III

The Learning Curve

Pokhara, Nepal,
January 2000—Approximately 2,625 Feet

“Lakeside,” the man said, and kept walking. “A bus will be here soon. It’s 60 rupees.” Babu didn’t understand the answer to his question. Lakeside? It’s a funny word, he thought, a word he had never heard before. It sounded to him a bit like the word lake, which, in Sunuwar, the language spoken back in his village, means something to the equivalent of “a high place.” It was 5:00 a.m., and he was standing alone in the Pokhara bus station with no idea of where he was or where to go next.

A bus to take me where? Babu wondered.

There were still only 20 rupees in his pocket. The old man he had been traveling with said good-bye to him and good luck, and then he wandered off to beg on his own.

The first rays of the morning sun began to faintly illuminate the Annapurna Massif looming to the north. Rising up over 26,000 feet, they were the tallest mountains Babu had ever seen. Oh no, he thought. That’s probably where Lakeside is. It certainly looked to be the highest place nearby. And it probably wasn’t going to be a cheap 60-rupee bus ride either, he figured. It would take at least a day for a bus to get there, he guessed, appraising the hazy pyramid-shaped peak in the distance.

What Babu didn’t know is that Lakeside, the name for Pokhara’s tourist district on the eastern shore of nearby Phewa Lake, was actually less than a mile away. He could walk there in under ten minutes. When the bus finally arrived and the attendant asked for 60 rupees to take him there, Babu was ecstatic. He still couldn’t afford the ticket, but the attendant let him on anyway, appreciating his excitement. It was only a few minutes’ drive, after all, and the young boy seemed to be particularly eager about it, even though he could have easily walked.

After only a few minutes on the road, Babu saw his first lake. The vast expanse of Phewa Tal came into view in pieces at first—a patch of blue between two banyan trees, blocked by buildings, flitting in between alleyways. Even with the punctuated view, Babu could tell that this new body of water was bigger than any of the mountain rivers he had ever seen, and eerily still: unmoving, flat, and over a mile across. Wow … what is this? Babu wondered. Then, glancing down a narrow street leading to the shore between two buildings, he saw a man on the water, sitting in a kayak, like the ones he had seen floating down the Sun Kosi River near his village. This is it, he thought.

“Stop the bus!” he yelled. “Stop! Stop! Stop!”

The sun was above the horizon now, and the valley’s morning fog began to lift as Babu ran into the street. On the sidewalk, lying on the pavement not far from where he was standing, he saw a line of neon-colored whitewater kayaks, each anywhere from 6 to 9 feet long, scratched and faded from years of unapologetic rental use. Looking farther down the street in each direction, he could see even more kayak shops: their brightly colored boats sporadically lining the sidewalk off into the distance. (There are still well over a dozen of the shops in town. Pokhara is the self-proclaimed “Whitewater Capital of Nepal.”) He approached the store immediately in front of him, smiling from ear to ear, excited to have finally found a place where someone, anyone, might be able to teach him how to kayak.

“Can I have a job?” he bluntly asked the man opening up the shop in front of him. “I want to learn how to kayak.”

Evaluating the short, skinny frame of the boy standing in front of him, the man replied bluntly in return. “You’re too small,” he said with a frown. “You can’t work for us.”

Undeterred, Babu walked down the street to the next shop he could see with kayaks in front of it and asked the same question again.

“Do you even know how to swim?” they asked him.

“Yes!” Babu said, thinking that the skill his father taught him back in the village might just help him land his dream job. The shop owner didn’t believe him, however, and asked him to leave.

At the next kayak shop he visited, they yelled at him to get out before he could even explain that he was actually willing to work in exchange for paddling lessons. The rest of the day, Babu walked from kayak shop to kayak shop, asking for work with no success. He soon began to wonder where he was going to sleep. The sun was beginning to drop, casting long shadows on the pavement. He suddenly realized how hungry he had become. He hadn’t eaten all day. Finding an empty bus stop bench, Babu laid down and cradled himself for a long, cold night’s sleep. Confident in the fact that he would now, after running away from home for the second time, and after having traveled more than halfway across the country, learn how to kayak. Soon.

