The Icy Ravines of the Annapurna

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It had been a deadly scramble on the Annapurna Base Camp trek from the village of Ghandruk, a steep descent of over 400 meters from the top of a hill to the Kimrong Khola stream and then a near vertical ascent of the same altitude to the top of a hill on the other side. My knees broke down after I stumbled into the village of Chhomrong and I had to spend many days recuperating there watching one trekking group after the other walking ahead to the icy wonders of the Base Camp.

But I have no complaints. Chhomrong had a clear 180 degree view of the Annapurna mountains and because the Himalayan mountains make their own weather, every day, from the roof top of the Panorama Point Lodge, I had the opportunity to appreciate the the icy peaks and ravines in more textures and shades than many trekkers who would spend just a night there would.

Pindari

Huffing and puffing up a long, steep, slippery slope, AR and I reached the edge of the Zero Point in front of which, a razor sharp, scree-ridden slope led our eyes deep into the valley below and the glacial wildernesses beyond. Unfit mortals like myself weren’t allowed to venture ahead of this area and for very good reason. Just standing there staring at the slender thread of the Pindari river snaking through the barren, snow-capped gorge was enough to give me a vertigo attack.

“That’s Nanda Khat, that’s Nanda Kot and that’s Pindari glacier,” said D, perfunctorily pointing out the hazy peaks in the Himalayan panorama visible in front of us. While the view might have impressed anyone just waltzing into the place, having toiled long and hard for 3 days, fighting hunger, lack of sleep and the sort of body aches I never knew a human being could endure, my expectations were obscenely high and they found these views underwhelming. To make matters worse, my camera stopped working and I felt like all the hard work I had put in to get there was futile.

D might have sensed the disappointment writ large on my face because he saw a ripe opportunity to throw more salt on my wounds. He said, “The views aren’t great today. But if you had come in October, it would have been much better. It’s all crystal clear that time of the year. That ridge you see next to the Pindari Glacier is the Traill’s Pass. When you lose 20 kilos, get fitter and buy a good camera, I’ll take you there.” I was weary and tired but I summoned all the energy I had to give him as fearsome a death stare as I could.

We walked back down the rocky hillside to meet the most famous resident on the Pindari trail, the Pindari baba. The baba was born in Orissa but after years of wanderings, he became a disciple of an aged guru and took a vow of asceticism. One day, his wanderings took him to the icy wildernesses of the Zero Point. He was so impressed with the landscapes here that he chose to make it his abode for life.

The baba had been living alone in his modest little wood-and-stone ashram for over 20 years. D said some of the people in the villages had weird theories about him. Some suspected he was a CBI agent, some thought he got funding from foreign NGOs, some felt he was a spy. But what he did know was that the baba could speak over 36 languages fluently and did a lot of work with the schools in the villages to spread education and improve infrastructure.

When AR, D and I entered the ashram, Pindari baba greeted us with a plate of dal-rice and endless cups of tea. He was a gentle, cheerful man, very curious, uninhibited and open to conversation.

“We’ve heard a lot about you”, I said.

“Haha I don’t know what you’ve heard. People say all kinds of things about me. Most of it is untrue. I’m just a simple man living a simple life.”

“How do you speak 36 languages?”

“I can speak more than 36 languages. Many foreigners come here. I talk to every single one of them and try to learn as much as I can. What’s the point of life if you stop learning?”

“Don’t you ever feel afraid or lonely living alone?”

“Everyone asks me this. But what do I have to fear? Every morning I go down to the river to collect water and watch the bharal (wild sheep) grazing on the high mountain slopes. If you had come here earlier, you could also have seen them. Then the trekkers keep coming during the day. After people leave in the afternoon, I have all the time to myself. There’s no one to disturb me. I do my meditation, prayer and a lot of reading. People keep sending me books. Just a minute, I have something to show you.”

He went inside and got a hard cover copy of a book called “Spies in the Himalayas” by M.S. Kohli.

