The Gokyo Trek – Leg I

At Indira Gandhi International Airport a while back, I wondered how it was almost all the tourists headed to Kathmandu were ready-pressed and dressed like they’re heading to the mountains the moment they step out the air instead of a cab to Thamel and its cheap wonders?

It’s places like Gokyo, that’s how, coupled with the attenuated hold on the Occidental mind of Kathmandu as some kinda Shangri-La, ha, ha. Increasingly popular with those intrepids who fancy crossing over from Renjo Pass to the west or Cho-La pass to the east, the nine-day Gokyo trek along the Dudh Koshi Valley (see map) may not be as isolated as my 1997 Lonely Planet led me to imagine but the wilderness is still out there, as magnificent as anything you could dream of.

 

The Lonely Planet, 1997

Tired of people demanding if you’ve climbed Everest when the closest you’ve been to the roof of the world is through the seat of your pants? Book your flight to Lukla now.

Day 1 – Kathmandu to Lukla to Phakding

Reconfirm your flight to Lukla. Or face the consequences at Tribhuvan International Airport with your fellow travellers, most of whom will at least have a guide to do the talking for them. Walking into a terminal heaving with three days worth of tourists champing at the bit, we considered ourselves lucky to be off just two hours behind time. We squidged ourselves onto the wrong side of the plane but there ain’t much that can beat the thrill of spearing through the hills to the Lukla airstrip rushing up to meet you at an angle designed to slow you down before you hit the town, quite literally.

C Thapa, 2008

 

We enlisted a porter for the days my sister was planning – I’m an incorrigible DIY guy when it comes to trekking – and off we went, up and down the sunny mountainside along a broad, busy trail prettied up with painted mani walls and rocks. The rippled grey symmetry of Kongde (6086m) rising to the left on the other side of the suitably chalky Dudh Koshi promised much, and down by the Saino Lodge & Restaurant at Thaado Khola where we had the first of many quite passable dalbhat-sabji-achaar combos, we caught our first sight of a classic Himalayan peak – classic, that is, in its perennial coat of blinding white. Kusum Khangkaru (6370m) is considered by some the most difficult of the trekking peaks, and at this point (2580m) it seemed a long way off.

C Thapa, 2008

 

But it was a short, easy day to Phakding, which suited us just fine. Forty-five minutes by plane, three hours by foot, we were a world away from the bluster of Kathmandu. We were in the Khumbu, on our way to Everest…sort of, and certainly if you fell for the triumphal blares of music pouring out the telly where a mountaineering DVD regaled the weary, dulled punters.    

Day 2 – Phakding to Naamche Bazaar

Trekking in Nepal is tough love, no question. Thousands must have been fooled into thinking the famed Everest Base Camp trek a doddle after their first day. Hiking up from Jorsale to Naamche Bazaar the day after puts most in their place.

I was more surprised by the sheer volume of people populating the trail. Were we really out of the capital? We strode past files of octogenarian Japanese tourists and weaved around mini yak caravans. True, the weather had blanked out flights for two days. Views of Thamserku’s (6618m) serrated, ragged glory and the blue-grey confluence of the Dudh Koshi with the Bhote Koshi notwithstanding, I couldn’t help but wish I was further along the road to Gokyo.

I was somewhat mollified at the entrance post to Sagarmatha National Park, where I exercised the local privilege of jumping the queue, not needing to be in one at all. But after a long, hot slog soothed only by a brief, thrilling first sight of Everest peeking out from behind some pines, Naamche Bazaar seemed to offer little more than relief, with not much at the end of the day by way of ambience in its spread of multi-storeyed blue-green-red roofed hotels, Thamelesque high street tourist tat and om mani chants.

But though this Sherpa village at 3440m has moved with the times, as any trading post must do, it continues to court ambition, desire and fulfilment. We wandered through the weekend market, where the pained, sweaty visages we’d passed on the trail were to be seen smiling behind wares lugged over from Jiri, a week’s walk. Further along the China market sprawled in technicoloured heaps, unspooled from yak backs. Coffee and pastries at the original Hermann Helmer’s Bäckerei und Conditorei, stacked with rows and rows of loaves of bread, did wonders for us. There’s no denying the drama of Naamche’s surrounds either, confirmed by a short uphill stroll to the army post that lays out Ama Dablam (6814m), Lhotse (8516m), Nuptse (7864m), Everest (8850m) and  Pumori (7165m).

