‘Namaste,’ I say cheerfully to everyone we pass.
On one particularly steep section we’re overtaken by a mule train, the animals sashaying nimbly past and shoving me sideways into the bushes with their panniers.
‘Namaste!’
Wongchu sticks fairly close to me. He’s been given the impression that I’m someone of consequence, though he’s not absolutely sure why. He’s in his late thirties, solidly built with the broad features and high cheekbones of a northern Nepali or a Red Indian chief. He’s horrendously over-qualified for this sort of work, having twice summitted Everest. On one of those occasions he arrived at the top at 5.30 in the morning, so far ahead of the rest of the party that he lay down on top of Everest and fell asleep until they arrived. Now that is cool.
He talks in staccato bursts of heavily compressed English, a lot of which I miss.
‘Bondo. They call me Bondo.’
I nod and smile, vaguely.
‘Bondo,’ he repeats, smiling broadly. ‘The Gun.’
‘Ah, yes.’
‘Ask anyone on Everest for Wongchu, they may be confused. Bondo Wongchu everybody know.’
He drops bits of information at regular intervals, as if I need food for the mind as well as the body. Did I know that the tip of Everest is limestone, a seabed pushed five and a half miles into the sky.
I ask him what he thinks about the situation in Nepal.
He looks around with a shrug and an expansive sweep of the arm.
‘Nobody in charge of the country any more.’
We climb over a spur and begin moving down through thick rhododendron and then bamboo forest. The way becomes increasingly dark, overgrown and claustrophobic. The sun has disappeared behind the mountains and a white mist is descending over the forest as we reach our overnight stop at Dovan. There are three of the long, grey, stone buildings with their blue, painted, tin roofs to choose from: The Dovan Guest House, the Annapurna Approach Lodge and Restaurant Hotel Tip Top. All are identical and all are full. In the courtyards a largely Western crowd of trekkers is resting, washing, snacking, lolling and generally looking knackered.
‘Tourism,’ mutters Wongchu, contemptuously. Though of course he makes his living from it.
The Sherpas set up camp. We’ve had a long, hard day’s walk and only about 1000 feet (300 m) to show for it.
Basil is in a bad way. He doesn’t like trekking - ‘the longest walk I do is from the bar to the table’ - and seems to have been cursed with a cold and a knife-like sore throat.
The talk at supper is not uplifting, turning mainly around the choice of our next camping spot, bearing in mind the risk of avalanche further up the mountain.
As we sit at the table after supper, Wongchu, unbidden, comes round and massages shoulders, arms, heads. A good massage too. He has fingers like steel.
‘Sleep well, now,’ he assures me.
How wrong he was.
Day Fifty One : Dovan to Derali
Temperatures fell sharply in the night and when I push back the flap of my tent it’s ice cold with condensation. As we approach the toughest part of the trek, I can no longer ignore the inconvenient fact that I am feeling pretty lousy, and, if I’m about to get what Basil is already suffering from, things could get a lot worse.
He sits at breakfast with a pile of tissues beside him, dressed all in black and looking like death warmed up. In between painful coughs and raucous nose-blowings he delivers sharp and pithy observations on the joys of trekking, most of which seem to be eluding him.
French toast and boiled eggs are barely digested before the Sherpas set about striking camp with military precision. They like to keep moving. Or do they know something about avalanches we don’t?
I stubbornly resist offers from Nawang and Wongchu to carry my backpack for me. It’s become a matter of pride for me to carry it, a defiant attempt to show that there is still something I can do for myself.
We set out at half-past seven, climbing up steep stone staircases through a tangle of semi-tropical woodland, with wispy lengths of Spanish moss trailing from the branches of the trees like a trail of feather boas. When we emerge from the trees the sunshine is still way up in the mountain tops but the air is cool and fresh.
I feel a sudden surge of joie de vivre and ask Wongchu if he thought I could climb Everest. Flattered that he says yes with barely a pause I ask how long it would take.
‘You must do training. Get used to altitude. Climb other mountains first.’ He looks me up and down. ‘I get you up there in maybe 75, maybe 100 days.’
I was thinking about a week.
‘No time on this schedule, then.’
He grins and indicates my backpack.
‘You want me take that?’
The distance between us and the tantalizing ceiling of sunlight high above us is gradually decreasing, but it’s not until 10.15 that it tips over the rim of the mountains and spills into the valley. The temperature change is instant and dramatic. Off with fleece and on with 35 factor sun cream.
The scenery change is equally dramatic. After 24 hours of sometimes oppressive forest, the valley now opens and widens out and for the first time I have a sense of the monumental scale of what we are heading into. The 40-mile-long wall that stretches from Annapurna I in the west to Annapurna II in the east has no fewer than nine summits above 23,000 feet (7010 m). Even closer to us are Annapurna South at 23,678 feet (7200 m), Hiunchuli, over 21,000 feet (6400 m) and, barely five miles due east, the mesmerically eye-catching Machhapuchhre, the highest of its two pinnacles rising just short of 23,000 feet (7010 m).
This is sublime mountain scenery. Only Concordia in Pakistan, on the threshold of K2, reduced me to the same sense of inarticulate wonder.
Not much time for wonder, inarticulate or otherwise, as we have to keep moving, stopping, filming, moving and eventual stopping for a more substantial breather beneath a soaring overhang called the Hinko Rocks.
Animism preceded and has survived the religions that came to Nepal and it doesn’t surprise me to hear that this conspicuous rocky cave is a sacred place. Talking of myths and legends, I ask Wongchu about the yeti.
He says that like everyone else round here he believes it exists.
‘I saw some yeti in the mountain.’
‘What did it look like?’
‘Look like monkey, it look like people like us.’
Wongchu rolls off a list of unlikely but intriguing facts. The best way to catch a yeti is to get him drunk. He likes tea and he likes alcohol, and people used to trap yetis by putting out a dead dog full of alcohol. It’s the people who have hunted the creatures down.
‘And now, one only left yeti.’
Beyond Hinko a sheer rock face rises to one side of the path, steep, smooth and sheer. A thin, white plume of a waterfall drops from way above, glancing off the rock and ricocheting down towards us in slow motion, it seems.
When the snow comes these rocks turn lethal. This is the high-risk avalanche area and Wongchu has seen people killed here. The only possible chance you have to avoid a fall is to have a sense of hearing acute enough to pick up the very first sound. The avalanche sound, Wongchu calls it. Then, as he puts it, ‘Quick run.’
We reach the Sangri-La (sic) guesthouse at lunchtime and decide to go no further today. It turns out to be a good decision. By 2.30 swirling, vaporous cloud has descended, bringing the temperature down with it. Out of T-shirts and shorts and into scarves, hats, gloves and eventually thermals. We have a grandstand view of Machhapuchhre, revealing itself in tantalizing Garboesque glimpses between the drifting cloud.
It’s a holy mountain. It is forbidden to slaughter any animal within its sacred valley, and Wongchu says his attempts to obtain permission to climb it have always been refused.
As the conditions become increasingly cold and inhospitable, the only members of our expedition who look at all cheerful are the porters. Released from their loads half a day early, they spend the afternoon noisily gambling away their take-home pay. A coin is thrown on the ground and where it lands it’s replaced with a stone. Players then have to hit the stone with their coins. If you hit the stone, you pocket all the coins that have missed. It’s a game that has apparently come down from Mongolia and is played throughout the Himalaya.