3
We Are the Pilgrims, Master
The doorbell sounded and as usual I was greeted with the unbridled enthusiasm of a man on a mission. My friend Ash Bhardwaj had just taken a tube from East London where he spent his time hanging out in trendy bars and watching immersive theatre, in between running a production company and writing articles about pop-up coffee shops. He was wearing his distinctive black skinny jeans, a garish shirt with the top button done up and pointy brogues. His hair was very fashionable and he was sporting a solid black beard that gave him the appearance of a rather dashing hipster. I’d happened to mention on the phone a few days before that I was thinking about getting a dog. He insisted on seeing me right away.
‘You can’t do it, Lev, you simply can’t,’ said Ash. ‘Suburbia just isn’t for you. You need to do another walk. At least one more. ’
‘Absolutely not,’ I reassured the man with whom I had travelled on and off for five years. He knew me like a brother and was one of the most positive, thoughtful and considerate gentlemen I’d had the pleasure of getting to know. He was also far too enthusiastic about me going away again and I wondered what he was up to.
‘You need another challenge. You’ve been in one place for six whole months now, don’t you have itchy feet? You’ll be bored out of your mind if you keep on hanging around here.’
‘I’m quite content, thank you very much,’ I said. ‘I’m beginning to enjoy London. It’ll be spring soon and then we’ll all cheer up. The last thing I need is another walk; my feet have almost recovered and my toenails are only black at the tips now. I’m going house hunting this week, a lovely little two-bed has just come on the market. It needs a bit of work, I mean, a whole new replaster and plumbing, and probably a kitchen, but it can all be done in a month or two. It even has outside space.’
‘Outside space? Wood, have you heard yourself? You mean a bloody garden? You sound like you’ve been living in Fulham too long. I’m worried about you. You wouldn’t know what to do with a spanner if it hit you in the face. You’re not a plumber. And if you want outside space then I hear the North Pole has some. Forget about the house, go on another journey into the wilds, and then you can settle down in another year or two. We’re still young.’
‘I’ve made up my mind, Ash. If you want an adventure, then go on one. I’m done. Let’s go to New York and get drunk, that’ll be an adventure.’
Ash shook his head. ‘Forget it, let’s just get drunk here.’ But I suspected he hadn’t forgotten anything.
‘Fulham?’ I said, more to wind him up than anything.
‘There’s no way I’m drinking there–it’s a fiver a pint and full of arseholes who work in property. Let’s go to Hackney.’ For the sake of our friendship we had to negotiate the same deal every time. We’d either take it in turns and visit each other on our own turf, or meet in the middle.
‘I’m not going to East London,’ I said. ‘It’s still full of arseholes and they don’t even do pints there. I’m not drinking craft ale from a bottle.’
‘Well then, we’ll have to do central.’ We both hated central, as it was always too busy and also full of arseholes. And it was still a fiver a pint.
For March the weather was unusually mild and it was decided that we would take a walk from Charing Cross station, running the gauntlet down Villiers Street, avoiding the charity pitches and overenthusiastic buskers, to Gordon’s Wine Bar.
Gordon’s is a London institution. Nestled between Victoria Embankment and the Strand, it’s a stone’s throw from Trafalgar Square and right opposite the offices of PricewaterhouseCoopers, which explains the abundance of accountants on dates with their secretaries. Mind you, who could blame them? With its underground bar in the ancient wine cellar and rough brick walls illuminated only by candlelight, it has a certain old-world charm. The wobbly wooden stools, melted wax and vaults covered in yellow newspapers from days gone by, whip you straight back to Victorian London. The chairs are so close together you can’t help but feel an intimacy towards whoever you’re with–possibly because you’re reluctant to touch the dripping mould that grows from the walls. Getting a table in the dungeon is virtually impossible unless you’re first in, and since there’s no beer, you’re guaranteed to have polished off a couple of bottles of burgundy before the sun has even set; the ideal venue for a date.
Ash and I thought we’d leave the lovers inside to it and instead claimed a corner of a table in the garden, where we plonked ourselves with a cheese board and vintage port.
‘You’ll get gout if you stay any longer.’ He chuckled as he gulped down a full glass of tawny. ‘When was the last time you went for a run?’