Charley Gaillard, owner of the Ganesh Kayak Shop in Pokhara, had known Babu for nearly two years now—ever since the small boy had shown up on a bus with a big smile and started asking every kayak shop owner in town for work. Gaillard, a lanky white-haired Frenchman in his mid-fifties who had originally moved to Pokhara in 1974 to live with his Nepali wife, hadn’t hired him at the time. Babu, despite his overwhelming desire to learn how to kayak, had wound up taking a job, out of necessity, as a trekking porter the first four months after he arrived in Pokhara, carrying supplies for foreign hikers in the foothills of the Annapurna region. After the trekking season ended in December, when the high mountain passes became too cold for tourists, Exodus Rafting, a Nepali-owned outfitter just down the road, took him on as a guide trainee. Gaillard knew that Babu helped clean the shop there, including maintaining the rental equipment, and that he seized every available opportunity to take one of Exodus’s rental kayaks out on the lake.

“He is one of only a few Nepali kayakers I know who goes kayaking for fun,” Gaillard says. “For everyone else it is work, guiding on the rivers,” he explains. “There are so many good kayakers here, but they only paddle during the tourist season. They don’t paddle when they’re not working. And I think Babu went kayaking every chance he got.”

Gaillard liked the boy and his enthusiasm for paddling, and they quickly became friends. He wasn’t looking forward to telling the young man that Exodus had closed its doors while Babu had gone back to his village and that Babu was, once again, out of work. Yet here Babu was, standing in his shop in front of him with his backpack, fresh off the bus from Kathmandu, smiling as always. Completely oblivious to the fact that he would have to start over.

“You know,” Gaillard said in Nepali laced with a heavy French accent. “Exodus is no more. It’s finished.”

Babu’s smile faded. Gaillard knew that Babu had also been sleeping at the newly defunct outfitter and that his friend, along with now having no way to continue kayaking, was both unemployed and homeless. The same position Babu had been in two years earlier, when he had first gotten off the bus from Kathmandu.

What Gaillard didn’t know is that while Babu had been away visiting his family, the seventeen-year-old had gotten married, which had turned out to be a surprise to Babu as well. While Babu had been in Pokhara learning how to kayak, his family had made arrangements for him to marry a frail-looking thirteen-year-old girl named Susmita Rai, who lived in a nearby village. They had sprung the good news, and the ceremony, upon his arrival. Susmita, who had been pulled out of school permanently for the occasion, had never met Babu before the day they got married. After being handed a small bag of clothes by her parents, she walked, alone, through the hills to meet him at his parents’ house, where they were quickly wed, and where she would now be expected to live and work. Babu promptly returned to Pokhara afterward, leaving behind a promise to return for his new child wife once he had earned enough money to bring her to west Nepal with him.

“Anyway, if you don’t have a job,” Gaillard told him casually, “maybe you can come in my place, and I can employ you. Maybe work here?” It was an offer Babu couldn’t refuse.

He spent that night, and most every night for the next two years, sleeping on the wood floor behind the desk located in the back of the Ganesh Kayak Shop. It was then and remains today a small, vaguely rail-shaped establishment not more than 20 feet wide and 40 feet deep, with kayaks stacked along both walls and one large window occupying the front of the store. Near the back, on the wall behind the low wooden desk, a few faded pictures of kayakers and rafters paddling on nearby rivers like the Kali Gandaki, Seti Gandaki, and Trisuli hang in neat, evenly spaced frames. A small wooden statue of Ganesh, an elephant-headed deity that is revered in the Hindu pantheon as “the Remover of Obstacles” or “the Lord of Beginnings,” and also the namesake of Gaillard’s shop, sits cross-legged on the corner of the desk, looking forward blithely. Never moving.

