A Wild Ride on the Roof of the World

Tags

base camp, driving, EBC, Everest, Friendship Highway, Himalayas, Lhasa, Tibet

We are nearing Day Zero, the day we drive away from one house and start the move to another, so I’m posting an entry from my blog’s earliest days today. The perspective from atop the world, almost literally, does my mind good at this bittersweet time.

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Driving in countries around the world is always an adventure. From the careening traffic on the autobahn and the peripherique, to the stop-and-go progress on a Scottish Highlands road full of sheep, to the heart-attack cliffs with no guardrails in mountains the world over, there is always a story about our international brothers’ driving habits. Penjo, our driver on the Friendship Highway – the route across the Tibetan Plateau (the “Roof of the World”) from Tibet to Nepal – was no exception.

We left Lhasa early one morning for a cross-country adventure in a 4WD Mitsubishi SUV. A few hours out of Lhasa, we experienced the first of many so-called “pee breaks” which were really designed for our guide, Pasang, and our driver, Penjo, to take a smoking break. Timed passage on the road also meant that if we were going to arrive at a checkpoint too early, we had to either slow down or stop and wait until the time was OK. (This happened at every checkpoint since the law, meant to slow drivers down, really seemed to signify “drive as fast as humanly possible and then stop and wait until enough time has passed.”) Even using this finely-tuned strategy, Penjo managed to get a speeding ticket as we approached Shigatse, a hellhole (at least at that time) we discovered we should have been in no hurry to reach anyway.

Getting to our hotel and dinner in Shigatse was like a barrel race as we were stymied by street after street under construction. We drove in circles through an apocalyptic landscape, a bombed-out scene of heavy construction equipment and vehicle-swallowing holes in the powdery streets. Penjo showed some serious moxie by driving on sidewalks, down one-way streets, in front of bulldozers, and through numerous barricades. Shigatse is a dusty town by nature, and all this earth-moving and car maneuvering left a deep coat of grime on the Pajero and a sneeze-inducing mass of dust in our nostrils.

The next day, after lunch in Tingri, we turned off onto a dirt road for the next three hours. This was a true washboard road, with constant ridges and bumps, along with switchbacks, steep climbs and descents, and barely two lanes across. Penjo did not disappoint, spending large periods of time on the oncoming traffic side of the road and squealing to dustcloud-raising stops in the loose gravel, precipitously close to various drop-offs, as he attempted to pass large trucks, SUVs and, really, any moving vehicle, beast, or human on the road. Penjo finally slowed down and the air finally cleared as we crossed our third and final high pass for the day at 17,500 feet, with a view of the entire Tibetan Himalaya range, including Makalo, Lhotse, Everest, and Cho Oyu.

On our way back to Lhasa, we took a different route through a gorge along the Brahmaputra River. Penjo was at his finest today, offroading anytime the main road was closed. In Tibet, barricades indicating road closures are apparently simply something to drive around. This road was clearly closed, but Penjo decided we would take it anyway, which meant that at certain points we had to totally drive off the highway and go through pastures, fields, and people’s property. Many others had the same idea, including giant 18-wheelers! Penjo passed semis in a blur of dirt, drove through sagebrush, which we dragged along behind us until it shook loose, and swerved even more than usual.

Penjo’s driving was truly a thing to behold, with brake slamming, high speeds then incredibly slow ones, random veering, and aggressive crowding of other vehicles. Somehow we never worried too much; we decided people here drive like maniacs and have constant near accidents but never any actual accidents. At one point, Penjo almost nailed a dzo, but neither he nor the female owner of the dzo seemed the least bit perturbed as he screeched to a halt mere inches from the animal in the middle of the road.

Penjo was a soft-spoken (Tibetan language only) man who was quite mild-mannered out of the vehicle. He had a sweet, shy smile and since we are alive to tell the tale, we have only the fondest memories of him!

More posts on our Tibetan adventures:

A Love Affair with Lhasa

Face of a Pilgrim

Not for the Squeamish

Mountain Mama

Tags

avalanche, Himalayas, Mount Everest, mountains, Nepal, Sherpas

I wrote this little meditation on mountains a few days ago, and then a terrible avalanche made yesterday the deadliest day ever on Mount Everest …

(CLICK ON PHOTOS if you want to see them full-size)

Mountains move me. They speak to me, embrace me, and have a hold on me that won’t let go. Sometimes I fear their rocky faces, and I frequently curse my wheezing breath as I climb them. The great ones are far away, expensive and time-consuming to reach. I will never achieve the summits of the “eight-thousanders,” or even much lesser peaks, and yet they call me to come close, to play along their flanks, to lean into their sides for a few weeks at a time. A few let me reach their crests, and my exhilaration knows no bounds.