For some reason I looked at my watch. ‘December,’ I said ruefully, realising that in the havoc of London life, amid the whirlwind of parties and talks and charity functions, I hadn’t so much as broken a sweat in over two months.
‘You should be ashamed of yourself,’ said Ash, tutting.
He had me there. I needed a way out. An excuse. Something to pacify him. ‘All right, all right. I won’t get a dog. I’ll take up waterskiing instead. Happy now?’
‘No, not until you agree to another journey. Remember the Nile? Wasn’t it incredible? The simplicity, the lack of choice, of having to make do, that’s what happiness is all about. Look around us. People spend their lives worrying about little insignificant decisions. Pointless choices that really don’t matter, that’s what makes people unhappy. You need to get away again and have a bit more of the simple life. And I want to come along for a bit.’
I’d had enough of his persistence but I knew he wouldn’t give up.
‘Fine,’ I conceded. ‘Let’s go for an adventure. I’m not walking though. Let’s drive somewhere,’ I said, more to keep him quiet than anything.
‘That’s more like it. I’ve been thinking… how about the Silk Road?’ said Ash excitedly. There it was. I knew he was up to something.
I thought about it for a minute. Ash knew all too well that I’d wanted to revisit Central Asia since I hitched to India in ’04.
‘Think about it. The Silk Road would be fantastic, I’ve always wanted to see Persia.’ He beamed.
‘Iran,’ I corrected him.
‘Where’s your sense of romance? It’ll always be Persia. The minarets, the deserts, the great palaces at Bukhara and Samarkand, the bazaars in Herat and the high mountain passes in Hunza. Get your phone out, let’s plan a route.’
‘Tomorrow perhaps. More port?’
‘There’s no time like the present. Go on. We can draft a proposal. How about something like “the Silk Road By Any Means”? You can drive, or go on horseback, motorbike or whatever you want. I’ll meet you for bits along the way. You could start in Turkey and go all the way to China. You could do it in six weeks, eight max, and then you can retire and live in suburbia.’
I had to admit he’d piqued my interest. I felt a familiar shiver of simultaneous excitement and dread rattle down my spine. I knew, right then, that the cogs of destiny were about to make another turn and there was nothing that I could do but play my part.
I took out my phone and looked at Google maps. The route looked simple enough. I could retrace part of the route I took when I was twenty-two, from Istanbul through the Caucasus and Iran and head north through the ’Stans and cross the Taklamakan desert to get to Western China, and if I drove fast enough I could even make it all the way to Beijing. Easy. I drafted a note to my agent Jo and got back to the more important business of sinking the port and listening to the clamour of London.
It was dusk now, but the crowds showed no sign of abating. If anything, the bar was getting busier and with it a shifting feeling of proximity ensued. People were crowding closer, strangers talking to each other as disparate groups of drinkers converged because table space commanded a premium. Pile upon pile of crumbs of cheese and flakes of Parma ham were stacked on plates that awaited collection by frantic waiters who seemed resigned to the continual destruction of wine glasses at the hands of increasingly intoxicated patrons.
Perhaps it was fate, or just serendipity, but as I went inside to order another bottle, I happened to look upon a faded plaque that clung–against all odds–to a wall adjacent to the bar. It boasted the fact that once upon a time, when this grimy cellar was used for its original purpose of storing wine, Gordon’s used to be the London residence of that most acclaimed of Victorian writers, Rudyard Kipling. The moustachioed author and imperial correspondent happened to have lived upstairs from 1889, when he was twenty-four, until 1891 while writing his desperately sad and semi-autobiographical novel The Light That Failed, the tale of a stricken young writer and adventurer, who suffered blindness and the subsequent loss of his fickle lover.
