By evening there is still no word of Adrian and the others.
Day Forty Nine : Pokhara to Chomrung
Early morning microlite flight over the lake and up towards the mountains. Myself in one tiny craft, Nigel filming me from another. Feel terrifyingly unsafe. Tucked in behind a Russian pilot with a big seventies moustache who speaks only in thumbs-up signs, with thin air on either side. Cavorting at 10,000 feet above the ground, secured only by a car seat-belt across my lap, I experience pure terror for the first half-hour, and for the next, as we come down low over the shining lake and wooded hills, pure joy.
When I get back to breakfast, someone shows me the front page of the Kathmandu Times. So much for secrecy. ‘Maoists abduct British Army Officers’, reads the headline. Below is a jumbled report, which not only includes our director among the abducted, but has promoted him as well. He appears in the story as ‘Brigadier General John Paul’, which I hope won’t go to his head.
And still no word on their whereabouts.
While we’re in Pokhara a good opportunity arises to try and glean a little more insight into just what’s going on in the country. John Cross, born in London and at various times in his life a soldier, diplomat and author of eleven books, including Whatabouts and Wherabouts in Asia, is an ex-Gurkha and expert in jungle warfare. He lives in a comfortable house in the quieter part of Pokhara with his adopted Nepali family.
We talk beside a small Hindu temple in his garden. It’s an esoteric affair, containing a Buddha, a picture of the Blarney Stone, and a figure of St Jerome, the patron saint of languages.
‘Cover all our options,’ he grins.
John is a wiry, sharp-eyed 78-year-old. He still looks and sounds military, with a clipped delivery, straight back, green shorts and socks pulled up to the knee, but his replies are never predictable. He speaks ten Asian languages.
‘I learnt one in seven days. Mind you, I wasn’t eating.’
He sees an historical pattern in what’s happening here.
‘This is my third revolution,’ he tells me. ‘The first one was in Malaya, the second was in Laos. The first one the government won, one-zero, the second the Communists won, one-all, and this is my third. Third time lucky for who?’
He sees it as something that’s been bubbling for a long time.
‘The poor have been marginalized.’
Law and order and a strong political base are prerequisites for defeating the rebels, but understanding the poor, as he has tried to do by travelling up and down the country, is also vital.
Wearing thick, dark glasses for his fading eyesight, John brushes off my query as to whether he’s been tempted to try and help the Nepali government sort this one out.
‘I’ve got to keep a low profile here.’ He smiles. ‘The doctor said get hit on the head, you’re blind for life.’
We leave Pokhara this morning for our first serious assault on the mountains. Brigadier General John Paul, mindful of the fact that we will soon be crossing into Tibet and operating for several days above 16,400 feet (5000 m), has scheduled a five-day, altitude-training trek to Annapurna Base Camp.
The one sop is that, because of time constraints, we shall be taken by helicopter to our start point at Chomrung. A 20-minute flight instead of what would be a two-day walk.
Once the helicopter has delivered us we’re left in deep and almost sensuous silence, hemmed in by the steep and thickly wooded walls of a valley, one side in brilliant sunshine, the other in deep, impenetrable shade.
At this height - we’re at just over 7000 feet (2130 m) - even the most precipitous slopes are cultivated. Across the valley, I can see a farmhouse with 40 terraces, descending the hillside below, one after the other. Rising high in the distance, the summits of Annapurna and Machhapuchhre (Fish Tail Mountain) mark the parameters of our adventure; our constant companions on the trail, the objects of our pilgrimage.
For now, the atmosphere is relaxed. We sit outside the hotel in warm sunshine surrounded by all the trappings of an English country garden: thickets of marigold, chrysanthemum and nasturtium, butterflies fluttering round hydrangea bushes. The trail up to Annapurna runs through the hotel and a steady stream of walkers comes by. Three Israeli students tell us they have been approached by Maoists and asked for 1000 rupees (about PS7) each. They pleaded student poverty but the Maoists were insistent, and, as one was armed, they thought it best not to argue. They were dealt with very courteously and issued with receipts. An English hiker we talk to later said that he and his party were asked for 2000 each. The Maoists justified the price hike because the British, and the American, government supplies arms to Nepal (the very arms which the Maoists are probably using).
The guerrillas don’t like the Annapurna Conservation Area, presumably because it’s a government initiative, and recently forced six of the checkpoints on the trail to close. The 1000 rupee fee that was levied to pay for conservation work they now take for themselves.
Nevertheless, Wongchu, so nervy yesterday, doesn’t think we’ll have trouble with the Maoists, who he refers to, dismissively, as ‘Jungle Army’ and, even more derisively, Long Noses.
There seem to be plenty of other things to worry about, if a large sign just outside the hotel is to be believed.
We are, apparently, in an Avalanche Risk Area. ‘Cross the Risk Area before 10 am’, the sign warns. If you avoid the avalanche, you could still fall victim to Acute Mountain Sickness.
Symptoms are divided into ‘Early’, which include, ‘Headache, Loss of Appetite, Dizziness, Fatigue on Minimal Exertion’ (I had three of these four in Ladakh), and ‘Worsening’, characterized by ‘Increasing Tiredness, Severe Headache, Walking Like Drunk and Vomitting’ (sic).
‘What To Do?’ asks the big metal signboard. The answer is unequivocal.
‘Descend! Descend! Descend!’
The accommodation, on two floors, is clean and basic, with a bed and pillow and a lavatory and washroom at the end of the block. There is electricity but it only manifests itself in one dim bulb per room. As a result of strict anti-litter controls, all drinking water is boiled, instead of bottled. The chicken at supper is, well, muscular.
Day Fifty : Chomrung to Dovan
We set off about eight. Our 35 porters, though expertly marshalled by our 13 Sherpas, are not used to the stop-start interruptions of filming, and by 9.30 we have reached only as far as the Chomrung General Store. More worryingly, our progress up to Annapurna has been entirely downhill. We’ll surely have to pay for this.
The store, crowded with schoolchildren buying sweets before climbing up to their school in Chomrung, is our last chance to buy what J-P calls ‘sophisticated provisions’.
The range of goods on the shelves gives a foretaste of the weapons we might need should we ever have to touch the void: Pringles, porridge oats, toilet paper, vodka, ‘Man’s Briefs’, chocolate, ‘Bandage for Knee Caps’, nail clippers, Chinese playing cards and rum.
Once outside the village we continue down on paths occasionally stepped with wide stone slabs (mostly laid by women of the local Gurung tribe) until we cross the Modi Khola (the River Modi) and at last the ascent begins. The porters bend to their work. As I watch their rubber sandals nimbly negotiate the rocks ahead of me I’m ashamed to think how long I spent deciding which kind of boots to wear. And some of them are carrying 40 kilograms in their wicker backpacks.
For a while it’s idyllic. Prayer flags festoon the trees at intervals, fat bees feed off the cornflowers, lizards sprint across the mica-sparkling rock.