“I just got this book last week. Do you know there’s a nuclear device hidden in the Himalayas? This book gives you all the details. The Indian Government tried to install a plutonium device in the 60s to spy on Chinese nuclear instalments but they somehow lost it and haven’t been able to find it ever since. Why do you think people aren’t allowed to go close to the Nanda Devi mountain? It’s because the radiations might kill you. You should read it. It’s about the deepest secrets hidden in the Himalayas. The author was in the army before. So he knows what he’s saying.”

I would have loved to spend an entire day chatting with the baba but we had a long walk ahead of us. D was especially anxious to get going because he wanted to cross the snowfields on the way before they began melting in the afternoon sun. Walking back in the thick forest, I was consumed by the idea of living alone in the wilderness and entertained thoughts about living a simple life satisfying only my basic needs. I asked D what he thought of these ideas.

“Terrible”, he said, sounding decidedly unimpressed, “First of all, many tourists, especially foreigners, try to do this after seeing babas in the Himalayas. No one survives for more than a few days because it is impossible to live alone for so long. Pindari baba is good and I don’t want to say anything bad about him but there are many babas like him in the Himalayas and not all of them are genuine. Many of them hardly ever stay for winters and have a lot of money in the bank account. They have connections, investments, back up plans and are as materialistic as you are. Some even have money to visit Europe every year. So if someone like you wants to do it, without any tapasya (meditation) or training, you have to have a business plan in place.”

“I wasn’t talking about becoming a baba. I only wondered if it’s possible to build a hut and settle down in the mountains somewhere and live peacefully for the rest of my life.”

“That’s even worse. You’ll kill yourself in a few days. You won’t have anyone to talk to. You don’t look like you fast a lot and you probably don’t know how to grow food either, so what will you do? I have a better idea for you. Come here every year, have fun, spend a few peaceful days walking in the mountains and go back home to your wife and children. Better still, bring them with you. You’re 28 years old. It’s about time you got married. Then you’ll be so busy your mind won’t think of these stupid ideas.”

As we were walking and conversing, the long trail of school children walked ahead of us. One of the kids was traveling on top of a mule, crying uncontrollably. She had twisted her foot close to Zero Point and was unable to walk any further. The mule walked awkwardly and every few steps, it would jerk around and one of its legs would threaten to slide down the trail deep into the gorge below. The girl wailed every time this happened and one of the rescue specialists who was part of the team ran to pacify her.

I was a bit disgruntled with D’s straightforward assessment of my life choices and walked with the rescue specialist. He, too, was a frustrated man.

“It’s not as if I don’t like doing this”, he said,  “Of course, it’s wonderful to take children deep into the mountains and show them natural beauty. But as an adventurer, I’m sick of walking on these easy trails. I have seen these mountains so many times it’s boring. I need some new adventures. Just last week, I was climbing Satopanth with a Korean expedition and see what I’m doing today. But if you want to put food on the table, you have to run after mules. Chances for big expeditions don’t come very often.”

“But from my perspective, you’re very fortunate”, I said, “If someone gave me your job, I’ll very happily take it and do it for the rest of my life.”

The rescue specialist laughed and said, “This is not an easy job. I had to train for years at the Mountaineering Institute to be good enough to qualify. If that mule falls down the slope, I would have to put my life on the line and run down the gorge, pick up the girl and climb back here. There’s no option to fail because it is my responsibility to see that everyone finishes the trek safely. That could be a huge burden to deal with every day of your working life.”

We soon arrived at the Tourist Rest House in Dwali without any casualties. The angry caretaker who had shooed us away just the day before didn’t look any happier when he saw AR, D and I striding towards him.  He looked at me and said, “What did I tell you yesterday? He is your guide! He has to come hours before you do and tell me you are coming. How can you make the same mistake again and again?”

“So you don’t have any rooms today as well?”, I said, wearily.

“No, I don’t. All the rooms are taken by the school group.”

D smiled sheepishly and said, “Wait here. I’ll do something.”

He managed to find a “friend” among the guides working with the school group.

“You know that if it was up to us, we could walk down to Khati in a couple of hours”, he said to his friend, “But these clients, they get tired too soon. So just do something.”

