Adventure begins at 60

Sudha Mahalingam

Cartography may be a science, but planning your trek using only maps certainly is not, not when the destination is the high Himalayas, not when you are 60 plus.

Originally, our plan was to trek to Annapurna Base Camp, at 13,000 feet, over six or seven days from Pokhara, that picturesque lakeside town in Nepal. But poring over the map spread on the dining table, I had a brainwave. Nepal’s legendary Mustang province, home to Khampas, those irresistibly roguish Tibetan bandits who valiantly tried to repulse the Chinese advancing into their beloved land, and Lhobas, also of Tibetan origin, seemed to be in the same Annapurna Conservation Area. So why not extend our trek to Lo Manthang, the capital of Upper Mustang fabled for its Buddhist art treasures? On the map, it seemed doable.

Parvathi, my friend from Bangalore, jumped at the idea. Her father had trekked all the way from Kathmandu to Mustang in — hold your breath — 1956.  He had taken along elaborate camping gear and an entourage of porters, cooks and guides. This exotic destination was a family legend of sorts among her kith and kin. How exciting it would be to retrace his footsteps, long after he himself was gone! Suhasini was indifferent — after all, sitting in San Diego, she had not bothered to look up the map. 

All she did was to grumble about the length of the trip — 24 days. For all three of us in our sixties (two of us past the midway mark), the prospect of a continuous 24-day trek should have been daunting, to say the least. But a delightful recklessness had overtaken us and Mustang became part of our itinerary.

So, here we were, huffing and puffing up the heaps of rocks that make up the trekking trail to Annapurna Base Camp (ABC). Starting our trek at Nayapul, 80 km from Pokhara, we failed to notice that most trekkers rattled past us in SUVs, to start climbing from further up the trail, beyond the vehicle track — from a village called Siwai. It took us the better part of the day to reach Siwai itself, after which we had another five hours of climb to Jinu Dhanda, our first pitstop. It was getting dark and we were stumbling through bramble and bush with an unseen river Kali Gandaki roaring in the adjacent precipitous gorge. After a couple of hours, we reached an unimaginatively (and repetitively) named village called New Bridge where we flopped in a heap and called it a day. We were at least three hours from Jinu.

When you trip up on the very first day, there is little hope of catching up. Suman, our agent in Kathmandu, and Dinesh, our guide, seem to have some imaginative notions of trekking distances which, in these parts, are not measured in kilometres or miles, but by the number of hours. Accordingly, our night halts had been planned according to the speed and prowess of habitual trekkers of Sherpa calibre, certainly not suitable for hobbling sexagenarians with wheezing lungs and crackling knees.

Trekking at senior pace would not have been that much of a problem had we not combined the Mustang leg to our initial plan. Part of the Mustang trip — from Pokhara to Jomsom — could have been done by plane or rickety buses for which tickets would have to be booked from Kathmandu. Suman was unsure of our pace and the date on which we would make this journey. He had, therefore, taken the easy way out (for himself) and designed a trek that would take us straight from ABC to Jomsom through some of the steepest ranges of the Himalaya, without touching Pokhara. We would be cruising — if you can call it that — above 12,000 feet throughout the trek on a route guaranteed to wreck anyone’s knee-joints, including those of Tenzing Norgay himself.

With Dinesh reminding us of our tight schedule and cracking the whip mercilessly, we had no option but to plod on gamely through the treacherous trekking trail to Annapurna Base Camp. Besides, failure to reach the next hamlet on any day would mean freezing under a starry sky at minus temperatures. At every bend and turn, we were straining our rheumy eyes to catch a glimpse of that tell-tale fluttering prayer flag, which marks the entrance to a hamlet.  After all, spotting it literally signified the difference between life and death.

Each hamlet on the ABC trail — most of them have just five or six households — has a few rooms that go by the honorific “teahouses” where trekkers lodge and board, unless they carry their own tents and stoves. There is no advance booking in the teahouses, you just arrive and grab a bed. At times when there are more trekkers than rooms, you might even be asked to share a room with perfect strangers. In some hamlets, even the dining halls were packed with weary trekkers, their sleeping bags rolled out over every inch of covered space. Fortunately, for us, our porters had skipped ahead and grabbed rooms for us in the teahouses all along the way.

By far, the most daunting challenge of the trek for us was the prospect of accomplishing our daily ablutions. Teahouses invariably have just a single squat toilet used by every passing trekker, trader, porter, guide and the villagers themselves. Flexible knees apart, you need strong bladder and bowels to withstand the inevitable wait that entails.

From day four, as we gained height, the air became thin and so did our wallets. Charging phones, cameras, iPads or taking a hot shower costs you a bomb as the altitude increases. The rarified air may not give you a heart attack, but the price of wi-fi certainly will. But then, families back home have to be reassured, and more importantly, friends on Facebook have to be made envious.

And when you finally reach the base of the mighty Annapurna and have taken your regulation photographs, smugness comes to you effortlessly. Smirking at those poor souls plodding up the steep slopes, you patronise them cheerfully.  “Just a little bit more, you’re almost there,” a blatant lie when they have at least three to four more hours of this excruciating uphill trudge. The far more challenging trek to Upper Mustang still awaited us, but for the moment, we could savour our small triumph of having reached ABC.