I sought a recommendation from a German couple who were waiting for a flight out of Lukla, and they had good things to say about their porter, who at that moment was introducing himself to me in halting English. He got himself hired. The entire time, and until the next day, I didn't notice he had a crippled right hand. The interesting thing about that was that only a few weeks before, on my flight from New York to London, I met an Irishman with some very primitive scrawlings on his left hand. He explained that he had given himself tattoos, just for kicks, from the age of twelve up into his teens. Amazingly, he kept the tattoos completely hidden from his father until he was 20. He simply kept his left hand in a place or position where his dad couldn't see it, while never looking like he was trying to conceal anything. “It's surprisingly easy to hide something from someone,” he told me.
In this picture Lhakpa, the porter, is making a quick stop at home, in his village about 20 minutes from Lukla, apparently to tell his family that he just got hired—in spite of his visible handicap—for yet another trek. ni22-27_YaksInGreen.jpg They're just ordinary green tarps, but I liked their color against these yak/cow crossbreeds in Namche Bazaar. ni23-33_2hikers.jpg I went with these two guys, whom I met back in Namche Bazaar, on a day hike to the Everest View Hotel. It’s the only luxury hotel in the Himalayan range. Its clientele are those who want to be in the heart of the most spectacular mountains in the world, but don’t want to (or can’t) do all the rugged outdoorsy stuff to get there. For US$150 a night they’ll fly you by helicopter to a flat field a mile or so below the hotel, where staff will meet you with horses to carry you up to the hotel. There’s oxygen, should you need it, at the hotel. Anyway, my two friends and I wanted to spend a little time on its Everest-facing porch. Lunch there was way out of our budget, so we ordered a pot of their locally famous hot chocolate. It ran us the equivalent of four or five bucks US—enough for dinner for the three of us back in Namche. But the experience was worth it. Here (in the picture) are my two friends walking just a little bit further into Everest country from the hotel. ni24-10_Menu.jpg High up on the slopes above the Gokyo Valley, in a little guest house (yak herder's hut with a platform added for trekkers to sleep in), I was offered the house's one and only menu. I was charmed, then mystified, by the spelling—why would someone spell Pepsi “Papshi”? Did they try to spell it phonetically, and if so is that how they pronounced it?
Oh well. Nothing like a little Gralik Shop (garlic soup, I presume?) to warm me up on a cold Himalayan morning!
Incidentally—the prices are in Nepali rupees, which then were going fifty to the U.S. dollar. y ni24-36_fenceShadows.jpg The climate got more peculiar the higher in elevation I got. As the shadow of the fence shortened on this very cold, dry morning, it exposed frost from the night before, which would shine white in the sun a few minutes before melting—producing this intriguing white border around the shadow. ni25-12_approachGokyo5Lake.jpg The morning of my 32nd birthday didn't start out all that great: my porter Lhakpa didn't want to leave the guest house and get on the trail. Or maybe he felt he couldn't.
I told him to or three times I was ready to leave, and finally I walked out the door without him. When he didn't follow I yelled for him, then I went back to the guesthouse. When I walked inside, I saw him and the proprieter of the guesthouse in a very serious conversation. I understood none of the language they were speaking, but the innkeeper looked very stern, and Lhakpa looked very deferential and sheepish. Obviously Lhakpa owed him something—money? an explanation? a pledge to behave better next time?—and it was clear that Lhakpa wouldn't be leaving until it was resolved.
Lhakpa finally left with me. I never got an explanation—although Lhakpa was, by that time, starting to exhibit a troublesome fondness for alchohol. But, a couple hours later, we came to the fifth lake of the Gokyo valley—one of the most beautiful lakes I'd ever seen. And the innkeeper at the guesthouse in the village of Gokyo was able to bake me a birthday cake that night. ni25-29_ChoOyu.jpg The sixth highest mountain in the world, Cho Oyu, seen from the village of Gokyo just after sunset. NI16-14_MeAtopGokyoRi.jpg I set personal altitude records three times during this trip. This was the last one, the record that still stands: the top of Gokyo Ri, somewhere between 17,500 and 18,000 feet above sea level. Gokyo Ri is a hill that rises 2000’ from Gokyo, the last yak-herding/trekker-lodging village on the Gokyo Valley trail. Beyond Gokyo, the valley turns to nothing but glacial rubble swept by frigid winds off the Tibetan Plateau.
