The Foothills of the Himalayas, Nepal
I am not, in any way, shape or
form, a hiker. I once bought heavy hiking boots to take on a trek through the
Alps and, before even catching a glimpse of the mountains on the horizon, had
ditched them in a hostel in Switzerland. By the time I was in the shadow of the
Matterhorn, I had decided that my Keds were content to just look up. I didn’t
have to climb up and look over.
I approached the mountains of Nepal
the same way, those great beasts of the Himalayas. I had met dozens of
backpackers throughout India headed the same direction – north – their
windbreakers already dirty, their hair already dreadlocked, their cheeks
already rosy with anticipation of adventure. I sat with them through clouds of
hookah smoke and pots of chai, their questions always the same. “Are you doing
Base Camp?” they inquired. “The Loop?”
They were referring to Everest Base
Camp and the Annapurna circuit, two journeys ranked among the world’s best by
hikers and adrenaline extremists alike. Spanning days if not weeks, the hikes
were fraught with challenges both physical and mental, with feats of strength I
knew my legs wouldn’t handle, feats of strength I feared my mind couldn’t
handle.
But still I went to Nepal, armed
with henna-decorated hands and a cockiness my time in India had given me. I had
been travelling the world, all by myself, for years now. I knew what it was
like to be alone, knew what it was like to be faced with just about anything
one could throw at a young woman in a foreign land. I’d fought off an angry mob
of tuk-tuk drivers in Cambodia. I’d faced the drunks on the Trans-Siberian in
Russia. I’d jumped off of cliffs and dived with sharks and motorbiked
helmet-less down busy streets in Bangkok. I felt invincible. I was going to go
to Nepal and find myself, find adventure, find friends, maybe even find love.
There is no loneliness quite like
the one you face when tragedy strikes thousands of miles from home. I sat in
the lobby of the hostel, fresh off of Skype with my mum, looking down at my
hands. It was my first day in Kathmandu. She had died while I was still in
India, but I hadn’t been online in a few days and so did not see the gentle
emails from my family urging me to phone home. They are the worst kinds, those
ambiguously gentle emails.
I wouldn’t fly home – my family was
spread across the globe and we had arranged to have a memorial later in the
year. And so I was left to grieve in a dark hotel room, where the taps required
a wrench to loosen, where the light bulbs flickered or stopped working
entirely, where the walls wouldn’t muffle my sadness. Stray dogs howled in the
alley behind the hotel, and I was sure I was going to leave a part of my heart
with this place forever. This hollow place, this hollow heart.
The next few days in Kathmandu were
muddled, full of weight. The chaos of the city, those smells of cooking momos
and those colours of yak scarves, couldn’t shake me out of my foggy state of
mind. I spoke to no one. And, just as it felt that my world couldn’t unravel
anymore, that the nights couldn’t get any lonelier, I packed my bag and went in
search of the Himalayas.
It was only after I was in yet
another lonely hotel room in Pokhara, 125 miles west of Kathmandu, that the
scope of what I was about to do sank in. I had signed up for a three-day hike
through the foothills of the Himalayas, through a part of the country that even
the overly enthusiastic man running my hotel and its small travel agency hadn’t
heard of. He had to phone a particular guide named Rajan, apparently the only
one who could navigate those hills and arrange all the places to visit.
I met Rajan the afternoon before we
were to leave; he was a quiet, polite man in his late forties. He shook my hand
limply. His English was not very good, I was warned, but he knew the area I
wanted to hike well, as he had been born nearby. Not for the first time, nor
for the last, I questioned what I was getting myself into. It would just be the
two of us for three days. I had to blindly hand my faith over to him, trust him
that he would not lead me astray.
That night, after a solemn dinner
in town, I packed a small bag for the journey, nothing more than a toothbrush
and an extra camera battery. I slept restlessly. It had been days since I had
been able to contact my family. I stared at the ceiling and counted the hours
until dawn, when Rajan and I would share dry bread for breakfast before
catching our first bus of many.
