Songs of the Baka and Other Discoveries

by Dennis James

  Djémila (the beautiful in Arabic) was a Roman military outpost uncharacteristically constructed inland rather than on the coast. It is situated in an easily defensible position on a high ridge formed by the confluence of two rivers. The only aesthetic anomaly is that the triangular shape of the ridge did not easily accommodate the Roman preference for square grid urban design. As it grew to its peak population of twelve thousand, it spread from the point of the triangle uphill in successive waves of construction, known as the first city, second city, and third city. What was good for military defense in ancient times translates now into a spectacular view of the surrounding mountains and valleys.

  We walk downhill from the entrance toward the third city, stunned by the extent and integrity of the ruins, which are more concentrated than those of Tipaza. There are few gardens and fewer, but larger, fora and market areas. The efficiency and ingenuity of the water supply, waste disposal, traffic control, security measures, commercial facilities, and residential accommodations are remarkable. There is a fourteen-seat unisex stone privy that no doubt was the scene of some hilarity. A stone pedestal in front of one of the smaller buildings on the cardo bears the relief image of a large phallus and testicles. This may have been a simple fertility symbol, a sign for a brothel, or just boasting by the resident. Large structures, like the amphitheater and the Christian Basilica, sit outside the city’s walls. We wander the grounds for hours, almost all alone, not a foreign tourist in sight.

  Roman Theater, Djémila

  Next, we visit a museum where statuary and mosaics from the ruins are restored and protected. The mosaics from the Roman and Byzantine villas are huge. Roman, Greek, and Phoenician mythological scenes, some blatantly erotic, join lives of the saints and depictions of hunting, farming, and bucolic bliss. The mosaics take up the walls and floors of the spacious museum.

  We move on to Setif—birthplace of the final struggle for independence from France. During World War II, Algerians were encouraged by de Gaulle and other French politicians to join the Free French armies and fight for the Allies in Europe, with the promise that this would lead to independence. A parade to celebrate the Allies’ victory in Europe was held in Setif on May 8, 1945. Relying on the French promise, the independence activists marched under their own banner. French troops and colonial militia fired upon them and chased them through the town, killing about one hundred activists. This led to reprisals against the colonists. The French army and air force responded with an all-out assault on the local population, killing an estimated forty thousand Algerians and marking the beginning of the end of French colonization in Algeria. The independence movement was largely nonviolent until November 1954, when the FLN formally turned to armed revolution, leading to independence in 1962.

  I keep these things in mind when I walk through this modern bustling city, with its smart shoppers in western dress and its French-style, tree-lined boulevards superimposed on its few but well-tended ancient baths, fountains, and columnar fragments. It is hard to believe that this was once a war zone. The only conflict we witness in Setif is between Sidi N and a young guide at the Museum of Natural History, who argue over details of Algerian history and art, competing for our attention.

  The drive back to Algiers is interminable. There are control roadblocks every few kilometers. Traffic is backed up as far as one can see. Progress is so slow that a young boy sits on the concrete slab of the highway meridian, selling paper cups of tea to the nearly stationary drivers. Between control points, Sidi’s grandson drives like a madman. He gauges his progress by his proximity to a pickup truck heavily loaded with caged chickens. He dubs the pickup driver “Chicken Man,” and we make a game of trying to stay ahead of him. We are relieved when Chicken Man finally turns off at an exit.

  The next day, Sidi N drives us to the airport and speeds us through check-in and security. He is not wearing his khaki bill cap, so, in addition to a healthy tip, I give him my own khaki bill cap, which reads “Brooklyn Botanical Gardens.” Smiling, he claps it on his head.

  Ma salaama and au revoir, Algeria.

  Epilogue

  We have great respect for the Algerian people for their fierce resistance to colonialism, their tenacious struggle for independence, and their preservation of the unique and disparate cultures in the country.

  But the issues that led to the civil war have not been resolved. Incidents of violence in 2007 led to predictions of an imminent slide back into the horrors of widespread armed conflict. It hasn’t happened. Perhaps the extreme violence of the recent past has cauterized the societal wounds no one wants to open again.

