Organizing the trekking group had its problems and surprises too. Ten members originally signed up for the trek to Basa. Niru and I were both very pleased with this increase from our 2007 nine-member Langtang-Helambu trek.
It was a good group. Two high school teachers from the Indianapolis area planned to do a comparative study of education in Nepal. John, a physician friend from the Jordan YMCA, would be a useful addition to the group, as a medical doctor is always a valuable member of any expedition. Dr. John planned to bring a load of medical supplies to donate to the medical clinic nearest to Basa, which Niru had advised is in Sombare, a two-hour hike from Basa. I had not seen my cousin David, who lives in the LA area, since he was a little kid, but he had heard of my Himalayan experiences through the family grapevine, and he reconnected with me to ask if he could join my next expedition. Two friends of friends, Karen and George from Biloxi, signed up. Bill, a friend from college now living in San Diego; Carl, a member of the Wilderness Club; and Dax, a veteran of many climbing and trekking expeditions and my tent mate on my first climbing expedition in Ladakh, India, completed the group.
But by the time we arrived in Katmandu, the group was only six. The two teachers had been counting on a grant for partial funding of their costs, but it was denied, so they had to cancel. Dr. John was in a car wreck just a month before our departure date. He cracked several ribs and was in no condition to trek and sleep in a tent. George from Biloxi had planned to lose weight but didn't, and so decided he was not sufficiently conditioned to handle the trek.
Each year, I tell the group members that to handle a standard Himalayan trek they need to be able to do at least forty-five minutes at a good, hard pace at a steep uphill setting on a Stairmaster or elliptical machine, and, to handle an introductory climb, they need to be able to do at least sixty minutes. George knew he wasn't in shape to handle the trek, and he was wise enough to bow out.
The six of us arrived in Katmandu on different dates and by varying routes and airlines. Karen flew the Atlantic route on India Air with a stop in Delhi. Dax came through Dubai on the Emirates airline. Bill and I flew from Los Angeles on Cathay Pacific. Carl was the first to arrive in Katmandu and had flown Royal Thai Airlines. He had planned to spend several days in Katmandu before the trek started to acclimatize and explore Katmandu. David was the last to arrive on October 6, 2008, the day before we were to fly up into the mountains.
Katmandu is a cultural shock to first-timers with its wild tuk-tuk drivers, rickshaws, women in colorful saris, lepers, and beggars. Given the 5,000-foot altitude, it is helpful to arrive in Katmandu at least a couple of days before starting the trek, especially for those who live at sea level, to acclimatize and to become acquainted with the local culture. It also allows time to do gear sorting and to shop locally for any needed gear, clothes, or personal effects for the trek.
Only one other member of the group, Dax, had been to Nepal and had mountaineering or trekking experience. I met Dax in 1996 at the Hotel Imperial in New Delhi. He was just under six feet tall and weighed over 225 pounds, massively muscled in the upper body. Dax was a weight lifter who wanted to become a mountain climber. On our first Himalayan climb, we were hotel roommates as well as tent mates. Just after we met in the hotel lobby, Dax told me he had talked management into an upgrade for our room, and then he said, “You do know what I am?” I had guessed. Dax became my New York Jewish weight lifter, mountain climber, gay friend.
Bill and I met in college. He was the best friend of another friend of mine. We all went to law school after we graduated from college but began our law practices in different places, Bill in San Diego. We got together a few times in a group of mutual friends from college. The group took ski trips to Big Bear in California and fishing trips in the Sea of Cortez. After Bill moved to California, he developed an interest in Hispanic culture, becoming fluent in Spanish and marrying a Mexican woman. Bill was someone who was sensitive to and enjoyed cultural differences, I thought.
I met Carl through the Central Indiana Wilderness Club but had not done any Wilderness Club trips with him and did not really know him. He is six foot six, so a giant by Nepalese standards, an actuary, and a very spiritual guy. Karen was a friend of one of my neighbors. I didn't meet her until we arrived in Katmandu but had learned through email correspondence that she was a psychotherapist, was very interested in spiritual matters, and used the nickname of Narayani, which is the name of a powerful mother goddess in the Hindu pantheon.