 

And cheese-lovers weep no more! If the general lack of your favoured nibble and the blandness of Kathmandu Yak and Kanchan had you groping for comparisons with Comte, try some of the local variety of firm, holey, mature Yak cheese. While you’re at it, ask for a dram of the local millet chhyaang or better still, settle in for an evening of fermented millet beer. The leisurely charms of tongba will keep you warm and woozy a few mugs down the line. Many thanks to Palden and Dolma, who run one of Naamche’s oldest and most respectable hotels, the Namaste Lodge.

Day 3 & 4 – Naamche Bazaar to Thami trek (acclimatisation)

The Naamche to Thami trek is a couple of clicks more than the three-hour jaunt advertised in the Lonely Planet, and the Thami you sleep in is really just a collection of lodges rather than the ‘more traditional Sherpa village’ it’s touted as. The walk is well worth it however, unless you really fancy a night out on the cobbles of Naamche while you’re acclimatising. It begins with a pleasant stroll through cool oak and rhododendron forests west from Naamche and continues to the end of the Bhote Koshi valley.

We ambled along the trail, passing our first ‘real’ yaks (and first ‘real’ Tibetan men with turquoise in their ears) coming down the old trade route from Tibet, which passes through Thami. Lunch took forever at the Maya Lodge in Thamo, giving us ample opportunity to admire the dining ceiling plastered with t-shirts from past Everest Marathons. Our porter, Nir Kumar Rai, revealed he’d been sixth in the men’s event this year. He’d run the 42-kilometre loop from Base Camp to Naamche in less than 5 hours; while most trekkers hobble the same in three to four days. I was limping along myself; the leather boots I’d treated myself to were holding up admirably well, except being brand new, they felt like logs of wood with my feet tender worms within them. I wouldn’t be running no marathons.

As the sun was cut off mid-conversation by the looming black mountains we crossed the furious rush of the Bhotekoshi sculpting russet rock into smooth convolutions. Our porter stopped, pointed and lo! there stood a magnificent Himalayan tahr twenty metres down the hill, its coat flowing in the wind.

 

The sighting of Khumbu natives apparently unafraid of humans (ergo unhunted) cheered me enough to ignore the nondescript approach to Thami, where we quickly settled in to the neat, cosy Everest Summiteers Lodge, owned by Appa ‘many times’ Sherpa. Just how many times Appa’s got to the top becomes clear as you survey out of enforced boredom the certificates ringing the warm dining room. I’ll stick with 17, insomuch as I couldn’t locate one that congratulated him for the 18^th time. There are certainly some interesting ways to make a name.

Give the man his due, but Appa might want to hike back from Amrika to straighten out the lodge operating in his name. The Everest Summiteers Lodge breaks outrageously with the unspoken tradition of not charging porters for room and board. This has as much to do with rising prices as the gradual compulsion on the part of hoteliers and trekking agencies to grant porters rights, from setting daily rates of pay to allowing them into the common areas. If they are to be treated as humans, the logic goes, they (read: their clients) must pay their share, and never mind if they brought the hotel business. Nir Kumar’s bill amounted to almost ten dollars…more than what each of us was paying.

Grumbling about the commercialisation of trekking, stomachs rumbling with the most awful momos we’d ever chewed through (two plates instead of one, courtesy of an error in the kitchen), we trudged twenty minutes up to the freshly renovated 500-year-old Thami Gomba, which sits pretty amongst stone dwellings more resembling a village. A cheery, wide-eyed monk showed us an upper chamber, waving away our attempts at de-shoeing and winking towards the donation box, leaving me wondering just what the pungent milky liquid sloshing around in his bottle was…

…but perhaps I was in an overtly cynical frame of mind. Really, there was not much to complain about in the clear sunshine of this mountain morning. After all it was this very hardheadedness that had got Khumbu where it was. The neatly uniformed, multi-ethnic group of students we encountered on the way back stood in stark contrast to the onerupeeonepenonechocolate child beggars of the Annapurna region. The Khumbu Bijuli Company set up by Austrian NGO EcoHimal illuminates the region even as Kathmandu hunkers down to 63 hours a week of loadshedding this winter. Naamche is booming. The Sherpas have done well by themselves, and who are we to begrudge them the fruits of their labours?