For many years, I loved the ocean and thought there was nowhere I’d rather be than by the shores of a crashing sea. But the mountains were a part of me from the beginning and as time went on, their clutch tightened. I grew up in the Appalachians and took for granted a Sunday hike up through a pine grove to a stony knob overlooking the western Pennsylvania countryside. I spent early summers in the Blue Ridge mountains, and later came to know and love the Colorado Rockies, but it was not until I started hiking around the world that I really grasped the grip that high altitude had on me.

My memories are filled with mountain scenes. A cup of tea by a frosted window in Namche Bazaar, Nepal. A soft call of “jambo jambo” to rouse me from my tent in the Great Rift Valley of Tanzania. The last of the evening sun on the cuernos in Paine Grande National Park in Chile. A tinkling of cowbells in a wildflowery meadow in the Alps. The shiny, worn, ancient stone paths of the Inca Trail in the Peruvian Andes. And the absolute awe of being face-to-face with the most famous face of all, the North Face of Mount Everest on a cold June evening.

Long story short: As John Muir said, “the mountains are calling and I must go.”

… Today, I’m feeling almost a little guilty about my mountain obsession in light of the number of Sherpas killed yesterday on Everest. For me and many first-world adventurers, mountains seem like mere playgrounds when we think about the fact that they serve not only as home but as livelihood to those who are doing our grunt work on their slopes. Rest in peace, Sherpa heroes.

Please read this: http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/climbing/mountaineering/The-Value-of-A-Sherpa-Life.html

A Sense of the World

Tags

Ama Dablam, Himalayas, Kathmandu, Nepal

I breathe in the Nepalese Himalaya, from the earthly to the sublime. In Kathmandu, I snort, trying to rid my nostrils of the olfactory assault on the streets. Rotting garbage, small fires, burning rubber, dogs, sweat, incense, hot, sticky blood that pools in small rivers on this special slaughter day of Dashain. In Thamel, reefer wafts and mixes with saffron and cumin and garam masala and dirty dreadlocks. Asan Tole market cows bump my legs and leave their sweet hay-dung smell, an instant memory of fresh mown fields and summer days.

A stomach-lurching flight later, I inhale the freshest air I’ve ever breathed. The crisp blue air smells of ancient glaciers and fallen snow not yet touched by living feet or polluted clouds. There are hints of fresh earth and grass and water, mountain flowers and rhododendron leaves, and the dusty oxygenated smell that rises off a sidewalk after a long-awaited spring shower.

Eyes shut as I pull the alpine freshness into my lungs, my ears engage. Yak bells jingle and dzo bells jangle, prayer wheels chime and temple horns bleat. Monks chant and nuns murmur, brooms whisk and fires crackle. The Dudh Kosi swishes and tumbles, gathers strength and roars over the river rocks. Hanging bridges creak on their cables, and feet – both human and beast – clump and clop across from bank to bank.

Senses blur further on the trail. I feel the steep climb in my calves; they shriek with tension that is soon relieved by the soft squish of pine needles on loose earth. At higher elevations I curse my ragged breath rasping through my airways; my lungs burn and my throat tightens and my head throbs. And then I am fairly skipping downhill, fresh-headed and light on my feet, bouncing and floating from boulder to boulder, root to root, humming a song, thinking of childhood happiness in the woods.

My eyes focus sharply when I’m not fighting to climb and breathe. A close examination of a tiny red spindly flower growing right out of a rock, an open-mouthed awe at the layering of myriad mountains in the distance – from the tiny to the vast, my vision is rewarded over and over again. We pass through vibrant Sherpa villages whose colors are an illumination of the Buddhist soul. Grounded by black, richened by red, blue, purple and green, heightened and lightened by sunny yellow and crisp white, their houses and temples insist that man lives here in the farthest reaches of the earth.

As the days progress, brown and green trails lead to gray rocks and gravel, barren escarpments and pale lichens. As we climb ever higher, color weakens; the sky fades from cerulean to lightest blue. The tundra changes to a more frozen, snow-covered zone. In the calm and almost featureless landscape at our feet, the peaks grow ever more impressive. They knife toward the sky, their serrated ridges jagged against the heavens. They are massive from this close – huge blocks of granite and limestone hulking into the atmosphere. The thinness of the air clears the mind of all but this sight. There is nothing to smell at this altitude, and any noises seem dampened and muffled inside my headband and hat and fuzzy head. I still feel an exertion, but I am on autopilot now. I plant one foot in front of the other and just see. I watch the narrow path, the boots of the hiker in front of me, the tiny holes made by his poles, the slight kick of wispy dust or dandelion snow. When I can, I raise my gaze to the giants and simultaneously shrink from their stony faces and lean into their mother-earth embraces.

At base camp near the top of the world, we collapse and succumb to a final sensation. Our sherpas pour sweet hot chocolate from steaming thermoses into cups we clasp in clumsy, gloved hands. We fall silent as our salivary glands engage and the rich, sweet aroma fills our noses. The wind swirls, a rock ledge digs into my back, the multi-colored tents at base camp glow in the late afternoon sun. My senses are filled …life is good.