The group members had not known each other before joining the trip, though some were able to meet before leaving the States for Katmandu. We met for the first time as a group at dinner at Thamel House Restaurant the night before we were supposed to fly into the mountains. Niru made a quick appearance to meet the group, but he was hosting a larger group at another restaurant. Niru's son, Milan, and Sanga, who would be our sirdar, hosted the dinner. Sanga led the Katmandu day tours our groups had done in 2006 and '07, but I had not done a trek with him. I was disappointed that Ganesh was guiding a climb on Dhaulagiri, a 26,810-foot peak in western Nepal, and could not be our sirdar. But Sanga's English is slightly better than Ganesh's, and he has the kind and comforting temperament of Nepalese sirdars that I admire, so I was confident he would do the job well. Like Ganesh, he is married to a sister of Niru. I learned subsequently that Sanga's wife is the head teacher at the Basa school.
We met Niru for breakfast the next morning at the Katmandu Guest House (KGH), and I presented him with a check for the $1,400 already in hand for the school project. As is often the case, a couple of our members needed to rent sleeping bags, so we walked to a gear rental shop in Thamel owned by a friend of Niru. Climbing gear and trekking supplies can be rented or purchased at secondhand shops in Thamel for a fraction of the price it costs to buy the same items in the States, so I encourage those who don't own some needed gear to buy or rent after arriving in Katmandu. (The one item each member absolutely must have before arrival is a well-broken-in pair of hiking boots.) A trip to a gear shop has become a first-day ritual for my groups. Exploring the narrow streets of Thamel together provides another opportunity for the members of the group to become better acquainted.
After a leisurely day of walking and shopping, we met Sanga back at the KGH, where he distributed the company-provided duffels we would each use on the trek and answered last-minute questions about packing the duffels. The porters will find a way to carry anything and any amount of weight a member of the group wants to bring on the trek, but there is a forty-five-pound weight limit on most domestic flights in Nepal. That should not be a problem for trekkers, but climbers have more gear and often must wear their climbing boots and multiple layers of clothes on the flight up to the mountains. Irrationally, the forty-five-pound limit is based only on baggage weight. What a passenger wears or carries is not considered in the weight limit.
Niru had sent our group members a detailed list of recommended items to bring on the trek along with a list of items and amenities provided by his company. His list is accurate down to the number of socks, underwear, and reading materials, so I encourage members to use the list as their bible for packing. Nevertheless, some members seem unable to follow these simple directions. In 2006, one member brought a Coleman stove, cooking pots, plates, and utensils, even though Niru's list clearly stated that all food preparation is done by the staff and members need bring nothing in the way of food or utensils other than snacks or power bars. One of our porters carried this group member's “kitchen” on the sixteen-day trek, even though it was never used.
The next morning, we met Sanga in the KGH lobby, expecting to be driven to the airport to fly to Phaplu, the village airstrip that was to be the starting point of our cultural trek. Bad news: although the sky was overcast only in the Katmandu Valley, lightning was flashing up in the mountains and most of the flights that day, including ours, were canceled. Since we had planned to do a day tour after our return, Sanga suggested we use this day instead. That way, we would remain on schedule for the departure dates from Katmandu. We agreed, piled into the van, and drove off to see the strange and quirky sights of Katmandu.
We visited Swayambodh, “the Monkey Temple,” where arrogant monkeys stalk around a magnificently eclectic Hindu-Buddhist temple complex overlooking the city. We walked the sacred circuit around Bodnath, the largest Buddhist stupa in Nepal. Sanga and I showed the group how to turn the prayer wheels clockwise, according to Buddhist tradition, and to chant the Tibetan-Buddhist prayer for good luck, “Om mani padme hum.” While we ate lunch atop a restaurant overlooking the gigantic stupa, men climbed to its peak and threw buckets of whitewash and gold paint over the sparkling white structure. We spent most of the afternoon hiking around, sitting for a while across the Baghmati River from Pashupatinath, where the ashes of all devout Hindus in the Katmandu Valley are carried to the sacred Ganges.
