Chewed up purple Nepali homemade binding; I angle it out and ponder the hand painted elephant and cow atop each other on the cover. I can’t remember my exact reasoning at the time for choosing the blank pages of this particular yet-unwritten book, but feel now that purple is too chemical a color for my Dolpa memories — which are all strictly scripted in high-altitude grays and blues. And while the experience was as heavy and sacred as the beasts on the cover, at 15,000 feet these animals would be as mythical to those looking down, as we at lower-elevations consider the gods when looking up. No. The choice of journal was all wrong; saying something also of my miscalculated expectations of the journey. The latter, I’m sure, the very reason that I now remember one particular day on that trip as the most reality-quaking of my travels.

It’s for this day that the same finger that dragged across my bookshelf now searches in the tattered purple journal.

I come across a page splattered with large bleeding holes of black ink and the quip, “did you know that pens explode at 14,000 feet?!”

I laugh just as much at the comment itself as at the fact that I had correctly guessed that my future self would find this self-delivered jest, one day, funny.

I scan my thin and weak scribbles and suddenly sympathize with the exhaust evidenced by the simple bullet points that I hadn’t the energy to even expand upon.

I return to the top of the page and see in the corner that I’ve documented only:

June 7th
Santa
11 hours trekking
14,000 feet

I return to the bullet points – some so faint and foreign that I can’t remember the associations of things I clearly thought would burn in my permanent memory so deeply that I’d only need a single term or phrase of prompting. And for those lost associations, I feel a bit of sadness: does a memory cease to exist if it’s not remembered?

Then I read a note that sends my head back in a fit of laughter.

In the bullet-pointed memory, KT, also known as Sangheeta in this story, is looking at me blankly. Her cheeks are scalded red by the high altitude sun and wind. Her face is still covered in dirt from when, at the top of a 15,000 foot pass, a supposed dinn-powered whirlwind attacked her before being chased off with protection mantras and a few well-aimed stones by our Tibetan guide.

It’s with these eyes, black like the bleeding ink of my exploded pen, that KT turns to me after taking slow account of our surroundings:

A little frightened, I touch her arm and tell her, “KT, I just want you to know that this is the most culturally shocking place I have ever witnessed in my 7-years of travel.”

To this, she turns around and shows almost no reaction. Then she scans our surroundings again and comments, “No. I think I’ve seen this before.” She concludes her sentence in straight-faced shock, “on National Geographic.”

It’s the altitude and the exhaust and the absolute absurdity of where we’ve found ourselves that suddenly sends us, with this serious comment, into high-altitude hysterics. Her tears of laughter clear tiny pink streaks down her face and, in a place where there are no mirrors except for the face in front of yours, I am left forever wondering if mine have done the same.

How can almost a year have flown while my words still stumble?

It’s a messy thing. Catching the processing of experiences down to something real, that happened, while at the same catching experience up to something, well, describable.

I hold the photo in my hand and wonder, without it, what evidence would I have?

Oh yes! A journal. Let me see here. Let’s see if this brings anything back…

In black pen I’ve squared a box that says, “18th,” supposing, at the time and wrongly, that at the very least, of this trip, I’d remember the month. Ha!

Anyway. There are bullet points:

* We stop at a goat and sheep herder’s tent, fold our legs and huddle in. We break and share Chinese military cookies, cook noodles and accept or reject, endless cups of salty butter tea.

* When we walk again, we collide like a creek into a stream heading downriver, and become part of a train of young and colorful pilgrims. Mothers with babies in baskets. Men with red ribbons on ponies. Young boys, as always, self-entertaining with sticks and stones, as they stumble along behind.

*One boy watches me carefully. I’ve fallen behind my group and I can see he’s concerned with how I’ll cross the river on my own. In a sagging, leather-belted and weathered jacket lined with animal fur, with a dangling earring of turquoise and coral, he approaches me. With childlike disregard for our obvious difference, he speaks fast and fluently in Tibetan, never doubting that I might not return the same. When I only smile in response, his world, for the first time, widens to contain more than one language. Finally, he points to my pony crew and motions for me to follow him over a carefully chosen course of river stones.

