Trekking to Tibet: From Sipsip Camp across Nara La Pass

Another killer day

From the journal - (expletives not deleted):

We're camped by the Karnali again. Tibet is on the other side of the river. Rose at five this morning - bit warmer than at night. Woke up for a leak last night - saw two mountain massifs glowing in the starlight - another awesome sight! Clouded in and hiding again this morning though. Jagat Man is anxious to move - we take the trail up toward the pass. Breathing is OK, but I don't have the energy or breath to converse while moving. Heart rate sits about 135bpm for hours and hours on end - only drops back when we pause. With every breath, stuff is coming up for me - I keep harking back to yesterday's fears...

I know this is my own insecurity speaking, but I can't find another voice to speak against this feeling.

As we rise, we pass mani stones in the landscape and the temperature begins to drop. Soon we're forging upward through cloud, and snow begins to appear on the ground. I look up through a break in the cloud and see an impossibly high mountainside, white with snow, transected by a zigzag line of darkness - is that our path? Yes? Wow! It looks impossible...

We stop at a snow covered high pasture called Sipsip for tea and hot noodles. Heat safely sheltered in the belly, we head up. In... Out... In... Out... In... Out. My heart... my breath... my life. Each step is labour, but what is waiting to be born?...

...Everything turns to white. The trail, the hillside, the sky, my thoughts.

We move upward and onward into the pearly light.

We turn to the south. Above us flutter prayer flags connected to the cairn of stones marking the top of the pass. Total whiteout - snow everywhere - three feet deep in places. As we pass, the land begins to fall toward a shallow meltwater lake...

All OK - no altitude effects, just wonder - and a white sadness for where I've let you down...

My left knee begins to complain as we start the descent. News comes that we can't use the usual trail because of... landslides! Fuck! Even on this side of the range it's been raining! Extremely unusual!

As we re-enter the Karnali River valley, I begin to feel that this river doesn't like us. Huge, outrageous, dangerous slipways have taken the trail down to the river and we have to find a new route over the newly unstable slopes. These mountains aren't rock - they're huge piles of mud and stones and when they start moving, they go!

We have three straight hours of incredible tension and life threatening walking. In some places a trail has to be cut into the scree slope and cut again for each person to pass. (By our Nepali trekking staff - all these guys are absolute legends!) It's 2500ft down if we slip. (Or if the land does.) Every time we crest a ridge, we're greeted with the vista of yet more slip zones and gaps in the trail.

It's really scary - Tania freaks and cries, Cyril blanches white, Paul looks like he's at the bedside of a terminally ill loved one, while Anthony is a picture of Virgo stoicism. It takes its toll on all of us. By now my knee is screaming. I drop an Ibuprofen and Kerry straps it for me. Kerry's felt constantly nauseous for a long time now.

For the first hour it pisses rain, as if in replay of Thursday, like the weather is conspiring with Karnali to sweep us off the mountain. Then the sun emerges and it's blistering! All around us are impassive snow peaks, a huge amphitheatre for our performance of the insignificant.

We regain the original trail, round the next ridge and - another huge landslide! Again: Fuck! This one we cannot cross and have to follow its scar to the riverbed where it has left thousands of tons of stone and loopy mud that looks like piped icing. The mud is springy, jellylike - the horses break through and belly out - it's quicksand! More washaways with water still pouring out of the scree slopes left behind. We skirt them to the campsite at Hilsa, which lies in the narrow Karnali valley next to the suspension bridge across to Tibet.

Everybody's buggered when we arrive - it's been a nine hour battle this time. We buy each of the crew beers and crash on the grass in the fierce sunshine. We dry clothes, polish boots, make camp. Since we've come over the range there's been an incessant wind. Now that the sun is gone it's freezing. The river rushes in its bed like the wind. A half moon lights the snowcaps at each end of the valley. A satellite passes overhead...