14
Return to Pokhara
As the realisation that I was still alive dawned on me, the pain got worse. My arm was in indescribable agony and I could barely move. The smallest motion caused me to scream out loud. Binod was dazed and muttering nonsense to himself. There was no sign of the driver or the policeman. Neither of them was in the car. From what I could make out, the vehicle was now nothing more than a twisted hulk of metal. All the windows had been smashed. I still couldn’t figure out how I was alive, not to mention how we’d found ourselves outside of the car sitting together. I realised that the head I’d been cradling had been Binod’s. He must have been forced over me in the tumble and then we must have been thrown through the windscreen together on the final collision. Either that or a guardian angel had plucked us from the wreckage and put us to one side.
It felt like an eternity, sitting there in anguish. We were at the bottom of a ravine, unable to move. I could tell my arm was broken and goodness knows what else. Binod couldn’t move his back or his neck, and was in pain too. Pete was in the best shape. He climbed back into the car and found a torch and was busy flashing it back up towards the road. I couldn’t tell how far we’d fallen. It must have been as much as a hundred feet, maybe more.
It began to rain and Binod was sobbing now. And then suddenly there was hope.
‘Lights!’ shouted Pete.
I was beginning to hallucinate. I’d started to believe that actually I wasn’t alive after all, and that this was really damnation. The distant torchlights only made it worse and I recall telling Pete not to bother them. They would never find us. We were destined to stay put in that jungle gulley. Pete luckily took no notice of my rambling and screamed like hell in the direction of the lights. They gradually got louder and closer but my thoughts alternated between resignation and frustration at their seeming lack of urgency. It didn’t occur to me that we were at the bottom of a cliff in the middle of the forest and whoever our saviours were, they were having a really shit time of it too, trying to get to us.
It was only when they finally found us half an hour later that I truly believed we’d been saved. There were dozens of them. Farmers in rags, men and women soaked through. It looked like the whole village had come out. God only knows how they’d found us, and why they’d come. Perhaps they’d heard the noise of the crash, or my screams, or Pete’s shouts for help. It didn’t matter; we’d been saved. The army came after that. My final hazy memories are of some police loading me onto a stretcher and picking me up, and then a hellish twenty-minute scramble through the jungle, being passed around and jolted and almost dropped three times. Every bump was agony but I couldn’t feel anything other than gratitude. I remembered my days as a soldier when we’d trained to carry the weight of an injured man five miles off the battlefield. These poor bastards were doing it for real, crossing waist-deep rivers and pushing through dense forest. I knew how hard it was for them so I tried to keep my whimpering to a minimum.
We eventually reached a road and I remember being unceremoniously dumped down. There was the sound of a car engine nearby. Torchlights swirled around like dancing fairies; a bearded face leant down and grinned. Then there was a sharp pain in my arm. I was being injected. I don’t know what with. I didn’t care–the pain went away after that. Pete helped a soldier pick up the stretcher to load me into the back of the car and off we went. Speeding even faster around the mountain lanes. I closed my eyes and tried not to think about it.
I can barely recall the rest of the night. Flashes of movement come back to me now. A nurse in white, a doctor in red, my brother’s smile, Binod with a black eye and his face covered in blood; tubes, needles and pipes; a chicken clucking; the groans of the injured and a dirty bed in a hospital where the lights stayed on all night.
The next day I was more conscious. I don’t think I’d actually slept properly at all and I couldn’t stay still for more than a few seconds without feeling a shooting pain in my arm. It was bloated and covered in blood. I was on a drip and used needles littered the floor.
I tried to sit up.
‘Get back down,’ said a familiar voice. It was Pete. ‘You’re okay. We’re all okay.’
‘Where’s Binod?’ I asked.
‘He’s here. He’s asleep, but fine.’
‘What about the driver and the cop?’
‘I don’t know. They were carried out too. They’d been thrown out somewhere on the hill. The last I heard they were alive. It’s serious though, they’ve been taken to a proper hospital in Nepalganj.’
‘Where are we?’ I asked.
‘We’re in Rukum. This is the village clinic.’
