Long life, only two babies
Spending time in the mountains can be a humbling experience. There’s nothing like a towering mass of rock and ice to put you in your place. But in the Himalayas I found it was the Nepalis as much as the mountains that had this effect on me. Looking back on three weeks of trekking around Manaslu and the surrounding ranges, the efforts of the people who supported us along the way will stay with me long after the slopes of the world’s 8th highest mountain have faded from my mind.
There was Sonam and Kamansingh, our super-fit and super-patient guides. There was our excellent trek leader Pradip, whose passion for Nepal and knowledge of its wildlife is only matched by his botanic kleptomania. There was Damber, who co-led the trek, and who has a natural modesty belying his talents. And there was our industrious cook Soukman (aka ‘Superman’), who has the mysterious but happy ability to bake a chocolate cake at 4000m using camping stoves.
In the Alps a climber can be more or less self-sufficient. In the Himalayas it doesn’t tend to work that way. You quickly find yourself dependent on an embarrassingly large retinue of helpers. In normal circumstances the idea of heading into the mountains with a 12-man support team would appal me. But on this trip the opportunity to spend time with some of the local guides and helpers quickly became one of the main draws.
The experience made me recall the impatient reactions of some to the Sherpa strike on Everest earlier this year. The Sherpas (or helpers as they prefer to be called) asked for better compensation than the $400 given to the families of colleagues who died in the recent avalanche. They were met with little sympathy from a small but vocal faction of the climbing community. In a weird way the response from some of the more swaggering climbers was almost impressive – to go somewhere like the Himalayas without developing even a cursory interest in the people who live there must take Olympian levels of self-absorption, carefully cultivated over years of committed ego-stroking.
Eleven days into our trek we reached the Larkya La pass, the highest point of the route. As we approached the pass the snow got deeper, and it became clear that the mules carrying our kit would not be able to continue unless their loads were removed. It could have been a tricky situation, but Damber, Sonam, Kamansingh and some of the others volunteered to carry the bags over the pass themselves. They worked for hours under a hot sun, doing the long journey up and down the pass three times and only finishing well after nightfall.
There are all kinds of ways in which we in the West depend on people in poorer countries. Often the dependency is invisible – as when you buy a cheap piece of clothing from a high street store. But the nature of the relationship is made startlingly clear when you see a guy with a sunburnt face coming off a mountain in the dark, lugging the bags you were physically incapable of carrying yourself.
Any form of tourism that puts people from very different worlds in contact can throw up ethical questions. Over the last nine months we’ve often been confronted by situations where it’s not immediately clear how best to act. Personally I think that done right, tourism can do more good than harm – but only if done right. That applies even more to adventure tourism where the stakes are much higher. And if westerners have to pay twice as much to go up Everest so that the people whose efforts allow them to do it can enjoy the security of a decent insurance scheme, so be it.
On our last night in the mountains we sat outside our tents drinking to celebrate completing the trek. Damber raised his glass and gave his customary toast, always delivered with a cheeky smile – “long life, only two babies”. I hope he and the others we met get exactly that (the first part, at least). They probably have no idea how well they’ll be remembered.
Chris