Himalayan time warp -

‘I imagine hiking in some alpine landscape; of the Nepalese I know

nothing’

To note how naïve I was about Nepal when I first went there towards the end of 1973, I quote
from my notes written not long after I arrived from Calcutta: ‘there are Hindu temples such as
the famous temple of monkeys, on a hill outside the edge of town, with the famous mystic
eyes’. The ‘monkey temple’ at Swayambhunath is of course Buddhist, as any knowledgeable
observer would know; and my notes didn’t even comment on the far older and extraordinary
Hindu temples right in the centre of Kathmandu, in Durbar Square. I was even staying right
there in ‘D Square Lodge’ as I have written in ‘Thanks for the Labyrinths Mr Roy’.
I did remark that my knowledge of Nepal was one built on the Thai International Airways
‘Get Into It’ advertising campaign. Thai was then a brand new airline and was the first one into
youth travel; its magazine carried stories of young western travellers and images of them in
Kathmandu – the same types who ‘populate Bali and Kabul’, they noted (my, how those two
places have changed!).
I added that ‘I imagine hiking in some alpine landscape. Of the Nepalese I know nothing’.
I wrote a story of that ‘hiking in some alpine landscape’, a trek which I took with four
good friends, Maureen, Rod, Michael and Bliss; unfortunately the story is lost but I recently
found the notes on which it was based. The notes begin, ‘Our expedition, which then appeared
absurdly as a sort of assault on some Everest in miniature, had begun’. We took a typical wreck
of a bus from Kathmandu back to the Indian border and then another eastwards along the Terai
to a place called Biratnagar – that took two full days. There we stayed a night in a hotel named
Hope, mainly occupied by businessmen trading between east Nepal and the centre, and India.
The ‘hope’ was a fair comment on most aspects of the hotel, but expressed mainly in its menu
which seems to have copied every item from restaurants in Kathmandu popular with foreigners,
things like egg drop soup, chop suey and porridge, a menu which must have begun life
somehow in a place where people from different countries congregated. More elaborate
versions of that menu can still be found in tea houses along all the popular trekking routes in
Nepal.
On the Terai lowland in November it was still hot and humid, the monsoon having not
long departed. The next day we began walking and ‘entered a world devoid totally of wheels
– where all movement of people and goods is by foot, the goods, (and sometimes old or sick
people) being carried in enormous v-shaped woven baskets called dokos, carried on the backs
of sturdy men, women and children, secured by a namlo, a band of rope around the forehead,
people, often without shoes, who wearily and slowly, yet with undeniable strength and a regular
rhythm traipse an astonishing network of trails that ramble up and over mountains, weave
through villages and farms, and wind through forests and across treeless windy plains –
connecting the scattered communities of Nepal and providing the main (and often only) means
of communication – outside of an irregular and not comprehensive air service’.

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 ‘And many times as we tramped our own way, keeping to a far less arduous timetable, we
thought of the impact roads and wheels would have, of the ever widening circles of destruction,
disruption and change’.
‘Our first day was truly gruelling, with many steep ascents, and our unfit bodies gasped to
be allowed to rest. Fortunately up this pass were many tea houses and frequently we stopped
for hot sweet milky tea, sitting among porters, always in old torn clothing, and a few smart
young Nepalis in western trousers and shirts returning from college in Kathmandu to their
homes and towns in the hills. On this path we met an engineer who had studied at Monash in
Melbourne and we passed many hours as he talked of his work on electricity projects,
population and family planning in Nepal, and of the thoughts he had on having to leave
Australia and return to work in his village’.
As darkness fell, suddenly, for we were too tired to look behind us to the hazy sunset over
the plains of India, we arrived in Dharan, and our porters delivered us to a sort of doss house
for people on the trail – consisting of two large very dark rooms packed with beds – wooden
platforms covered with a small pile of bags, calico sheets, mouldy and muddy blankets, with a
small tea, rice and lentils shop outside. And here we discovered rice and daal (daal bhaat), the
standard meal for the average Nepali (‘unless he is a poor man and then he will subsist on corn,
or else chura a hard flattened rice cake and curd’).
‘At each meal – and there are two a day – at about 11am and again at 5pm, boiled rice is
eaten in enormous amounts, flavoured by daal – a soupy preparation made from lentils or
millets, and fortified (but often not enough) by leafy vegetables’. This we ate on our first night,
and then collapsed onto our beds, zipping ourselves into our amazing red and blue sleeping
bags (hired from the Sherpa Society in Kathmandu), before the wide eyes of porters and others
who gather always at such times – (old women, naked children etc) secure against the rats,
bedbugs and fleas which we were sure must infest hotels like this.
And for all of us it was one of those nights that you never forget – when it seems that dawn
will never come, and when your fatigue, no matter how great, will not bring deep and lasting
sleep. ‘All night parties of porters would arrive and there would be shouting and shuffling,
bumping into beds, striking of matches, and, worse, coughing. Everyone it seemed had a
rasping, phlegmy, exhausting cough so that the hotel, if it could be called that, resembled more
a TB ward, with lungs and throats being worked accompanied by the constant sound of spitting,
while the rats scurried about the roof until after the first light of day’. For most porters the day
begins with a cigarette and a glass of steaming tea at about 6am before loading up and setting
off. For the cigarette we substituted a slice of delicious fruit cake (brought by Maureen who
had come directly from Sydney, and retrieved after strenuous searching through the jumble of
quarantined articles in a rambling godown at the airport).
Walking the second day proved to be less arduous – we were higher so it was cooler and
the ascents were less demanding. As well the countryside became more picturesque – as we
walked through forests still green with the growth of the preceding monsoon and beside rivers
singing and tumbling furiously down from their sources in the Himalayas.
We had our own little reading club which we called the ‘Annapurna Literary Society’ –
why Annapurna, here in east Nepal? What did we know? Anyway the books I remember us
reading, passing around and discussing as we walked or stopped for chia were the Alexandria
Quartet by Lawrence Durrell, the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell,