The friend spoke to his crew and managed to get AR and I some space in a dark, dank store-room space filled with quilts and rugs piled on a filthy floor. My feet were aching so bad after the strenuous 8 hour walk that I could barely move them. We had to wake up early the next morning for another long day’s walk up to the Kafni glacier and back, a thought that sounded more agonizing than pleasurable.

D was right, if this was the way I felt after only 3 days of walking in the mountains, maybe it was a terrible idea to even entertain thoughts of settling down here.

Dwali-Phurkiya

The hike from Khati to Dwali is one of the most languid and social hikes I’ve ever done. Every few minutes, our progress would be hindered by some acquaintance of D trudging along the path entertaining him with gossip and conversation. There were friends, guides, horsemen, pandits, old people, so diverse were the people we came across that it was hard to believe there was anyone left in the world who didn’t know D.

Two women, distant aunts of D, provided the most enjoyable company. They were on their way back from the forest with big baskets of wood on their backs. When they saw us, they took a break and began making tea with hot water from a big flask and tea powder. Both women had a lot of fun at D’s expense, dredging up the silly things he did as a kid – stealing chicken from the neighbours farm, wrecking giant cobwebs in the house and putting the spiders inside his mouth, annoying other girls his age by pulling their hair etc.

D soon had enough of this teasing and said we had to get moving quickly or our legs would get swollen up with all the rest. The women mocked him saying that was the randomest excuse they had ever heard and asked me not to worry because even the slowest of walkers walked to Dwali in under 3 hours. So we had more cups of tea and more conversation.

I told them that Khati was the most beautiful village I had ever seen and that nothing appears to have changed in a hundred years. The women shook their heads in disagreement. It wasn’t the village it was, they said. Back in the 70s when they grew up, only the hardiest of mainland Indians or foreigners ever made it to the village and when they showed up, it felt as if they had come from another world. But now, so many came every day that the surprise and the shock of seeing people from other cultures had dwindled to nothing. Even the language barrier didn’t exist anymore because most people had learnt to speak Hindi. People were more content back then, they said. Hardly anybody had money and while life was hard, they had everything they needed to survive. But now, thanks to tourism and easier access, everybody worked for money and no amount of money was ever enough. I could have talked to the women all day long, probing deeper into their history but we had to get moving if we wished to reach Dwali soon and I bid them a sad goodbye.

The most pleasurable section of the walk to Dwali was by the bright green grassy banks of the Pindari river. It was an ethereal faeriland with butterflies of myriad colors flitting by and scarlet minivets adding a touch of bright red to the landscape. Much to D’s annoyance, I took inordinately long breaks here to just sit by the river and watch it flow. On one of these breaks, D confessed that he had once fallen in love with a Gujarati girl from a group that had hired him for the trek. Even though he was a married man, he thought about her every single day, he said. He wrote long letters to her to stay in touch and was enormously happy when she replied to a few of them. It was a bittersweet happiness as it also made him feel guilty and sinful for loving another woman more than his wife. Having married at the age of 18, he felt trapped at having to lead a life he hadn’t chosen. He couldn’t run away from his village and his family because they were the only tangible things in the world that he had and without them, he would feel painfully lost.

By the time we crossed the wonky suspension bridge to reach the Dwali Tourist Rest House, it was 4 pm. I was delighted to be at the end of a beautiful day of hiking and looked forward to spending the rest of the evening with umpteen cups of tea staring at the mountains in front of me. But these alluring thoughts would prove to be delusional. The Dwali TRH was swarmed with a mighty group of kids from an International school in Pune. They had taken up all the accommodation and the place was so small and beds were in such short supply that there weren’t enough of them to accommodate the gargantuan support staff of guides, teachers, porters, rescue specialists, horsemen and random hangabouts.

