The Best American Travel Writing 2014

by Paul Theroux

  “The gods want us to worship Kawa Karpo,” Nuoji told me gravely, “but not to touch it. Those who touch it die.”

  Kawa Karpo remains unscaled. So dangerous are trails near its summit that some devout Buddhists attempt them in the hopes of accelerating their passage into the next life. Suicide pilgrimages on the mountain are a tradition—one of which I hoped not to partake. So I took care to outfit myself properly and arranged for experienced guides, Tenzin and Anadorma, both 36, who for most of the year are small-time farmers of Yongzhi’s scant arable land. Tenzin, an eight-time pilgrim, was tall, bony, and stoop-shouldered, with a frequently pained expression on his otherwise benevolent face; Anadorma, a veteran of five tours, was tirelessly cheerful and agile, and kept her long black hair bundled beneath a baseball cap turned backward. They had loaded their two mules, white Hujya and brown Ramo, with provisions (rice, salted pork, green peppers, and tea, bought in the base-camp village of Deqin, a six-hour cliffside drive and hike from Yongzhi), utensils, and even dried corn for the high passes, where fodder for our pack animals would be scarce. Our common language would be spoken Mandarin, of which I have a working knowledge.

  The trek would involve no technical climbs, so my equipment and garb would be basic: a tent, a lightweight sleeping bag and ground pad, trekking shoes, polarized sunglasses, and rain gear. A GPS module would let me check altitudes and distances; a pocket thermometer clipped to my expedition knife, temperatures. For spiritual sustenance I packed two key Buddhist texts, the Dhammapada, something like an extended Buddhist Sermon on the Mount, and the Bodhicaryavatara, a guide to enlightenment by the Indian monk of the eighth century Shantideva. The Dhammapada belongs to the ancient Indian canon; Shantideva’s text holds sway in both Indian and Tibetan Buddhism.

  Thus kitted out, we quit the pass above Yongzhi. We marched north, parting the clouds, along a mostly level, foot-wide trail. My heart and lungs pumped hard in the thin tepid air. But within an hour we were engaged in a loping descent through dewy grass toward a waterfall, a slit of froth and glitter tumbling from a cliff into the dark forest, with Kawa Karpo’s massif on our right, across a ravine, lost in the clouds.

  Downward we strode, our mules’ bells ringing.

  By noon we had descended to the Mekong’s headwaters, which roared blue-white at trailside, and found ourselves penetrating a jungle, stepping over mossy ledges, marching through tunnels formed by giant arching ferns and lushly leaved trees draped with garlands of phosphorescent gossamer moss. The route’s altitude varies from 6,000 feet to almost 16,000 feet, and cuts through three (of four) types of biogeographic terrain: humid tropical, humid temperate, and polar. The primeval forests of Yunnan, some of China’s last, support 7,000 species of plants and 263 varieties of orchids, plus 450 kinds of birds, as well as snow leopards, bears, and the elusive Yunnan golden monkey. But just when it seemed we were most alone, wandering through enchanted domains, skirted women in pink tassled headdresses would cross our path, smiling and hailing us in Tibetan, shouldering baskets brimming with wild mushrooms (one of the few regional exports). Then they, like sylvan sprites, would scurry up a slope and into the foliage, and be gone.

  That evening the skies cleared as we left the jungle and strode down the rocky path into Yonsiton, a sweeping, stone-dotted meadow overhung by jagged bluffs. Above the Mekong great trees rose like sentinels, silhouetted against drifting banks of fog. A pair of wizened cowherds in black boots, baggy brown jackets, and worn leather hats welcomed us with few words and radiant smiles. My guides put up in an abandoned herders’ hut. I thought I would do so, too, but it was foul with dung. So I pitched my tent on a knoll just beyond it.

  After we used chopsticks to down a meal of stir-fried pork and rice cooked over a campfire fueled with branches Anadorma collected, I retired. The sun sank behind the peaks, the azure empyrean flushed with lavender before darkening to star-studded cobalt. Gazing out through my tent’s gauze door, I watched meteors flit and flash, until I drifted off to sleep.

  Sometime after midnight rain began pattering down. The sun never rose; the sky at dawn just shaded from black to luminous gray.

  “Dogela Pass, Dogela Pass,” said Tenzin, standing over the campfire as we ate breakfast. “We must start now, because ahead, high above, is Dogela Pass.”