I was ill-prepared in so many ways
for the trip; I didn’t have the right shoes or the right jacket, I didn’t have
the right stamina or the right mindset. But I was in Nepal, and I needed to
force myself into feeling something again, something that wasn’t mourning or
self-pity.
The first challenge came early,
sharing crowded local buses filled with men carrying supplies and women
carrying chicken or children. I had to struggle to stay on my seat as we snaked
up narrow mountain roads, the bus lurching left and right. I tried to remain as
rigid as possible so as to not press into Rajan or the elderly lady who also
shared our two-person seat. She stared at me the whole time, her eyes burning
into the side of my head, but whenever I looked back at her, she smiled.
Finally, after hours of discomfort
and very awkward conversation, we reached the end of the road. It simply
stopped at the foot of a sloping hill, one that, although covered in boulders,
looked well-travelled. I soon learned it was the only route to the small
village where we would be staying for the next few days, and that we had to
climb for a few hours in order to get to our homestay family’s house before the
sun set. I also learned that the bus driver, for some reason I never understood,
would be joining us. And so the three of started the slow ascent, the two men
chattering in Nepali. Rajan stopped from time to time to point out special
flowers or grasses, or so that I could pet the goats that wandered around us,
disinterested in our movements. There was nothing magnificent here, and I
couldn’t even see the peaks of the mountains yet, but the air was fresh, the
onset of evening cool, and I felt relaxed and content.
We reached our homestay as the sky
was turning orange; it was a tiny farm that consisted of a house with two
rooms, an outhouse, a garden, and a stable for their two buffalo. Rajan later
explained that the family owned the land surrounding the house, and survived
off it as well as whatever odd jobs the husband could find back in town. The
family greeted me with nervous smiles, their eyes blinking quickly. Rajan
informed me that they hadn’t had a visitor in over a year.
“Sunita is happy you are here,” he
told me. Sunita, the matriarch, glanced at me while she started boiling water
for tea, her one-year old baby strapped to her back. I considered where I was –
considered what had happened to get me to this place – when I finally looked
out at the surroundings. I had been too distracted by the baby and the roosters
and the salutations. I looked out at the view before me, and the Himalayas
stretched out in all their glory, bigger than imagined, bigger than life. For
the first time, I wanted to climb up, I wanted to look over, I wanted to see
what lay ahead.
The sun set, and dinner was served:
dahl, buffalo jerky, and millet wine. Sunita sent her oldest daughter into the
black night, clutching a torch and a few rupees. When she returned over an hour
later, she had one warm bottle of Coca-Cola in her hand, a gift for me, the
honoured guest. I shared it with all of them, including the bus driver, though
I tried to ignore his betel-stained teeth and the flecks of saliva on his lips.
We mimed our way through conversation, Rajan’s translations stilted and
dubious, but still the evening was full of laughter. My bed was made of
lentils, and I slept next to a vat of corn, but I slept soundly.
And when I left that place, two
days after I had arrived, I did not feel whole again. I did not have a
miraculous epiphany; I did not suddenly feel better. I had never asked for
that, never asked to be fixed. All I had wanted was to feel something
different. The days I spent in the foothills of the Himalayas were beautiful
and full, spent hiking and sharing tea with new friends. Experiences I cherish,
all of them, regardless of the fact that they were washed with sadness. But
slowly, over the course of the next few weeks in Nepal, I was stitched back
together, I was rebuilt from the bottom up, just as we humans are designed to
do.
We travel to try new things, to
meet different people, to discover ourselves. We travel to see the
extraordinary, to feel the wind at our backs. We travel with our minds open and
our hair wild, our imaginations, too. Sometimes, though, we travel just so we
can feel our feet move, step after step. We travel to know our hearts still
beat and our eyes still see, to know that one day, we’ll be able to climb up
and look over.
