Annapurna Circuit by Andrew Stevenson

Author:Andrew Stevenson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472116109
Publisher: Constable & Robinson

Kagbeni-Jomosom.

Michel agrees, rather than walk the regular trail back to Jomosom, to climb instead through villages on the other side of the Kali Gandaki Khola to come in over the mountain ridge perched over Jomosom. Sangpo likes this idea too; it is in the direction of his adopted homeland Dolpo, and he still has friends in the villages where he used to work as a labourer during the Dolpa winters.

We climb higher into the desert landscape, the silence periodically disturbed by a sound like that of a train approaching, warning of a violent gust of wind that seems to have a life force of it own. Men plough their fields, singing hauntingly as they work. As we walk through the village of Dangorjung, a villager becomes belligerent, thinking we are common tourists straying off our permitted trekking route. His eyes open wide as Michel heaps fluent Nepali abuse on him, and within minutes they are holding hands.

Half a dozen fearful white-eyed yak are herded through the narrow passageways and we are forced to take refuge in the doorways of houses. Over the doorways, goat skulls covered in cloth and a backdrop of crossed sticks and a spider’s web of coloured threads ward off evil spirits. The white threads of the zor are for the gods. The coloured threads are for the tsen, the evil spirits which lie in wait everywhere, ready to do harm. The exorcists call the evil powers into the zor where the gods represented by the white threads can keep control of the entangled spirits bound in the coloured threads.

Roof-top prayer wheels with three wind ‘cups’ attached, effortlessly spin silent prayers into the wind. Tibetan-looking women in grey robes with colourful aprons wrapped around their waist go about their household chores. We are invited by our former belligerents to a dark abode for chang, which none of us resists.

Staggering slightly inebriated out of the shadows, past a school on the outskirts of the village, classes terminate for the day. The children exit the school building, but when they see us, they flee down the hillside as fast as they can. These are not fearless members of the Pen Brigade. On the contrary, they are clearly terrified of us. We are only several kilometres above and away from the well-beaten trekkers’ path, and yet we move in a different world. I wonder again why these children are so clearly terrified of Westerners. What have they been told?

In the fields far below, the haunting sounds of the men singing as they work their ploughs, wafts on the wind. We must be higher than Muktinath and yet I no longer feel problems with the altitude, or the weight of the back-pack. We pass through areas with small clumps of junipers and Himalayan cedar and delicate purple gentian flowers. At the top of a ridge I pick up a stone and place it on the cairn, each stone piled high by a grateful traveller thanking the gods haunting these lonely, windswept crossings.

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