Fire table madness

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  Kagbeni, Nepal, Nepal
Saturday, January 15, 2005

The evening in Tukche was spent reading and writing until it got too dark. We were treated once again to the table-with-a-fire-under-it which was happily administered by a lovely but clearly insane old lady. She was toothless but constantly smiling. She'd been put in charge of table fire duties and it was a job she clearly took very seriously. She would appear with hot coals at frequent intervals and, with a maniacal cackle, would dive under the table with them. Our comments on these occasions progressed from: 'Oh brilliant. It's the fire table lady with some hot coals...' to 'Wow. Here she is again. It's getting kind of hot under there...' to [sweat dripping from forehead and horrified expression] 'Oh my God. Here she is again...'

The temperature under the table is enough to peel the skin off your legs. My trousers are synthetic and I'm seriously worried that they're going to melt

A nice mountain in the Himalayas...

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The night progresses, the TV comes on. The only other time I'd seen TV on the trek was in Ghasa and mostly involved watching Nepali pop videos with Dina giving a running commentary. When we'd been in Ghasa all of the porters had sat glued to the TV, catatonic, like it was some kind of drug or something.

Anyway, tonight there's a movie on called 'the Hours'. James thinks it's rubbish and goes to bed. I sit there, catatonic and find it strangely compelling somehow. I didn't realise it but I had seriously disrupted the evening's viewing schedule for the old ladies sitting behind me. For this reason I can no longer return to the guest house in Ghasa. (Certainly I would be taking my life in my hands by using any fire-tables).

From Tukche we set off for Kagbeni - what is to be the last stop before Muktinath ('mook-tin-ah') which is the furthest point on James's journey and the last stop before the Thorung-La pass for me.

The four of us - James, Yam, Dina and me - seem to have gelled somewhat as a group and walk together at much the same pace, usually with Dina and Yam out in front

Dhaulaghiri from the temple

. James and I march along behind with the operative word being 'march. Nobody's egging anyone on and I certainly don't feel like there's any sense of competition or whatever but somehow we settle into a pace that, to my mind, is pretty fast. We rarely stop.

We begin by following a trail that is beside a dry riverbed. The going would be quite easy if we weren't walking into the teeth of a gale. The wind comes howling down the valley and hits us straight on - we might as well be walking up a steep hill. Worse, the wind picks up large amounts of dust and grit from the dry riverbed and throws it straight in your face and eyes.

All in all the walking is quite hard. It's overcast with not much to see, but you settle into a zone, sing 'The Earth dies screaming' by UB40 (old UB40 - pre their commercialised stuff) and just walk and walk.

With the pace that we're walking we go quickly through Marpha and Jomsom. We go down onto the dried riverbed and spend the rest of the day marching on smooth rocks about the size of your fist and loose sand. It's quite hard going although it doesn't seem to slow us down that much. We reach our destination for the day - Kagbeni - after about six hours

Dhaulaghiri peak from Muktinath

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We have, over the last couple of days, put in some fairly serious mileage. We walked about 25km that day and a little bit less the day before.

I haven't showered since Tatopani. Not that I haven't tried, but at both Ghasa and Tukche I held my hand optimistically under a running shower for about five minutes until, with crushed hopes and a very cold hand, giving up.

Almost all the hot water on the Annapurna circuit is solar heated. I could go into complex discussions on the subjects of thermo-dynamics, radiation and heat transfer but what 'solar powered' in the Himalayas means is a black tank that sits on the roof of the guest house. This is the hot water tank. It can actually be quite effective - the sun can be very strong in the mountains. The fatal flaw, though, is that whilst the tank sits exposed to the sun, it also sits in ambient temperatures of about -10 degrees centigrade (and frequently in a pile of snow and ice).

So it was with minimal optimism and great cynicism that I turned on the hot water in the guest house in Kagbeni

Dolls at the entrance to the temple

. Hold on a minute... This is warm! I mean this is warm enough that I'd put myself under it without making those girly squealing sounds... Whoah! I mean this is actually hot!

Well, another addition to the James Drummond Karma Sutra (v.3.10b Mk IV). I must have been in that shower for an hour.

Feeling like all my Christmases have come at once I wander downstairs to see about some tea. I go into the dining room where James is being indecently spanked at chess by Dina (Dina is a seriously switched on bloke).