It was Kipling’s short stories that had first inspired my teenage fascination with Britain’s colonial past, especially her involvement in the Indian subcontinent and the high mountain passes that led to the interior of Asia. The Man Who Would be King and the classic novel Kim sent my young mind spinning, making me half wish I had been born a hundred years earlier. I devoured all I could read about long-forgotten skirmishes on the roof of the world. I encountered the likes of Younghusband, Curzon and a whole host of other bold, hirsute romantics who went off in search of glory and adventure under the banner of a tattered regimental colour, or the patronage of an aristocratic President of the Royal Geographical Society. The period known as the Great Game soon became an all-encompassing passion. Over the years I’d tried to put aside these fanciful studies in favour of more useful and contemporary issues. At university I read modern history and got my teeth firmly sunk into political theory and the basics of philosophy. But I found myself returning to those obscure texts dealing with the intrigues of an imperial past that has so often been disregarded and misunderstood. It seemed to me that in those histories perhaps a lesson or two might be learnt about our world today after all. For what happened in the aftermath of that fateful day in September 2001 and the events unfolding in Afghanistan in the early years of the new millennium, were a direct consequence, and in many ways, continuation, of a battle between civilised and uncivilised, West and East, invader and invaded, secular and fanatic that has repeated itself time and again, in the deserts and mountains of High Asia.
I remembered the chilling words of warning Kipling issued to the British soldier fighting on the frontier a hundred and thirty years earlier. They were just as relevant today to the tommies I’d fought with in the same dusty defiles that harboured Ghazis and Pathans in 1880.
When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.
But where there is darkness, I’d also found light. Years of travelling out of uniform in war zones had taught me a few lessons. So long as you’re not armed and come in peace, you’re willing to adopt local customs with sensitivity to culture and tradition and try not to judge too much–however tempting–you’ll generally be fine. People in the most dangerous parts of the world had gone out of their way to make me feel at home, sometimes regardless of whether I’d wanted to or not. With a smattering of language, a spot of homework, a bit of fancy dress (and knowing when it’s wise to grow a beard or not), I’d somehow managed to blend in, survive, and what’s more, make some good friends along the way. From the minefields and mountains of Kurdistan, to the swamps of Sudan and the forests of Rwanda, from the frontlines of Burma to the deserts of Syria I’d met a fascinating bunch of likeminded souls. I’d found that by putting myself through the same hardships as those that live in a place I’d been invited to see its secrets, and it’s the secrets, I think, that make travelling worthwhile.
As I tried to shove through the throngs of tourists and accountants, great wafts of Stilton fumes floating over the haze of humanity, I reached an impasse in the form of an enormous Frenchman who was blocking half the bar and something occurred to me. I quite liked walking. Despite my outward complaints, I supposed that I must enjoy it at least a little since I spent quite a lot of time doing it, and it was through walking that I’d had the opportunity to meet so many people that had given me faith in the world. It was a minor epiphany but an important one and I rushed outside with an acceptable vintage to tell Ash the news.
‘I’ll do another walk. But this is the last one,’ I said, gravely.
‘Wonderful, but you do realise the Silk route at its shortest is at least five thousand miles. You don’t want to be walking all that, do you?’ he said.
I racked my brain as I imagined the winding path, and he was right. There was a lot of yellow on the map–vast empty stretches of desert and barren plateaus. The Silk route stretched from the edges of Europe all the way to China, and passed through a heck of a lot of ’Stans. Sure, it would be possible to walk it all but it would take a couple of years, and I wasn’t getting any younger. No, it was too far. I needed a route that was more contained but just as interesting.
If I were to walk at all, it would need to be an expedition as iconic and sublime as the Nile, if not more so. I carried on looking at the map glowing from the screen of my phone with a sense of squinting bewilderment. As I looked harder, a faint outline seemed to stand out, an outline that seemed to smile from the screen of the phone in an upward arc of white, purple and green, a creased and crumpled bevel of such magnitude and dominance, as bewitching as it was threatening. It was of course, the Himalayas.
It was an area I knew well and it seemed absurd that it hadn’t occurred to me before now. I wondered for an instant if anyone had succeeded in walking the entire length of the mighty range, from one end to the other.
Perhaps it was the port addling my brain, or just the sense of excitement that accompanies the dawn of a new idea. This adventure had suddenly manifested itself as a tangible, realistic goal and I felt alive again, ready for a new challenge. It was as if Ash had known all along that this is what I had wanted and been lacking in my recent suburban interlude.
‘If I have to walk then it has to be the Himalayas,’ I said, and without a word Ash simply smiled and raised a glass.
