Dolpo - Ringmo Full Moon October 1988
(Somewhere near the Tibetan border at 3600 meters above sea level)
The dinner fire was turning to coals, the full moon rising while finishing up the last of the brandy in between tokes up at 3500 meters above sea level in the cold Himalayan evening. I could hear my team still awake inside, they were giggling as if they were the ones on this end of the spliff.
Our lodgings, the first solid roof over our heads in over a month, was the abandoned ruins of what once was a school house. It consisted of four rooms, with thick crumbling plastered walls pocked marked and scarred; no match for the drafts that found their way through every crevice. This being the only shelter from the Himalayan winds, it was to be our home for the time it would take to recharge and continue along our journey, or until the winter snows set in, we were flexible, whatever happened first.
Inside Anna slept uneasily, in her sleeping bag with all her clothes on in our tent, which we pitched in the middle of the room for yet one more layer of warmth. The other two rooms were taken by our “official guide” Krishna, the last of our porters Mohindra, Safi our chef, and a Lama who had taken up with us. The other room with a makeshift hearth served as our kitchen.
Our mascot; a Tibetan BonPo Lama who adopted us, was an old billygoat who looked as if he never had seen a bar of soap. As far as anyone could tell, he never slept. He was always hungry, cheerful and interested in everything we did, we kept him along for spiritual guidance.
The laughter got louder until I had to ask Krishna, who really only functioned as an interpreter, “What’s so funny?” His answer surprised me, “Hey Shaib, wanna find some girls?”
Ringmo, Dolpo Region Nepal, a million miles from nowhere. The remote stomping grounds of the great Jetson Milarepa, the desolate mountain landscape under the shadow of the mighty 6800 meter Mt Kanjiroba, is a small village of maybe a dozen stone two story houses built with flat slate roofs.
Not a very popular destination considering its inaccessible except by foot, and is a two or three week walk to the nearest road, ( we later found out there actually was an airstrip a few days walk away hardly a muddy ledge on a steep mountainside, which we ended up using, but thats another story). Geographically it’s cut off from the world and was accessible to us only by braving sweaty lowland leach covered tropical game reserves, steeply gaining altitude and eventually climbing up mountain trails leading to treacherous snow covered high mountain ridges; crossing rickety frayed suspension bridges that swayed and were missing floorboards, air so thin sleep becomes almost impossible. It’s also cut off most of the year by heavy rains or snow.
The only detailed account we could find written about the area was in was Snellgroves’s 1956 book, “Himalayan Pilgrimage”. In some spots we stood in the exact vantage points of his blurry black and white photos and nothing at all had changed, a broken fence was still broken, a lightning struck tree lay in the same position, unmoved more than 32 years later. We carried it and “The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa” throughout the entire time.
We had been trekking and camping for over five weeks. Our only link to the outside world was a short wave radio picked up on an impulse in the marketplace in Kathmandu. Radio free Tibet, Radio Moscow, and the BBC world service , that broadcast only classical music and propaganda, kept us entertained at night. We hadn't seen another Westerner for weeks. At various checkpoints we had to show our permits and sign a log book; the last travellers had been this way in May. It was almost November. Krishna said he’d be able to deal with it if our permits expired, at a fair price. This ruin of a schoolhouse was our first real rest stop, and a luxury.
The expedition started as a well outfitted group of a cook and his assistant, a guide, and fourteen porters. We had to carry in everything; food and medical supplies, for a supposedly a four week trek. Our planning meant accounting for every meal and snack for the amount of time we would be in the wilderness. Our porters would be needing porters. There would be no shops or hotels for us along the way.
At our snails pace it was easily going to be more than double the time we planned for. In order to justify our meandering we said we were doing research. And research we did. Every waterfall , or interesting vantage point was another excuse to stop, pull out the paper and inks, paint box, camera, or compose haikus in praise of the divine Jetson Milarepa as we walked in his footsteps. “We weren't Trekkers” as Anna explained to Krishna, “we were more like Bikkhu”
At this late stage we carried most of our own stuff; left our unnecessary books and art supplies at a lower altitude to be picked up on the way out, and had distributed most of the medical supplies to needy cases we encountered along the way. Streamlined now, at this point we were still determined to trek around the lake, to Shey Gomba at 4,160 meters cross the frozen 5,350 meter high Kang-La pass on the way back. And it looked like as long as the weather held up and we could find food, we would be OK.
We were now down to just the barest of staff and supplies. Our numbers dwindled as our supplies did. I’d pay the porters off and send them back as the load got lighter. Now we were down to just a cook, guide and one porter. And the intrepid Ringmo BonPo Lama who we called Baba, and Anna and I.
Ringmo itself sprawled across a ridge bordering the glowing turquoise Phokshindo lake, where as legend has it, a Dakini being chased by the Jetson Milareapa, threw a giant lump of turquoise giving the lake it its colour. The people here herd livestock and farm, make almost everything. They weave their clothes on backstrap looms out of vegetable dyed yarn , from the wool they spin taken from the animals they rear. They make everything they need, , trading for what they can’t make themselves, and survive off the livestock and the grains they grow.