That highest peak on the horizon is Mt. Everest. It’s only from this altitude that I could really see the predominance of Everest. Viewed from down in the valley, it’s flanked by peaks that look higher only because they’re closer. From the vantage point shown in this picture, a British fellow trekker named Giles was able to visually trace, and describe to me, the route used by Hillary and Tenzing on their first successful ascent of the mountain.
The night before in Gokyo, I’d set personal sleeping-altitude and drunk-altitude records (approx. 15,500’). A couple from St. Moritz, Switzerland celebrated their arrival at their trekking destination with a plastic bottle of Johnny Walker Red, which they shared with four or five others they’d been walking with. As if two or three shots at 15,500’ weren’t enough, the innkeeper announced a few minutes later that he was celebrating his son’s first birthday back in Kathmandu—and presented us with another bottle of the exact same thing. I guess alcohol at that altitude leaves the system as quickly as it enters the system, since I felt surprisingly okay the next morning. ni28-14_MonksAndGuitar.jpg I came to the top of a ridge and saw Tengboche Monastary, and these young monks practicing their Tibetan script. One of them recognized the object in my black gig bag; he did an “air guitar” gesture.
So I brought out the guitar and thought, hmm, what's an appropriate song to play for a group of Buddhist monk novitiates high in the Himalayas? I decided on Cat Stevens' song “Moon Shadow”; the lyrics seemed Buddhist-y in a Hallmark sort of way.
That song got a good reception, and so Marcus, the guy from New Hampshire I'd been hiking with, said, “Let's see if they have any requests.”
“Jingle Bells,” one of the monks suggested. So, Jingle Bells it was.
I thought about how the Buddha had proclaimed that the key to overcoming suffering in this life is to overcome desire. So for a final number, I played the old Elvis song “All Shook Up” just to be perverse. y ni29-11GangesDawn.jpg Several of the best photographs I’ve ever taken (in my opinion) were shot on a single morning in December of 1994. I had flown from Kathmandu to Varanasi, India, and my first morning in that Hindu holy city, I was up and dressed before dawn to see the bathing rituals on the banks of the Ganges. Although it wasn’t as serene an experience as it could have been for me—being a conspicuously tall, pale fellow surrounded by constant calls of “Sir! Boat! Boat! Only ten rupees!”—I did take in some ethereally gorgeous sights as the thick mist slowly lifted. Some of these sights I managed to even capture on film. ni29-13ganges_umbrellas.jpg More ten-rupee boats on the Ganges... ni29-17GhatFromBoat.jpg I finally paid my ten rupees and boarded one of the boats. The boatman rowed no more than thirty or forty feet out, but the mist was so thick that at times we couldn't see the shore—we were surrounded just by whiteness and the soft din of ritual activity on the banks. Other times we could see this shrouded view of the shore, and these little beacons in the water—candles placed inside lotus blossoms inside little clay cups, offered to the Ganges and sent to float off in the slow current. y ni29-22BoatOnGangesAtDawn.jpg That's the sun behind the boat there. At this moment it was no match for the mist, but by a couple hours later the sun had won. y ni29-24MePujad.jpg Before the mist had cleared that morning, I got a puja—a Hindu blessing from a sadhu, complete with a daubing of paint on my forehead. “I bless your father, your mother, your brother, your sister. One hundred and one rupees,” the holy man said. “Good health, good money, good happiness. One thousand and one rupees.” Don't ask me if the escalating suggested donation (US$30!) was a standard part of an authentic Hindu puja, but I gave him ten or twenty rupees—less than a buck. ni29-38Hindu8x10s.jpg Though I had come to associate pictures of wide-eyed, blissful Krishna with religious cults selling flowers at airports, in India they're as commonplace as pictures of the blonde Christ are in America. Everywhere there were stalls selling these colorful 8x10 glossies of Krishna, Vishnu, Ganesh, and the other major Hindu gods. All over India I'd see calendars in people's offices given by a business associate. They're just like calendars we Americans get with a scenic or inspirational photo and the name and address of the insurance agent that gave it to us, except the picture would be one of these vibrant Hindu devotional paintings. y ni30-06EggplantVendor.jpg Lots of produce was sold right out on the street, but none so brilliantly purple as this man's eggplants! ni30-03SadhusOnSteps.jpg More sadhus. I have no idea what these men professed or how they expressed their devotion, but at least they seemed to be not in it for the tourist photographers' tips.