I read my book for a bit, the sun starts to go down, a Dutch couple come in and sit down at the same fire-table as me and, right on cue, a lady walks in with a bucket of hot coals and puts it under the table. Ah, lovely! My legs are getting warm. Assuming the classic fire-table position of hunching over with my hands under the table cloth, I'm really getting quite warm... A couple of German girls sitting at a different table begin talking and gesticulating in alarmed fashion. The word 'smoke' enters the conversation.

Now smoke is a relentless feature of life in Nepal

Looking cool on the trail...

. I never came across a building with central heating in Nepal. All heat for cooking or, um, heat comes from open fires which are fuelled by anything that will remotely burn - wood, cardboard, corn husks, yak dung... I also never came across a building with a chimney so the smoke doesn't escape very well. Most nights on the trek I'd wake up hacking my guts up with a dry, smoker's cough.

So it wasn't a particular surprise that the dining room was a bit smoky, but now that I think about it the smoke in here really is quite thick...

The source of the smoke is revealed by lifting the table cloth which results in smoke billowing out from under the table. Further inspection reveals that the hot coals are releasing two foot flames directly onto the under side of the table. I have yet to see a fire-table instruction manual but I suspect that such conditions are outside of the manufacturer's guidelines. Anyway, with great cheer and notable lack of concern one of the ladies calms the flames and I resume the now nightly ritual of picking molten synthetic fabric from my knees.

I get talking to the Dutch couple who have just finished cycling around the Kathmandu valley

Our plane - the good ship 9N-AEP

. Nutters. We start playing cards with James, Dina and Yam and then the Dutch guy asks the German girls if they want to play so they come over and join us. Some of the other guides and porters join as well. There are about 12 of us sitting around the table and we have a seriously good laugh playing a daft card game that involves singing a song or telling a joke if you lose. I lose and sing 'Flower of Scotland' much to James's disgust.

The next morning we're up bright and early for the trek to Muktinath. This is to be an 'easy' day in the sense that it's only three of four hours walk. What are not easy are the conditions. We're to ascend about 1,000 metres and it's pretty much all straight up.

There is a half-finished, unused road which gently ascends to Muktinath. The local Nepalis obviously regard the road as a time-wasting irrelevance and have forged a path straight up the hill side. It's one of those that you're thinking if you fell over here, particularly with a pack, that you wouldn't stop for a looooong time.

It's punishing but relatively short. We soon reach a lightly sloping trail that leads into Muktinath. It is the most spectacular walk that I have ever taken in my life

Prayer flags and mountain

. The sky is crystal clear and dark blue. We have the Dhaulaghiri range to our rear and the peaks that enclose Thorung-La to the front. You'll have to do this walk for yourself because there's no way that I can possibly describe it.

We stop for lunch at a restaurant that has average food and a spectacular view.

Whether or not I go to Throung-La has become a subject of hot debate. The night before I asked James to ask Yam (James's guide) for the low-down on whether this is a good idea or not.

Yam's a brilliant bloke. When you picture a Himalayan mountain guide you probably wouldn't think of someone quite as rotund as Yam. You also might not envision someone who smokes 20 cigarettes a day and gets drunk every night on apple brandy / beer / whatever's going really.

But if you were to put Yam in the hills against James (who recently ran a half marathon) then my money would definitely be on the guy with the pot belly and cheesy grin (that's Yam in case there's any confusion).

Team South Manchester (and Nepal)

He's a very happy guy with an infectious grin. He's also very experienced where the Annapurna circuit is concerned and I'm very interested to know what his opinion is of me doing Thorung-La. James says that Yam is unequivocal: he doesn't do Thorung-La in January. Full stop. I can also hear Yam's voice as James lists off the problems that I face.

Number one and crucially: I'm doing this in the wrong direction. If you do the Annapurna circuit anti-clockwise then you approach Thorung-La with a gradual climb over several days. From about 4600 metres you do an ascent of 900m, go through the pass and then drop 1,500m steeply down to Muktinath. What I'm proposing is to start at 4,000m, make an extremely punishing ascent of 1,500m which takes 7 or 8 hours then turn around and come down. Dina tells me he's done Thorung-La thirty times: 27 times from the other direction and three from this side.

Not only are there physical challenges to this route but you also significantly increase the probability of getting AMS (Acute mountain sickness). By approaching Thorung-La from the other side you give your body a chance to acclimatise.

James lists off the other problems

The trail leading to Thorung-La

. Because you're spending 11 or 12 hours on the trail you have to start well before sunrise. The trail is very steep and treacherous and will probably be covered in ice. There is a high probability of snow and fog in the afternoon - both of which make Thorung-La very hazardous.

