Before we left Tal, I decided to lose some weight & give
away some things. Some were not hard to part with (old, backup pair of
sunglasses), but others were tough to let go of (small binoculars and a pair of
seriously heavy duty cargo pants that Beth gave me). In the end it was a wise
decision, but still went against the grains of my heritage…
We stopped & had lunch in a tiny teahouse just before
Temang. I ordered hot tea to wait out the rain that just started, but we ended
up deciding to just stay for lunch. We were invited to join our hostess in the
kitchen when she saw that we were cold out on the veranda. She made an amazing
dal-baht with fresh mushrooms from the forest, although her pickled (radishes
we think) were seriously fermented! When leaving, we asked to use the toilet
& were amazed by the stonework.
We walked through the rhododendron forest, just starting to
bloom with brilliant red, pink, and purple flowers. We also saw huge, old,
moss-covered trees everywhere. Most avoided becoming firewood, but many not so
lucky.
We passed guys carrying chickens on their backs in cages,
but these chickens were white, while all the chickens running around were
multi-colored kinyeji (meaning "local" in Kiswahili) ones. We also passed a guy carrying
>40 liters of paint on his back (easily more than 90lbs)!
For the last two hours or so of the trek, we were in the
rain. It was pretty miserable and cold and I had to pill my raincoat over my
hands to keep warm. Wendy was also pretty miserable and I barely convinced her
to continue past Koto to Chame, but she was very happy she did when we pulled
in…
 |
| Those plastic pipes snaked all along the trail, carrying water from the river into peoples' homes. They ran constantly with no need to turn them off. |
There was a little girl living in at the lodge who was a
real terror! She screamed and threw tantrums constantly as well as grabbed
stuff off our table and taking off with it. In the morning when Wendy put down
her toothbrush, the little girl grabbed it and threw it as far as she could!
Tal is located in the valley where it opens up to
accommodate a bend in the river. It is known for its mountain ponies. We
watched a guy heading out of town mount a running horse.
This was the first day we felt like we were in the
mountains. By lunchtime the towering snow-covered peaks were visible ahead and
behind us.
For the first hour or two we followed the river. We saw
where they had blasted for the road. There were several crews with jackhammers
that echoed in the valley.
We finally started to climb and around noon we passed
through a rhododendron forest. These weren’t bushes, they were huge old gnarled
moss-covered trees. Some had started to bloom. The flowers were wonderfully
fragrant. If you tried to bottle the scent and open it somewhere besides a
damp, mossy forest with trickling water high in the Himalayas, it would have
smelled like old ladies’ perfume. But in that forest, it was perfect and
unexpected.
Shortly after, we stopped at a teahouse for lunch. It was
cold and had started to rain so the owner invited us into the kitchen while she
cooked. She had a stove made out of 3 plates of steel in a u-shape over a wood
fire. The top had two circles cut out and she cooked over these.
Everyone has a pressure cooker for making dal bhat (lentils). She served
us dal bhat with rice and curried potatoes with local mushrooms. We watched her
throw a little bit of this and a little bit of that into the pots – stir, cover,
move on and off the ‘burners’. The curried mushrooms and potatoes were
fantastic – they had the same mustard-y tangy flavor as other curried veg we’d
had, but milder so you could taste the earthy mushrooms. She gave us some
serious homemade chili sauce and fermented pickles (maybe turnips?) on the
side.
Everyone has their shorts in a bunch over this road being
built that follows the circuit trail. Tourists complaining about the road have
an incredibly narrow and selfish argument. Of course it isn’t very nice to walk
around bulldozers and stop for blasting. But the construction of the road is
likely to be more inconvenient than the actual road. Not to mention what this
road will mean for the local communities – better access to healthcare, better
access to education, better access to markets for their produce so the young
people may stop leaving to go live in the slums of Kathmandu to look for work.
The number of abandoned houses we passed was remarkable and increased as we
climbed higher. Maybe the road can even reduce deforestation by providing
better access to affordable electricity or propane for cooking. It may also
improve tourism. If people can drive all the way to Tal and spend 5 or 6 days
to go over the pass rather than 12, then maybe more people will come. Certainly
there will be downsides. Maybe the road will provide a means for resources to
merely be extracted. Maybe it will bring more people, trash and pollution.
Without a doubt it will change these communities. But to rail against the road
because you want the villages to remain quaint, pristine, trapped in time just to
preserve your memories of a place you will never likely visit again is silly.
Evidence of the impact of human survival on the land is
everywhere – deforestation for cooking and building, clearing for planting,
landslides as a result of both, trees coppiced to within an inch of their life.
We saw both people and mules bringing building supplies up the mountain- bags
of concrete, rolls of iron sheeting, bridge slats (2 meters long, 18 inches wide,
3/16 inch galvanize steel slats, stacked 3 high), steel plates (8 feet by 18
inches wide, ¼ inch thick steel plates, stacked 3 high), more than 40 litres of
paint in cans on one wooden rack, even cages of chickens – all carried on the
backs of people.
Mules carried bags of cement, propane cylinders, gravel and
rebar bent in half. Each mule has a bell of a different size and some have
bells around the neck and a string of bells on the flank. When they pass by it
sounds like a wind chime.
It rained on us again the last 3-4 hours of walking which
increased our pace. We arrived in Chame, a fair-sized town just as touristy as
Tal. We sampled the local beer, which is basically like sake, but a bit
sweeter, unfiltered.
Driven by disappointment over the local beer and lack of
alternatives, we reached a turning point in O’Meara trekking history. We
invented the hot whiskey lemonade – lemon Tang powder, hot water and Johnnie
Walker. Considerable improvement over whiskey and coke!
No comments:
Post a Comment