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Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, Han Suyin’s The Mountain is Young, and George Orwell’s Down
and out in Paris and London and Burmese Days. As it is today in Nepal in the mountains (even
in Kathmandu because of ‘load shedding’) there was no light at night and so no reading;
anyway you are bone weary after walking those interminable up and down trails and fall asleep
readily. Nevertheless such was the unpressured nature of our wandering, we found plenty of
time to read and contemplate during long afternoons lying on a grassy hillside or beside a
stream in the sun, one eye on the book and the other on the glorious horizon.
As we walked, when not discussing books from a seemingly faraway planet, I amused
myself recalling glimpses of the Himalayas seen on black and white television in High
Adventure with Lowell Thomas. Thomas had the stentorian delivery of 1950s American news
readers, providing gripping authority: ‘So now, as our band of men and great woolly yaks
traversed the Dhang La pass at 19,000 feet across the mighty high Himal into the forbidden,
fabled lands of Tibet …’, a gravity I adopted as I silently related our journey to myself.
Our second evening we reached the town of Dhankuta, a pretty place of whitewashed
double story cottages, some decorated with cleverly carved woodwork and many displaying
beautiful gardens of red poinsettias and other orange, yellow and purple flowers. Outside the
Dhankuta college, a wonderfully harmonious place of earthen bricks, stood a tall orange tree,
heavily laden, which pleased us immensely as such fruit had been unobtainable in all our
travels.
The streets, of brick and flagstones, were, of course, free of any traffic, not even the bicycle
or wheeled carts and stalls that clutter most Asian towns.
Here we decided to stay a few days and so dismissed our porters, settling the matter of
payment, and a long list of unanticipated extras such as cigarettes, tea, fruit, backshish etc.
Staying at the local hotel we met a couple of young field workers – a German teacher and three
Americans (teachers and agriculture advisers), involved in projects. Fortunately they had
explored much of the country through which we intended to walk and they advised on a route,
as well as buying oranges for us at the local price, suggesting that we shouldn’t filch any more
from the college’s tree.
Hile was our next stop, a delightful afternoon’s walk with a couple of interim porters,
through a shady pine forest across fields of rice stubble between rows of blooming yellow
flowers, up a grassy ridge, and through millet fields being worked by farm girls. We found Hile
to be home to several Tibetan refugee families. These people seemed wealthy by local Nepali
standards, all having brought with them art treasures, jewellery and money from Tibet, and had
established themselves in eating houses, hotels and land. It appears they are ‘disliked’ (my
diary crosses this word out, strangely) by local Nepalis who voiced suspicions that Tibetan
food being so much more varied than Nepalese, would poison them (!), and hinted darkly, but
we found the Tibetans friendly and relaxed.
Staying here, in a guest house run by three Tibetan women, who dressed always in
traditional clothing, we passed a few days strolling in the countryside, captivated by
wildflowers, and one day huddled indoors as winds blasted from the Himalayas, whipped
around the village, while our Tibetan hostesses cooked us crisp Tibetan bread, momos
(dumplings), rich noodle soup, and offered us thumba – a hot wine made from fermented millet
and drunk from huge, daunting, elaborate flasks.