I can see Throung-La slipping away and it's bothering me. Most trekkers would have a problem with going 5/6 of the way up a mountain and then turning around before reaching the peak. This walk didn't have a peak as its goal but it still had a goal - Thorung-La - that really appealed to my imagination somehow.

I'd been badgering Dina about it for days. He'd adopted the Asian strategy of saying every possible alternative as opposed to outrightly saying no. I thought we'd reached a compromise by saying: 'Well, we'll set off on the trail, see how it goes. Any problems at all - the weather turns bad or whatever - we'll turn around.' I think Dina realised quite quickly that it was unlikely I'd get half-way up that path and then decide to turn around. I can be pretty bloody determined when I want to be.

James hands me a book which has a large section on AMS. It was a little bit late to be reading it at 4,000m. My approach to AMS had been: 'Now to go trekking I need sleeping bag... down jacket... socks... Ah yes! AMS... Now let's see. Iodine tablets... sunglasses...

I did know a bit about AMS: there are multiple seemingly minor symptoms: headaches, nausea, dizziness, lack of appetite, inability to sleep and so on

View from the cockpit at takeoff

. I knew that if you feel rough then you need to descend. And this is true. The book spells this out as one of the first rules concerning AMS: if you start showing symptoms then you must not ignore them. You should start descending immediately and should certainly not ascend. (interestingly, you can buy drugs to suppress these symptoms in Jomsom. Probably not a good idea but anyway).

What I hadn't appreciated was how serious the consequences of ignoring the symptoms of AMS can be. There are two types of AMS: High Altitude Cerebral Edema (HACE) and High Altitude Pulmonary Edema (HAPE). HACE is fluid in the brain, HAPE is fluid in the lungs. You can read more about AMS here. As you might imagine, both are extremely serious. You can go from having a headache and nausea to life-threatening illness in a matter of hours. People die from AMS on a shockingly regular basis (as I would soon, tragically, find out).

So that was it then. Yam won't touch Thorung-La with a barge-pole. Dina is resistant and James is taking the attitude of 'better you than me mate'. We've broken every rule in the book in terms of acclimatisation; it's the worst time of year to be attempting this and I'd be doing it very much from the wrong direction. I'm only here on holiday - not to risk my life on something that everyone is telling me not to do. Oh well.

We are, still, in one of the most incredible places that I've ever been in. James is a management consultant or something and destined for a very non-spritual career in the city. I don't think either of us is particularly inclined to mysticism or new-age mumbo-jumbo but that place manages to reach quite a deep part of you somehow. The two of us spend the entire afternoon just staring at the mountain.

Dinner is pretty low key compared to Kagbeni. James and I go our separate ways in the morning: he's walking all the way back to Nayapul. I'm going to have a much anticipated lie-in and then walk to Jomsom to get the plane back to Pokhara.

I wake up late the next day and go to meet Dina. The plan is to go and see a nearby temple and then set off for Jomsom. The temple has reasonable religious significance as it has ties to both Buddhism and Hinduism. People in Asia always seem more laid back about these things than people in the West somehow. There's quite an interesting little building where there's a flame of natural gas that burns straight out of the mountain. Noone knows how long it's been there.

The temple is on the path to Thorung-La and I ask Dina if we can go up a bit further to see the path that leads up to the pass. I can see him inwardly rolling his eyes: 'not this again...' I think he thinks I'm going to get on the trail and then go charging up it with him hanging onto my heels or something.

So we walk for about five or ten minutes until we're at the bottom of the valley and can see the trail going up until it crests a hill and... That's what all the fuss has been about??

The trail starts relatively gently before hitting quite a steep slope and then going pretty much straight up. Dina says we can see about half of what we'd have to climb but really I'm thinking: 'that's it??'. In Scotland you'd have that done before lunch.

I'm frustrated and a little bit pissed off. The weather is perfect. The sky is a glorious dark blue with not a cloud to be seen. I don't have any headaches or anything; I don't even feel short of breath. I feel absolutely 100%.

Actually, without sounding like an idiot, I feel quite a bit better than 100%. This is my tenth day on the Annapurna circuit where I've been regularly knocking out 25km a day in mountainous conditions. I haven't had a drink since I've been here. I'm in the best shape I've been in for years...

Anyway it just seems that the conditions are perfect and you just don't know when you're going to be back in this part of the world. It's a bit frustrating but we're way too late to make any kind of attempt now.