For someone who hadn’t travelled outside of Europe in five years, and had never been in a survival situation, Pete had acted heroically. He’d co-ordinated the rescue while I was high on painkillers. He’d tried to get us extracted to a town where I could be treated, but my arm was too severely broken to be moved by car again.
‘I’m trying to arrange a helicopter,’ Pete said. ‘But the weather is too bad.’
I looked out through the window, where a vast spider’s web stretched under the awnings of the roof. The black clouds had gathered again, obscuring the hilltops.
‘Maybe tomorrow,’ he reassured me.
Every time the painkillers wore off a nurse would come round and inject me again with the unknown drug. I wished she’d come round more often. It was only when I kept perfectly still that I could tolerate the agony. The doctor came and apologised that he had no facilities to treat my arm. It would need surgery as soon as possible, and my gashes required stitching. We all needed X-rays and maybe spinal scans. We had to get out.
It was two full days before a break in the weather meant that we could finally escape. I was indebted to the doctors and nurses and the villagers who had come to my rescue. It was them who’d saved our lives. They’d gone above and beyond too; local policemen had searched the area and gone back to the crash site and recovered all our bags and personal belongings including my camera and my diary. They must have been flung out of a window during the free-fall, and, despite having spent two nights in the monsoon rain, somehow still survived. In a bizarre twist of fate, as I was going through my memory cards to check the data was all okay, I found a blank file, forty minutes long. I played it. It was all black but there was audio, somehow, and it must have been on the first roll–my camera, which was in the bottom of my bag, had turned itself on and recorded the sounds of the crash. Noises only–but it was all there: the screams, the shouts and the cries. I couldn’t listen to all of it and to this day I don’t think I will ever be able to forget the horrors of that episode.
The helicopter came and Binod, Peter and I flew all the way to Kathmandu. My brother had never been in a helicopter and had his eyes closed for the entire flight–particularly as we banked sharply to avoid the streaming clouds and monsoon rain that appeared as shape-shifting black ghouls, creeping over the mountains.
But we landed safe and sound and were all taken to a hospital in the city where I spent a further couple of days until I was finally ordered to go back to England. There was nothing to be done here. X-rays showed a clean fracture of the upper humerus and severe lacerations. The jagged bone had torn my bicep almost in two. It needed to be operated on soon, and it was best done by an orthopaedic surgeon in London. In my dream world I had imagined a couple of days’ rest and then cracking on with my arm in a cast, but it was not to be.
I said goodbye to Binod after arranging for him to fly back to his family in Pokhara. Pete decided to stay in Kathmandu for a few more days since his holiday had come to a rather abrupt and dreadful end and he wanted to get over the accident in his own way. So I flew back to London alone. I was naturally shaken up, but at the same time I don’t think I’d ever felt so happy. I was in a state of euphoria for days and days, just glad to be alive.
The time went quickly. I kept a low profile and spent my time writing and going on short walks, trying my best to keep fit and active. The doctor filled my arm with metal plates and screws and stitched me up well, and before I knew it I was doing bicep curls and arm stretches with a very patient physiotherapist who tolerated my profanities with a kind smile and gentle words of encouragement. I told her I wanted to be fixed up and able to carry a rucksack within five weeks. She said she’d do her best. In the meantime I did my utmost to avoid feeling sorry for myself, and despite the agony of a limb in repair and not being able to sleep for more than half an hour at a time I reminded myself just how lucky I was.
The physio signed me off after just four weeks, at the point where I had full spectral movement and could just about pick up a bag. And so on the fifth of October–fifty days since I’d gone off the edge of the cliff in Rukum, I set off once again from Heathrow on a flight bound for Nepal.
Binod was waiting for me outside the hotel already dressed in his trekking gear with his rucksack on his back. He was ready to go.
‘Welcome back, brother,’ he said with a smile on his face, hugging me. It felt like no time at all since I’d waved goodbye to him in Kathmandu amid the pain and morphine-induced haziness of that terrible episode.
‘How’s your arm?’ he asked me.
I rolled up my sleeve to show him my scar, which stretched from the elbow to my shoulder. Apart from a rogue stitch that refused to dissolve, it had almost healed.
‘How’s your back?’ I asked.
‘Fine,’ he said with a slight pause. ‘Just a few bumps here and there.’ He told me that he’d been resting in his house in Sarangkot with his family.