 

The Gokyo Trek – Leg II

Day 5 – Naamche Bazaar to Dhole

Having dispatched my sister back to Lukla with Nir Kumar, I was on my own again, and happily so. As much as I appreciate the camaraderie of a trekking group, I prefer going solo, picking my companions as I roll along. There’s nothing so liberating as an extended ramble through the mountains when you can start and stop as you like it, which means something of a frozen Khumbu morning. Half an hour more in your cocoon? No worries. Think you can leg it to the next set of lights before dark? Carry on, trekker.

That said, the first evening on my ownsome offered ample opportunities for not wholly wholesome reflections. I was alone in a crowd, dining among groups of trekkers chatting fluently (the Spaniards), playing cards and giggling (the Nepali guides and Canadian girls from Mountain Madness), journaling and reading (the Germans) and poring over their maps (the French).

Post-prandial high-altitude flatulence aside, I was the odd one out. The guides and porters clearly didn’t know what to make of a Nepali who’d trek alone for the heck of it. For my part I found myself judging the young bloods for their pop accoutrements and sneaky, lewd asides, preferring the pastoral ideal of the honest, naive village guide even as I chided myself for believing in it. Perhaps I considered them inadequate as representatives of our collective culture. Perhaps it was a general resentment of pharener girls with those boys, mirroring that of pharener lads with our girls. I felt better qualified to discourse on the country they were experiencing through the microcosm of trekking. But I was too much like them to give them the Otherness they craved, too easily dismissed as a rich boy from Kathmandu.

Thoughts turn upon themselves in the dark. Once more, I had nothing to complain about! A fresh, sunshiney start from Naamche up to Mong, scattering raucous blood pheasants before me, relishing the first clear views of the jewel that is Ama Dablam and the approaching Everest panorama. A dusty scramble down to Phortse Thanga and a bowl of noodles before a dogged climb up and through forests to Dhole at 4110m, facing the emergent massifs of Thamserku and the saddle mountain Kantega (6783m), golden in the dying light. I’d covered excellent ground in a day – I don’t recommend pushing on beyond Phortse Thanga to everyone – and was well on my way.

Day 6 – Dhole to Macchermo

A slow community was forming this second day out from Naamche. Moving en masse to our destination, meeting and greeting on the trail before dispersing over the few lodges that awaited our arrival at the end of the afternoon. There was none of the jostling anonymity we’d kicked off with from Lukla. I took it easy, hanging back with the Spaniards to admire the giant whose slipstream we were entering, Cho Oyu (8201m). We were clearly above the treeline now. Rooted to the sienna scrub, we traced the grey serpent of the glacier down in the valley to the white massif framed by the deepest blue.

Setting our bags down in the busy, sunny first lodge whose name I cannot recall, we pushed up a nose above Machhermo at 4470m, and stood enthralled at the view from Cho Oyu to Thamserku as the boys from Mountain Madness leaped from rock to rock for the benefit of their kaanchhis. It was only when a Frenchman pointed it out we saw old hoary Everest itself pop out of our panorama, resplendent in its pyramidal, defiantly unsnowed glory.

Our emergent community and the relative comfort (the toilets! the cooked food! the arctic nights!) may have negated the down-at-earth ‘into the wild’ experience my facebook status message promised à la Chris ‘Supertramp’ McCandless, who perished in the Alaskan outback. But it’s all about the bigger picture. The wide angle of the rocks, ice and snow rising above the scrubby hills, the play of light as it ebbs and flows through the day, throwing into relief what it will when it will. Red, yellow and orange lichen in sheets and bubbles, clumps of stubborn alpine flowers. This was the wild around me even ensconced in a warm dining room waiting for my mixed chowmein before to bed, to bed!