At any rate it was hardly the place “to find girls” as he put it. Krishna explained to me that the people of Dolpo are, within their own cashless society quite affluent. They have 2 places to live. They migrate seasonally from summer quarters and pastures on high ground avoiding the lowland monsoons, and when the snows come in they herd the livestock over high mountain trails back to lower pastures until the rains set in and their higher ground thaws. The snow was due to start soon. This explained the skeletons and sculls and bones of livestock that were strewn around everywhere, giving this windswept plateau an eerie surreal and desolate vibration.
All of the men had already taken the livestock to lower pastures and left the village women behind to work round the clock to finish up the wheat harvest.
They convinced me that the fields were very close, and we should visit them, and with that in mind we set off. Four of us in the silvery moonlight, the Lama, Krishna, and our 18yr old Mangani porter Mohindra. I dressed for the occasion, a thick sweater under a bulky down jacket, longjohns, heavy trekking boots, scratchy yakwool cap, gloves and a Borneo blanket wrapped around my neck for a scarf.
The path twisted and wound around a narrow trail upwards and over various windswept ridges. It was cold, I regretted allowing myself to be dragged along. In Nepal “very close” can mean anything.
We came upon a ridge; a final pass in a circle of mountains; snowy peaks gleamed in the moonlight. We stood on the edge of a giant crater, maybe a few kilometres in diameter. The fertile bottom was a field dotted by a few campfires. The air was filled with echoing sounds of woman’s laughter and singing in time to the chopping of their harvest. Every sound bounced off the cliff face. It was a spectacle to delight the mind. Low Himalayan stars shone so brightly that the full moon was not enough to drown them out. The circle of moonlit snowcapped peaks, the echoes of the harvest songs and laughter was enough in itself to make the journey worth it.
I found a comfortable ledge and would have been quite happy to remain there, which was surely a throne carved out of the cliff face from which the Gods sit and survey their divine creation. Our porter, Mohindra, the youngest of our team was ready to go. He cupped his hands to his mouth and sang out in a singsong Nepali mountain wail, what I translate to be “We are from Kathmandu and we want to meet the local sisters”. By the time the echos stopped bouncing off the caldera walls, we were greeted with shrieks of laughter. The boldest of them answered singing up to us in deep baudy mountain tones, what amounted to, “Come on down, have some hot tea and sit by our fire!”
The three of them stumbled down the narrow path giggling like schoolboys taking giant steps, they dragged me along reluctantly.
We got down to the meadow thru the waist high crops of golden wheat that shimmered in the moonlight. The surreal echoes of their laughter and song bounced and reverberated, multiplying everything in three or four beats. Around the first fire we arrived at the ground was covered with woven straw mats and a pile of neatly bundled wheat that stood about three meters high. The friendly women approached us with steaming chai in hand. They were dressed in their traditional Dolpa/Tibeten style; thick hair matted and greased with the acrid smell of animal fat, huge pieces of coral and turquoise in golden settings protruded from their nostrils and ears. Their clothes embroidered and handspun with multicoloured rainbow striped aprons, were soot and grease stained and worn in many layers. Their mountain complexion was dry and cracked but rosy beneath the soot and they had huge yellow chiptoothed grins.
In a moment, at some unspoken signal, the 18 year old Mohindra took the hand of a young girl and led her into a field only a few meters away from us. They wasted no time on small talk, or talk of any kind. I doubt they even got out of their clothes. The Lama was led to a comfortable seat by the fire by two young girls who plied him with tea and flanked him for warmth and support. Krishna was jabbering away to the crowd when one of them saw me in the firelight as I took down my scarf to get a slug of the hot sweet chai. She must have only then realised that I was a foreigner. She grabbed my scarf and roughly tried to pull it down to see my face almost strangling me, and started to shriek. As the others heard her shouts they arrived to see this bearded foreign specimen. A crowd soon gathered around me, pushing and grabbing and giggling and shouting playfully, when suddenly the group parted and a few more women came leading a small girl of no more than sixteen or seventeen dressed as the others. They pressed us together, all the while laughing and shouting. I lifted my arms high in the air not wanting to touch the little girl and have to deal with any repercussions. I started to shout, “Krishna! Krishna!, Help!, what do they want?!” His answer, a simple, “Take the girl.” I said, “You gotta be kidding! get me out of here!” He finally dragged me away from them. I could see he wanted some joy of his own so I gestured to a large boulder jutting out of the high grass a short distance away and said, “Look, you see that rock over there?, I will be sitting there, when you guys are done and want to head back, just come and get me.”
I made my way to the rock and put a spliff together to calm my nerves.