‘Are you sure you’re okay to carry on walking? What did your wife say?’
‘Of course I am,’ Binod replied. ‘Chandra understands it’s my job and there are risks but what to do? When it is our time it is our time, only God can decide that.’
‘And how’s the situation here now? Has the strike finished?’ I asked him.
‘Oh no, brother. It is much worse now. The Indians have closed the border and no fuel is coming into the country. The economy is very bad and no one is allowed to buy petrol–it is reserved for the government and emergency services only.’
It turned out that in the intervening weeks since I’d left Nepal the situation there had gone from bad to worse. The signing of the new constitution had caused riots and protests across the Terai, mainly as a result of the ethnic Indian Madhesi feeling politically disenfranchised. It was a terrible setback for the poor Nepalese who’d been through hell already this year. It seemed that their misfortune was never-ending. From the expedition’s perspective, it wasn’t helpful either.
‘How are we going to get back to Rukum and carry on with the walk then if we can’t drive?’ I asked Binod.
‘There’s only one option. We need to fly.’
My heart sank. If there was one thing that terrified me even more than driving around ghastly mountain roads it was the prospect of a gravity-defying flight.
It was a petrifying journey in the tiny Twin Otter plane back to Rukum. The poky little aircraft bounced and clanked through the skies in a way that convinced me yet again that I would almost certainly die. It weaved and jolted through the storm clouds and every bit of turbulence made me grab my seat till my fingers hurt. To make matters worse, just the thought of where we were heading filled me with horror. The plane skidded to a halt on an obscenely short runway that seemed to balance on a knife-edge ridge in the middle of the green mountains, and here we were again. It was like returning to the scene of a crime.
A huge part of me wanted to skip this bit altogether and just recommence the journey in Pokhara, a hundred miles to the east. But a piece of me knew that if I didn’t go back, I might just regret it for the rest of my days. Plus I wanted to see if I could find the people that had saved my life and thank them in person. I knew it was something I just had to do. Binod was as nervous as I was, walking up through the little village of Rukum towards the clinic. Both of us were visibly shaking at the prospect of reliving the memories of that day.
The first person we met was the doctor who’d treated me. He recognised us immediately and came over to shake our hands.
‘Did you forget something?’ he asked, bewildered at what we were doing back in this remote village.
Binod explained that we’d come to offer our gratitude and make a small donation to the clinic and that brought a smile to his face.
‘Thank you, dear,’ the doctor said. ‘As you can see we don’t have much funding here.’
It had occurred to me that was the case, what with the chickens running amok in the wards and an outside long-drop toilet that could be smelt from the airstrip, not to mention the poor breastfeeding mothers outside in the gardens as there was no space in the two wards. It was the least I could do.
A policeman offered to take us to see the crash site and we agreed it was something we should do. My memories of that night were so vague that until then, I had no idea of where it had happened, or exactly how we’d been rescued, and to go back, I hoped, would give me some closure.
The road wound through the verdant forest, which was bright and fresh, past wooden villages where women plucked rice from the fields in the autumn harvest. We drove through shallow fords and around switchback turns; this was the route we must have taken in the ambulance during the extraction, but I remembered none of it. It had been a bumpy, drug-fuelled haze. This time around I asked the driver to go slow, and stay away from the edge. He nodded solemnly.
‘Don’t worry, brakes are good.’
‘That’s what the last guy said,’ joked Binod.
‘It’s there,’ said the policeman pulling over at the side of the road. It was as I remembered. Getting out of the car I saw the cliff and the ditch we tried to swerve into. There was a pile of logs inside the ditch–what we must have hit in order to bounce and swerve off the edge. The policeman walked over to the precipice and pointed down into the jungle below. I gulped in anticipation and slowly peered over.
I could hardly believe my eyes. It was a vertical sheer drop for the first ten metres. The exact spot where we took off was the only gap in the trees, where a rocky gulley made a natural path through the otherwise dense forest below. Of all the places to go off the road it looked like the worst–no trees to stop our fall. There was no sign of the car.
‘It’s down there,’ said the policeman shaking his head. I strained my eyes but still I couldn’t see it. ‘Very far,’ he said. ‘You very lucky.’
