The north side was dramatically less endowed by nature with rain and crops, and less endowed by Kathmandu with amenities. Land of the forgotten Nepalese, it seemed to me. Goiters were common—fist-size lumps on peoples necks caused simply by lack of iodine in the diet. Villagers often brought to us trekkers' attention an infected wound, with the implication that as long as we're in town, they sure could use our first-aid kit.
And sometimes, the villagers just had a kind of suspicious look on their faces. ni18-07familywithCat.jpg On the other hand, some families had all that anyone could wish for: lots of fodder stored for the winter, lots of firewood. Grampa's happy, Mom's happy, and Junior couldn't be more delighted with his fat and happy cat! ni18-21_ApproachLarkyaLa.jpg Finally, we’re approaching the 17,000 foot summit of Larkya La. It’s daybreak, but I’ve been slogging in the dark for several hours—we’d gotten up at 3:30 AM. We had to cross this summit, descend a few thousand feet of snowy steepness, and pass alongside the confluence of four glaciers before we got to anyplace flat enough to set up camp. A fourteen hour day for the speedier trekkers. ni18-25LarkyaLaSunSliver.jpg During what may have been the coldest morning of my life, it was a totally mood-lifting inspiration to finally see a sliver of actual sunlight on the mountainside ahead.
At the summit I experienced another first. Even with the sun out, it was so cold and dry that I saw my first completely intact snowflakes—distinct, perfect, six-sided crystalline structures, like snowflake pictures I'd seen as a kid. Not the clumped-together broken pieces of flakes I was used to in western Oregon's slushy snow!
ni19-36_NamasteBoy.jpg Oh, yes—this one is everyone's favorite child picture. Even if his big brother doesn't look so angelic. y ni20-03_NepaliBallot.jpg Swastika marks the spot! Sorry . . . anyway, this is a ballot, and the rubber stamp used to mark it happens to be in the design of a swastika rather than an X or checkmark. The swastika as a symbol, as you probably know, predates the Nazi Party in Germany by several thousand years, and in some part of Nepal it was a symbol for a school.Now that that matter is taken care of . . . well, it was the day of Nepal's first nationwide general election ever. Since most of the population of Nepal is illiterate, canditates were identified by the symbol of their political party; for example, the tree identified the Congress party (based on the Indian Congress Party of Mahatma Gandhi), the plow stood for the Labor party. A voter would stamp a swastika next to the hammer and sickle to vote for the Communist candidate, or just to confuse a Western tourist observer.
By the way, this election, which took place a few days before the American general election in which Newt Gingrich and the Republicans swept both houses of congress in America, resulted in the Communists sweeping the Nepali parliament! There's nothing history is better at producing than irony. . . . y ni20-25_PVCPorter.jpg No trucks (no roads) nor wheeled carts (not enough level ground) nor beasts of burden (the paths get too steep) carried the supplies of day-to-day life to the villages of the Himalaya—that job fell to the human porters and their two strong legs. I can't decide whether I'm more amazed, and aghast, at the weight of this guy's load of PVC plumbing pipe, or at how cumbersome his extra-wide load is. ni20-37_HotelMTV.jpg I sent this picture as a postcard to my friends in Mountain View, California. y ni20-35_TreeAndRicePaddies.jpg The Himalaya is incredible not just for how high the mountains get, but how low as well. Canyons cut through the mountainsides almost down to the level of the plains south of the range. In the first couple of weeks of the Manaslu trek, we walked from about 3000 feet to 15,600 . This makes for an astonishing variety of landscapes: a few days in the tropics, a few days in a sort of southern Californian zone, then northern Californian. At about 9000 feet it starts looking like home—Oregon—except with monkeys. From there, we climbed into a kind of Scottish highlands, then into the frigid arctic. Then back down to the tropics. This picture was taken in the last few days of the trek, in the tropical rice paddies of the Buri Gandaki valley. ni21-20_meAndSherpani.jpg Me with the Shepani—the Sherpa women that worked as porters on the trek.