Babu earned his keep by doing odd jobs around the shop and his home: cleaning the rental equipment, sweeping the floors, and cooking meals of dal bhat for Gaillard and his wife. Babu did this happily in exchange for a small amount of pay, a place to sleep, and the chance to use Gaillard’s rental kayaks daily.

After learning some basic paddle strokes, which allowed him to move forward in a straight line and turn on the flat, unmoving water of Phewa Tal, Babu was then shown how to roll the boat right side up without having to exit the kayak, in the event it should ever flip over with him inside of it. It is a decidedly tricky maneuver for a beginner, known monosyllabically throughout the paddling community simply as a “roll.” It required him to, essentially, bend his spine sideways, in the shape of a large C, and then attempt to knee himself as hard as possible in the head, thus flipping himself and the kayak right side up. It takes most beginning paddlers months of continual practice to gain any amount of proficiency at it. Babu was consistently rolling his kayak in the lake within a few weeks.

“He became a strong paddler very quick,” Gaillard says. The only problem was Babu didn’t have anyone to go kayaking with. Gaillard was a rafter, not a kayaker. And all of Babu’s Nepali coworkers only went kayaking when they were guiding, safety boating for the rafts that carried paying clients. They couldn’t afford to take the time to teach Babu how to paddle safely on a river, let alone take the time to repeatedly rescue him if he swam out of his boat, which is what beginning kayakers have a tendency to do. Babu needed someone to be on the river with him, teaching him one-on-one and rescuing him when he, inevitably, screwed up. There wasn’t anyone, though, so for the first year of his kayaking career Babu simply paddled around in circles by himself on the lake, venturing out onto the Marshyangdi and Seti Rivers only a handful of times with Exodus’s senior guides, preparing for the opportunity to work on moving whitewater, whenever it came.

Pete Astles, a clean-shaven, square-chinned, thirty-three-year-old professional whitewater kayaker from England, had just set his bag down in his hotel room in Lakeside when the phone sitting on the small bedside table next to him rang. He picked up the receiver. “There’s someone here to see you, Mr. Astles,” the voice of the hotel receptionist told him. The line was disconnected before he could ask who it was. Astles found this curious, considering he had just stepped off the bus from Kathmandu. As far as he knew, no one besides the eleven other international kayakers he was traveling with even knew he was there, and none of them would have asked the receptionist to call him from the lobby. They knew where his room was and would have just walked up to his door and knocked. He walked downstairs to reception, where he was greeted enthusiastically by a short, excited-looking Nepali teen with clear, shinning eyes and an ear-to-ear grin.

“You must go kayaking with me!” the young man exclaimed, quickly pumping Astles’s arm with an overly firm but heartfelt handshake. Only after some hurried, confused discussion did Astles discover that the boy’s name was Babu and that his boss, their mutual friend Charley Gaillard at the Ganesh Kayak Shop, had suggested Babu go seek him out. Gaillard had known that Astles was going to be in town that month for the Himalayan Whitewater Challenge, a kayaking festival held annually in Pokhara, which Astles helped host each year through the kayaking gear company he worked for, Peak UK. Babu, armed with this knowledge, had apparently started walking through town looking for foreigners with kayaks. He had seen the boats on top of the bus parked in front of Astles’s hotel and figured that’s probably where he was.

“He basically pestered me until I took him paddling,” Astles says. Babu followed him and his friends to supper that night and listened intently to every word they said. According to Astles, “He just wanted to learn everything about kayaking that he possibly could.” He couldn’t help but like Babu and his infectious grin. And so he agreed to take him out on the river.

“His paddling just kept getting better and better,” Astles says. “I could tell he was very, very talented right away.” The professional paddler from the UK and his friends showed Babu how to paddle on the river on relatively easy Class II whitewater: how to move with it while sitting inside of a tippy boat approximately the size of a bathtub. How to see the different parts of the river—the waves, holes, pour-overs, sieves, and numerous other features—and how to recognize which ones were safe to interact with and which ones weren’t. They had a hard time believing that Babu had swam some of the Class IV big water rapids on the Sun Kosi, “just for fun,” when he was a child. They also showed him how to surf standing waves, which Babu caught on to with a flourish. “We would show him new freestyle tricks, and within a few minutes he’d have it dialed in,” Astles says. It takes even expert paddlers sometimes months to master some of the complex maneuvers Babu learned, often in the same amount of time it would take most people to make a sandwich.