‘Shall we go and see?’ said Binod.
He led the way. I couldn’t refuse despite the obvious dangers of trying to climb down the cliff-face with a still broken arm. Curiosity got the better of me.
We scrambled down the rock face and found a narrow trail that led to the ravine. It was steep and I kept slipping on the gravel underfoot. After fifty metres the gulley was covered in trees and we pushed on through the overgrown green tunnel. There was debris from the car everywhere. Pieces of glass were embedded in the trees; parts of the exhaust poked from grassy mounds; the plastic bumper was snapped in two; I found one insole of my shoe, and then the other. The further down we slid, the more we came to appreciate the enormity of the descent. Eighty, ninety, a hundred metres. Still no car. The gorge continued with its ghastly trail of litter.
I wasn’t counting exactly but it must have been over a hundred and fifty metres down when we finally encountered the ruined hulk of the jeep. Seeing it in broad daylight, I almost broke down, but I restrained myself for the sake of Binod who I could tell felt the same.
‘Thank God,’ he said aloud. ‘We are blessed. No one should have survived this. Our parents did good karma.’
The car was mangled. Without a shard of glass left in any of the windows, it was as I remembered, and the full horrors came flooding back. I remembered the free fall, the first collision, the rolls and the bumps, grabbing Binod’s head and trying to shield it; the imminent sense of death, my wonder of how it would feel; the crash, the silence, the guilt and the agony. It was all real and utterly horrible. The state of the car said it all.
Except now it just looked pathetic. It was just the empty shell of a horrendous memory; the ghost of a lucky escape. It was the kind of place you’d explore as a child and fairy tales would be created. ‘This is where they all died,’ I imagined future generations of Nepali boys to say. ‘Not a one survived.’ And nor should they have, I thought.
Binod knelt down and picked up the orange scarf he had bought in Haridwar on the banks of the Ganges. It was filthy and rigid from a month of sitting in monsoon rain, but he took it as a souvenir of his survival.
The jungle was eerily quiet except for the shrill of a lone cicada that echoed through the canopy. Binod and I sat for a while, just looking at the wreckage. There were no words needed, we both knew what a lucky escape we’d had. But as the rays of sunlight that beamed through the trees lost their power, I knew it was getting late. It was time to leave the ghosts behind and carry on with our journey. Following the gulley down to the river, the valley opened up once again to reveal a magical setting sun and the full glory of the lush mountains shining in the evening half-light. The path through the long grass and the paddy fields was the same one I’d been carried out on a stretcher just a few weeks before.
We walked east the following day. It felt like a new beginning. The monsoon was almost at an end and the rain no longer came down in sheets. It was good to be away from the roads and cars and we followed little footpaths over the crests of pine-clad ridges and along the banks of gushing rivers. The white-tipped peaks of the Himalayas loomed in the distance and the further east we trod, the bigger they got. Everywhere we were greeted with friendly smiles and courteous namastes. Up here in the hills, the people took on a more Mongolian appearance. These were the Magars and Gurungs. The men wore kachad skirts and rubber wellies and homespun woollen waistcoats. In their cummerbunds the older men sported enormous kukris, the curved knives made famous by Gurkha soldiers. The women swept along the paths in colourful saris and some had rings made of gold. The younger girls were pretty yet hardened, carrying heavy loads of thatch for roofs and animal fodder.
But it was by no means plain sailing. In fact the area we were traversing was the heartland of the Maoist insurgency that had plagued Nepal for twenty years. Everywhere we went, the archways into villages were inscribed with the hammer and sickle, and graffiti displayed open support for communism. A new Prime Minister–Khadga Prasad Oli–himself a communist, had been elected, much to the dismay of the Indian government. Civil unrest had led to the southern borders being closed. The news reported violent protests in the plains and the strikes were ongoing. There was a widespread fuel shortage too, which meant that prices had rocketed and tensions were high. It hailed back to the ten-year civil war and reminded me of my first time in Nepal in 2001. It seemed that unfortunately little had changed.
I asked Binod what he thought of them.
‘I voted for the Maoists myself,’ he said after a while.
I was quite shocked. When we were younger, he’d always been an advocate of the monarchy.