In a Hindu funeral, priests prepare and then burn the bodies one after another on ghats, cremation platforms, on the bank of the river below the temple complex. So many corpses are burned each day on the ghats that it looks like a ceremonial assembly line. The ashes of the cremated body are stirred by the priest's great stick and then scuffed into the river. Trash and the bodies of dogs and monkeys float down the river, while pilgrims and sadhus bathe just upriver from the ghats. The scene offends Western sensibilities of hygiene. But lest we become too stiff-necked about our superior ways, Sanga pointed out that above the ghats is the oldest known hospice in the world. While Hindus have been coming to Pashupatinath for a thousand years to prepare for death by spending their final days with family and spiritual advisors, it has only been in the last few decades that the West has discovered the wisdom of this approach to death.
Pashupatinath Cremation
A surprising development during our group's tour of Katmandu was that my old friend Bill frequently complained about the carelessness and stupidity of Nepalese drivers. When he was bumped on the arm by a rickshaw in Thamel, he yelled at the driver, as if he thought the rickshaw driver had done it deliberately. Then he complained about the incessant honking and about tuk-tuks weaving in and out of lanes. He was upset that Nepalese drivers were not behaving according to his American standards of traffic etiquette. Fortunately, the other trekkers enjoyed the tour.
That evening we met Bob Meyer for dinner at a restaurant in Thamel that Bob suggested. The restaurant was fairly busy and the service was slow, but I was enjoying Bob's description of his successful but scary climb of Cho Oyu. Drinking chiyaa (tea) and chang (beer) while we awaited our food, the group was having convivial conversation getting to know each other and Bob, I thought. Bill, however, was becoming increasingly upset about the food not being served. After about foty-five minutes, he stood up and declared he was leaving and asked Karen to leave with him. She politely declined. I tried to mollify Bill, pointing out that the evening was pleasant, we were seated outside, and there was no need to be in a hurry. Bill stayed but remained agitated, and only calmed down after Bob paid for the entire group's dinner.
Bill was manifesting symptoms of “the ugly American.” It made no sense to me. He is married to a Latina, his kids are bilingual, and the family lives cross-culturally, with homes in both San Diego and Mexico. And he is one of the nicest guys I know. Yet he seemed more concerned about unregulated traffic and slow service than the cultural experiences offered in a country new to him. It seemed as though he expected Nepalese to conform to his standards, rather than being curious to learn about their ways. He even mocked local customs and language. The common greeting in Nepal is “namaste,” which is usually translated as “I recognize the god in you.” It is a lovely greeting and sentiment. Most words in Nepali are stressed or accented on the first syllable, as is namaste. At every opportunity, Bill used the greeting but exaggeratedly stressed the last syllable instead of the first, mispronouncing it “nam-us-stay!” Then he would chuckle, laughing at his little joke. He was a different person in Katmandu from the friend I had known.
Tim Meyer told me that on his flight from LA to Katmandu for our 2007 expedition, he sat beside a Nepalese businessman. Tim asked the fellow what advice he could offer to one who had not been to Nepal before. The Nepalese guy said, “Open your mind.” That was excellent advice and I passed it on to our group in 2008. But the message wasn't reaching Bill.
It also worried me that Bill appeared to be about thirty pounds overweight and walked with a slight limp. He had assured me several weeks before we left for Katmandu that he had been working out, hiking up and down hills around his home. When Dax and I had visited him in February, eight months before the trek, we both stressed that he needed to lose weight and get in shape if he was serious about joining us on a Himalayan trek.
When he called me in May and said he'd decided to join the group, he asked me to promise him that Dax and I would look out for him and “not leave him up in the mountains.” I assured him he would not be left behind, but it would not be Dax or me that would be responsible for his safety, it would be our sirdar and crew. And I told him the best insurance of doing well on the trek was to get in the best shape he could by working on his cardioaerobic conditioning and leg strength. “You need to have the heart and lungs and leg strength to get up mountain trails higher than you have ever been in your life.” It was the same message I gave each member of the group. But the importance of the advice had not penetrated Bill's consciousness. His lack of concern for the demands of the trek seemed to reflect his lack of respect for the local culture.
