Life Without Limits, A

by Wellington, Chrissie

  6

  Nepal

  After the erupting volcano experience in Jeju, I started looking for some hands-on development work, and found myself drawn towards Nepal. On my travels through Asia in 2000, it was one country I hadn’t visited, bar a brief stop in transit at Kathmandu airport, where I’d met the most engaging Nepali. I’d made a decision then to revisit the country properly, which I did over New Year 2003. After that three-week stay, during which I trekked to Annapurna Base Camp, I fell in love with the place.

  After investigating options on the internet, I was offered a job by a local Nepali NGO called Rural Reconstruction Nepal (RRN), run by a well-known political activist called Dr Arjun Karki. The salary was $80 a month.

  My heart screamed yes, but when it came to the crunch the decision was difficult. For all of my frustrations with it, my job at Defra was a good one and I did enjoy it. What was more, the following year (2005) would see the UK hold the presidency of the G8 and the EU. This meant my job would be invested with an increased level of responsibility. No longer would we be feeding into EU documents, we would actually be drafting them. The hours would be long, but the career progression rapid, as Georgie was to find out because she took my job when I left, and thrived.

  It was always at the back of my mind, even after I decided to go to Nepal. Should I have stayed? Later it occurred to me that if I had stayed and made a success of it, would I ever have become a professional triathlete? On these decisions hang more than you can ever know at the time.

  In the end, I applied for a sabbatical and my request was accepted. On 9 September 2004, I headed to Nepal.

  It’s easy to see why anyone would fall in love with Nepal, especially if they had a passion for the outdoors. It has some of the most awe-inspiring scenery in the world, and against the backdrop of the world’s highest mountains the local culture of temples, festivals and free-ranging animals is vivid in colour and personality.

  There is a lot wrong as well, though. The country was in the midst of a civil war when I arrived. The Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) was intent on overthrowing the corrupt ruling monarchy and turning the country into a republic. They would eventually succeed, but when I arrived the conflict was well into its ninth year. The atmosphere was fraught. The Maoists drew their strength from the vast constituency of poor in Nepal who had nothing to lose. They destroyed police stations, army barracks and the local infrastructure, extorting money from tourists and calling frequent strikes or bandhs, which brought cities and towns to a halt. The monarchical government, through the Nepalese Army, responded with intimidatory tactics. More than 10,000 people died during the course of the ten-year civil war. It was a dangerous place to be, particularly at RRN. Arjun, our boss, was on a list of political dissidents wanted by the government. While I was there he was put under house arrest for antagonising them, and towards the end of my stay, in 2005, we had to smuggle him out of the country.

  RRN operated out of a ramshackle building with wires everywhere, much like all of the buildings in Kathmandu, other than those owned by the government and the embassies. It turned out RRN was the largest local NGO in Nepal. Apart from me, a British woman called Ruth and an Austrian called Bernard, all of the employees were Nepali. Everyone was incredibly welcoming, and threw myself into the work as a jack of all trades, overhauling the website, editing documents, writing policy proposals and chapters for books, applying for funding and, in time, managing my own project, which was called the Community Water, Sanitation and Health (CWASH) project.

  I loved my job, particularly the first-hand project management experience with CWASH. During the UN conference in New York in 2004, I had attended a lecture from a man called Dr Kamal Kar, who challenged the traditional concept of development through his Community-Led Total Sanitation scheme. The scheme did away with grand projects of investment and modernisation in poverty-stricken regions, and concentrated on education and empowerment at grassroots level. It was aimed at helping people to help themselves. He made a huge impression on me, and I enjoyed some lengthy discussions with him afterwards. I set about trying to pilot his scheme through CWASH.

  The project was focused on the remote, conflict-ridden district of Salyan, a few hundred miles west of Kathmandu. It was not uncommon for a village of a hundred people to share one or two toilets. Men thought nothing of defecating in the open. Women would do the same, although custom allowed them to do so only before dawn or after dark.

  Everyone in a community was encouraged to go on transect walks, or ‘walks of shame’, in which they identified how the waste was finding its way into rivers, livestock, crops, hands and feet. It led to the calculation that each person was ingesting between ten and twenty grams of faeces every day. Feelings of shame and disgust would trigger a desire for change and discussions about how the situation might be improved. It was a process of empowerment from ground level up. It was the very opposite of what we were doing beneath the erupting volcano.

