Chapter 63: Trekking at the Top of the World

So, I survived my 3 week trek in the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon, aka Bhutan, a tiny Himalayan country of 600,000 Buddhist souls sandwiched between Tibet and India. Omigod, it was glorious with some transcendent moments, but it was also unbelievably hard. We slogged over 200 km though freezing rain, hail, mud (take your pick or combo) and over 7 km of steep ascent and over 7km of steep knee-shattering descent. Much of our hike was above 4000m, where one gasps for breath.
I was entirely unprepared for the cold, and brought wildly inappropriate clothing. I had cotton shorts and singlets, but I needed a polar down suit and rain slickers, and a thick wool scarf. Never been so persistently cold for so long. I went with Ziggy from Capetown, Francois from Boston and we're joined by Jane, a trekking-addicted vulcanologist from Lancashire with a total immunity to cold, and Karma our guide. Here's my daily log:

Staging post: Bangkok
Staying on the 58th floor of Lebua State Tower Hotel. Room has open air balcony, looking out on the river and the city which seems to stretch out forever. Drinking cold beer and hot chilli peanuts as a questionable antidote to extreme heat and humidity. Unable to go near vertigo-inducing balcony railing coz it makes me feel totally sick. Wonder how long it would take before I hit the ground if I accidentally slip over the balcony railing. Go for a cruise on the canal, to the snake park where i play with a monster python. Then to the Grand Palace where Ziggy and I check out the world's largest reclining Buddha, who seems very comfy!

Scary airplane arrival in Bhutan!
Arrive in Bhutan's Paro at 2550m. Only Druk Air, the national airline is allowed to use this airport because of the need for specialist flight training to navigate the weaving trail through the steep pine-clad mountains. The airplane bobbed, corkscrewed, weaved, spiralled and shuddered to land suddenly in tiny narrow Paro Valley. Airport consists of charming carved colourful wood buildings. Very different. The main airport terminal building:


Ziggy has near meltdown when I seem to break his specially purchased high-tech walking cane, while we wait for Francois and Jane to change money. "NO! I can't believe it, Peter, no!" he shouts at me. Disaster averted when he manages to put it back together after much huffing and puffing.

Hike to Tiger's Nest
Buddhist monastery perched on the edge of a cliff, allegedly founded by an 8th century saint who flew there on the back of a tiger and secured the building with angel hairs. Already the Bhutanese version of Buddhism - so called tantric Buddhism with deities, demigods, spirits, magic men, and a healthy dose of Hindu traditions - is starting to seem a bit bizarre. Buddhism is supposed to be nontheistic, but they have all kinds of gods. In front of a statue of the 8th century saint, there are all kinds of offerings: jelly shots, a loaf of bread, a HUGE plastic jar of Mentos Mints, biscuits, altitude-inflated packets of potato crisps, a bottle of wine, a can of coke (diet), a box of chocolate chip cookies, and tetrapacks of fruit juice. But the monks and nuns in their ruby coloured robes look very wonderful, and everyone smiles back.

On the way back we give a ride to a posse of young school boys who've been at Tae Kwon Do training. They are entranced by my tattoos and want to know if I know any of the wresters from WWF. One tells me that Bruce Lee is his father.Day 1 of true trek: Ruined Dzhong to Sharma Zampa at 2870m
Walk past the Bhutanese version of RSPCA. They round up stray dogs and because of Buddhist prohibitions on killing, they simply intern them in giant dog camps, and people looking to build up karmic merit donate food. The howling is intense. Howling dogs later prove to be the curse of the Himalayas. The dzhong and the dog concentration camp:

Starting to realize that there are lots of quirky things here in Bhutan. For example, cigarettes are illegal, but the people chew betel nut like crazy. Betel nut, which is chewed with some ground limestone and a leaf, not only stains their teeth a hideous orange-red, making them look like they've just come from a meal of blood, but it is also highly intoxicating and carcinogenic.
And the Buddhists eat meat, because it apparently is OK if someone else kills the animal. Plus, they raise pigs. Apparently, if they want to eat pork, they tie the pig next to a cliff, and when it falls off they can eat it because it has apparently committed suicide. The Buddhism here is highly superstitious. There are prayer wheels EVERYWHERE, and many of the houses have phalusses (ph painted on them.