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 Here we hired two more porters, a roguish looking old man whose fine sparkling eyes
belied his wrinkled face and bony body, and a young ‘forgettable man’ (as I described him)
who perhaps was his son. Only the older man had shoes, an unmatched pair obviously
scavenged in two parts somewhere. The fee was eight rupees a day (about 60c) plus food and
smokes. Neither could speak English – but with our Gurkhali dictionary and a quantity of
repetition and gesturing, we were able to communicate, with some sort of satisfaction and lots
of humour.
We left Hile walking easily through the fields laden with the remnants of summer and
autumn wildflowers, delicate purple, pink, white, mauve yellow and blue, most very small and
pretty, blooming in open fields and tucked into cracks in rocks. From Hile there is a long, gentle
climb to the top of a ridge from where we enjoyed inspiring views of lofty Himalayan peaks
glistening in the high altitude sun, Along the path we were passed by many, many loaded
porters descending, some of them at high speed, to Dharan and the lowlands with the produce
of the high country – mostly oranges and brass pots coming from we didn’t know where.
There were goods moving uphill with teams of porters, burdened with anything from rice
and tea to biscuits, sandshoes, cloth, medicines and school books.
This was a full, enjoyable day’s trekking from the bare windswept ridge, down through a
changing world of forests, some still with the greens, golds, browns, and warmth of deciduous
forests in early autumn, others damp and mossy, richly green, full of the smell of decay and
growth. We stopped for the night in the scrappy village of Basantapur where men sat over fires
in minute, grubby tea houses behind smeared curtains and warmed their hands around glasses
of tea, pulling on Indian cigarettes.
We then pushed on to Choki, a chilled, miserable, muddy place, where even the tea was
cold and the views for which we had been enthusiastically waiting eluded us, hidden behind a
mass of grey cloud.
So on we walked around the ridge to begin a descent into wide, lovely valley where the
voices of the villagers and their animals drifted up to us, and on the valley floor a broad river
rushed. That night our porters arranged for us to sleep on the top floor of a small mud walled
house; from the owners we bought rice, daal, chokos, spices and firewood, and the porters
cooked for us in that smoky room a splendid filling meal, demonstrating how Nepali men who
spend much of their lives away from home carrying loads through the mountains, look after
themselves (although no doubt the variety they could buy for us was greater than what they
could normally afford).
There was no end to the amusement of the old fellow as he attempted to copy our strange
sahib habits such as cleaning our teeth and washing our faces, removing some of our clothes
before slipping into sleeping bags and so on. He once decided to follow us into a freezing river
as, stripped to our underwear, we stepped in for a quick wash; he almost came to a dreadful
end as the pounding water knocked him head over heels, and of course he couldn’t swim.
Happily there were four Australians nearby. As well, there was great curiosity in things such
as watches – our head porter began wearing mine with fabulous pride, and showing it to others
on the trail, along with my sheath knife – and our food pack which contained mysteries such
as fruitcake, cashews, coffee and peanut butter.
The interior of the village huts are simple, with rough planed timber walls and a hard earth
floor. There is no glass in the windows, just wooden shutters. There are woven straw mats, a