The Himalayas have attracted a steady stream of mountaineers, adventurers, conquerors and empire builders for thousands of years. Something about these majestic peaks has been irresistible to armies, traders and vagabonds whose attempts to conquer and subdue them have become synonymous with a kind of sadistic futility. Humans have lived and travelled in the Himalayan foothills since time immemorial, fatalistically pitting themselves against some of the harshest conditions in the world and often failing. But in spite of the knowledge that men have always looked up to mountains and not the other way round, they come back time and again to see for themselves the power and majesty that these sublime thrones seem to radiate.
It was the same forces that drove me to want to see the Himalayas for myself at the age of nineteen, and once hooked, I knew that I would have to return.
After Binod bade me goodbye at Pokhara bus station that fateful summer, I made a promise to return one day to Nepal and repay his kindness and hospitality. He had rescued me from the deadly after-effects of the royal massacre and the rioting in Pokhara and looked after me in the foothills until a normality of sorts had returned and I was able to reclaim my passport and escape to India. He’d done all this in exchange for no money, because I had none left, and by way of gratitude I wanted to show him that I was a man of my word. I told him that in a few years I would come back on an expedition where he would be my chief guide and I could pay him properly. He told me that his future was in the hands of God and that if I chose to come back and pay him, great, if not, no matter. It made me all the more determined to keep my promise.
It was to be another eight years before I saw Binod again. In 2009 I had reached the rank of Captain in the British Parachute Regiment after four years of service around the world, including a short stint in Afghanistan. I had been posted to the darkest depths of Yorkshire, to the Infantry Training Centre in Catterick where it was my duty to instruct new recruits in, among other less important tasks, the art of shaving and how to avoid venereal diseases. After the excitement and adventure of combat duty in the deserts and mountains of Southern Afghanistan, it was a huge disappointment to find myself giving PowerPoint lectures on personal hygiene to seventeen-year-olds, even though I’d been assured it was a great addition to a junior officer’s CV. The previous three years had been a rollercoaster ride of action-packed exercises in the forests of East Africa and jungles of Belize as I learnt the ropes at commanding soldiers. I’d thoroughly enjoyed escaping the confines of Sandhurst and getting my teeth sunk into proper soldiering, and with the campaign in Afghanistan in full swing by that time I knew that sooner or later I would see action, and I wasn’t disappointed. Four months of patrolling the battlefields of Kandahar province may have been a drop in the ocean in the grand scheme of things, and my wartime exploits pale into insignificance compared to many of my colleagues’ who deployed on two or three full tours, but it gave me a taste for action and I relished the experience of living life on the edge. The danger, the unknown and total immersion of being alert 24/7, constantly on the lookout for the enemy and roadside bombs might sound like hell, but ask any infantry soldier and they’ll tell you it was the best time of their life.
But now it had all changed. I was suddenly promoted from the blissful joys of field soldiering to the litigious mire of welfare and teaching, which I soon realised were not for me at all. As a result I found myself looking for any opportunity to escape, and failing that, amuse myself with a new challenge that would see me through to the completion of my contract.
I wasn’t the only despondent soldier in Catterick. While it is a convenient posting if you happen to hail from the north-east, or if you’re married and need a break from the rigours of tours of duty, for a keen young soldier eager to gain experience in the field, it was like a prison sentence. Most of the other Platoon Commanders felt the same, as did many of the junior corporals and sergeants instructing the soldiers.
The one benefit of working at the Infantry Training Centre (ITC) was that you were working on a fixed rotation according to teaching terms. In that respect it was similar to being a teacher and for the first time in my army career, I was in the very strange position of knowing exactly what my diary was going to be like for six months at a time. There was planned leave and therefore the opportunity to book holidays in advance, a precious luxury I’d almost forgotten existed.
One such bout of downtime came in October 2009 at a time when, due to some administrative balls-up, there hadn’t been enough soldiers to fill a platoon and as a result I and a number of NCOs found ourselves with the forthcoming prospect of almost an entire month with nothing to do. Ordinarily, the army would conjure up some inconceivably pointless task with which to fill the time. Luckily my Commanding Officer, who appeared to be just as upset as the rest of us, was unusually forward thinking enough to be receptive to the ideas of junior Captains such as myself.