  CWASH took me deep into the Nepali countryside. We would drive for ten hours in a jeep along rocky roads to visit communities in the direst poverty, torn apart by the civil war. It was painful to witness, but so invigorating to empower them to improve their lives.

  Immediately on arrival in Kathmandu I started investigating the prospects of pursuing triathlon. Not good. The only pool in the city was a 50m cesspit, so swimming was out of the question. I ran every morning when I first arrived, but you were taking your life in your hands among the Wacky Races traffic, smog and rabid dogs. So I soon bought myself a mountain bike and I christened him Prem (premi is Nepalese for boyfriend). Around that trusty steed, who had already traversed the Himalaya with his previous owner, my social life took off.

  The first person I met was this wonderful, very married German guy, Cornelius. We soon forged a deep, platonic relationship that involved cycling off through the forests of Shivapuri National Park, to the north of the city, being eaten by leeches and carrying our bikes along what was left of trails washed away by the monsoon season.

  I also joined a group of cyclists – six or seven local guys and anyone else who fancied coming along – organised by a Nepali called Sonam. He is a biking institution in Kathmandu, and owns the best bike shop in the city, Dusk Till Dawn. Through that group I met three didis (‘sisters’ in Nepali), an Argentinian called Agustina (or Tina), an Australian called Helen and a German called Billi. Tina is one of the kindest and calmest people I have ever met. Even now, if I get stressed about something, I ask myself what Tina would do. Billi, meanwhile, is my soulmate. We could have been separated at birth, our attitudes and characters are so similar. She was out there as a freelance journalist and translator.

  Billi and Tina are mountaineers (Billi has since summited three mountains higher than 8,000m, including Everest), and they invited me on an expedition during Dashain, which is a two-week festival in celebration of the family. The Nepalese calendar is full of festivals. They seem to have more holidays than work days. Teej was my favourite – the festival for women, where every married woman wears the scarlet sari she wore on her wedding day. All the festivals are dazzling spectacles of colour and vivacity. People dance in their jewellery and throw coloured paint and water over each other. The cows, which wander where they please throughout the city, are bedecked with garlands, and each wears a crimson tikka, or painted dot, on its forehead.

  But for my first Dashain in Nepal, I went with Tina and Billi to Langtang, a region in the north of Nepal that borders Tibet. We took the rickety ‘bus’ from Kathmandu and, as usual, chose to sit on the top most of the way, rather than be stuck inside with vomiting children, chickens, goats and mountains of luggage. This particular journey was about twelve hours, though, which was a bit hard on the bum. We were aiming to summit an unconquered 6,000m peak. There were harnesses, ropes and crampons involved. Tina and Billi were fine, but I hadn’t got a clue. We were accompanied by our friend Namgya, who is a Sherpa. Unfortunately, an avalanche meant we didn’t make it to the top, bu
t we were the first to try. A couple of years later the mountain was renamed Baden-Powell Scout Peak, and now they lead expeditions up it.

  It was on that trip that I had my first brush with altitude sickness. We had reached 4,500m when we decided we should climb what looked from where we were standing like a nearby hill. But because we were already standing at 4,500m, it was a hill whose summit was 5,300m above sea level. Me being me, I decided to see how fast I could get up it. Sure enough, I beat Billi and Tina to the top and celebrated among the coloured prayer flags on the summit. Well done me.

  On the way down, though, things turned nasty. My head felt as if it were in a vice; the blood started to pound against the inside of my constricting skull. By the time I got back to the trekking lodge, I couldn’t lift my head at all. I sat for hours slumped over my haunches, a broken woman. I thought I was going to die, which is far from an unreasonable fear with altitude sickness. I was afraid to go to sleep the pain was so intense, but Billi and Tina looked after me.

  A day later, we went up to 5,000m and camped, and I was fine. The problem was not that I couldn’t adapt to altitude; it was that I had gone up too quickly. I may have reached the top first, but Billi and Tina had won the day. At those altitudes, my competitiveness had been exposed as immaturity, and I paid the price. Lesson learned.