‘After the King was overthrown, I thought what harm could it do? Things were bad already and at least the communists promised equality and rights for the low-caste people. You know, I have to look after my family.’
‘And what about the future?’ I asked. ‘Will the new Prime Minister succeed in making Nepal better?’
‘God only knows. Nepal is a mess, and how can our country improve with all these riots and strikes and border closures? That’s the bad thing about the communists–all they do is complain, but we need action, and I hope this man can do something to make it better.’
Binod wasn’t too interested in politics, but he was a patriot and it struck me that he, like most people in Nepal, simply wanted peace and to have the opportunity to thrive.
‘You see, we’re like a small pebble, stuck between two big rocks. To the north we have China who we cannot fight, and to the south we have India who give us all our fuel and all the things we need to buy. What can we do? The communists want us to start making our own things so that we don’t need to rely on India but they play games, political games, and if we fight they will crush us, so we have to find a balance. I don’t know any more, all we can do is pray and hope.’
It took a week to walk to Baglung, following terrible roads that had succumbed to the monsoon over the past months. The mud was still knee-deep and landslides had wrecked entire portions of the mountain paths. The few trucks that were able to find diesel had their routes blocked for hours, sometimes days. We walked past, helping where we could, but generally just glad that we were on foot. It seemed the government was doing little to fix the devastation.
‘Terrible corruption,’ said Binod, shaking his head in disgust. ‘The local authorities get grants from the government to build bridges and put down tarmac but they never finish the job, and steal most of the money.’
It seemed you could almost speculate on the relative levels of honesty of a particular district authority by how much infrastructure was actually completed. But it was rare to find a bridge that wasn’t half built. One exception that did impress me though was the footbridge at Kushma, a 350-metre-long bridge that spanned a vast gorge 150 metres deep over the holy Kali Gandaki river; it had cut down the villagers’ commute across the valley from two hours to five minutes. But as I say, it was rare. The earthquake hadn’t helped matters either; the closer we got to central Nepal and the epicentre of the deadly quake, the more we saw of the ruins and devastation. Mile-long queues formed at petrol stations as cars and motorbikes waited for days to get their ten-litre allowance. Armed police patrolled the villages in case the unrest down south flared up in the hills. There was a feeling of tension in the air but more than anything it was hard not to feel saddened at the plight these people were going through, over and over again.
But at least we were alive and I was grateful for every new day. Binod seemed to have changed completely. Gone were his complaints about walking, and now that we were back on the road, he seemed to be a transformed man. He was his old self–the Binod I remembered; the trusty guide and faithful friend. He found us porters along the way with a new-found charm and confidence, he’d wake up early every morning to bring me tea and offer to carry my bags. My arm was still weak from the accident and the rogue stitch on my shoulder had become infected, so I wasn’t able to carry my rucksack. Binod went above and beyond what I had ever expected of him and he carried my share of the gear.
Perhaps it was the fact we were closing in on Pokhara but Binod seemed happier, more jubilant than ever. I was excited to see his family again but he was ecstatic to be passing by his home for the start of the Dashain festival, and for the chance to spend a few days with his family. And moreover, to share the experience with me.
‘My neighbours will be so jealous,’ he said with a mischievous wink. ‘They all know about my English brother. I have been telling them for years but they never believe me, and now you are coming home. Now they will see.’
I suddenly felt abashed and almost feared what his wife, Chandra, would make of me–the person who’d put Binod’s life in danger.
‘Don’t worry brother, she is happy you are coming. We will all celebrate.’
And so, finally, we rounded the northern road and from the top of of Pauderkot hill I saw Pokhara city and the famous Fewa lake. There, unfolding before us were the looming mounds of Kaskikot and to the north the Seti Gandaki river. And beyond that, marked by its lush green jungle-clad slopes–topped now by a telephone mast–the hill known as Sarangkot. Binod’s home, a place I hadn’t seen in over fourteen years.
‘Remember?’ said Binod, pointing down the valley.
It was hazy and the town was covered in a low-hanging cloud. Nothing whatsoever could be seen of the Himalayas. Annapurna and the fishtail mountain Machhapuchchhre were hidden by an impenetrable wall of grey. But in spite of it I was happy, glad after all these years to have finally fulfilled my promise to return.