In the morning, we assembled again with our duffels in the KGH lobby, ready for the drive to the airport. Sanga wasn't there yet, so we focused our attention on the TV in the lobby. A news station was reporting that the first morning flight to Lukla had crashed. When Sanga arrived, he gathered us around him and told us that all the morning flights into the mountains were canceled due to the plane crash. We were to meet again in the lobby after lunch to find out whether we could get a flight out that day.
As we waited, we monitored the news about the crash in Lukla. It was not good.
Flying into Lukla at 7,000 feet is an adventure in itself. As the prop plane approaches the runway, you see a sheer mountain face below it and a sheer mountain face at the runway's end. If the pilot comes in too low, the plane will crash into the mountain below and, if too high, it will crash into the rock face at the end of the landing strip. When a plane flies out of Lukla, the plane actually drops off the end of the airstrip, because of the sheer mountain face at the end of the short runway, and then the plane gains altitude. Before the airstrip was resurfaced and widened in 2006, there was a fence between the airstrip and a farmer's field made of broken props, wings, and tails from downed planes. I morbidly enjoy the reaction of first-timers when I point out the fence after landing in Lukla. I don't enjoy, however, recalling a terrible night in Lukla in 1998, awaiting news about our lodge manager's son, who was in a helicopter that crashed on the flight up to Lukla. Early in the morning, the news arrived that there were no survivors.
On the other hand, while the experience of flying in and out of Lukla is harrowing and exciting, if you look out the windows of the plane on a clear day after it gains altitude, you can see the highest mountains in the world in their great and majestic beauty.
By the time Sanga returned after lunch, the news reports were that the pilot had come in too low and crashed into the mountain face below the airstrip. No survivors were expected. There would be no more flights that day, and, because so many flights had been canceled in two days, Sanga feared we would be unable to get a flight for another two days. The group was sobered by the crash and there was actually relief among some members of the group when Sanga informed us we would be unable to meet our expedition deadlines if we awaited another flight.
Sanga told us he had put together two alternative itineraries and asked us to choose between them: an Annapurna trek or taking a bus as close as we could get to Basa and then hiking to Basa. The Annapurna trek would be a teahouse trek, meaning we would stay in lodges, because our tents, kitchen, cook, and porters were in Phaplu waiting to meet us. If we took a bus to Jiri and then began hiking to Basa, we would spend the first two nights in lodges, but would then meet our crew on the trail and tent camp to Basa and then back to Phaplu for our flight out.
The trek to Basa would not be a leisurely cultural trek, however. Sanga explained that the bus would leave us at least two days this side of Phaplu, where our flight had been scheduled to drop us. The trek had been planned as an introductory village trek. It would now become an extreme trek in terms of the distance we would have to hike each day. Sanga estimated that our average trekking day would increase from the planned four to six hours to six to ten hours and we would have no rest days. Alternatively, the Annapurna trek would be a more leisurely trek with similar hiking distances to what we had planned.
I very much wanted to go to Basa. The primary goal of the trek for me was to visit the village, inspect the school, and bring back a report to the prospective donors to the school project. Of course, I hoped our group would have a great experience and I thought that visiting a village as untouched by the West as Basa would be the climax of the experience for our group. So I told the group how I felt, but we would vote and the majority would decide. I wanted to be fair and truly let the group decide the issue. I explained to them that I had not been to Annapurna, but after the Khumbu Base Camp Trail, it was considered the most beautiful hike in Nepal.
There was little discussion. We had already lost two days and were all anxious to get on the trail. The vote was unanimous to go to Basa.
Though I had shared with the group my strong desire to see Basa and the school, I hadn't shared with them a murmuring disquiet in the back of my mind about how we might be the harbingers of a transformation of Basa by being the first actual tourists to visit Basa. The French-Canadian and French groups who had been to Basa before us had not come as tourists. They were secular missionaries there to work on the school building. True, I was raising money for the school, but our group was on a tourist trek, not a philanthropy mission. How would we affect Basa by being its first tourist visitors? By opening Basa to tourism, were Niru and I really doing the right thing for the village?