Day 7 – Macchermo to Gokyo and Gokyo Ri

A state of stunned euphoria is how I might have described my state as I sat alone – blissfully alone – amongst the three-score loudly babbling trekkers scarfing their dinner in the Gokyo Resort. Cut off from their expectations of the morrow, having taken the advice of the owner to catch the Gokyo Ri panorama at sunset, I floated in my own weary bubble of satisfaction. I didn’t care that everyone I met on the trail was elsewhere lodged – if anything, I felt slightly sorry for them. To them the numbing morning winds as they crawled up Gokyo Ri, to them the blinding sunrise views.

Words can’t quite convey the spirit of the panorama from Cho Oyu to Thamserku as it moved through shades of gold, pink and violet above the long grey smear of the Ngozompa glacier next to the chain of perfect turquoise lakes I’d skipped along up from Macchhermo. But neither can photos. Beyond the obvious, much of what made the view is lost in translation. It was in the long, tough trudge to the top. It was in the anxiety of seeing mists cottoning up the valley and wondering if the view would be gone by the time I got from 4700m to 5355m. It didn’t happen. It all lay before me as I clambered happily on to the rocks strewn with prayer flags to join the half-dozen intrepids already there, the sublimation of all what had gone before.

A jocular Nepali showed me the pair of tents he and a wild-bearded Japanese were spending the night in before offering me a warm drink of pineapple tang and a lightning name-drop tour of the vista…before gesturing towards the retreating glacier pocked with ponds and adding sombrely, yehi ho nepal ko bhabishya. The future of Nepal lies in the rising glacial lakes of the Himalaya.

Gokyo may well be in the path of a future inundation. For the time being it’s thriving. The Gokyo Resort’s unassuming Brahmin owner Surendra Sharma recounted to me the development of the settlement. In the early 1980s, when he set up shop, there was almost no traffic to speak of. A ballooning expedition in the 1990s brought the region much-needed publicity. Today up to 30 or 40 trekkers and guides bed down in the dining room on the busiest of evenings. I almost found out the hard way. Meandering along the lakes with assortments of acquaintances I got to Gokyo to find I was the only one without a room booked. Until Sharma took pity on me. It was just as well. The food was the best I’d had since I left Kathmandu; an experimental Thai special fried rice with cashews and coconut bits for dinner, and tasty, substantial hash browns and eggs for breakfast did me very nicely.

There may be some good in having a guide, though the going hasn’t been all that good for them this season. Those with daily budgets for their guests have been hit by hotel prices (300 rupees for a plain jane dalbhat, anyone?) because commodity prices are more than up in this elevated part of the world. Sharma’s Sherpa wife Kaanchi complained about paying Rs350/kilo for tomatoes and Rs500/kilo for onions…and how not, when the formerly reliable service provided by porters from Jiri has been supplanted by an unreliable plane and helicopter service? I look at everyone’s accounts, said Sharma. I can tell by the guides’ faces that their guests are eating all their profits. And why wouldn’t they, given how much they pay the trekking agencies?

 

Day 8 – Gokyo to Thore

In an unsually empty lodge off the main drag – the Kantega View in Thore on the return loop the other side of the Dudh Koshi – after a slow listless morning lit up only by the crackling crunches of the glacier as it poured down in its millennial tread from Cho Oyu, the trip felt as if it were winding down. I wasn’t tired. But I’d had my fix. I wondered at the numbers of enthusiastic trekkers who, liberated from their backpacks, figured they’d squeeze in two five and half thousand metre climbs in a fortnight (Everest Base Camp and Gokyo) rather than one in twice that time: the guides spoke fearfully of rumoured deaths from altitude sickness in Gokyo the day before.

My trek felt done, if only in a physical sense. But each day I was going where no Nepalikukur had gone before. I was alone only when I chose to be. And I had the Mani Rimdu festival in Tengboche to look to. Wrapped up in my bag in my cold room, I blew plumes through the circle of light cast by my torch.

The Gokyo Trek – Leg III

Day 9 – Thore to Phortse

I halted at a twist just above Phortse, walked out onto an outcrop and plonked myself down. Just for the view and all there was in it. In the terrible, murderously sharp ridges of Thamserku. The deep clefts running down to the rivers. The meagre settlements perched where these ridges eased out, their square gombas offering some solace in the midst of such giant wildness.