* We pop up our tiny tent. An orange American dot in a sky of Tibetan clouds.

* Children play. Adolescents flirt. Some are fighting. Some are fleeing. All in what I gather to be a rare event of permission to tumble, unsupervised, with each other. There’s a lot a grooming going on.

* We make soup on a propane burner underneath an audiences’ hushed and cross-cultural murmur of, “magic.”

* We make tea, and in answer to the pointing fingers, we dip a spoon in honey and drip a slow drool across a dozen fingers. Eyes and smiles light up to the universal language of sugar.

* I make the mistake of sharing my sweet biscuit with a small one, and as a rumor spreads of handouts, we slip underneath the zip of our tent. But it’s too late. The thumping of muddy boots ends at our door. A dozen tiny fingers and eyes start pulling at the corner of our tent. And even an arm or two manages to sneak in. Sangeetha freaks out. She yells for, “Gombu!” who is unusually talented at schooling unruly children. But he doesn’t hear or come. Instead a chorus from outside our tent picks up in the exact same tone of desperation, and in faux American accents, begins chanting…”Gombu! Gombu! Gombu!”

I try to lay down a game of Gin to secure parameters for our thoughts smaller that the walls of our tent. Thirty minutes later, we can still hear the new foreign word, in foreign intonations, being echoed off of Himalayan walls and returned with laughter….”Gombu! Gombu! Gombu!”

*The Gin score is: Kavita 546, Sangeetha 410

Today, Sangeetha and I follow our whim through the the alleys and to the corners of this little sand and stone town.

We also weave our way in and out of the veins that sustain this community; the food, trekking equipment and hiker miscellaneous stores touting the treats one more often wants than needs.

In a Tibetan antique shop that my curiosity, running out of corners to investigate, leads me into, I greet the two men in the entrance in Nepali.

“Oh?! You speak Nepali?” one asks with surprise.

“No. Some Hindi. Only a few words in Nepali,” I shyly correct.

He switches to English and inquires as to what I’m doing in the area. I explain that we’re trekking into the Dolpa, but are stuck for lack of ponies. When he asks for what purpose are the ponies, I explain that we decided that if we’re going into such an off-the-map area, we might as well bring needed goods; in this case, some 200 pairs of shoes and socks. I then turn the question back to him, “and what do you do here?”

To this he states, “Well I don’t live here. I’m just travelling through as well. I build schools and plant trees in Mustang.”

Mustang is an equally remote corner of Nepal and I reply, “Oh? You’re doing good work!”

He squints an eye and says, “but you don’t actually know that, do you….”

And I wink back, “No I don’t. But doesn’t my trusted enthusiasm make you feel more inclined to do good work, even if you’re not already?”

He laughs and claps his hand on the table, “You’re right! That’s the right kind of optimism!”

He then spies the pendant around my neck that I had silversmithed in India. As he quickly scans the Devanagari script, he poses to me, “Parvat, huh? And where is Shiva?”

While most people immediately read and interpret the scripted word to mean that which sits across from it in the dictionary, “mountain,” I have not missed his reference to the Goddess Parvati and her relationship to her consort, Lord Shiva.

I answer, “Shiva’s at home.”

To this we both laugh out loud together.  I then leave the store, as one should all good jokes, in the linger of laughing.

The Hindu Lord Ganesha, remover of obstacles and god of all good beginnings.

There is an appropriately dusty and crooked sign at the entrance of Jomsom that identifies itself, proudly, as being the capital of a windy valley. And as evidence of this claim pushes me around on the street, I muse to myself just how fitting this trailhead town trait is….

