Nepal Part 3: the Summit

The truth is that I could write about Nepal and out travels there almost endlessly. While there I filled pages and pages daily about the sights, the scenes and the things I was thinking. It is an absolutely magical and marvelous part of the world. I knew that when I first started hearing people talk about it and I hear the same wonder in my voice when someone gets me on the topic now.

The most intensely emotional part of the journey for me was going over Thorong La Pass. It involved gaining almost a kilometer of altitude to the summit of the pass and then descending more than a mile on the other side. It was a long day.

Getting there was slow, hard and wonderful. As we reached higher altitudes, the air thinned and with less oxygen it didn’t take much to lose breath. My heart rate sped up, my feet slowed down. There were times I felt like I was crawling across the surface of the earth.

It’s not such a bad thing to be forced to slowly plod across the particular section of this earth known as the Annapurna Mountain Ranges, I have to say. It’s not even a bad thing to have to stop often to catch one’s breath, since such stops afford a nice long look at the mountains soaring around.

It is an amazing thing to be 3500m above sea level and to see mountains still towering thousands of feet above your head. Dizzying, in face.

When at altitude, your body needs time to adjust to the different levels of oxygen in the air, so we walked slowly and traveled just a few hours a day. The amount of time you can walk is limited to how much elevation you gained. From where we were, the path went continually upwards, so we couldn’t go far.

One day we pulled in before noon to our destination, a town which is only inhabited during the summer by yak herders. There were two hotels, one on either side of the path, and the women working there were the only ones in the area this late in the year. We took the path on the upper hill side, which meant a few more steps, but an amazing view. A group of nudist European trekkers took the downward slope and proceeded to get naked in the winter sun, despite the extremely traditional dress of their hostess and oblivious to any discomfort they may be causing.

We had our hotel to ourselves and spent the afternoon drinking tea in the sunshine. We both had books at hand, but spent the majority of our time lost in contemplating those gorgeous mountain ranges spread out before us. I flew my kite, or tried to, but the uncertain gusts of wind teased but didn’t deliver. Jay took his camera into the deserted village, chasing a yak through the streets in slow, high altitude motion.

I had a book of my favorite poetry with me, but even that couldn’t compare to the beauty around us. The mountains were intoxicating. They were poetry written large across the sky, lines of verse carved into long sedentary rock formations undulating across the mountain range. The mountains were a song , great booming orchestra of silence. It was impossible not to feel a happiness akin to elation floating around among it all.

The next day the walking was difficult, but I knew we didn’t have far to go and that we had a whole day to get there, so I just kept putting one foot a little in front of the other and focusing on keeping my breath coming. We stopped for tea at Thorong Phedi, a popular camp, but instead of staying the night, we tackled a steep slope straight up the rock.

It seemed to go forever. My feet seemed to hardly move. My lungs heaved. And yet, every stop I made was incredible. At every switchback the view changed; a little more was revealed, something fell into shadow, something was hidden, something else came to light.

So I came, almost unbearably slowly, to High Camp – a wooden building on a steep rocky hill in the middle of dust and rock and snow. Plain, ugly, gray, brown, and incredibly powerfully beautiful.

We revived in the lodge’s sunroom over soup and then set out to tackle the small peak just outside the lodge. At the top was a cairn of rocks stacked up high enough to lean upon and festooned with prayer flags. The wind was strong and cold and the view unparalleled and completely worth the climb. I got dizzy and dropped my camera, sticking close by the rocks after that.

There was no fire in the hall that night, but the bodies of so many trekkers packed together kept us from freezing. Still, we were snuggled in our sleeping bags at 6:30pm just to stay warm. The night was dark, with the most brilliant pinpricks of light overhead. They stopped me in my tracks when I darted out to the outhouse in the middle of the very cold night.

In the morning, snowflakes were swirling in the wind and the clouds walked among us. We were the last trekkers to set off in the dark, walking across the desert wasteland through the dawn. As we climbed, the clouds descended, the sun rose and then pierced the clouds. There was no doubt that we were on top of the world.

It was long but not as difficult as some of our other days climbing and suddenly I saw Jay up ahead, waiting to take my hand. “This part, we do together,” he said.

So we walked forward across the snow, just the two of us up there on top of the world, the wind flapping strongly around our heads, the cold biting at our flesh, feet and backs tired and sore and hearts full and overspilling with joy.

We arrived at that place, the pass between huge peaks, together, hands entwined, a hundred prayer flags snapping against the gale and tears pouring from our eyes. It seemed incredible to be there, to feel so alive, to have overcome the dengue and the altitude and everything else, to stand there, in that moment, that hand in mine.

I couldn’t stop crying.

There was a hut at the top with tea and a fire and we huddled there for a while but eventually it was time to go. We had to drop down a mile and hike for another several hours before we’d be in the next settlement and the wind was too cold to bear. So, facing outwards towards a magnificent river valley, we put our feet forward and kept on walking.