Above, the ink blue sky reflected ultramarine off the moonlit snowy glaciers. A cloud rolled by covering the moon; the universe shown through its wispy tail and everything was illuminated in an ethereal silvery twilight by just the stars; (…another long hit off the spliff…) The air filled with mind bending echoes of laughter, song, to the beat of chopping wheat and the grunts and groans of the couples in the high grasses. I laughed out loud at the thought, ”Was this the great bordello in the sky?”
In front of me, first one head popped out of the high grass, then at least another four or five, enshrouded in the mists and cloaked, they had crawled through the field, up to the base of my rock and called out in the only English words they knew, “HELLO, Hello hello, WHAT IS YOUR NAME? What Is Your Name?…what is your name?….HELLO Hello hello? WHAT IS YOUR NAME??? What is Your Name? what is your name?.” …getting closer with every ECHO, Echo, echo…
It was starting to freak me out a little. I stood on top of the boulder and in my loudest voice shouted with all my might, with the echoes bouncing off the very peaks towering above us and for all the heavens to hear, ”MY NAME IS…… HELLOOO”, Hellooo, hellloooo!!!” At that, with loud woops and yelps, they came running from all around dropping their tools and bundles and rushed to my rock, I jumped down and tried to scramble back towards my friends, who I knew were somewhere around the fire.
Someone playfully grabbed my scarf pulling me I stumbled and fell down into the frozen mud, my glasses flew off into the bushes in the dark somewhere, In the distance I could just make out Krishna running towards me with one hand holding up his pants and the other punching the air in a mad dash to get to me thru the crowd of woman who swarmed like flies laughing and shrieking in the mountain echo.
He pushed them away one by one as I lie covered in mud and blood; one of them put a cycle in my hand. I shouted, “What the hell do they want?” He said they just wanted me to cut some wheat, I stood up with a mud caked beard and a bloody lip , half blind without my glasses, shouting, “ So you want me to cut some wheat? OK, I’ll cut fukking wheat!”.. and with that began to hack furiously, until I had a bundle so big I could hardly carry it. I walked over to the stack by the fire and dropped it there and stood shivering and shaken wild eyed and panting like some wet and frightened animal.
Now the silence was so thick that for the first time that night I could hear the wind whistling thru the rocky cliffs around us.
After some time my wet and muddy blanket was draped over my shoulders and my glassed reappeared, I was lead to a straw mat near the fire and propped up by bundles of wheat. Across the fire the Lama eyed me cautiously still sitting arm in arm with his two young attendants. A cup of chai was put into my hand, I stared into the fire, motionless, unaware of the cold and damp that permeated everything and the blood freezing on my cut lip.
As time went by the sound of chopping and chattering and giggling and singing returned as they got back to their work. I had enough and wanted to head back but Krishna nowhere to be seen, was as lost as our boy porter, who became a man that night.
The young girl who they were earlier pushing on me approached cautiously with a tea pot in her hand. She sat beside me shyly and after a few cups of tea, rested her head on my shoulder. As the fire died down and the chill set in I opened my blanket to share it with her and draped it around her shoulders. She fell asleep curled up with her head on on my lap, I covered her with the rest of the blanket.
When I awoke in the early twilight she was gone, the misty snow peaks were turning a neon powder blue in the first moments of dawn. The Lama, still awake with the two young girls asleep cuddled next to him, gave me a knowing look and a Buddhistic smile. I dipped the edge of my shirt into the remnants of the tea and silently wiped the dirt and dew off my face, gathered my things, picked up my walking stick, found the trail and began winding my way back up the cliff.
At the crest the path forked. At this narrow junction I didn’t have a clue how to get back as last night I was just blindly following my friends in the dark, never really looking at the where we were going. At that moment a giant yak the size of a buffalo appeared blocking the path. I casually picked up my walking stick and lightly tapped him on the head shouting “shoooo, shiii “! He looked at me puzzled, “Oh yeah, thats right, Im going native” I said out loud to the animal. The docile beast turned and fled; he took the turn to the right, I saw this to be a sign and followed, and turned back to take one last look at the scene behind me.
The first rays of sunlight shot across the peaks through the mist in a golden beam illuminating the western top of the caldera, not yet hitting the purple ground and the bodies sprawled out around the smoky embers of last night’s blazes. Some chopping was still to be heard but no songs, or laughter. It was then I saw the entire field had been cut and neatly stacked, with only a few small patches left to be finished up around the edges.
I followed the yak trail along the ridge hoping it was taking me in the right direction and finally down below could make out the rooftop of our little schoolhouse.
Grateful to be home but dreading that I had some explaining to do, I tiptoed into the schoolhouse and struggled to remove my muddy boots quietly. The ancient split door creaked loudly when I entered the classroom and tried to unzip the tent without disturbing the sleeping Anna. She turned and said in a sleepy voice, “Where the hell have you been?” I answered in my best tone of sarcasm, “Out chasing girls, where else?”