  We want to return. We want to see the Louvre of rock art in Djanel; to visit Oran, Tlemcen, and western Algeria; to walk among the Roman ruins at Timgud; and to spend more time in the Kabyle Mountains with Sidi of the North and other Algerians, even vagabonds.

  Nepal:

  LANGTANG VALLEY TREK

  Nepal. The name evokes images of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay waving their nations’ flags at the top of the world; of climbers, Sherpas, and porters crossing the shifting crevices of the Khumbu Ice Fall, balancing on aluminum ladders; of multicolor prayer pennants snapping in gale force winds in the Annapurna base camp; of the colossal spindrift of snow that the global jet stream blows off the top of Mount Everest; of earthquakes, avalanches, and sudden fierce storms.

  Nepal is a climber’s and trekker’s Nirvana. It has the most spectacular mountain scenery on the planet. Its borders encompass eight of the world’s ten highest peaks, whose ascents have been the subjects of countless books, films, and legends. And I thought that books, films, and legends were as close as I would ever get to Nepal.

  The California Sierras, Colorado Rockies, and White Mountains of New Hampshire were challenging enough for me. But during a Sierra Club backpack outing in 2004, Barbara and I get to know Melinda Goodwater, coleader of the trip, who is married to Singaman Lama, a Nepali and tour organizer in Kathmandu. Melinda spends half the year leading Sierra Club outings in the US and the other half in Nepal guiding tours with Singa. In Nepal, she and Singa prefer to avoid the popular Everest Base Camp Trek or the Annapurna Circuit, which are crowded with too many tourists who leave their junk behind. Instead, they find alternate routes that are beautiful and far less traveled.

  In the summer of 2010, when Barbara and I discuss where to travel next, we remember Melinda’s descriptions of Nepal. We make contact via email and discuss our Nepal options; she is aware of our strengths and limitations and believes we can handle an extended Himalayan trek. So Nepal it is, in November of 2010.

  We have other reasons to choose Nepal. Barbara’s twenty-year-old niece, Rachel, is studying in Kathmandu and living with a Nepali family. We would like to see her and have her show us around the sprawling city. Finally, we could take a few days after the mountain trek to visit a place we had never heard of: Chitwan National Park in southern Nepal.

  Exhausted and jet-lagged after twenty-five hours in transit, we land at the Kathmandu International Airport in the late afternoon on November 6. Melinda picks us up and takes us to the Potala Guest House, where we meet our fellow trekkers, Gordon Duvaul and Suzanne Swedo, both of whom are in our age group and have trekked in Nepal before. We already know Suzanne; she was the other leader of the 2004 Sierra Club trip. Suzanne has written books about hiking, camping, and wildflowers. Gordon wants to run a marathon in every state of the Union and has only a few left to reach his goal.

  Gordon’s and Suzanne’s hiking backgrounds are intimidating. However, we are in pretty good shape ourselves. I am seventy-two, but I swam competitively in a Masters program for fifteen years and completed six triathlons in my sixties. Barbara, sixty-six, is a distance runner. And for the trek, porters will carry the heavy stuff—tents, cooking gear, food, etc.—while we carry daypacks with necessities and a change of clothes. We are nervous but excited.

  Nepal is one of the poorest countries in the world, and Kathmandu, its capital and largest city, reflects that. The
Potala Guest House is on the border of what is called the Old Town, the center of the city. There are charming centuries-old buildings, shrines and temples, and narrow winding streets and alleys to get pleasantly lost in. With few exceptions, these structures are in poor condition, in need of repair and repainting. Power outages occur daily. Beggars are everywhere. Fortunately, for some in the travel business, so are tourists.

  We spend our first morning in Nepal meeting some of the Sherpas and porters who will accompany us for the next two weeks. Sherpas are an ethnic group that, long ago, migrated from Tibet to the Nepali highlands. They live on a subsistence economy, supplemented by their earnings as guides, cooks, and porters. They are strong, tireless, sure-footed, and invariably cheerful, and their first concern is the safety of the client. Most of the Sherpas on our trek are from the same village in the Langtang Valley and have worked with Melinda and Singa before.

