stopped for lunch and did laundry, and washed our hair. It had been days, and though the water was frigid, in the warm sunlight it was refreshing. I hung up a hasty line made with Wongdee's trekking pole and a bamboo stick Laura was using, and while the line proved weak, the trekking pole and the length of bamboo proved invaluable in the days ahead. I had wondered if we needed poles, but was told it wasn't necessary. For those trails, it was bad advise, and I commandeered Wongdee's trekking pole for the rest of the journey. Laura, as well, was never without her sturdy piece of bamboo Wongdee had fashioned into a trekking pole. After lunch, we continued.
The weather had turned chill (but we were in jungle!), and when we arrived in the early evening in Doban, a dreadful little hamlet where chang and dal baht were the only things worth purchasing, Laura stopped to talk with the Austrians, and promptly caught a chill. My mother had warned, in my youth, that in cold, wet weather, camping in the mountains, however jungley, that once you caught a chill, you had to go to bed. We hurried into our tent, Laura put on all her clothes she had brought on the trek and dove into her down bag in a cloud of feathers, more chickens were killed in her attempt to get warm, and I finally had to lie next to her to thaw her as the sleeping bag had wept feathers on too many nights and was thinning fast. The camping was similar to Colorado (but more jungley), and I washed in the little brook next to our tent. Above me, I spied two of the Austrians, Swiss Italians, or French, a man and a woman, bathing, and I was scandalized at their nudity. Wongdee pronounced them mere buffalo for bathing naked in the stream (the Budists and Hindu's of Nepal are very modest), but I had did not object to their hijinks.
The evening passed, Laura longed for her rest day, and heavily questioned our death march schedule. As for me, what were my thoughts? I loved the trek, I loved the trail, I loved our Dhaulagiri expedition. It was exactly what I had wanted, difficult, extreme, something out of my boyhood fantasies. I thought often of the books I had read, the dreams I had had, of a long expedition complete with a guide and porters. It was so much like my imagination that I was completely satisfied, and only if Tarzan would have come sweeping out of the jungle on a vine, could I have been happier.
That night, Laura woke at one point, shivering, hot and cold by turns, at one point freezing to death, the other being cooked alive by the fever that consumed her. She woke me to fetch her aspirin, which I did, but her night was fitful, her cough worsened, and she took ill. It was to be the death-knell to our plans, though we did not know that at the time. Perhaps the communists were wrong, that such exertions, day after day, an average of seven hours a day, might not be strength, but exhaustion, and illness. And our rest day was two long days off by our itinerary. A day to Italy Base Camp, a day to Dhaulagiri Base Camp, and then a rest day at 5400 meters, nearly 18,0000 feet!
Those amazing views you just read about
The very creative bamboo techniques used to keep a washed out trail alive & well
Aaron's sophisticated clothes drying technique
I'm lost, take me back to the Nepal home page!