That next year, in 2003, Babu and his wife moved into Gaillard’s home to live with him along with his wife and daughter. (Babu had fulfilled his promise to Susmita, bringing her to Pokhara two years after their marriage, though she had never before left village life and wasn’t sure she wanted to.) When Astles returned to Nepal that year for the Himalayan Whitewater Challenge, he spent nearly a week paddling down Babu’s home river with him—the Class III-IV Sun Kosi, a relatively advanced high-volume run—to visit Babu’s family in Rampur-6.

Five years after first leaving home, Babu found himself standing on the sandy beach below his home village with a paddle in his hand and a kayak at his feet, a neoprene spray skirt dangling at his waist, a PFD on his shoulders, and a helmet on his head. It was his childhood dream come true. “My first adventure dream,” as Babu puts it. But like most dreams people live to see realized, it wasn’t enough. After visiting his family for a few days, Babu and Astles got back into their boats and paddled downriver, looking for new adventures.

In the years that followed, Babu and Astles ran numerous Himalayan rivers together, including the committing 82-mile Class IV+ Tamur, which drains from Kanchenjunga, the third-highest peak in the world, and the infamous Dudh Kosi: the River of Everest.

Starting at 17,500 feet from the toe of the Khumbu Glacier at the base of Mount Everest, the Dudh Kosi runs alongside the main footpath leading to Everest Base Camp, dropping over 13,000 feet in the first 50 miles with an average gradient loss of 600 feet per mile. It’s a six-day, Class V-VI run, prone to massive flooding,* that didn’t see its first kayak descent until 1976.

“There were some pretty stiff rapids,” Astles admits. “Babu would just be like, ‘Ah, possible.’ We would all walk around a dangerous-looking section, and he would just run everything. Always nailed it perfectly, no worries at all.” It was on this trip that Babu first saw Everest.

Gaillard points out, “Babu is not into competition.” However, whenever he did choose to compete, he did well. Babu took second in the junior division at the Himalayan Whitewater Challenge in 2004. The year after, he took second place in the senior division.

Babu was quickly becoming one of the world’s best kayakers, paddling the hardest, most committing whitewater in the Himalaya—and not only with Astles, but with other international whitewater heavyweights too. He befriended and boated with Gerry Moffatt, a Scotland-born, Idaho-based whitewater paddler and adventure filmmaker who was a member of the first successful expedition to paddle the legendary “Upper Gorges” of the Great Bend of the Yarlung Tsangpo in Tibet in 2002. Moffatt also was part of another expedition set up for Men’s Journal and the Outdoor Life Network that became the first to paddle North America’s “Triple Crown,” three of the hardest rivers on the continent—Canada’s Grand Canyon of the Stikine and Susitna, and Alaska’s Alsek—in under four weeks. Babu met him when Moffatt set out to become the first person to paddle all of Nepal’s major river drainages. Babu joined him on several of those expeditions. Babu also started paddling with the equally young but highly skilled American Erik Boomer, a world-class expedition kayaker and photographer who led Babu off his first 40-plus-foot waterfall on the nearby Burundi Khola River when they were both nineteen.

“Babu watched me go over the falls first,” Boomer says of his first visit to Nepal in 2003 when he met Babu. “I went over the handlebars, landed upside down, but rolled up fine in the pool below. I’m sure it looked bad. Babu ran it anyway. I think he was the first Nepali to run a waterfall that big.”

Babu spent what little money he earned from working with Gaillard to pay for dozens of expeditions across Nepal to northern India, oftentimes picking up odd jobs along the way to pay for gas and food. “I remember he told me about one paddling trip he took with Gerry Moffatt to northern India,” Boomer recalls. “He was on his own, on his way back to Nepal, and somehow ran out of money, somewhere real high in elevation. And he had to stop for a month and chip rocks to make gravel for a road to make enough money to finish the trip.”