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small clay fireplace, but no chimney, and a clutter of things such as drying corn, ripening
pumpkin, dried chillies, and tangled heaps of old cloth and clothing, brass cooking pots and
old earthen water jars, and where there is space, pictures cut from magazines – an alpine scene
from Switzerland, the Eiffel Tower, and John Kennedy – which would have arrived in the
village as wrapping on a bolt of cloth or slab of sugar, rather than in a magazine.
The following evening, after a day’s walking following the contours of the valley, we
reached the house of a Brahmin family on a very scenic, very steep hillside on which were
scattered other houses of obviously prosperous owners. Typical of upper class Nepalis this
family had numbers of sons and relatives who had been or were studying in the UK or USA;
and their style of living and relationship with peoples of lower caste gave us some insight into
social stratification; they had working for them many adults and children who were treated in
a very offhand, cursory manner, and were excluded at such times as when we went to take a
group photo. Our senior porter, by now confident in his contact and relationship with ‘his’
sahibs, would have none of this caste bulldust, and walked in and out of photographs and their
home as he pleased, as proud as any man had a right to be.
On our first evening there we were allocated beds and floor space on a ground level
verandah, and pandemonium and riotous amusement erupted as five colourful sleeping bags
and three sahibs and two memsahibs organised and outfitted themselves for sleeping. ‘Around
us stood and laughed and gazed the entire family, grandparents, grandchildren, as well as an
assortment of snotty-nosed children, grubby, as all Nepali kids seem to be, with their bottoms
showing through their pants or dresses, for easy evacuation, and inquisitive adults, priests
included, from nearby villages’.
Our next stop was the charming bazaar town of Chainpur, located along a saddle shaped
ridge looking out to the peaks on the skyline. Staying here in a small hotel we parted with our
porters, the colourful old man, near to tears as he accepted his money, and a shirt, tilting his
head to the side in the usual mode of assent. He returned my watch and sheath knife.
At the hotel, run by a delightful, affable woman and her teenage daughter, we somehow
seemed to take over, nobody could remain indifferent to this strange invasion and crowds
would gather around the doorway as we sat down to a meal, played chess or wrote mysterious
code in notebooks.
With the woman and daughter we played a game of learn the other’s language, and while
sitting and talking or wandering about we learned a little of life in a village with no road, rail
or air connection with anywhere – the actual condition of most Nepali villages, even today.
Twice that week, in the evening, the movies arrived. Someone told us that it was the first
time ever in Chainpur; another said it happened every month. Anyway this week it happened
twice. A projector, speaker and collapsible screen arrived in the basket of a porter, with a diesel
generator on the back of another. Then came the impresario, an Indian man whose work was
walking from village to village bringing this occasional entertainment from the world beyond.
‘The only entertainment outside religious festivals’, I note knowingly, though in fact most
villagers seemed to be content with the simple pleasures of strolling, eating tiny bags of
peanuts, chatting in groups under wide trees, seated on stone steps or seats, while children
played as children can, with the barest of things – a bit of string, a tin and a stick, a baby goat.
So the lack of what we would call ‘entertainment’ didn’t seem to trouble them.

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 The atmosphere was electric as the projector was set up. People appeared from the
surrounding hills, wrapped in yak wool blankets, entire families ready to be transported far
away. The first film was an Indian documentary on birth control with the most oblique way of
presenting its message – which was essentially the Indian slogan, ‘When you have two, that
will do’. Huge steam locomotives seemed to provide a Freudian symbolism, thundering across
the screen, and bringing gasps and roars of delight from the crowd – less alerted by the
symbolism than the glamour and drama of the steam age – which hadn’t penetrated anywhere
near their village, and never would. Gleaming cars and bicycles, also not to be seen within
several days’ walk of hereabouts, were present in the second film, a very tame middle class
family drama set in an Indian city, whose story, setting, and cast would have been equally
foreign to the delirious audience.
At the end of the session, the porters went to sleep somewhere where porters passing
through Chainpur slept – a porters’ lodge, or perhaps a cave, whilst the projectionist brought
his equipment and films to the little hotel where we were staying for the night. In the morning
he was gone, off on the trail again to his next venue.
On market day the entire population which had been at the film re-emerged from the hills
and valleys bringing produce from cattle and goats to clumps of onions and herbs, and set up
on the grassy square where the films had been presented. The most prevalent items of local
production seemed to be mandarins and peanuts; vegetables were mainly chokos and corn. But
traders had also walked for days bringing blocks of sugar, tea and salt, soap, sandshoes, shoe
laces, cigarettes, used spectacles, medicinal herbs; as well there were itinerant tailors and cloth
merchants, accompanied by porters carrying their hand-operated sewing machines. A great
variety of faces representing the range of ethnicities in eastern Nepal – Newars, Rai, Tamang,
Limbus, Sherpas and Tibetans, amongst others, all dressed in traditional, exotic (to us) manner.
We didn’t then know much about the ethnic constellation of Nepal – Sherpas and Tibetans, and
people we thought of as ‘Indians’ because they resembled more the population of India (whose
astonishing ethnic variety we didn’t then appreciate either) were about all the names we could
come up with.
The market went on for several days, and there was a carnival atmosphere, again indication
how easily people were entertained in those relatively remote areas and pre-electric times. And
just as market day was winding down a religious festival began and more people started to
arrive in Chainpur. The Hindu temple area became very busy, and stalls of religious
paraphernalia were set up.
We would wash in the icy water channelled downhill to stone spouts and mini bathing
ghats, watched by enormous, amused but respectful crowds; it was not quite like Tibet here –
where people were reputed to only wash once a year, but the only people we saw bathing were
a few young men who would lather frantically under the spout for several minutes; the women
also used these stone fountains for washing clothes and little children (who would disappear
into blizzards of suds), and sometimes their long hair.
All around, farm work went on ceaselessly, at this time of year harvesting rice, building
hay stacks, and threshing using heavy foot operated pestles.
The town and surrounds basked in the sun from about 10 to 3, it is pleasantly situated along
a long sloping central road made of blocks of stone, flanked by clean whitewashed or ochre
coloured brick houses. Many had elaborately carved shutters and balconies in what I now know