I knew that in order to avoid being sent on a course designed to inflict upon the student a greater knowledge of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs I had to think fast and come up with a plan. It suddenly occurred to me that this was an ideal opportunity to do my bit for the morale of my team and have a little adventure in the process. In Catterick, the Infantry was sharply bisected into two camps, as the main garrison was divided by a road and high fences. On the north side of the roundabout was the Line Infantry headquarters where soldiers destined for the regional regiments were quartered. This included the likes of the Rifles, the Yorkshires, the Scots and the Welsh, or, as we Paras liked to call them, hats, in honour of the multitude of silly headgear worn by the provincial regiments. To the south of the roundabout only three types of soldier were based. The Foot Guards, the Gurkhas and the hopefuls of the Parachute Regiment. While the Guards and the Gurkhas, according to strict Para sensibilities, were also technically hats, at least both of them had some sort of a selection process, even if for one of them it was merely the ability to stand up straight for long periods of time and walk in a straight line. To the Commanding Officer of the Second Battalion ITC these were his chosen few.
‘Sir, I’d like to take eight soldiers and climb Mera Peak.’I stood to attention before the wild-eyed Colonel. This, as I saw it, was the perfect opportunity to return to Nepal and fulfil the promise I’d made all those years ago to Binod.
I knew that not only did the Colonel have Gurkhas under his command but also that he’d travelled to Nepal himself and was very fond of the country. Even armed with this insight, I couldn’t have been more surprised at his enthusiasm.
‘Good. There’s money in the pot so the blokes shouldn’t have to fork out themselves. Just don’t kill anyone.’
Coming from a grizzled Para that was as positive as it gets.
For the first time in months I was excited to be in the army. They were going to let me lead an expedition and repay my debts to Binod at the same time. I asked for volunteers and they were forthcoming, as soon as I mentioned that it was free and they could escape Catterick for a few weeks. Two of the sergeants had climbed before but the others were all novices and I looked forward to showing them the mountains for the first time. Training consisted of an hour on the gym climbing wall and a weekend in the Lake District where a professional mountaineer instructed us in the art of not impaling oneself with a crampon or ice axe.
The expedition was a success–well, almost. Only two of the team summited the mountain, which stands at 6,500 metres making it one of the tallest trekking peaks in the world. Those who made the top were Geordie Taylor and Phil Kew, the two Senior NCOs who actually had mountaineering experience. The rest of us got to within a couple of hundred metres of the summit, before being forced to turn back to base camp due to extreme weather and the onset of frostbite. After that I swore I’d never set foot on a mountain again. While there was some disappointment for some of the team having not reached the top after a two-week trek I had no sense of let-down. For me, it had been all about having Binod along for the journey and to have fulfilled my promise. He was of course over the moon to be invited to be the chief guide and translator. The money he earned in that fortnight would keep him going for several months to come and, as a bonus, in my team he earned himself several new potential clients. It also reaffirmed a long friendship between him and me which I was sure would continue for the rest of our lives.
In the years that followed, Binod and I kept in touch and I helped him where I could, sending him small gifts of money and essentials for his family and children. During my first visit to Nepal in 2001, Binod had just one son, a few months old, but now he had a daughter too, and another baby boy. A dispute over land rights to his shack in Sarangkot and the fact that he belonged to a low caste, meant that he was always short of money. I became aware that the cost of a few nights out in Gordon’s for me, amounted to a lifeline for him and the future of his family. Naturally, I took him under my wing, as he had done for me all those years ago.
I left the regular army to try my hand at new things and for a few years found myself pottering. I tried everything from wedding photography to charity work, until I finally settled on the rather insecure life of a full-time travel writer. And then I decided to walk the length of the Nile, after which I swore I’d never walk anywhere again.
Time, it seems, is a great healer. Or at least it helps fade the bad memories. After I’d sobered up from Gordon’s and the idea of walking the length of the Himalayas solidified, I found myself once again trawling through the archives of the Royal Geographical Society for maps and routes and browsing the diaries of explorers past and present. I studied the mountains intensely, looking for a way through and soon realised that while I could potentially complete this expedition in a much shorter timeframe than the Nile, walking the Himalayas was going to be the biggest physical and bureaucratic challenge of my life.
