9th November. Manang (Rest day??)
Ha! So much for our supposed rest day – we ended up walking just as far and climbing considerably more than on any other day so far. I guess this is all good for acclimatisation purposes.
It was gloriously warm in the cocoon of my five-season sleeping bag in which I lay snuggled until 7am.
We had heard that a lama dwelt in a nearby monastery and doled out blessings to those heading over Thorong La. Thinking we needed all the luck we could get, we decided to try and track him down. Narayan presumed that he hung out in the gompa in Bryaga, which we had passed yesterday, so after breakfast the four of us set out, Narayan in his bright yellow scarf and big grin. There was no wind and it was a beautiful walk in bright warm sunlight through the village then across a frozen stream to the valley. Narayan led the way up several flights of golden stoned steps to the gompa entrance. The door was locked. We sat for a few minutes, like lizards in the sun, staring out past the ocean of prayer flags to the glacial peaks beyond the valley. The lama, it turned out, was away on business in Kathmandu, but a young boy showed us around. Narayan, as a devout Buddhist, guided us through the complicated maze of prayer wheels that guarded the entrance. There was one huge red one in a small ante-chamber. We all had to walk around it in a clockwise direction spinning it as we went. Next came rows of mini prayer-wheels like those we had seen on the mani wall outside each village in Buddhist regions of Nepal. (You should always walk around these clockwise to avoid bringing dire bad fortune to yourself and the community. Even the local dogs seem to know the correct way to go.)
Inside, the temple was very colourful with several pillars completely clad in bright silk brocade flags, rows of yak butter lamps and photos of the Dalai Lama.
We continued up the valley along a track which we thought might possibly be the high road to Pisang. I rolled up the sleeves of thermal shirt to catch the sun. It was hard to believe the temperature difference since yesterday afternoon. Up here it goes from T-shirt weather to full thermals the instant the sun dips behind a cloud or mountain. The team were all in incredibly good spirits, bursting into ‘Resum piriri’ in all but the steepest bits. Beth stopped to lean her pink daypack against a sun-baked rock, creating a great photo op with the meandering river and distant mountains in the background. Narayan sang a catchy little Nepalese folk number and Euguene spontaneously broke into an Irish jig, beating his walking stick in time to the rhythm. This was what life was all about.
By the time we returned to Bryaga (probably about mid-day), a cold wind had sprung up again, necessitating an abrupt change from T-shirt to fleece jackets. We stopped for tea on the breezy roof of Bryaga’s sole guest house and got into a conversation about photography with a South African trekker. As we walked through the windswept arid valley back to Manang, Tibetan ponies galloped alongside, full of the joys of life. Their saddled companions sported lots of red leather and jangling bells. Very picturesque. We wondered about hi-jacking one to take us over the pass.
After lunch we ran into Patrick, a British guy we had kept encountering since a few days back. He casually waved a yellow ribbon tied round his neck and told us it was a blessing from the lama who lived on another hill at the back of Manang and not at Bryaga, as we had assumed. Still relatively full of energy and determined to get our blessings, Beth, Eugene and I followed a narrow path upwards against a strong, dusty wind. Beth instantly regretted wearing her contact lenses. We gasped in the thin cold air as the path became steeper. We were starting to notice the altitude. We must have come up at least 200m from Manang village so must now be at around 3,700m above sea level. Gudrun and Gerard passed us heading downhill. They said they had gone half way to the lama’s lair but the path was too steep and they wished to conserve their energy for Thorong La tomorrow. This of course gave us gluttons for punishment extra impetus to make it all the way.
I had been pouring gallons of water and tea down my gullet in an effort to combat altitude sickness, so of course had to keep stopping to pee. Very little cover was offered by the scant mountain scrub, so I probably exposed myself to the entire Manang valley. Beth and I envy Eugene his male anatomical advantage. Eugene led the way and Beth and I huffed along behind muttering that you could see who was the youngest by ten years now.
‘We’re nearly there’ I heard from above. And then, ‘Wow!’
A golden eagle was hovering directly above. I caught up with Eugene and we stood still on the narrow path to watch it. It soared then swooped down towards us until it seemed as though we could almost touch it. It swept and dropped, playing on the thermal air currents, until it dipped below the cliff and out of sight.
Wheee! We’re there’. There was a collective cry as we all rounded a corner and popped over the last rise to emerge at a flat space near a chorten. Feeling a great sense of euphoria, we stood at the edge of the ridge and stared out at the primeval landscape before us. We could see a turquoise cirque lake glinting in the last rays of the sun far below and cold grey mountains stretching to infinity. It felt as though we were the only people on a young and volatile planet. Tentatively, I propped the camera on a stone jutting from the chorten and fired ad lib with the self-timer. I raced to join my bobble-hatted companions as the electronic beeps sounded, incongruously, in that vast natural domain, and we all stood grinning triumphantly into the lens.