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as the Newar style. There were small shops mostly selling textiles, homewares and dry goods;
many of the townsfolk were surprisingly well-dressed, no one at all wore western dress. We
met a Dutch doctor working with the British Medical Trust who was a great source of
information about the health of the population and the sorts of diseases encountered. TB and
intestinal disorders were the most common, along with women’s conditions like prolapsed
uterus, and, surprisingly, some mental disorders. Of course the needs were far greater than he
and his clinic could adequately serve.
One night during the festival we followed a crowd along a mountain path through the
forests at the edge of Chainpur to a temple set in a clearing on a ridge The crowd was warmly
dressed, once the sun goes down here, it becomes very cold quickly, and suggesting that they
were expecting a long night. Many were carrying lanterns and candles, though it was not yet
dark. At the temple there was a small noisy bazaar, bells were ringing and Hindu priests were
doing what priests do to long queues of men and women, with oils and coloured powders. We
stayed for about an hour, not really noticing how dark it was becoming, and then, finally bored,
we set out to follow the narrow path back to Chainpur.
At night it was treacherous, none of us had torches, not even matches, and there was no
light whatsoever. Walking out we had noticed the steep fall away on our right – but that was
normal in Nepal, hills and spectacularly deep valleys were the landscape. As we walked
gingerly feeling our way, hands on the uphill slope, Maureen suddenly disappeared with a yell.
She’d slipped on loose stones over the side, and could’ve tumbled hundreds and hundreds of
metres, but fortunately landed unharmed on a small ledge just a couple of metres down. In
panic I lay prone on the path and leaned over; with Michael and Rod each holding a leg I was
able to reach down to Maureen’s upstretched arms and slowly drag her to safety. It was a few
minutes that I have never forgotten and that I recall every time when we are trekking along a
narrow, winding trail, even on the alpine lakes walk in Kosciuszko national park, the
precipitous drops on the lower side reminding me of this 1973 near catastrophe.
A few days later we walked out of Chainpur on a long trail down into a valley. We had
hired two new porters, a diverting activity that took most of a morning. In Nepali towns there
are always numbers of men sitting or squatting on the ground with their baskets and head ropes
waiting for a job. In a place like Chainpur in those days the work would have been for a trader,
or someone supplying building materials, or perhaps an itinerant tailor. Certainly not
foreigners. Our five rucksacks would have weighed about eight kilos each, so divided between
two porters they made a light load compared to the phenomenal 50 or more kilograms the men
were used to. Anyway we found two who were happy to accompany us on whatever our
mysterious errand was; Rod negotiated with our Gurkhali dictionary and we fixed on a daily
rate plus food and smokes.
Our destination was the village of Khadbari which we were informed variously would take
anywhere from two to twelve hours of strenuous walking. It did prove a tough day – though
the sun was bright, the distant views inspiring and the villagers working in the fields en route
delighted to see us coming their way. Light-hearted banter accompanied us as we passed, some
of it humour at our expense of course – the unbelievable sight of women in shorts for a start.
We had left in the early afternoon, so shouldn’t have been surprised when we were still trudging
after dark.