  There was still plenty of scope for competitiveness elsewhere, though. I entered a few mountain-bike races. I was often the only girl, and I managed to beat the majority of the men. Then, for New Year we went to Pokhara, cycling the 200km from Kathmandu. With rucksacks on backs, we set off at 7 a.m. on the terrible roads, which were a lot of things but flat wasn’t one of them. I just would not give in. One by one, everyone dropped out and finished the journey by bus, except for me and the Nepali mountain-bike champion. We arrived, showered and headed straight out for a night on the town.

  And those morning rides with Sonam and his team were a daily opportunity to test myself against men at altitude. Kathmandu sits in a bowl, whose lowest point is 1,350m above sea level. When you cycle out of town, you are straight into the mountains surrounding the city.

  I used to get up at the crack of dawn, which is actually an hour or two later than most Nepalese, who tend to rise at 4 a.m. just after the first cock crow has awakened the first dog, whose incessant barking wakes the next, and so on until they crescendo into a canine pre-dawn chorus: somewhat tedious.

  With the sun rising over the foothills of the Himalaya, I would set out for the designated meeting spot with the team. The cows meandered drunkenly through the streets, the butchers slaughtered their goats, the Hindu bells rang and the poor children scavenged on piles of rubbish or sat slumped in doorways, breathing glue fumes from paper bags.

  Each morning the riders met at a chiyaa stall. This milky, sweet Nepalese tea was drunk by the gallon out of vessels washed loosely with a swill of local parasites. I suffered from giardia and other intestinal issues almost constantly in Nepal. But after a couple of cups of chiyaa I was ready for anything, and off we would cycle into the foothills around town, where buffalo pulled their ploughs through the terraced paddy fields. We climbed through villages of ochre mud-houses and past elaborate temples. Scantily clad children would fly home-made kites from the rooftops, their freedom and weightlessness a poignant image in a country crushed by civil war. In the distance rose the 8,000m peaks of the Himalaya.

  Our morning bike rides usually took two hours, and I was back in time for work. (Well, I hardly ever was, but they didn’t seem to mind my being a bit late. They liked the fact that I was getting out into the local villages.) At the weekend, the rides were longer. It was usually Cornelius, Billi, Tina and me, but others would often join us. We just rode and rode. We ate and drank whatever we could lay our hands on in the villages we passed – usually chiyaa, chick-pea curry, coconut biscuits (at four pence a packet) or deep-fried doughnuts. Wherever we ended up at dusk on the Saturday, we would seek shelter, sometimes in the house of a local, sometimes at a monastery. Dinner was always the same, as was lunch during the week. Dhal bhat – rice, lentil soup and curry. The Nepalese eat it twice a day. I loved it. Then, on the Sunday we wended our way back to Kathmandu by the most indirect route possible.

  We would arrive back in town exhausted, sweaty and hungry, but with spirits soaring. We had no idea how far we had been, how many calories we’d burned, what heart rate we’d maxed out at. There was no data to download or logbook to tick. This was raw and elemental, the way sport and adventure has always been. I’m sure it was the making of me.

  Then again, our sixteen-day bike ride from Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, back to Kathmandu via Everest Base Camp, might also have played a part. Billi, Tina and I pledged to make the trip while we were on our expedition in Langtang. At the end of April 2005, we flew to Lhasa and made our preparations for the 1,200km ride home. We called ourselves the Rangi-Changi team. Rangi-changi means ‘multi-coloured’ in Nepali. Our team consisted of Billi, a German; Tina, an Argentinian; Rupesh, a Nepali; Trond, a Norwegian; Chris and Kirsten, who were Danish; and me.