  We were soon on the move, hiking back into a jungle invaded by drizzle and billowing mists, always skirting the Mekong. Now, for me, the charms of the trek gave way to its inevitable discomforts: fatigue and aching thighs; sweat soaking through my clothes; and shortness of breath that increased with our gain in altitude.

  Just past a clearing called Dokin Lata, we crossed a wooden footbridge festooned with prayer flags, and found ourselves at the base of a steep tumble of boulders and bamboo thickets riven by a waterfall plunging down over rocks from fog-obscured heights.

  “Where’s the trail?” I asked Tenzin.

  He pointed to the waterfall.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No. The rains flood the trail now. It’s the typhoon season. Wait.”

  He unsheathed his knife, dipped into the bamboo grove, and hacked about. A few minutes later he emerged clutching a stalk. He cut off a four-foot segment, honed the bottom end into a sharp V, and sawed the upper end flat.

  “Here,” he said, “you need this to hike with, or it’s not safe.” He turned to the mules. “Yiip! Yaaass! Gaaa!”

  “Yiip! Yaaass!” echoed Anadorma.

  Following the mules, we began climbing from rock up to slippery rock, hoisting ourselves a foot or two higher with each precarious step. Water poured down and the fog thickened; bamboo groves hedged in over the stream. Within an hour my thighs ached and my gait grew unsteady, and my (modern, waterproof) boots slalomed over moss and into puddles. Tenzin and Anadorma climbed on methodically, never pausing. Whenever I felt like complaining, I glanced at their footwear: cheap Chinese sneakers and shreds of socks.

  My eyes stung with perspiration. I glanced up the trail. Two streambed switchbacks above me labored the mules, their loads wobbling, their iron-shod hooves clacking and slipping on the boulders, causing Anadorma to gasp. All at once I imagined the mules losing their balance and crashing down on top of us—a real and potentially lethal possibility. I knew from bitter experience that laden mules, like people, could misstep in the mountains and fall.

  I dragged myself upward, wondering how I was to experience the spiritual on a pilgrimage that might end up mostly a workout for the body. Then I remembered the Buddha’s words from the Dhammapada: “The mantram is weak when not repeated; a house falls into ruin when not repaired; the body loses health when it is not exercised.”

  Spiritual, in other words, should not mean sweat-free.

  Around one in the afternoon, with the waterfall now far below us, we were trudging above timberline beneath looming anvil peaks, on a path zigzagging up an ashen scree, heading for prayer flags that flapped madly in clouds blowing through a saddle of barren rock: Dogela Pass, at 14,384 feet. Winds now chilled the sweat covering me, and I took baby steps to save strength, feeling as though a fiendish Samsara had racked me all day on his infernal wheel.

  Anadorma, in the lead and till then spry, suddenly staggered and halted. She bent over double. Tenzin took out a pack of cigarettes, of all things, and handed it to her. Then he came over to me and proffered the pack.

  “What?” I asked. “Are you crazy? We’re at 14,000 feet here! And anyway I don’t smoke!”

  Looking grave, he pressed the cigarettes on me. They turned out to be a box of Chinese medicine for people with heart trouble; he wanted to share his pills with me, in case I needed them. Anadorma looked pale. She popped one and swallowed.

  “Oh my God,” I asked her, “are you okay?”

  Holding her hand to her heart and inhaling deeply, she averted her gaze. After a while she got up and started walking again.

  A half-hour later we reached the prayer flags, a mess of ragged banners strung from poles leaning every which way, many c
ollapsing. Wind-driven clouds poured through the pass like steam from a locomotive’s smokestack. Anadorma’s eyes had lost all their sparkle. She and Tenzin dropped to their knees and began erecting tiny huts from stone slabs—“for a dead person’s soul to live in,” explained Tenzin. Tibetans believe that after death, our spirits spend 49 days on earth before reincarnation, and so need a temporary dwelling place. The yak-butter candles the bereaved burn in Buddhist temples are meant to light their way.

  Anadorma stood up, her hands trembling, swallowing hard and rubbing her eyes. Finished with his hut, Tenzin pulled a rope decorated with prayer flags from our white mule’s side pack, and tied it to a stake. Anadorma did the same, driving her walking stick into the ground and attaching her own banner to it. As mists flooded over her, she turned and faced the pass. Tears gushed out and she began choking through a recitation of prayers. She then dropped to the ground and prostrated herself three times, touching her forehead to the earth.