For a start there is a dispute over what constitutes the beginning and end of the Himalayas. Strictly speaking the westernmost anchor of the range is the mountain Nanga Parbat in Pakistan, where the northernmost bend in the Indus river heralds the gateway to the snowcapped peaks. But one only has to look at a map or a satellite image to see that the white swirls and geographical contortions begin much further west, where the Karakorum, Pamir and Hindu Kush all collide, in a massive uplift that forms the borders of Afghanistan, China and Tajikistan. Likewise to the east, the spinal column of Asia appears from above to change during its progress from a narrow ridge into a sprawling fan of gigantic proportions as it departs Bhutan and spills across eastern Tibet, India and Burma. It seemed an almost impossible proposition. How could one hope to cover it all and do it justice?
The scale of the undertaking suddenly hit me and I realised that whatever I was hoping to achieve would need to be focused and limited in its goals. I decided that the aims of this expedition wouldn’t be to climb mountains, or to try to break any records, or even to attempt to cover as much ground as possible, but instead use this opportunity to explore, on foot, the valleys and foothills that were inhabited by the various communities and tribes that called the Himalayas their home. For me it was about the people I encountered that attracted me to travel, and travelling on foot is the only way to explore the backcountry and villages that are hidden from the main trails and roads. It is also the way people have travelled in these regions for millennia and there seems to be a common bond between pedestrians everywhere. The physical hardships, the risks, the utter vulnerability mean that on the whole you will be looked upon as a fellow human being, rather than a foreigner, or worse, a tourist. So with that in mind I planned to travel more or less the extent of the mountains from the westernmost fringes in Afghanistan, a country I knew well, all the way through its main arteries via the countries that were currently so presumptuous to claim ownership–Pakistan, India, Nepal–and finish up in either Tibet or Bhutan, depending on which of the two infamous regions happened to be feeling sporting enough to let me in.
It sounded simple in theory–all the best ideas do–but even with as vague an aim as that, the journey was likely to be riddled with enormous and varied challenges. On top of my first visit in 2001 and my first forays into mountaineering with Mera Peak in 2009, I’d also travelled briefly into the Indian Himalaya in 2004 as part of an overland journey from Europe and had completed a five-month hitchhike ending in the foothills of Himachal Pradesh. Here I almost froze to death after a nightmarish few hours in a cave, convinced that if the cold didn’t finish me off, the wolves and bears would. The route that I proposed would pass through the same region, and I was acutely aware that what lay ahead wouldn’t always be pleasant.
Insurgency in Afghanistan, landslides in Kashmir, Maoists in Nepal, grizzly predators throughout and that’s without the heavy rains of the monsoon; rabid dogs; rabid monkeys; rabid bureaucrats and a whole host of equally terrible ways to meet your end: leeches, scorpions, hypothermia, snakes, spiders, leprosy, leishmaniasis, malaria, typhoid, altitude sickness, avalanches, dysentery, bad roads, worse brakes and terrible drivers.
The travel advisory on the Foreign & Commonwealth Office’s website wasn’t exactly reassuring either: ‘The FCO advises against all travel to Afghanistan’; ‘The FCO advises against all travel on the Karakorum Highway between Islamabad and Gilgit’; ‘There is a high threat of terrorism, kidnap and sectarian violence throughout Pakistan’; ‘The FCO advises against all travel to Jammu and Kashmir’… These were all places I wanted to go to. As for Tibet, the British government assured me that the border could be closed without notice and that under no circumstances would the Chinese allow me to go off wandering without an official minder. In Bhutan I was faced with an almost empty page. Nobody knew anything about Bhutan.
To make matters worse, on 25 April 2015 the unthinkable happened. A 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck the very heart of Nepal, killing and injuring thirty thousand people and rendering hundreds of thousands homeless and destitute. In a country that was already terribly impoverished, the disaster was apocalyptic.
As a result, the general consensus among everyone I spoke to was that the walk was unachievable and that I would almost certainly be killed. And it did occur to me that on this occasion the naysayers might just be right.
I thought back to the Nile–the endless days on the road, being swarmed by mosquitoes, eaten alive by tsetse, sleeping among the roadside filth and being chased by dogs, rats and crocodiles. I remembered how I said I’d never do it again; once was most definitely enough. It all came flooding back: the loneliness, the pain of walking every day, of blisters upon blisters, the isolation and the bitter frustrations of dealing with officious little policemen and the fear that one night you’d wake up to the grinning face of a machete-toting madman above your bed. Suddenly the idea of staying in Fulham seemed much more sensible.