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 The last stretch was an unending, steep climb, partly on rudimentary stone steps and partly
on slippery gravel, but eventually we fell into the village exhausted. The usual shoals of
children who welcomed us were missing, no doubt asleep, and it took our porters some time to
rouse the occupants of the most prosperous looking house in the village to ask if they had
somewhere where we could sleep. A man who had obviously been asleep came to the door
which required complicated unlocking and stood absolutely astonished at what he saw.
The porters asked if we could sleep on the verandah, and if we could buy rice and daal so
that they could cook us dinner. The man after his initial reaction could not have been more
helpful. He actually found us an empty room upstairs, provided a sack of rice and daal for the
porters to take as much as we wanted, and then he retired to bed.
We collectively decided that we were so tired that a mandarin and peanuts would do for
dinner – we just wanted to sleep. But the porters, understandably, wanted their daal bhaat, so
they went outside to cook for themselves.
In the morning the children materialised. In those days even prosperous houses had no
bathroom or toilet, so we like everyone else, made our way to the fields or any nearby clump
of trees. We had learned the Asian way of cleaning with water, so didn’t leave the place littered
with toilet paper, as many trekkers to this day do, but finding privacy wasn’t easy especially
with crowds of children following us about.
The family in the house were more than welcoming and at first assumed we would be
staying for a few weeks or a month – here on some important project, perhaps, and were a little
crestfallen, and baffled, after we explained that we were just here for the walking. The women
(there seemed to be at least two families in the household) made us omelettes and gave us hard
boiled eggs, chapattis, and fruit for the day’s journey. They were quite worried about how thin
we appeared (though the porters were thinner still).
Over the next few days we trekked towards Num. The first day was a long uphill to
Chichila. We were not at particularly high altitude, about 2000 metres, though as we had not
yet trekked high into the Himalayas it was altitude enough for us. It was late November and
the nights were becoming very cold, and sometimes a wet mist descended in the afternoons.
Our Sherpa Society sleeping bags were old and threadbare, and the families in whose houses
we lodged – or on whose verandahs or ground-level forecourt we camped – rarely had spare
blankets for unprepared visitors.
One afternoon we emerged from a dense oak forest to see the soaring peaks of Makalu and
Chamlang – essentially we were walking on the Makalu base camp route taken by climbers,
but as we had no maps, as the porters had no sense of us following any particular route (in fact
they had no idea at all what we were up to), and as we had no particular destination, in heroic
contrast to the organised, focused trekkers of today, we just wandered, deciding in the morning
where we might try and reach that day, in conversation with villagers, or porters coming the
other way, and staying several days in places that we liked, again unlike today when trekking
parties move on early every morning, unless taking a day for acclimatisation to altitude.
That afternoon, as we passed a group of men and women packing hay onto long sticks and
perching them beside their houses, a young man called out and walked purposefully to the trail
to intercept us. He said he was a Ghurkha, home on leave from his British Army base in
London, and he invited us to his house and to stay the night there. He lived in a Rai village
which was fairly prosperous looking, as was his family’s house, and he explained that quite a

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number of households in this district had sons who were or had been Ghurkhas over several
generations. To us it seemed incredible, contemplating the cultural distance such young men
must have travelled – from remote eastern Nepal, where not even a wheel was ever seen, from
where, then, it was a six day walk to the nearest roadhead, where porters had to carry the sick
and infirm, sometimes in their baskets, to a clinic or doctor which would invariably be several
days’ walk away, and where no foods or drinks that were unfamiliar would ever be tasted, to
hyper-modern, multicultural (even in 1973) London. This man, speaking good English,
explained that he was equally comfortable in either environment, was glad that he had the
opportunity to help his family economically, looked forward to the day when electricity would
come to the district and allow his sisters to see a television, and was happy that he lived and
worked with other Nepalis, some from his local area and others from different parts of the
‘middle hills’ where most recruiting is done, so that even when they were on a posting – he
had been stationed in Northern Ireland and Cyprus – he seldom felt homesick. Of course mixing
with Nepalis of distant ethnic groups would have been an experience that most villagers of the
hill country would rarely have.
Next day we walked on to a bleak Sherpa village where we spent a dismal, cold night in a
rundown, poor house. Most villages in Nepal seem to be located to allow for maximum
sunshine during the day; this one seemed doomed by its location on the dark side of the ridge.
It was here that we decided to forget about getting to Num, which would have been half way
to Makalu base camp (which was over twice the altitude where we now were, and impossible
for us to reach with our not-serious level of preparation) and to set out for Tumlingtar, from
where we knew there were infrequent flights to Kathmandu.
Our porters were not bothered by this, they would be returning to somewhere near where
we had first met them. We followed the Arun river tumbling impressively from the high
country, stayed at Khadbari again and reached Tumlingtar on the afternoon of the next day.
There was a Royal Nepal Airlines office and late the following morning a man came and
unlocked it. It was part-time job, he explained, as the flights were ‘not often’. When, we
inquired.
‘Ah. You are in luck. In two days from today, if the Twin Otter from Kathmandu arrives,
God and weather permitting, there will be a flight to Kathmandu.’
We were in luck because it was then a not-always reliable fortnightly service. When we
asked whether we could buy tickets this young man said we could not buy from him, he had
no ‘facility’, but from the airline’s agent who would be arriving on foot from another town on
the airline’s itinerary the next day. What was the job, then, of the man we were speaking to?
It seemed he looked after the office before and after flights, made sure the peripatetic sales
agent had all that he needed to conduct sales, and ensured that the men whose job it was to
shoo sheep, goats, cows, ponies and children from the runway knew when flights were
scheduled.
He proved to be an amiable companion during the time we awaited our flight. He was
hoping to marry a girl from Chainpur whom he had met at college in Kathmandu, but didn’t
dare ask his father until his older brother was married. This brother had failed the rigorous,
brutally physical, Ghurkha selection tests, and this seems to have set his marriage back. We
accompanied the young man to meet his parents; they lived in a sturdy house – 150 years old,
at least, he asserted – where the family, prominent Chhetris, had lived for generations.