  In the afternoon, Rachel gives us a tour of Kathmandu—Durbar Square, with its temples and palaces in sad disrepair, and the Ghat, where bodies are being cremated along the river. That she is fluent in the language surprises and delights the natives; she looks nothing like them. In stark contrast to the Nepalis, who are dark-haired and short of stature, she is blonde and nearly six feet tall. Her language skills and her height make her a worthy guide.

  The Trek

  The trek is known as the Langtang and Gosainkunda Lake Trek. The first part is a five-day round trip starting and ending near the town of Syabrubesi (altitude, 4,820 feet). The route follows the Langtang River Valley upstream to Langshisha Kharka lake (altitude, 13,450 feet). The second part is an eleven-day trek that follows the Langtang River Valley downstream, visits the holy Gosainkunda lakes, goes over the Laurebina La pass (altitude, 15,120 feet), and descends to the Kathmandu Valley.

  We begin by carrying our gear through the crowded streets of Kathmandu to meet a chartered bus that will take us to the trailhead near Syabrubesi. We wait on a street corner until an old bus, full of Nepalis (at least eighteen), with piles of gear tied on its roof, pulls up. “This is it,” Singa says, and he starts tossing our duffels onto the roof. We jam into bus seats meant for smaller people, and the bus takes off. Jerry cans of kerosene block the aisle. A young man is playing the tabla; others are joking with the driver. The scenery consists of rocks, more rocks, patches of cultivation, and the occasional glimpse of snow-covered peaks. The bus is slow, grinding its way up the foothills.

  When the bus gets into the real mountains, the road narrows to one lane, skirting hairpin turns and sheer drops. The driver rarely shifts out of first or reverse gear. I’m scared stiff, but after a while I decide to trust the driver, relax, and enjoy the ride. The trip, which only covers about twenty-two miles, takes eight hours.

  At four p.m., we arrive at Syabrubesi and rush to unload our gear in a field before dark. The porters set up tents, and the cook fixes a great vegetarian dinner—soup, pepper bread, dal, rice, mushrooms, and potatoes.

  The next morning, we are up and out at seven thirty a.m. Getting to our next destination requires a net elevation gain of more than three thousand feet. We pass old and quaint stone bridges, playful langur monkeys, gurgling waterfalls—or so we are told. Instead, we spend most of the time staring straight ahead at the trail and sitting down whenever the lead (Melinda or Singa) stops. The altitude has finally gotten to us New York City flatlanders. Fortunately, it hits us not in the form of throbbing headaches or nausea—just fatigue. We’re used to more oxygen—or whatever it is we breathe in Brooklyn. It is a one-foot-in-front-of-the-other slog, but the legs hold up and we make it to a group of lodges called Lama Hotel.

  Langtang Village, with our tents in the foreground

  We set up tents in a pasture adjoining the lodges after the porters shovel yak dung out of the way. It’s very cold in the tent. Drinking pots of tea results in many trips outside to relieve ourselves during the night. A nearby dog decides to bark for an hour and a half. We wear everything we have but still can’t get warm. Our flashlight quits. Meanwhile, the porters, Sherpas, and the cook are singing and playing cards in a tent a few feet away. Yaks come and go, snuffling and defecating. We laugh, huddle together, and, eventually, sleep.

  The next morning, we climb another three thousand feet from Lama Hotel to the village of Langtang (altitude, 11,250 feet), a popular stopover for trekkers, hikers, and climbers. The village is built on the flat bottom of the Valley, with the glacier-draped, twenty-thousand-foot mountains Langtang Lirung and Langtang II looming over it. There are about two hundred permanent residents, with capacity for dozens of visitors. The buildings are one or two stories high, with corrugated steel roofs. Villagers tend gardens of potatoes and greens. Yaks roam free in adjacent pastures, and horses are herded through the broad unpaved streets.

  Along the way, Barbara takes hundreds of photos, many of the stupendous surrounding landscape but many more of the strong, tough, smiling, and gentle Nepali. Throughout the trek, she is concerned that exposure to the cold will drain her camera battery. A clerk at a camera store in New York had advised her to sleep with the camera close to her heart; I can attest that she followed his advice.