How many times have I heard a noise, turned around, and found a whiplash of footsteps haunting my own. This quick of the eye, evidenced only by the tail of a shadow ducking behind door or bush, makes my heart stutter with the question, what exactly is on my heels? Is it a guardian spirit? Or just the over-excited realizations of my immediate future rushing ahead to catch up to me? Is it deja vu running up to the door of my reality, knocking and fleeing, leaving only its ominous giggle? Questions unanswered, I conclude only that the wind is powerful. It seems to sweep our skin of any secreting soul, assuring the only state in which we are allowed to pursue this quest: naked. If uncomfortable, it still seems only right that we go through this purification ritual before our pilgrimage; it’s a gentle reminder that for all the stores touted “necessities,” and supplies with which we might stuff our sacks, nothing we can carry will protect us more against the forces of nature so much us our naked faith and trust. Yet this wind, as much as it is kind and cleansing, it is equally brave and daring. And at the same time as it purifies and prepares us, it bullies us around. Shoving our shoulders back and shouting, “Are you really tough enough? Are you?” Luckily, in our, perhaps naive, joy, all we can do is nervously laugh. And this good humor dismantles the push in the Wind’s shove as it does the power of all bullies. So we take our beating in the ring of the Wind, accepting that this practice, of cleansing, of submitting, of toughening, of trust and of good humor, will all, in the Dolpa, serve us well.

We wake and jostle our belongings together in haste; today, as we have long planned, we will begin our journey into the Dolpa.

Sacks stuffed, teeth brushed, packs on back, we descend the steep incline of wooden stairs and emerge on the lower deck of our guesthouse. Gombu, our “English speaking guide” is on the phone. He hangs up and sighs, starring at the phone like it might change its mind.

Finally, he lifts his head, but not his eyes, and carefully states,

“No porters. No ponies. Not cheap.”

Gombu speaks only in negatives; a style which tends to bump up roughly with our overly optimistic American angle on language. This is only one of the many communication challenges that we will encounter with our local guides; the first, and most glaring, being that Gombu does not understand English.

“But Gombu, we were told that there would certainly be ponies available. And that they would be cheap with your contacts. Well, we’re flexible. So how long do we have to wait? What are our options?”

To this, Gombu nods his head up and down and says, “Yes.”

When we furrow our brows in confusion, he furrows his.

Then he swings his head from left to right and says, “No.”

And the distinction between speaking and understanding English becomes clear.

Over the course of this adventure, we will come to adore Gombu with tender, constant and unconditional love. But his “yes” and “no” answers to our open ended questions will never stop testing our patience and compassion.

It’s our turn to sigh.

Sangeetha turns to me and says, “I’m convinced that everything that happens is good for us, even this.”

And I respond, “And that is why I chose to travel with you.”

We laugh and surrender ourselves to a situation in which we have no influence aside from attitude. We retreat to the roof deck where Sangeetha picks up her drawing pad and I my journal.

“Divots carved in the sandstone walls string together like the chunky coral strands that the Tibetan women tie around their necks. Lower teeth jut from caves, which, with squinted eyes, I am surprised to recognize as stupas: the Buddhist crosses of the Christian world; shaped monuments marking sacred sites. My eyes, adjusted and attuned to stupa spotting, suddenly spy dozens. But then, when my eyes relax, I realize that I’ve misidentified a natural pile of rocks for the sacred stupa shape. Confused, I realize my eyes are lost; confronted with that wall and question I’ve encountered in the midst of lucid dreaming: But which part of this is real? And which a symbol? And is this state, of un-focus, the intention? To blur the line between the sacred and profane; that one may become the other, not physically by shape shifting, but rather in the dilation of the witnessing eye? Is this exercise in the bardo, between the physical and metaphysical, an unnamed medium of every religion? A task in which we may further practice, aside from our nightly REM cross training, in preparation for the navigation our final traverse of life between lives? Is that the goal of all our sacred symbols? Well if the intention is confusion, then I am there. Pinching my understanding along with my leg.”

We put our pens down and wander into the streets on a mission. We have one map of our destination, but figure an additional pictorial perspective could do no harm. We weave our way through the street stores, but are consistently spit out of shops, short of our objective: “No map of Dolpa.” “Sorry. No map.” “We don’t have any.” “Of the Dolpa? No. Not that.”

Funny that the trail head for the Dolpa hasn’t a single print of its own mugshot. We’d note it as fair warning, if we weren’t so wrapped up in the cozy blanket of our own naivety. But at least we got out of that bed. The preceding day, as our bare-boned bus teetered over beckoning mountain cliff ledges, Sangeetha and I decided to define the word, “precarious.”

