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Travel Story - Issue 917

Annapurna Circuit, Part 4 Down the Kali Gandaki and home to Whistler The Kali Gandaki River heads on the Tibetan Plateau and slices through the great wall of the Himalayas before spilling out onto the Ganges plain of northern India.
Annapurna Circuit, Part 4

Down the Kali Gandaki and home to Whistler

The Kali Gandaki River heads on the Tibetan Plateau and slices through the great wall of the Himalayas before spilling out onto the Ganges plain of northern India. In the gorge between Dhaulagiri and Annapurna it flows through the world's deepest valley. Unlike the ice-encrusted mountains on the Manang side of the Annapurnas, the upper Kali Gandaki is an alpine desert – a place where the folded and fractured beds of 150 million year-old marine sediments, the geological roots of the Himalayan Massif, are exposed on stark, barren buttresses and canyon walls.

No one knows when the first humans ventured into this, arid, precipitous world or when they discovered the "water that burns" – a mixture of natural gas and water issuing from rocks near what is now the village of Muktinath. When lighted the Muktinath springs send a blue flame rippling over water, rock, and earth – a miracle of profound religious significance for both Hindus and Buddhists. Today the "eternal" flame burns in a small recess under the alter of the Jwala Mai Temple and Muktinath has become a sacred pilgrimage site, a meeting place for people of both faiths who come here to worship and seek a better life in their next incarnation.

Muktinath is also a meeting place for trekkers on the Annapurna circuit. Some, like ourselves, were resting after crossing Thorong La the previous day. Others, doing the circuit in reverse, had paused to acclimatize before starting their ascent. We got space in the Muktinath guesthouse and our room, with its earth floor and walls, was a welcome luxury after the previous sleepless night at Thorong Phedi. Before setting out to explore the town we checked in with Lama and found him in an adjacent courtyard with a bunch of other guides and porters, engrossed in a riotous card game punctuated by cheers, groans, and reckless gambling.

We left them, hoping their meager earnings were not squandered before the trek was even finished, and strolled up to one of the temples where a priest ushered us into the dim, candle-lit, interior. Both Hindus and Buddhists come here to worship directly to their own gods, and there are many to choose from. Brahma and Buddha are each represented in a thousand different incarnations. Here in Nepal the two intertwined religions cohabit and mix peacefully. In fact, Buddha is considered to be the ninth incarnation of the Hindu God, Vishnu. Interestingly, one of Vishnu's many incarnations is the "shaligram," an ammonite fossil found in rocks along the pilgrimage route to Muktinath.

Leaving Muktinath the next morning we passed a group of 12 Hindu pilgrims, some old and feeble, labouring up the trail to the temple and the end of their journey. That evening, at Morpha, Lama booked us in to what must be the cheapest and filthiest room in all of Nepal. The doorless room, furnished with a straw-covered sleeping platform, opened onto a dung-littered corral full of cows and goats. I suspect Lama's operating budget took a beating during yesterday's card game and he was out of cash, but I had no problem finding a decent room in a nearby guesthouse.

For the next three days we followed the dusty, wind-swept valley of the Kali Gandaki to the village of Tatopani. Narrow suspension bridges lead the trail back and forth across the river. On the gravel floodplain the track disappears among shifting silt-dunes formed by a relentless wind, and where the valley narrows the trail is little more than a notch cut into the canyon wall. Our hopes of a wash at Tatopani were dashed when we found the hotsprings almost dry. Still caked with wind-blown dust, we started the long climb out of Kali Gandaki valley up the thousands of flagstone steps leading to Shika, Ghorapani, and across the divide to the Modi Khola valley.

The trail is busy with commercial traffic. Heavily laden porters carrying tins of kerosene, bags of rice, huge rolls of pipe destined for some distant irrigation project, and even fully assembled furniture, share the trail with donkey trains decked out with bells and bright coloured tassels. Built for human traffic, the flagstone steps, worn smooth by the calloused feet of generations of porters, were not designed to withstand the constant pounding of donkey hooves. Where the steps have failed erosion is taking its toll, converting small detours into impassible ditches.

The donkey trains pose another hazard, as Betty discovered when she tried to let them pass on the inside, next to the cliff. The animals bolted and sent her spinning down the bank into a paddy – bruised, wet, and wiser!

It is Dewali. People are in a festive mood, wearing garlands of flowers and traditional costumes. The celebration goes on through the night and our camp at Ghorapani is surrounded by revellers until it is time to get up and make the obligatory, half-hour, hike up Poon Hill to watch the sunrise light up the high peaks of the Himalayas – a breathtaking experience even in my bleary state of sleep-deprivation.

We had been 20 days on the trail by the time we left Poon Hill. Everyone, including Lama and his crew, was getting tired. Betty, tired of being perpetually dirty, began to fantasize about hot showers while my thoughts turned to visions of steak, onions, and coffee. We were discussing this at a lunch stop when a middle-aged man carrying a young girl on his back jolted us back to reality. Approaching with an extended hand he repeated "medsin" "medsin." The girl, probably 10 or 12 years old, watched us silently, stoically, as her father rolled back the blanket revealing third-degree burns to the entire left side of her body. Walking non-stop, he was at least two days from the nearest hospital. He was asking us for medicine, for some miracle to cure his child. We couldn't help. Our pills and ointments could only provide false hope and probably delay or even halt their urgent need to keep going. This was no place to start fantasizing about our other life. Home was still a long way away.

For the next three days the trail led from rhododendron forests of the hill country to terraced farmland where the harvest was in progress. The millet crop, cut with a hand scythe and dried, was carried to a circular clay thrashing area where a pair of oxen, tethered to a stake in the centre, tramped round and round breaking the seeds free. Women swept the mixture onto bamboo trays, tossed it into the air where a breeze blew away the chafe, and with each toss recovered a handful of grain.

Before reaching our final camp we stopped at a teahouse on the outskirts of Pokhara. The proprietor, a middle-aged woman, had a new stove and she could hardly contain her excitement as she knelt down to show us. It was an earth and brick hearth standing about a foot off the floor but inside the blackened firebox, where wood had obviously once been the source of heat, there was a single electric heating element. A blue spark snapped across the open contacts as she closed the switch, and with obvious pride she urged us to feel the heat rising from the glowing element. We had just passed through the gradually expanding technological boundary between rural and urban Nepal.

The next day we said goodbye to Lama, Babu, Biress, and Bimbadu. For 25 days they had been our companions on the trail but none of us had any illusions about keeping in touch as our lives veered off in different directions.

Now on our own, Betty and I went back to the Tibetan Refugee Camp north of Pokhara where we met an elderly man who shared my interest in geology. He invited us to his house where his wife served yak-butter tea and sweet biscuits. The rancid, salty brew is definitely an acquired taste but we graciously accepted a second cup, admired his fossil collection, and talked about our countries; about Canada where I was about to return, and about Tibet, his country, where he could never return. A picture of the Dalai Lama hung on the wall.

Before leaving I bought a small yak-wool carpet. It hangs in our Whistler cabin as a reminder. A reminder of how privileged we are to live where we do. Where we can count on a clean bed in a warm house, a hot shower, medical help just a phone call away. The list is endless, but each of these simple things we take for granted is a luxury beyond the wildest dreams of the people whose lives we crossed in those other mountain villages, far from Whistler, in the shadow of the Annapurnas.