  Then she stood in silence, looking down.

  “Are you okay?” I asked softly after a minute or two.

  Her face screwed up. “Papa!” she cried out, her voice cracking, tears streaming anew down her red cheeks. “He died two years ago!” She sobbed and wiped her eyes again, and turned away.

  We stood for a while longer saying nothing, and then made our way up over the pass and into Tibet. From here to the horizon, peaks of 19,000 to 20,000 feet rose like slumbering Titans of gunmetal rock, their heads hidden in clouds.

  We spent the night at Tsisonton, a meadow at 12,200 feet, alpine and fresh with conifers, and traversed by the Salween River, our new aqueous trailside companion, one tamer and less voluminous than the Mekong.

  Tending another meal of rice, spicy green peppers, and gristly pork, Anadorma sat by the cooking fire as its embers dwindled, her face drawn, and occasionally daubed away a tear. Even Buddhists as devout as she could, at times, find less-than-perfect solace in their faith.

  Fog slunk down from the surrounding crags and enveloped us in a milky gloom that turned leaden as the light failed; and our breath puffed white as we huddled around the fire, saying nothing. Later, as I settled into my sleeping bag, now and again gasping for breath in the chill damp air, I could do nothing but wish for the morning.

  “This place is called Kanuma,” announced Tenzin in a hushed voice, dropping back from the mules and stopping under a canopy of dripping deciduous trees. He stared reverently at a stream bubbling out from a waist-high cave, at the mouth of which shiny rocks lay plastered with one-yuan notes. He pressed his palms together, bowed, and recited prayers. “The god Tsukya lives here. We must honor him as we pass his home.” To ignore the deity might invite his wrath—not all Bon’s gods are kindly—which we could not afford in this wilderness.

  He drew a one-yuan bill from his pocket, dipped it in the stream, and smeared it on the rock; he cupped his hands and took a drink. He stepped aside to let me do the same. He then pressed his palms together and prayed. We grabbed our walking sticks to rejoin Anadorma up the trail.

  With Kawa Karpo always a powerful presence mounting into the clouds, we traipsed on through jungled lowland ravines dank and dark, save for the glowing lime green of vine-draped boughs, or errant phantoms of fog pierced by solitary spears of sunlight. The forest teemed with hidden life, often signaled by rustlings from unseen corners, the cries of secreted birds, the chants of invisible insects. It was easy to see why the votaries of Bon populated these redoubts with deities: every rock and fallen log seemed alive, every dell the home of concealed beings espying our progress through their domain.

  The trail worsened, degenerating into a swath of muck, ankle-deep puddles, and slippery stones; we stumbled upward, with Anadorma lashing ahead the frightened, often stumbling mules. Somewhere far beneath us the Salween boomed, growing mighty with tributaries rushing down the slopes and investing the trail. As we pressed through the foliage, fat black slugs affixed themselves to my bare hands and neck. It was hard for me to get a grip on their squishy, slimy, annulated bodies and remove them. Then I realized that they were leeches, capable of cutting a Y-shaped incision in skin with the razor-thin teeth of their sucker mouths. I scraped them off, disgusted with the sores they left behind.

  We finally emerged beneath cliffs by the river, at a grassy clearing named Gaituchyeta (altitude 9,940 feet), and halted for lunch. Here we found five or six garrulously cheery, scruffy-haired pilgrims, strapping their provisions to their backs (no mules for them) in burlap bags, readying themselves to depart. They left behind no litter; most pilgrims are too poor to throw away anything.

  We started a fire in a makeshift hearth of castaway stones. The sun flayed us with fierce yet welcome rays; a rainbow limned prismatic colors into the azure. But our mule Hujya, once divested of his load by Anadorma, was unimpressed. He promptly lay down, his belly distended. He showed no interest in all the succulent grass around.

  “He’s been overeating,” said Tenzin. “I’ll cure him.”