Abruptly, in 2006, Babu switched his career from kayaking to paragliding. The modified parachute of a paraglider (which is differentiated from a hang glider because it lacks a rigid frame) holds the pilot aloft through a series of eight precariously thin-looking support lines, which in turn are attached to a chairlike harness the pilot sits in while operating two “brake” handles dangling overhead, in order to control the descent from whatever high place he or she has leapt from. “It’s a lot like kayaking,” Babu says. “The air moves like water, and you have to read it the same way and anticipate what’s going to happen next.” The only difference is the medium you’re trying to read is all around you, above and below. And you’re in a chair in the sky.

“I don’t know what happened,” Gaillard says, reflecting on Babu’s sudden switch from paddling off waterfalls to jumping off cliffs. “A few kayakers here had stopped kayaking and started flying, so maybe he thought, ‘Why not?’ So he tried it, and he liked it. More than kayaking, I think. So he starts paragliding, and does one day, two days, three days; and then same like kayaking. Now he’s crazy about the paragliding. Starting again. New life, new sport. And he learned very quick, same as kayaking. He took a course, and now, every day he flies—too much.” As it turns out, being a tandem paragliding pilot happens to pay almost double the wages of safety kayakers and whitewater guides in Nepal. “He can definitely make more money paragliding,” Gaillard says.

The three-day introductory paragliding course Babu took at the lake and nearby Sarangkot was under the tutelage of Swiss pilot David Arrufat, owner of Pokhara’s Blue Sky Paragliding and the head of the recently founded Association of Paragliding Pilots and Instructors (APPI). He is a 6-foot-tall “acro” (acrobatic) pilot with dark, cropped hair; a heavy, slow Swiss accent (which makes him sound perpetually tired); and a rather unique claim to fame: being the inventor of the Rhythmic SAT, an aerial paragliding maneuver that involves going into a spiral and eventually flipping end over end, in midair, repeatedly—on purpose.

“Lots of Nepalese ask me to teach them how to fly,” Arrufat says of his and Babu’s first meeting in Pokhara. “But they want me to give them everything for free. Babu tells me, ‘I want to learn. I don’t have money, but I can work.’ I say, ‘OK, tomorrow you start.’ Many come and say, ‘I want money,’ or ‘Give me a glider.’ He’s the only one to say, ‘I can work.’” So Babu told Gaillard he couldn’t work for the Ganesh Kayak Shop anymore and started from the bottom, cleaning and organizing gear and cooking meals for the instructors and participants at Blue Sky Paragliding in exchange for flying lessons. He was on a new adventure.

That same year, Astles took Babu mountaineering for the young Nepali’s first time on 20,305-foot Island Peak, a relatively easy “trekking mountain” near Everest in eastern Nepal. It typically requires nothing more than a strong pair of legs and lungs, along with guidance from hired sherpas, to climb. Moffatt’s Kathmandu-based guide company, Equator Expeditions, led and helped fund the expedition. Bad weather and Babu coming down with a severe case of altitude sickness stopped them from reaching the summit; however, the rarified air had, along with inducing a white-hot migraine, planted an audacious idea in Babu’s mind: paraglide off Mount Everest.

He discussed his idea with Arrufat and Astles shortly after the expedition, while eating dal bhat together in the shade at a small restaurant by the lake after a day of flying.

“He was really kind of proud to take us to dinner and tell us his idea,” Astles says. “We didn’t dismiss it immediately, but we kind of looked at each other and thought in our own minds, ‘That’s kind of crazy.’ We said, ‘Oh, wow. That’s an undertaking.’ That was it. He kind of stunned us with this idea, I think.”

Babu then asked Arrufat if it was possible to fly a paraglider from the top of Mount Everest. “It’s possible,” Arrufat told him. “But I think you should learn to fly a little better first.”