It was so overwhelming when one paused to really look, how could I have room for the mundane thoughts of the everyday, let alone the abstractions of the future? I just sat there and looked, crunching on some welcome Trekker’s Granola.

Then back down for a hot shower at the big, red-roofed, well-organised Peacefull Lodge in Phortse. After a week of sticky sleep and smelly socks, I cannot say just how cleansed and liberated I felt. Warming myself in the late afternoon sun, I chatted to an older porter. A Frenchman approached and asked me to ask the porter if he wanted some boxers and socks. He did. ‘Tell him they need to be washed first,’ he warned as he handed over his gifts, smiling benevolently. You fool, I thought. But it was not my privilege to be offended.

As I sat there, the porters complained about their treatment at the hands of the locals. I felt vaguely uncomfortable, as one of the few Nepalis paying from the menu, and, it was implied, being treated decently only because of it. Still, they argued, compared to ten years ago it’s like heaven.

Day 10 – Phortse via Tengboche to Naamche Bazaar

 

After a foolish detour from Phortse that had me backtracking almost all the way from Pangboche (and rewarded with gorgeous full frontals of Ama Dablam), I got to Tengboche past midday. I pushed into the jam-packed, square gomba courtyard, where unfolded the masked dances one by one. As the venerables presided with chants, drums, cymbals and longhorns, skeletons and demons took their turn to dip and twirl across the flagstones. Old Man came out with his stick and proceeded to harass the crowd, picking out two tourists for special mistreatment which they bore admirably. They scuttled up rickety ladders to receive their scarves from the lamas after a extended run of slapstick kicks and random humiliations. And why not? The audience must get its due.

A plate of sour curd and an assortment of snacks later, handed out generously by the gomba, a fearsome octet emerged to solemn blares. Bhairab-like demons, wide-eyed feminine visages with huge, carved grins and disconcerting blind-eyed horrors arrayed in a fantastic spectrum of colours and armed with voodoo dolls, a half-skull, spears and knives went about their business when whooomphh! A sigh of horror sprang up from the very stones and we turned to see a lanky white-haired tourist splayed out on the ground, the women and children shrinking away as if he were an abomination. His friends rushed in. The fool had fallen 10 feet from the balcony into the courtyard, almost onto the women. While he lay fainting I watched horrified, a chill in me as much to do with the demon dance, which didn’t miss a beat. But the dancers turned to look; they were human after all. Eventually, the unfortunate sat up with a cup of tea, and nervous laughter broke out. All was well. I left soon after for Naamche.

 

Day 11 & 12 – Naamche Bazaar to Lukla to Kathmandu

And back again. Naught of note except I was in a hurry, and had no time for the slow-moving yaks and trekkers going both ways. Or ignorant locals. Stopping at Phakding for a terribly bland plate of chowmein, I was irked more than usual when the proprietor wondered if I really was Nepali. Tapai ta same Indian, she added for good measure. If you went down to the south, you’d be same Chinese, I retorted, but my point was lost on her. Tapai ta same Indian, she insisted, wrapped up in her ethnocentrism.

It was a long, sweaty day back to Lukla. I had no time for this town of hotels. Last night in the Himalayas, cheered the banners inviting returnees to parties. All I wanted was to get back home. My day was done.

Thanks to my solitary stay at the very ordinary Base Camp Hotel, whose proprietor is also the main man in Yeti Airline’s Lukla office, the next morning was as smooth as silk. On a signal the chosen scampered down to the tarmac, where the flying Yeti disgorged a fresh set of eager beavers. Just as quickly, we were pushed onto the plane (quickly please, urged the stewardess) and I’d barely got my belt tightened before we were on-air, and (those of us on the right side) admiring the view we’d just spent the last fortnight in. An admiring hour later, we skimmed down through the blanket of fog that was the Kathmandu Valley. The dirty ramshackle familiarity of my hometown grinned crookedly up at me.

Off the plane, I could make out a near-translucent Langtang behind the hazy northern contours of the Valley. A world away, once again. The Himalaya may as well have been a mirage…had I not known the dust of the trails threading around its fresh valleys of ice and snow…where it is cold and much, much more.