The manager stormed out and admonished D for taking such a long time to get there. He was terribly angry and advised me to cut his fees for the day because it was his duty to get there early and book a place for his client. If we had gotten there merely two hours earlier, he might have found a corner for me to sleep in. But now it was too late. What took us so long anyway?, he asked, arms flailing about. It was such a short, easy hike! I told him, smiling sheepishly, about the many breaks we took on the way to enjoy the bounty of mother nature. He replied scornfully saying, “That’s good then. It’s good that you like nature because there’s a lot more nature ahead of you on the way to the rest house in Phurkiya. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it,” and stormed back in to entertain the army of children.

The hike to Phurkiya was everything the walk to Dwali wasn’t. The terrain was relentlessly uphill and steep. Because it was late in the evening, many of the icy stretches on the higher slopes were melting resulting in stretches that were seriously slippery. The hike was made even more treacherous as we had to hurry up to make it to the TRH at Phurkiya before it got dark. After a point, the jungles, the trees, the meadows, anything green that grew, disappeared from the landscape leaving us a barren rocky wilderness punctuated by the hardiest of shrubs that thrived in this inhospitable climate. Little clumps of high altitude wildflowers were just beginning to sprout. D said I should come back a few months later when the entire hillside turned into a bed of color after the flowers bloomed in the monsoon.

As we neared Phurkiya, the oxygen in the atmosphere gradually thinned, the air became colder and my head felt lighter. There were stretches where the snow was so deep that when my foot hit the surface, it sank to the knee. The last rays of the sun were angling across the jagged peaks in the distance and as the light grew dimmer, the mountains wallowed in a deep blue. It was mesmerizing to watch but I had no time to take in the landscapes at leisure as we had to hurry up and get to Phurkiya before it became completely dark.

When I reached the TRH in Phurkiya in April 2009, it was the remotest outpost I had ever been to. At the time I felt it was astonishing that it even existed. A lone structure looking over a mountainous wilderness close to one of the edges of the Himalayas. There were cascading trickles of meltwater falling down the mountains on the opposite slope and the whole area was desolate save for myself, D, the caretaker and AR, a solo trekker who would be my companion for over a week from here on.

It got dark and cold very quickly and all of us huddled together in the kitchen shed to take refuge by the fire. The caretaker delivered us a simple yet sumptuous meal of dal, roti, vegetables and bottomless cups of chai as we made conversation. AR had quit his job to travel and had been trekking alone for the past few days. As two people who had momentarily given up a secure life to wander aimlessly, we connected immediately.

But kitchen fires don’t burn forever and we had to get out of the warm confines of the shed and venture out in the sub zero cold to our rooms to catch some sleep before another long hike the next morning. AR and I were given two mattresses and a mountain of quilts to sleep inside a dark and dank little room. The night was so cold that even though I had all my clothes on and about three heavy quilts over, I was still shivering to the bone. I looked at the time. Five minutes short of 10 pm. It was going to be a long night.

Khati

I had slumped into such a deep slumber owing to the exertions of the 10 hour hike the previous day that D had to bang the creaky wooden door down to its breaking point to wake me up. It had been a cold, uncomfortable night beneath a mountain of blankets and all my interlocking dreams had my bones shivering in an Arctic weather and the shivering continued seamlessly to the time I had woken up in the middle of the night wondering if the scenes of me riding a dog sled on thin ice was real or dreamt. But the exhaustions of the day had given me at least a few hours of deep, sound sleep.

D asked me to get ready quickly because we were getting late for school. This was a bizarre thing to hear for someone in his late 20s first thing in the morning and I pinched myself to check if the dream cycle was still on. It wasn’t and I grumbled my way to the big tub of water in the corner to brush my teeth. It was one of the more unpleasant tooth-brushings up to that point in my life.  There was no wash basin and I had to make use of the murky water in the big tub to rinse the mouth near the grimy squat toilet.

The government school in the village was housed in a small wood and stone structure. We went to the school because D wanted to introduce me to his kids. The school appeared to have fairly lax discipline because the kids were allowed to saunter out of class for something as unimportant as this. Like all encounters I’ve ever had with kids, this was predictably awkward. D told them who I was and they stared at me for 10 seconds waiting for the stranger to break the ice or do something funny. I asked their names. They told me. Then they just sort of looked at each other sheepishly perhaps exchanging funny impressions of the stranger telepathically. D tried to ease the tension by asking them to ask me what my name was. They asked. I told them. Then he asked them to ask me where I came from. At this point, they glumly told him they didn’t have the time for this shit and would like to go back to class. D laughed and let them run away. I was relieved.

