Walking wounded
Nepal. Mountainous, friendly, pace changing. I first visited 33 years ago on my OE travels with an adventurous lady who was to become my wife. We went trekking and loved it. We promised ourselves we would return. We finally made good on that promise with the very convenient excuse of joining our daughter on her travels as she embarked on her OE.
I nearly didn’t make it. Ten days before our departure I got taken out by our dog. Yes. Our dog. I was jogging along a gravel path early morning just before sunrise. The hound came belting around the corner towards me at full speed chasing a rabbit. She either didn’t see me or didn’t care to lengthen her journey by going around me. My legs got completely taken out from under by 25kgs of black dogpedo. Half somersault and splat on my back. I lay there trying to breathe and swear. It was some time before I could do both. I then dragged myself home. My Garmin informed me it took 19 minutes to cover 1.1km!
Off to the medical centre and obligatory x-rays. The radiologist managed to be suitably vague in his diagnosis because I’d previously broken some ribs in the same area - “It is difficult to appreciate an acute right-sided rib fracture as there are multiple chronic healed rib fractures present. Conclusion: Suspected small contained haemathorax on the right, likely due to acute rib fractures.”
I seriously considered pulling the pin on the trip as hiking up and down very steep hills was about appealing as a tooth extraction. Without anesthetic. But I couldn’t stomach the idea of my wife and daughter having a glorious time without me. What if I recovered quickly and was sitting at home? That would hurt. Like a tooth extraction. So backing my incredible powers of recuperation I stuck with the plan.
The drive to the start of the trek from Kathmandu was unforgettable. You are either going up or down. Very few flats. In parts, the road was very rough having been gouged out by flooding or slipping in many places. 80km took around 6 hours! (I was very thankful for my little white friends.) Numerous police and army checkpoints. We even had our bags searched at one (they were looking for guns as hunting is not allowed). The hills are enormous and the views were as magnificent as the hills are steep. Seeing where the locals had chosen to site their villages defied all logic, perched on these vast precipitous hillsides.
On the first day, I split with the team. They headed off with their guide and two porters to explore the Tamang Heritage Trail. Our guide had come up with a cunning plan that I walk to Briddim, the final destination of the Heritage Trail - as that was only a 3-4 hour walk from the start. Needless to say, no records were broken getting there, but we made it (despite my guide losing the trail for nearly an hour!). There I got 3 days of rest and recovery to give myself the chance to tackle the planned second leg (the Langtang trek).
Neema ran the guest house I stayed in. She is a happy round lady. She looks more Tibetan than Nepalese. I was her only guest. She lost her sister in the 2015 earthquake who was a nurse in Langtang - a village that got obliterated by an avalanche caused by the earthquake. Neema’s guest house was trashed, and luckily no one was hurt. They lived in a tent while the aftershocks rumbled on for a week and it ended up being their home for the next 6 months. Food was scarce, water was muddy, power was out, roads were impassable, phone communications were down, and people were killed and injured. It was a scary and uncertain time. They had to rebuild their guesthouse - as did just about every other homeowner in the surrounding valleys.
Then a few years later Covid hit the region, turning the tourist tap off overnight. Neema got Covid and was sick for a month, as were others she knew. She has been vaccinated, but like others, we have spoken to, they did not get the vaccine until after they’d had covid. It was a tough and unsettling time.
Neema is 35 and has a son and daughter, 10 and 8. Both are at boarding school in Kathmandu because the local school is not so good and English isn’t taught there. Neema had 10 years at boarding school in Kathmandu. Her children only come home twice a year. Unsurprisingly, they find it a little boring in Briddim (pop. 150). She felt similarly at the same age, but now she prefers the more peaceful village life and has been here for the last 10 years.
I was guided there by Sonan. He runs the guest house in Syabrubesi where we stayed the night prior to starting the trek. He is 36, has a 10-year daughter who is at boarding school in Kathmandu, and a 2-month-old daughter. He is a local from this region. He spoke Nepalese, Tamal, Tibetan, and English (I think there was one other language he mentioned!). Despite this being a good time of year to be trekking, we were the only guests. He tells me the number of trekkers has not returned to pre-covid levels. With a mortgage to pay on his guest house and the boarding fees for his daughter mean times are not the easiest - but that did not dent his happy demeanor.
On my walk to Briddim Sonan told me about their annual festival. One of the things they do is put up new prayer flags. They have five different coloured flags, and each symbolises an element of nature. Blue is sky, white is cloud, red is sun, green is nature, and yellow is earth. In this festival, they celebrate and give thanks to all these elements. Our big ball of earth, water, and air allows us to exist, so it seems like a worthy and logical thing to take time to appreciate this. Yet we prioritise our hedonic lifestyles over what we take for granted. We could learn a great deal from Buddhists.
The benefit of stopping in a village for a few days was I got to observe local life. Their jobs, routines, and easy friendships. There were so many contrasts to my ordered and busy existence in the developed world.
Happiness was certainly not determined by status or material things - in contrast to my world where it is hard not to aspire to bigger and better; toys, jobs, and chattels, when we’re surrounded by them and our cultural norms support their pursuit. The Nepalese were either stoically going about their work, or chatting and laughing. Meals were always shared occasions with lots of conversation. And the dishes they could knock up on a simple wood burner stove (in no time) would put many a cafe owner to shame!
It makes you aware of the trade-offs we make as we wriggle up our greasy developed world pole in pursuit of a ‘better’ life. Our propensity to chase rainbows can result in ignoring the joys of the present and what we already have.
Having said that, I enjoy being home. Sit loo, good coffee, feather pillow, reliable electricity, water you don’t have to treat, our wonderfully temperate climate, and no animals that want to kill you. That’s the value of traveling to places like Nepal. You return taking less for granted. You appreciate things more, and as they say; you don’t know what you got till it’s gone. So if you want to enjoy NZ more - leave it!