Day 2: Sharna Zampa to Takenthangka at 3630m Rain, heavy rain. F did not sleep well, his feet poking out of our short tent into the rain. Pine forest has given way to poplars and oaks and rhododendrons, whose flowers are startling scarlet flash against the green, green, green everywhere. Trail is muddy and wet everywhere. Jolmohari, Bhutan's 2nd highest mountain at 7314m emerges, towering and glacier-capped above us during a brief break in the clouds. My boots hurt and I have blisters. When we arrive at camp, it's my first visit to the shitting tent. Z has been reading Lonely Planet and informs us that today was nothing. It gets much worse.

Day 3, Takenthangka to Jangothang at 4090m
Both F and I pooing 3 times a day. Must be what we're eating, and all the walking. Shitting, in the forest, in the wind-driven freezing rain, with your legs so tired you don't know if you can maintain the squat and avoid pitching bum first into it, is one of life's experience's definitely to be missed. I pull my wool cap out of my pocket and find a tick on it, which Karma, our guide, tells me is what's given me the two swollen and sore lumps on my neck. F immediately begins to talk about how dangerous Lymes Disease is.



We emerge from the tree-line and are astounded by how cold it is. At Jangothang camp we get rid of the ponies - too high for them here - and switch to yaks. They sound exotic, but really they are just furry cows with severe attitude problems. Huddling in the eating tent at night, bundled up with every article of clothing we can find, using the gas light as a source of heat, we make serious inroads into a bottle of whiskey and bring ourselves to hysterics by concluding logically that the army officers at the nearby outpost must be killingly bored and how there's nothing to do here but have sex. With yaks. And this is why the yaks are looking so mangy and run down and ornary. Sounds stupid here, but it was HILARIOUS at the time.

What we have to do to get warm!
Day 4: Jangothang - a rest day!
Joy! I didn't want to get out of my tent this morning, but as I was watching the zipper I see a sparkle of brightness and break out of our nylon shell to find glorious sunshine! The blue glaciers of Jolmohari appear to tumble down into our stunning campsite. This turns out to be one of our few good days. F, Z and I bathe in a freezing glacial stream and do laundry with stinging fingers. While Z retires to expire in his tent, F and I go for a hike though a tumble of black glacial boulders and boggy meadows speckled with wildflowers and grazing yaks to some glacial lakes at 4400m. F gives me a foot massage and silk sock inserts for my blisters. He doesn't realize it but he just garnered 400 gazillion credit points in Pete's scorecard.

Day 5: Jangothang to Lingshi 4010m, via the Ngile La pass at 4890m
The night is freezing. I go to my sleeping bag, with a separate silk inner liner, thermal underwear, a T-shirt, a woolen sweater, socks and a hot water bottle and my woollen hat and I'm still COLD at night. When I get up for a pee in the middle of the night to excrete my half a bottle of whiskey, my breath smokes in the biting air. The green and blue tents, luminescent from within, seem like strange marine animals in the near-submarine darkness.

During the day I learn to manage my temperature regulation, though an exhausting process of repeated layering and delayering. I also learn to finesse my temperature by raising my wool hat above my ears and lowering it again, loosening and tightening my scarf, and unzipping my outer shell-jacket by degrees. I am both hot and sweaty and cold at the same time. A most unpleasant feeling. High up on the mountain we hike through an austere brown and charcoal and olive and dun coloured landscape, with giant boulders. It looks blasted, lunar, like Iceland looks I imagine. As we cross the Ngile La pass at 4890m, hailstorms pelt us. As we descend through a bouldered forest of birch and rhododendron and brass-coloured moss. Tiny flowers hug the boggy ground.


We arrive at Lingshi. It's a shit-hole. We're supposed to stay here for a "rest day" but we rebel. F and I demand the whiskey immediately. And then I sleep a delightful sleep, thanks to a third of a bottle of whiskey and an Ambien. (Thank God for F's plentiful blue pills!) None of others so lucky. Z and F kept up all night, despite liberal application of whiskey/Ambien regime, by the chorus of howling dogs in the valley. In the morning, Z says he thinks the "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" galloped through the campsite at night.

Day 6: Lingshi to Chebisa at 3880m
At breakfast Ziggy asks if we can move the tables outside the eating tent. "It will bring the rain" notes Jane, laconically. We stop in the home of some Laya woman for lunch in a lovely stone village. She keeps coughing in my direction. I am now worried I'm going to get tuberculosis.
Terribly fed up with the food. I have a persistent T-bone BBQ steak and ceasar salad and chocolate ganache fantasy. Or cheese. But a few days ago, our illustrious guide Karma gave us some yak cheese. Frankly, I think it was a joke and we were actually eating yak toenail. We surreptitiously throw our cheese into the bushes.