We then went to his house to get some breakfast. Like most of the houses in Khati, it was made of traditional wood-and-stone Garhwali architecture with bright blue doors and windows decorated with crude ornamental carvings. A bare-chested man with a chest full of hair sprawled in a corner. D introduced him to me as his uncle. I dutifully smiled and greeted the man but the uncle was far less diplomatic. He wasn’t happy to see a stranger enter his house at that hour of the morning and grumbled at D in a drooly slur asking why he kept bringing strangers into the house. D asked me to ignore him and brought a cup of chai, a plate of boiled spinach leaves and a few dry rotis.

The army of houseflies buzzing around us seemed keener on feasting on this meal than I was. D observed that I was tentatively prodding at the rotis instead of eating them and said, “Foreigners pay thousands of rupees for this experience. You’re getting it for free. So just eat.” So I ate. It wasn’t the most delicious meal in the world but it was nutritious enough and would provide nourishment for the many hours of strenuous walk ahead.

I took out my Panasonic LS70, the cheapest camera money could buy in 2009, to get some shots of the village before leaving. It was a 7.2 megapixel camera that ran on AA batteries and I realised to my dismay that the batteries inside were on their last legs and I hadn’t had the presence of mind to buy some when I was shopping for trekking clothes in Kapkote. This was a serious downer because the best landscapes were arguably ahead of us and while I appreciated old-fashioned perspectives on enjoying moments purely without worrying about capturing them, I wanted to take at least a few pictures to remind me of this journey when I looked back at it years later.

When I frantically ran up to D to ask if he knew a shop that sold batteries, he gave me that world-weary look that he had a habit of giving people when they said something stupid or disagreeable. Did I know we were in a village with no road access or electricity?, he said, angrily. There was only one shop that served the entire village and we had to go to the house of the man who owned it to get him to open it up for us. He had no AA batteries, he said, but he had some that were meant for torchlights but would also fit the camera. I bought a dozen of those when I saw that the first two gave out within the four pictures I took to test them out and hoped fervently that the rest would at the least allow me to take half a dozen pictures for keepsakes.

Khati is one of the last old-world villages left in the Indian Himalayas. It’s at the edge of the wilderness, the last inhabited place before the mountains take over. Even in 2019, there’s no direct road access as the nearest road-head is at a village called Khirkiya, a 5 km walk over the hills. It’s setting is absolutely mesmerizing, with high, steep, thickly forested mountains surrounding it on all sides and the high peaks of Kalanag and the Nanda Devi range looming above on clear days. It’s a village one would love not just to visit but linger.

So one of the regrets I have when I think about the time I did the trek in 2009 is that I hadn’t allowed myself even a cursory look at the village. I was so caught up with buying batteries, catching up on sleep, chilling at D’s house and prepping for the day’s trek that there was no time left to take even a casual stroll. Someday they’ll finish the road to Khati which will be a boon to the people who live there. But for a romantic like myself, who has seen places crumble to ugly and unchecked development, it will be a sad day when the regret of not fully experiencing a place when it was pristine and untouched only grows stronger.

Onwards to Khati

It was a gentle downhill walk from Dhakuri and this gave me the opportunity to learn what an achiever D already was at the age of 23. He was married with two kids, the assistant headman of his village and a vociferous campaigner for the Youth Congress. He had also been working with the Forest Department for environmental conservation and prevention of forest fires and of course, was a registered trekking guide for KMVN and private trekking outfits.

I also learnt that, for a guy his age, he didn’t care a whit for the musical trends of his time. He loved Hindi film music but as far as he was concerned, nothing after the year 2000 was worth listening to. He had particular contempt for A R Rahman because he felt his music sucked the soul out of what made songs by his heroes, Anand-Milind and Jatin-Lalit, great. To prove his point, he made me listen to his favorite song, a torturous ode to gentle objectification, “Kudrat ne banaaya hoga”, a song that literally went “God must have made you when he had a lot of free time on his hands”, on a loop on his phone and if the climb up to Dhakuri was physically gruelling, this made sure the walk down to Khati was no less so.