‘Four thousand metres,’ cried Eugene. ‘This is a first, a record height for all of us and we’re still OK. Now, let’s go and see this lama.’
‘Er….I hate to say this guys, but…’ I pointed to a pray flag flying from a flat roof about 150 metres above where we were standing. ‘I think the lama lives up there.’
Beth craned her neck to stare up the practically vertical track. ‘Crumbs! He must be enlightened.’
Having come this far, we could not fail to continue to our goal. We were all on a high anyway and visiting the lama was enough to send us off the scale. Eugene led again, I staggered along in the middle and Beth puffed and panted at the rear. Slowly but surely, we all staggered up one of the steepest paths I have ever climbed. As we neared the summit a little wrinkled old lady wielding a prayer wheel beckoned us into the lama’s lair. The lama himself sat in sun-beamed, orange-robed splendour and smiled at us.
‘Which country?’
He put on his ecclesiastical hat for the ceremony. In turn, we had to kneel in front of him while he tied a yellow ribbon around our necks and handed us a sort of ochre seed and a handful of holy water to swallow, all the time intoning prayers in Nepali or Tibetan (I can’t tell the difference). The lama and his wife spoke virtually no English and our Nepali was in its infancy. I managed to convey through pantomime that we had a friend, a porter, who was asleep back in Manang and that he would like a blessing too. The old couple instantly caught on and a yellow ribbon and seed were sprinkled with holy water and packaged up to be taken down for Narayan. (He really appreciated it.) Then a little girl brought us tea.
‘Ramro.’ We all said the Nepalese word Narayan had told us meant ‘good.’
The lama’s wife shook her head. She pointed to her eyes and said ‘ramro’, the pointed to her mouth and said ‘mito’.
‘Ah,’ I said in instant comprehension. ‘She means that ramro means good as in pretty and mito means good as in tasty. She would make a good language teacher.’
Feeling elated, we made a rapid descent. I used ski-technique, zigzagging sideways to slow my progress and ease pressure on knees and quads. We all talked eagerly about our latest experience, glad to have shared it with others who felt the same magic. Patrick had merely described the climb as ‘a bit steep’ but had said nothing of the jubilation felt when up there, nor the other worldly experience of meeting the lama. We all felt justifiably proud of our steep ascent and descent. We are certainly following the acclimatisation advice to ‘walk high and sleep low’. I hope it holds us in good stead for the near future.
We got a bit lost on the way back through the upper reaches of Manang village and Eugene and I lost Beth for a while and found a traffic jam of goats. Luckily, Eugene’s sense of direction proved itself again and we finally made it back to the Yak Hotel. Left to my own devices, I would have probably ended up in Tibet. At the general store under the Yak Hotel we stocked up on chocolate bars, mineral water and the Nepalese version of granola ready for our imminent days in the wilds. We were never sure what to do about drinking water. We’d been warned the local water was brim full of giardia and amoebic dysentery parasites with a possible side dose of typhoid and cholera and was not even safe to brush your teeth with. Beth stuck to dripping iodine solution into her water bottle to kill the plethora of bugs. Eugene and I thought the swimming pool taste was disgusting and we could never manage to keep a bottle of iodine intact for very long. The bottle I had bought in Thamel, which had stained Eugene’s trousers with suspicious brown splotches, had set to work to wreck as many things as possible in my daypack. It had leaked all over my other medicines and destroyed a precious loo roll, so in the end, following the advice of fellow trekkers, I had thrown the blasted thing away. Eugene still had a tiny leak-free bottle but we preferred mineral water when available. We did feel pangs of guilt about plastic being dreadful for the environment and were always careful to carry bottles on the next guest house for refilling from large containers. Naturally, we often suspected that bottles of supposed mineral water had been refilled with tap water. We would sniff suspiciously whenever we opened one and, if it smelt dicey, we would add a few drops of iodine anyway. The alternative was Beth’s famous umleko pani or boiled water. However, at the high altitudes we were now reaching, water probably did not boil at anything like a hundred degrees.
One of the disadvantages of having electric light in your bedroom is that you have to get out of bed to turn it off. Beth usually fiddled around the most and so was the last ready for bed, thus she was assigned this chilly task. Tonight, unable to force herself out of her warm sleeping bag, where she had completed her preparations for sleep, she caused hilarity among the ranks by hopping across the room, Egyptian mummy style in it.