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 At that time we knew that casteism had been outlawed in the 1960s, or at least
discrimination based on caste, and so had assumed that when people referred to their ethnic
group this had nothing to do with caste. But of course ethnic groups had been incorporated into
the caste system by the high caste Hindus who dominated Nepal society, from the king down,
and so a self-description of someone as Chhetri, Tamang or Limbu, say, also carried caste
signals that we were not aware of. Even someone’s name would normally reveal both caste and
ethnic group. And Buddhists, who were the majority in higher mountain areas, had not escaped
caste branding at the hands of high caste Hindus.
Our friend told us to be outside the airline office early the next morning. When we arrived
there was nobody about, but he arrived shortly, unlocked the door and dragged outside to the
sunshine of the dusty forecourt a desk and a chair, and some stationary items. After a while a
man, followed by a porter, turned up. He was neatly dressed, it didn’t seem he could have
walked very far, and he removed a cash box and other bits and pieces from the porter’s basket.
By now a crowd was developing; we were first in line though that didn’t stop the usual
practice of people of assumed importance, or those representing them, from pushing to the
front. Anyway our new friend made sure that when the agent had seated himself at the desk,
placed a stack of tickets in front of him, and rearranged several times his cashbox, pencils,
erasers, stapler and pens, we were the first seen. The inbound aircraft was a Twin Otter,
Canadian built and not long in the service of Royal Nepal Airlines. Its primary role seemed to
be to carry portly officials, mail and other important freight, but there were 12 free seats. Only
government officers and foreigners were in the habit of travelling by air, and so buying tickets
that day were a few self-satisfied public service types and their wives, who, even today
dominate public institutions, and a group of American wild life photographers who had been
on the trail of that damnably elusive yeti. (‘Tarnation! We just missed him!’).
Tickets bought we were told to go to the airport the following day at about 10am, or when
we ‘heard an aeroplane’. We spent the rest of the day exploring the hills above Tumlingtar,
looking down on the two great rivers which converge there – the Arun and the Sabha Khola,
and at the stunning horizon of Himalayan peaks. The ‘Asian brown cloud’, the consequence of
industrialisation in India and China and the burning of wood and dung for cooking, as well as
the climatic conditions of early winter which produced fog, had not yet appeared and so the
skyline was normally sharply etched. We had an even more dramatic view the flowing day
from our aircraft seats.
By morning the population of Tumlingtar seemed to have doubled. Porters with baskets
had materialised and were camped in clusters at the airport, a grass runway with a shed, not
unlike a rural Australian airport, and there were scores of villagers and children who had
assembled to look at the plane. We were staying in a little lodge near the airport that ran to
rudimentary beds but no toilets, and so we joined others using the corn and sugarcane fields
alongside the runway for this purpose. By late morning the fog had not lifted, and there was
the sound of an aeroplane coming and going, awaiting the opportunity to land. There was no
technical assistance, vision had to be good for a touchdown.
Eventually the plane made a low pass, turned and landed in an incredibly short length of
runway with a roar from its little turboprops and billowing dust. Disembarking passengers were
besieged by porters, mail bags were thrown out, and with our friend pushing we were ushered