Chebisa is even worse than Lingshi. Not only does it POUR rain down on us for the second part of the day's trek, but the tents are pitched in a mudfield. But our guides, to cheer us up, decide to make the first fire of the trip. (It's not really allowed here in Jigme Dorje National Park.) it's glorious. the brush they drag into the fire burns blue and sends a shower of sparks high into the sky. I am so pleased since it gives me a chance to wash and dry the silk socks I've been wearing for days. However, instead of drying them, I manage to melt them. Luckily, good F has another pair he donates to me. The brush burns blue and marvellous. Zig's hand towel blows off his tent and into a huge pile of yak poo.

Day 7: Chebisa to Shomuthang 4220m via the Gombu La pass at 4480
A very hard day's trekking. We are high up here, and we gasp for air. I'm powerfully struck by how fragile our world. We are 4km above the sea level and it's so cold here and we are well above the tree line and the land looks blasted and lunar. We can hardly breathe. But putting this into perspective, the distance of 4 km is something you could easily run in 20 minutes if it were laid horizontally! Think about it.

Day 8: Shomuthang to Robluthang 4160m via the Jhari La pass at 4747m
F opens a new jar of freeze-dried coffee, and when he plunged the spoon into the airseal the coffee crystals exploded all over him with a bang. I guess it was the pressure. Oh How We Laugh. My favourite day of hiking so far, with a long descent through a resiny pine forest bedecked with wild irises to cross a beautiful grassy valley. We eat lunch by a burbling crystal stream and fell asleep in the hot sun, before the final leg of today's trek. The sun disappears as soon as we take our clothes off at the pretty campsite, but we bathe in the freezing spring nonetheless. Shortly thereafter, in the eating tent, I feel a sharp pain on my ass. I ask Francois to have a look. Another tick, feasting on me. Lovely, just lovely.
Day 9: Robluthang to Limithang 4140m via the Sinche La pass at 5005m
A starving dog in our campsite eagerly ate the remains of the gruel which the cook Nidup spooned out onto the grass, but the dog took one sniff and rejected the spoonful of baked beans which I ladelled out for him. Which more or less sums up my view on baked beans too.

Ziggy not feeling well. He has a tooth infection. He's over it. He's talking about evacuating. His face is swelling up, so we start dosing him with amoxycillan.

We are freezing. Nonetheless, we feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment, as this is the highest point of the hike at over 5km above sea level.


Limithang is a beautiful campsite and when we wake we see Tiger Mountain towering above our campsite by the river. This is a nice place to stay:


Day 10: Limithang to Laya 3750m and Day 11 (rest day in Laya)
We finally reach Laya, a quite pretty village of about 1000 yak herders, though we have to hike through a sewer to get there. It's misty, but pretty.
At night, while Z suffers a swollen face and incredible pain from his tooth infection, we suffer a ghastly cultural performance by the local Laya women, in which we're only kept awake from the soporific shuffling dance by the awful caterwauling songs, which all sound the same, and drag on and on and on until I take an executive decision and ask Karma to ask them to go to bed.
On the plus side, however, Laya has a "general shop" (hahahahahahah) which sells beer and cheese! I'm thrilled, since I think I'll gag if I have one more meal of stewed asparagus and eggplant and rice. So I suck back the beer and eat a kilo of plastic cheese off the end of F's penknife and two bags of pineapple flavoured biscuits.
Me and Jane, emerging victorious, having found beer!
But my Extreme Beer Joy is offset by my great sadness for Z, who is really sick with a tooth abscess that has become a sinus infection. His face is swollen and deformed and he's in a lot of pain, and the antibiotics we've been treating him with are not working. And so, after much debate, we decide to medivac him off the mountain on the back of a pony. We are four days long hike from the nearest road. In the morning at 5am we see Z and or guide off into the rainy mist and we feel pretty gloomy and sad for him. I start drinking the brandy straight away, and by 6:30 am I'm drunk. And freezing:

Eventually, F and I decide to stroll through the village, and we are fortunate to discover a festival archery competition, where we are invited to partake of the lunch of rice and yak meat, which was utterly disgusting, like a dessicated poodle turd with lumps of rancid yellow fat clinging to it. Luckily for me, F rises to the occassion and manages to eat the bowl we've been given, after I gag on the second mouthful. (My contribution was a frantic effort to prevent them from giving us a second bowl.) "I'm going to take Cipro the moment I get back to the tent", whispers F to me. We also are served plentiful cups of butter tea - regular tea flavoured with yak butter and salt. This is not awful, but it leaves a nasty greasy slick on my lips. We drink the sour local barley beer/wine too.
We are hideously unwashed. I believe hot running water is the greatest achievement of western civilization. By far.Fed the local crows which have a brush of feathers on their head which makes them look incredibly thuggish, like dockworkers or schoolboy bullies who smoke.