“likely to fall”

“dependent on chance”

“insecure positioning”

“teetering on trouble”

“bound for natural disaster”

“on the edge”

We take dibs on the things that we will grab should we plummet. She calls the seat in front of her. I call her. She’s envious of my window. I remind her of the things that could jut through it as we roll. She says that if we die, our disappearance might make a great movie. She claims Carrie Russel. I, Wynona Ryder.

And so, acutely aware of the precarious state of our lives on this pilgrimage, we are perhaps more accurately labeled stupid than naive.

And there is fear. Great fear, of which we speak little. Sometimes we poke a little fun and nervously laugh, but we’ve chosen each other for a serious reason; that in our moments of self-doubt and true fear, we may ride freely on the other person’s (presumed) faith and (assumed) sense of security. Afterall, isn’t that the most common function of couple-dom?

Ironically, or not, that night I have a lucid dream: In the commotion of typical non-sense, I turn and face a wind and hear myself say in my head, “I’m dreaming.” My perceptive centers itself. And I wake up. But into another dream. Where I can hear my voice but am not speaking. The voice I hear is story telling. It’s speaking of this very adventure in the Dolpa, but in the past tense. Talking in the future of a tale all but done. Then the voice becomes my own and I AM the story teller, speaking with confidence of events long experienced and gone. I wake up. This time, not into another dream, but into my twisted sheets. And when I awake, the taste of certainty is still so strong in my mouth, that I have to shuffle through a timeline of events to convince myself that I haven’t yet finished this trip.

And only then do I realize the severity of my unspoken fear.

That my subconscious felt it necessary to provide me this favorable omen means, indeed, a fear was brewing into a less-laughable and quite formidable threat. It’s as if a third person has joined us, in whose past tense story of our present tale and in the voice of timeless and all-knowing perspective, presents a faith upon which we feel confident placing our bets.

Sangeetha awakes. I tell her my dream. We confess the most formidable of fears. We laugh a little. And sigh more.

We will return. We’ll live to tell our story in the past tense. And to this faith, we suddenly cling.

We had a number of amazing sponsors who spiked our gear with the best equipment in the field. Here’s my testimonial for Jetboil, who equipped us with our entire kitchen for our month in the Dolpa. I’ll be back with another Dolpa post asap. The problem is I’m broke and have had to refocus my energies and prioritize those projects that, you know, pay.

I’m actually shocked that in eight years of off-the-beaten-path international travels, it is only now that I have packed my first set of Jetboil gear. As it is in the nature of most explorers to shun instruction pamphlets, I considered it an auspicious sign that it took us only minutes to assemble our entire, “kitchen,” on the tiny porch of our guesthouse in Kathmandu. And it really was only a few minutes later that we were clinking metal cups full of wine and celebrating, not only the success of our Jetboil trial run, but the pad thai we had just whipped up wherein.

Of course, what defines success on a guesthouse deck is entirely different from the test of what will survive in the tiny and ancient villages perched at 15,000 feet, on the edge of the Tibetan plateau, in the Dolpa of rural Nepal. And perhaps more importantly, what would ultimately survive the three 17,000 foot passes and weeks of walking that we would have to travel to get there. As we were also carrying 200 pairs of shoes to deliver to the remote communities (often isolated by the Himalayas from aid) we had employed four ponies to help us with our load; a load that was significantly lightened by the missing full stove, kitchen and fuel of which I’ve seen expeditions accustomed to carrying. Not only our bags, but our moods, were notably higher for the simple stats of the modest, compact and ultralight set of jetboil gear that packed down into the corner of a single bag. With multiple 10-hour days, the ease of our Jetboil tools not only made coffee fast, soup hot, and dinner easy, but these adjectives earned us some of the most precious minutes of our day: an earlier start, a hot lunch on a cold day, a longer break for a priceless view, a second evening hot drink, less time between getting out of our boots and into our sleeping bags. The tools served not only practical, but entertainment, purposes, as word would quickly spread and a modest crowd of local villagers would accumulate to witness the, “magic fire,” upon which we produced their same staple of life, “dhal bhat,” or, “lentils and rice,” without a single patty of yak manure or log of high altitude desert brush.