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aboard. The twin engines jumped to life before the door was closed and in a space as short as
she had landed in, the plane took off steeply and turned for Kathmandu.
My notes report the 45 minute trip thus: ‘Bouncing along in a Twin Otter, many times
below the altitude of the surrounding peaks – the awesome, towering mountains of the main
Himalayas stretching away to Tibet and China, and below, landscapes similar to that through
which we walked – hills, valleys, streams, waterfalls, forests and slopes – and scattered villages
and farmlands, medieval in character and appearance – connected only by this extraordinary,
unending and probably ancient network of people trails’.
Kathmandu airport and surrounds were a culture shock. Suddenly it seemed less like the
ancient lost-in-time city that it was three weeks earlier than a modern, connected metropolis.
Well, relatively speaking. There was a Thai International DC-8 once a week from Bangkok,
and a similarly scheduled Indian Airlines flight from Calcutta. The one prop-jet of Royal Nepal
Airlines was habitually grounded, or commandeered into service by the royal family.
We returned our sleeping bags to the Sherpa Society along with our map. Rod was a precise
draughtsman, and with his reliable Rotring pen, had completed a whimsically illustrated map
of the route we had taken, in reality a random ramble, a far cry from the organised treks of
today. The Sherpas in the office, mostly real mountain guides (today it is a well-established
trekking and guiding organisation) were happy to accept it and claimed that they would
recommend the trek to any foreigners wanting to go to east Nepal. Incredibly a friend reported
that a copy of the map was on a noticeboard at the Kathmandu Guest House in Thamel a decade
later. I wish we had kept our own copy (which then would have required Rod drawing another).
Three weeks later we were in Delhi, having taken a bus to Pokhara then split up. Before
leaving Kathmandu I gave away my cheap Indian sandshoes (which I’d bought in Kathmandu
and walked in, having left my sturdy Canadian boots in the trunk of a taxi in Bangkok), and
was amazed and humbled by the riot I caused in bustling New Road as men and boys rushed
and jumped at the shoes as I held them in the air, thinking that I could choose the lucky recipient
from among them. Most poorer Nepalis wore no shoes in those days.
Maureen and I took buses and trains to Delhi via Sonauli, Gorakhpur and Lucknow. The
trip to Pokhara had been a ride hitched with one of those English transcontinental coaches; they
had begun in London, were going on to India and terminating sometime a month or so later in
Singapore. In those days this was the safe way for young people to travel. Safety in your own
culture and language, and food; we were astonished to find that many of the youngsters on
board, of our age, had not thought much of the food of the countries through which they passed,
and preferred tinned stuff brought from home which they consumed each night where they
camped. It was also, of course, a journey which would be impossible today: Iran, Afghanistan,
and Pakistan being at various times inaccessible.
Our trek was the last that Maureen and I would do for 37 years. We are fortunate to have
had the opportunity to walk idly through a part of Nepal in that era, before the age of mass
tourism which has also brought huge numbers to the hills and trails of Nepal (though in fewer
numbers to far east, and far west, than to the Annapurna or Everest districts). At about the same
time Peter Matthiesson and George Schaller were in Nepal hiking to Dolpo in search of the
secretive snow leopard. Reading Matthiesson gives a truly illuminating account of how utterly
remote much of the country was in 1973, and how people who were much more focused,
ambitious and organised than we were with our ‘our expedition, which then appeared absurdly

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as a sort of assault on some Everest in miniature’, could undertake a truly remarkable journey.
Where we walked was not entirely unknown to foreigners; as mentioned, part of it was on the
Makalu base camp trek. Makalu at 8463 metres is the world’s fifth highest, and climbing groups
had been coming this way since the 1950s. But even today there remain remote, almost
inaccessible areas.
And our return flight to Kathmandu was pure serendipity. When we set out we had no
notion other than that we would do a loop walk and return the way we had come, and then take
the two day bus trip back to Kathmandu.
There are now two flights daily between Kathmandu and Tumlingtar, operated by Yeti
Airlines and Buddha Air. As well the town is connected by road to most of the places we
walked through including Chainpur and southwards to Dharan and Dhankuta. Nevertheless,
enticing treks well off-the-beaten track beckon, even today: descending eastward from Lukla
away from the busy Everest Base Camp route, and further east past the lakes of Gupha Pokhari
and on towards the Kanchenjunga conservation area, and others, all with an imperishable
display of seven and 8000 metre mountains across the entire northern horizon.
Today might not provide the serious, worthy thrills of High Adventure, nor indeed, the
wonder and delight that I and my four friends experienced as we rambled aimlessly and
unimportantly on our first encounter with the people and landscapes of the Himalayas, but
traces of each approach and era linger in the still challenging hills of far eastern Nepal.

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