  Gradually acclimating to the altitude, we struggle with the other difficulties of the trail. Feeder streams, tributaries of the Langtang River, have carved deep gullies and canyons in their passage from the mountain glaciers to the river. When the trail crosses these streams, we must negotiate steep, often wet, descents and ascents. The descents are the worst. A slip on the way down can send us tobogganing on our backsides for many feet before we are brought up sharply and painfully by a protruding rock, errant root, or hapless comrade. On steep descents, we think about where and how to place our feet, weight, and poles for every step. Despite the greater exertion required for going up, we regard ascents as a relief from the tension generated by going down.

  River crossing

  There is, of course, the crossing of a stream itself. It is the dry season in Nepal, so stepping-stones are visible due to the low water levels. Were we nimble, like the Sherpas, we could hop from rock to rock to the other side. Instead, we proceed deliberately in stately consideration of each step, using poles dug into the streambed for balance. Some of the streams have cut canyons so deep, rough, and steep that suspension bridges have been built for the crossing. These are steel mesh affairs, about five feet wide and one hundred or so feet long. There is a waist-high cable on each side to hang onto, but the bridge twists and sways as I shift my weight with each step. I can see the awful drop through the mesh floor and hear the churning rapids of the stream below. I focus ten feet ahead on a metal strip that runs down the center of the bridge, hang on to both cables, repeat to myself, don’t look down, and hope a yak doesn’t come the other way.

  Every few kilometers, we see an isolated settlement with a teahouse and one or two other structures. As in Langtang village, all of the buildings are roofed with sheets of corrugated steel, manufactured in 65-kilogram (143-pound) segments. Since yaks are unable to carry these loads of steel on the rough, steep, twisting trails, the remaining option is human transport. Two or three times a day, a warning that porters are approaching is passed down the line of trekkers. We step off the trail to give them room, and within minutes they appear, bent over, wearing worn sneakers, each with a steel roofing segment on his back, leaping from rock to rock. This is a feat of strength and balance, and also an example of the extreme hardships the Sherpa people must endure in order to make a living. Our existential musings on why we trek at our age seem petty compared to the transport porter’s certain knowledge of why he does what he does.

  We develop a day-to-day rhythm, doing the same arduous climbing and descending, inching our way up and down the tall, smooth, slippery stones, and taking long strides on the level stretches. We engage in extended conversation with a comrade or hike alone in quiet contemplation. Barbara learns a lot from Suzanne about the flora of the region, and Suzanne learns a lot from Barbara about treatment for aching knees. It
feels good to challenge our physical limits, but we look forward to stopping for rest breaks, lunches, and dinners. There is some danger in what we’re doing—avalanches, landslides, earthquakes, freezing, and, mainly, falling. These are the risks we accept in order to trespass on these stony peaks and take in their fearsome beauty. It’s a risk we can minimize if we are focused, strong, and determined. The rest is up to nature, which doesn’t care.

  Holy man, Lake Gosainkunda, Nepal

  Lake Gosainkunda

  The scenery is overwhelming, especially in the early morning and late afternoon, when the slanted rays of the sun set the permanent snow caps of the surrounding peaks on fire. We see a similar effect, on a fraction of the scale, from our apartment in Brooklyn as the evening sun lights up Manhattan’s metal-clad towers. On relatively level stretches, we are able to look up from the trail to appreciate the views around us: rhododendron forests and glaciers; alpine pastures dotted with shaggy black-coated yaks; villages high on knife-edge ridge tops or spread on the flat floor of the valley; tiny teahouses built of stone and timber; morning seas of fog filling the valley until burned off by the rising sun; and Buddhist shrines and temples adorned with banners and pennants of gold, silver, crimson, azure, and green. What we don’t see many of are other trekkers.

  We spend two nights at the Gosainkunda lakes, the highest encampment of our lives (altitude, 14,430 feet). The lakes are shallow glacial ponds studded with cairns, tiny towers of stacked rocks. These lakes, sacred to both Buddhists and Hindus, are the destination of thousands of holy men who make a pilgrimage every August to leave more stone towers.

  A shallow open dugout near the shore of the most sacred lake is home to a holy man. The dugout is walled with rocks and the floor covered with sandy gravel. He is naked except for a bright-orange loincloth and arm bracelets. His skin is nut brown, his hair long and matted. He is thin and sinewy, with well-defined ribs and muscles. According to Singa, he is a permanent resident here. We share our food with him.