Few people venture into the Dolpa; we never, in all of upper Dolpa, saw another foreigner. As two young females with limited high-altitude trekking experience, we were probably in a little over our heads. But thanks to exceptional gear, we know little of the great problems that COULD have befallen us. Thank you, Jetboil, for sponsoring our outrageous expedition and helping us to safely and easily navigate a host of potential problems to assure a totally seamless, light, safe and tasty adventure. The next time we head again to where few have gone, along with our curiosity and courage, we will not forget to pack our Jetboil gear.

With enormous appreciation,

sol & kt


In the Picture: We come to the end of the road, quite literally: it ended in a cliff of rock. On the other side, we waited patiently for our next unknown form of transportation, but not before climbing on top of the bus and searching through bags until we found the coffee press and a bag of organic Nepali roasted beans. I swear we’re not high maintenance. We didn’t bathe for a month after this day. We all choose our treats. Mine happens to be french pressed.

Opening the book on our adventures in the Dolpa (rural Nepal) is as intimidating as the 17,000 foot passes we crossed to get there. Just look at a single page of my notes!

So instead of hesitating any longer, I’m just going to open and type.

Scared, exhausted, breathless, hungry, sore, cold and wet, on the first week of our pilgrimage in the Dolpa, I woke up early and as Sangeetha took to her morning ritual of flicking at the beads of water that accumulated into breaking dams on the low roof of our tiny tent, I scribbled into my journal the following:

THESE are the adventures of Kavita and Sangeetha in the Dolpa of rural Nepal.

Names, dates, times, heights, distances and places cannot be confirmed as such numerals and characters have little value when that to which they are respective does not exist. Let it suffice that such measures, here, change with the wind, waning moon and a timeless culture’s mood.

My name is Kavita. Kavita means, “poem” in Hindi. The name was given to me by a man born a shepherd of the Ladakhi North Indian plateau, at the summit of a pass in the Himalayas as a gift to crown the acceptance of the path of adventures that would ultimately lead to this one. On that same cliff of life crossroads, I, curiously, kicked not one, but two, copper horseshoes.

Upon finding my first phone, weeks later, I called my best friend and told her of my decision to follow my open-ended whim in South Asia. She replied, “then I’m coming too” and so I sent to her, by way of messenger, the second copper horseshoe.

Fall, winter and spring pass before we find ourselves reunited in the smooth clay underground room of an attending Tibetan family in a tiny and ancient village in rural Nepal. My friend is sitting cross-legged and wide-eyed at the underground world of which she has so suddenly entered. She keeps trying to bow lower than the dark, wrinkled man holding a prayer mala (rosary) and chanting mantras (Buddhist prayers) beneath his smile, for whom she has an unnamed source of reverent respect.

I enter the smoke-filled room and Sonam Tashi, our Tibetan ponyman, looks up with his perennial smile, just as he snaps a set of new batteries into an aged radio (and only medium of this otherwise communication-less world).

“SANGEET!” he shouts, as his arms, inflated by enthusiasm, rise into the air.

As I cross the room to my seat on the richly carpeted clay bench, I do a little line dance in my best impersonation of traditional Tibetan dance as I have seen it. Our small audience laughs in surprise, claps to the beat, and, finally, applauds my short act. Finding my seat next to my friend, she asks of me, “What did Sonam Tashi shout?”

“Sangeet. It’s Hindi and Nepali for, “music.” That’s it! That’s your name! Sangeetha!”

For it was only a day ago that my friend charmed an entire bus of local passengers waiting on a cliff ledge (for a secret amount of time) with the guitar she had struggled to bring half way around the globe to this moment. As she sang and strummed on the muddy step of the bus, a beautiful Punjabi boy in a pink turban snapped his fingers, gyrated his hips and thrust his arms about in animated poses of what he claimed to be his culture’s traditional dance.

The name is perfect, and thus are born the adventures of Kavita and Sangeetha.