Day 12: Laya to an unnamed foul mudpit
This is the portion of the trek where leaches are said to throw themselves acrobatically off the trees to feast on us. But we're lucky, we don't see any leaches. But it's an exceptionally long day through a stunningly beautiful, though dripping wet, landscape. It's like a Chinese painting of deep green impossibly steep mountains wreathed in mist. We don't stay in the intended campsite of Koina, commonly known as "the worst campsite in the Himalayas", because we'd be up to our knees in mud. But the place we eventually camp is not much better. It's not a proper site, just a little space by the side of the road, and F's and my tent is pitched at a steep angle. We are in a grim mood. Haven't bathed for ages, and my sleeping bag is damp, and I'm OVER IT. The donkeys, who've been freed to graze, keep stumbling over the guy wires of our tent in the middle of the night and nearly collapsing it. It cannot get worse for us.

Day 13: Unnamed foul mudpit to Gasa Hot Springs via the Bari La pass at 3900m
We set off next morning from the mud pit and pretty quickly pass the Bari La pass to begin an astounding knee-shattering descent of 1710m. The bird song is amazing. There are violet butterflies on the path that flutter up so quickly that I fancy they are ephemeral wrinkles in the space-time continuum. Clouds of shiny irridescent green flies lift off the fresh horse manure with a satanic buzz. By the side of the road are hundreds of tiny wild strawberries. I eat them, and Jane looks at me disapprovingly. "Don't eat them if a dog might have peed on them, or your liver will pack up in 15 years."

Finally we arrive in Gasa, where we SCARF monstrous amounts of cheese dumplings with chilli sauce in a local restaurant/flea pit. We have cell phone reception and after F calls his mother, I call Karma, who tells me that Ziggy has evacuated to Bangkok. I tell Karma that We Are Well and Truly Done. I tell him that we'll hike to the roadhead tomorrow, but then I want a car to pick us up and take us to a hotel. We are ecstatically happy with our decision to bail 2 days early. F praises me for my leadership qualities in deciding and organizing this early exit. Then we go and take a long, long soak in the sulferous hotsprings. My silver ring turns a copper colour.

Back to civilization!
We have to hike out quite far to the roadhead before we drive out a long winding dirt road that is carved into the sides of steep mountains. The impossible vertical topography of the land, the only horizontals being the road and, here and there, a tiny rice terrace carved into the side of a cliff. Everywhere else it is a verdant jungle of oaks and orchids and moss clinging to the sides of cliffs. But when we emerge lower into the hot dry heat of the Punakha valley, the landscape changes to pine forest and terraced fields of rice, barley, oats, wheat, potatoes, chillies:
It's really lovely here. Plus, I find marijuana growing by the side of the road, though despite our best cropping and consumption efforts, it fails to make us high, so I resort instead to copious consumption of Druk beer:
We go to the market and overwhelmed by the abundance of fresh and interesting foodstuffs, including the bizarre looking and incredibly awful Bitter Gourd, which we had the misfortune to have to eat nearly every day of our trip:

At the hotel we scrub ourselves clean and luxuriate in our dry clean room and beds. We feast on meat and beer. We hand in 3 huge garbage bags of laundry to the reception. We watch a movie on my laptop. I speak to Ziggy in Bangkok where the dentist drained a huge abscess. We are gloriously happy to know that he's finally OK.

This trip has definitely aged me. I find the first grey hairs in my scalp. F laughs at me, and I am not amused. This is a very bad development, these grey hairs

We visit the famous and stunningly beautiful Punakha Dzong at the confluence of the milky "male" and dark "female" rivers, with its grounds of blooming jacarandas. We take lots of pictures of the monks in their handsome robes, which are so photogenic. F has little appetite for our guide's faltering explanations of what it all means, and so it falls to me to nod politely while containing my growing irritation.
The next several days in the capital of Thimpu and Paro are much the same: dzongs and cultural tourism and beer and sleep. Finally comes the day to leave. All in all, it was an amazing trip, but much harder than I'd expected. Still, I survived!