We go back to the guest-house and get the gear together. We get on the downward trail to Jomsom. We get just outside of Muktinath and Dina stops to chat with another guide. They're babbling away in Nepalese and then Dina starts injecting the words 'oh shit!' into the conversation. He's quite upset and he says it quite a few times as they talk. I don't have a clue what they're talking about but then Dina turns to me and says that one of their friends (he means another guide - they're all friends) died from AMS at Thorung-La the previous day.

Bloody hell. I'm completely stunned. This was not some out-of-shape tourist who shouldn't have been at Throung-La in the first place. This was a Himalayan mountain guide. These guys are born and bred in the mountains. They literally spend their lives there. The reality of AMS and Thorung-La is brought home very hard.

Dina later explains that the guides are in a very difficult position with regards to AMS. Not only are there practical concerns with telling your group that you can't ascend any higher, there is also professional pride and fear of retribution from your employers. There is a huge amount of pressure on the guides to ignore the symptoms of AMS and continue climbing.

In keeping with the way we'd been walking the previous few days we move very fast. At some points we're actually jogging down the mountain which with a pack was, I decided, like going down-hill with a big hand pushing against your back.

There is a long walk on the river-bed to get to Jomsom - the same stretch we walked in the opposite direction three days previous. On the way out it had all been new and exciting. Now it's just a long, hard slog on the loose rocks and sand. Helpfully, the wind changes direction in the valley in the afternoon. We'd had a strong wind throwing sand and dust in our faces on the way out; now we had it in our faces all the way back. It took us four hours from Muktinath to Jomsom which greatly impresses the guest house owner when we get there.

I follow my usual ritual of collapsing on a bed for half an hour and getting very cold. Walking hard in the wind and the sun has made my face sunburnt and caked with dried sweat and dust. I get up and on a whim of the purest optimism test the shower to see if there's any hot water. It's hot! Yippee!!

That night I sit down for dinner at a fire-table on the second floor of the building. I'm joined by a Norwegian guy who I'd met on one of the first days of the trek. We're joined by his guide and Dina and we soon get talking about the Thorung-La pass and the people that die there. The Norwegian's guide says that if you go to the pass at the right time and stand there in silence you can hear the footsteps of the dead porters there. The locals believe that a person's soul is not at rest until they're properly buried and most of the porters who die at Thorung-La are left there until Spring when the snows melt. Dina, with his feet fimly on the ground, dismisses such superstitious nonsense. It seems, however, that the Nepalis are much like the Irish in that even the people who proclaim loudest to not have a spiritual bone in their body will, on some level be superstitious and/or spiritual. Dina goes on to tell a good story about a supposedly haunted place where he threw rocks at a ghost that turned out to be a tree. Unbeliever or not, he says he'll never go back to that place. On the bus from Kathmandu to Pokhara a teenaged kid had got on with a violin and sang for money whilst the bus was travelling. Somehow the kid had managed to get off a few kilometres before the accident - a fact which is highly suspicious to Dina. The kid is going to be in a bit of trouble if he bumps into Dina again.

It's not a late night as all four of us are getting the flight back to Pokhara in the morning - for which we need to be up at 6am. We're all pretty tired anyway and go to sleep early.

In the morning I almost enjoy getting up in the cold and freezing dark as I know that it's the last time for a little while that I'll have to do it.

Flights in the Himalayas are by means of small planes that hold about twenty people. As you might imagine in the Himalayas, they are subject to wind, fog, snow, etc. Mainly wind. The winds can be very strong in the valley that we're in and there are stories of people getting stuck for days in Jomsom waiting for a plane. The wind also makes the plane rides quite hairy when they do occur. The run between Pokhara and Jomsom is not supposed to be too bad but Dina tells me that the last guy he took to Lukla (drop off point for the walk to Everest base camp) was hyper-ventilating by the time they landed.

I really enjoy our flight. We're packed in with bags of oranges and so on. The door to the cockpit is left open so you can watch the pilots and you have a view through the cockpit window.

You have spectacular views of Dhaulaghiri and you can also see large parts of the trail as you fly over it. The trip that had taken me ten days of blood, sweat, hyper-extended knees, cold showers, bland food, sleepless nights, freezing mornings and endless, endless walking is accomplished in twenty minutes.

It was one of the best experiences of my life. I've done a reasonable amount of travelling over the years and this easily stands as one of the highlights. It's very hard to explain the appeal: 'well you punish yourself by walking and living in quite hard, uncomfortable, freezing conditions and there are some nice mountains to look at...' It was extraordinary and I'm already plotting how to get back.

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