  Tibet is very different from Nepal. Where Kathmandu sits in a bowl of lush vegetation, up over the other side of the Himalaya stretches the desert plateau of Tibet. Not much survives there, beyond clumps of course grass, chubby little desert rats and the yaks, which can cope with almost anything. As can the Tibetan nomads, who wander across the land setting up home for two months at a time, before moving on with their train of yaks, dogs and sheep. Tibetans are becoming a minority in their homeland as the encroaching tentacles of the Chinese take greater hold. What began as a violent annexation in the 1950s has become a subtler process of assimilation, as the Chinese move in on the roads and railways that increasingly penetrate the interior. I tried to talk to our guide about the situation, but he was reluctant to be drawn. He did reveal that he had spent three years in prison – for what, I don’t know. On the morning of the day we set off, a few of us visited the Potala Palace, which was the residence of the Dalai Lama until he went into exile during the failed Tibetan uprising in 1959. It made a huge impression on me, standing tall on elevated ground over Lhasa, as if in defiance of the Chinese influence that closes in ever more tightly on the city below. Once it would have been a hive of activity; now, sadly, it is little more than a museum.

  That afternoon, we began the long ride home. Arid it may have been, but the scale of the landscape was breathtaking. The plains stretched out with nothing but the odd dust tornado disturbing the peace. Beyond them, the land rose into barren mountains, and beyond those mountains lay the snowy Himalaya.

  The going was tough from the start. We lost Trond and Rupesh to altitude sickness on the second day. They were taken by bus to Shigatse, to wait for us there. The rest of us soldiered on. This was Prem’s second tour of duty in the Himalaya and he never let me down, even as we struggled against the stinging dust that was whipped up into our faces by the wind. At the end of the second day, I lay down in my tent with the horrible symptoms of altitude sickness over coming me. We were at 4,800m and had much further to climb, but my body seemed to adapt overnight, even if my sleep never did. The higher we ascended, the lighter my sleep became and the more vivid my dreams.

  We stayed an extra day to acclimatise at that altitude, which we spent with a family of nomads, whose temporary shelter of yak skin was just across the river. The ruddy-faced young son taught me how to use a home-made catapult, and inside the tent we were treated to the local Tibetan delicacy – yak butter tea. I’ll try anything, but this blend of hot water, tea leaves, yak butter and salt tested that characteristic to the limit. It’s vile, and it’s ubiquitous in Tibet.

  We struck camp on 1 May, but the maypoles of Merrie England seemed a long way away. That particular day was a neat microcosm of the whole trip, taking in euphoria and despair, the heavenly and the hellish. By midday, we had made it to the top of a snowy pass at 5,400m. Tears were in my eyes at what we had achieved, and at the sheer beauty of the terrain we had cycled through
, not to mention that which we could see in the distance. Having stopped for lunch at a small settlement of whitewashed houses on the plain the other side, we set off for the next pass that rose from the plateau to a mere 5,000m. This one, though, turned into an interminable slog. We regrouped at 5 p.m., and it was then that it started to snow. On we went, up through the hairpins as a full-on blizzard closed in. Conditions were even more horrific on the descent, as I lost touch with my extremities. The voices of Frank and Georgie rang in my ears: ’When things are tough, you are tougher.’ Just as I thought my extremities could take no more, we came across a building, which turned out to be a workman’s residence. Mercifully, we were able to bed down in the relative warmth of a spare room. We left our bikes outside, though, and in the morning the components were frozen solid. Solution? We peed on them. By 8 a.m. we were on the move again.

  Most of the days contained highs and lows of epic proportions, geographically, meteorologically, physically and emotionally. But what a high, on all counts, we reached at Base Camp! I found it impossible to look at Everest without crying. When I rounded a corner in the National Park after yet another draining ascent, and the Himalaya hove into view for the first time, tears welled up in my eyes. I couldn’t actually see Everest because it was shrouded in cloud, but just knowing it was there was enough. The next day, after a stay in a delightful little village, we set off for Base Camp. Everest rose majestically in the distance, but it seemed to take an age to reach the base. The rode was so bumpy it was like riding on rumble strips. The vibrations made our arms ache, but the pain paled into insignificance as the mountain drew closer.

  We finally made it to Base Camp under an unrelenting sun that blistered my lips. More tears. Base Camp is incredibly civilised, with its rows of tents all colour-coded according to the different climbing parties. There are sleeping tents, mess tents, toilet tents, even internet tents. Billi introduced us to a group leader, and soon we were chatting away with the climbers preparing for the summit. I’m not sure I would ever be able to go up there. It’s not the physical and mental demands, necessarily; it’s more the sitting around, waiting for a window in the weather, waiting to acclimatise to each new level of altitude. That’s what would break me.