  From his bamboo walking stick he cut a stiletto sliver four inches long. Hujya took alarmed note and clambered to his feet, neighing as his masters approached. They grabbed his head and pried open his mouth, exposing teeth encrusted with yellowish green cud. Tenzin inserted his fingers between them and yanked out his bulbous, pink-gray tongue. He jabbed the stiletto into the tongue’s underside. Hujya, to my astonishment, offered little resistance. At least the first time. The stiletto somehow went awry, so Tenzin had to jab once more, twice more, and twist it in hard. On the third try blood spurted out, Hujya bucked, and they released him. He loped away, dripping blood, shaking his head and snorting.

  But within an hour he was standing by the Salween, tearing grass from the muddy sward and chewing. Tenzin’s folk treatment had somehow cured him.

  The subtropical damp seeped into everything we owned; a warm mist floated in the air, settling clammily on our skins. Surely this was 100 percent humidity: I huffed onto my camera lens and the moisture would not evaporate. It was therefore with consummate relief that, at noon on our fifth day, we stopped for lunch in a fire-heated tent kiosk of sorts that sold Pepsis and (un-Buddhist) beer and the usual buckets of instant Chinese noodles to pilgrims. A grizzled smiling elder, who, despite his age, had just fathered a son he kept swaddled floppily to his back, offered us his hearth to cook lunch over.

  The fire lifted our spirits. I took the chance to dry socks I had washed two days ago. I draped them on my walking stick and hung them over the flames.

  The elder sat back, his smile fading. Anadorma stopped stirring her pot and regarded me with cold eyes.

  “Ah, what’s wrong?” I asked.

  Said Tenzin solemnly, “Please remove the socks from the fire. Fire is sacred to us, and may not be used to dry socks or underwear. It could offend the gods.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry!”

  I did as I was told. Everyone smiled again. How alien Tibetan Buddhism was proving to be! The rational precepts I so admired took second place to Bon-inspired superstitions. My pilgrimage around this holy mountain was not enhancing my belief, strongly held, in Buddhism’s possible role as a potentially saving (rational) ideology, but was rather driving home the fact that once in the hands of man, it had been encumbered with all the trappings of local religion and thus unsuited for universal application.

  An hour later we slipped through a tangle of prayer flags and crossed over Nantulaka Pass, out of fog and into light. The sun straightaway burned off our sweat. Gone was the jungle. Dry pink gravel, not mud, now skid underfoot as we descended through groves of pines, looping down toward the village of Abe. The temperature rose into the 90s, wearying us, slowing us down. Ticks now replaced leeches, skittering toward us, hungry for blood, over the pebbly ground whenever we stopped.

  Perched on a promontory jutting above the valley floor, Abe was all stone houses and cornfields occupying terraces of dry earth. As evening fell we marched in, covered with dust, and made for the pilgrims’ shelter (a concrete veranda un
der a wooden roof) on the outskirts. Clamorous gangs of rag-clad children skipped by; women in chupas (traditional pink woolen shawls) and floral skirts trudged along, sweating under baskets of produce. Goats, sheep, and donkeys snooped through refuse heaps, prodded by toddlers scarcely udder-high.

  Soon two Buddhist monks, smiling dusty fellows dressed in robes of burgundy and saffron, stopped and peered into our courtyard, studying me with amazement as I set up camp. I went out to greet them. Li Qi Zhaxi was 27; Zhaxi Jansu, 36. They belonged to a monastery of the Nyingmapa (“Old Order”), the Tantric school founded in Tibet in the eighth century by the Indian monk Padmasambhava (Guru Rinpoche, in Tibetan), who allegedly converted Bon’s gods to Buddhism. Tantric Buddhists recite the Sanskrit mantram Om mani padme hum, or “Hail the jewel in the lotus,” in meditation as a means to enlightenment, and to invoke the deity of compassion, Avalokiteshvara, the patron saint of Tibet.

  Before the Chinese reoccupied the feudal theocracy of Tibet in 1950 (the current Dalai Lama was then its ruler, and remains the head of the government in exile, in India, to which he fled in 1959), an estimated 25 percent of Tibetans were monks, and monasteries numbered around 2,700. The Chinese, especially during the Cultural Revolution, destroyed large numbers of monasteries, perhaps leaving as few as eight (though many are now being restored). Li and Zhaxi told me that monks in their monastery outside Deqin numbered about a hundred, and everything there was fine. They buttressed the impression I had that at least in the remoter parts of historical Tibet, the authorities did little to interfere with traditional Tibetan life.