When we reached the village of Wachcham, we rested in a shed plastered with posters of Mayawati, the leader of Bahujan Samajwadi Party (BSP), not because we needed to rest our bones or refresh ourselves with more chai, but because D, being an ardent Youth Congress worker had to get into a long debate with the people huddled together at the shed, many of whom were BSP supporters. In the middle of this squabble, an environmentally conscious gentleman pointed out that the Tehri Dam was a catastrophe waiting to happen and that it was the Congress party which was responsible for its existence, a point that didn’t sit too well with D, who reacted with supreme fury by calling the man a communist who had no space in the modern world. D felt that the dam was necessary for the economy of the region and for jobs and livelihoods to flow.

As the conversation meandered on endlessly, Panditji got tired of it and left the scene. I followed him as we walked down the stony trail to Khati. Panditji was highly disappointed at the selfish nature of the people who had been arguing. “They’re only interested in themselves,” he said, “not in the general well-being of humanity. They come to temples when they need something but none of them realise that good things will happen to them only if they consistently respect the rules that God has set for the people of the world. They’re greedy and it is this greed that’s going to destroy the world They might make a lot of money by indulging in corruption but God is going to make sure they pay for their sins in the next birth.”

“If bad things are going to happen to them in the next birth, why worry about it now? They’re going to suffer anyway, right?”, I said.

“That’s not the point. When I grew up, we feared our Gods and respected the rules set by our elders and our ancestors. We were taught not to do or say certain things and we tried our best to be good people out of the fear that doing bad things led to bad consequences. The young people these days don’t have that fear. They do anything they want, laze around all day, do drugs, fall in love with girls not approved by their parents, indulge in politics, don’t care for the rituals and traditions.”

“So what do you think of the Tehri dam?”

“I support the Tehri dam because it provides livelihood to local people. For the longest time, politicians only took money but never did any work. So any work that happens is good.”

“But people say the dam has destroyed the forests and only exists to serve the needs of people living in big cities.”

“People say all kinds of idiotic things. As long as it is beneficial to someone, it’s good. It’s providing work to young people who would be wasting their lives uselessly otherwise. And many young people go from villages to cities for work nowadays, so if the needs of a city increase they have to find resources from somewhere.”

“But how does this fit in with your philosophy that greed is bad? Surely, young people are going to the cities because they aren’t satisfied with the life in the villages and want to make more money?”

“That’s not greed. That’s moving with the times. In the olden days, you could live a satisfied life by tilling your land and taking care of your family without seeing anything of the outside world but that’s no longer possible in this day and age. You need money to survive and you can’t make any money just living in your village. You have to move out and seek work. You’re stupid if you don’t do that. I see many village boys just loitering around doing nothing. That’s not healthy. We never used to loiter when we were young. We always had work to do. Greed is when a wealthy politician promises to build roads and give you electricity and when he gets the money for it, he keeps all the money for himself. At least with the Tehri dam, the government has built something and it’s doing some good to ordinary people somewhere.”

Soon, we reached the cobbled paths winding through the terraced farms on the outskirts of Khati village. D ran up, patted my back patronisingly and said, “Good job! You’ve learnt to walk in the mountains today.” He put me up in a one room house that belonged to one of his friends that was covered with a stony roof and furnished with one desolate wooden cot and a squat toilet in a corner.

The sun was setting over the Himalayan mountains and even though I had walked over 20 km in the day on fairly steep terrain, adrenalin was coursing through my veins and I wanted to explore the village to see what it was like. These desires were put to rest emphatically by D who said, “You’ve walked 20 kms today. You have to walk 20 more tomorrow. So just eat and go to sleep. You’ll need it.” It was good advice as the moment I had finished my simple meal of dal, rice and vegetables, I slipped into a deep slumber.