Death Zone

by Matt Dickinson

  After a cold omelette and chips we bedded down for the night in our sleeping bags. I found it difficult to sleep; the thought that tomorrow we would be in Tibet gave me a delicious shiver. I had wanted to travel through that mysterious high land, ever since a tentative and ultimately disastrous journey through Nepal in 1978 which ended with me running out of money and collapsing with amoebic dysentery on to a Kathmandu rubbish heap.

  Just after midnight Kees was violently sick, having, like Sundeep, picked up something in Kathmandu. He spent the rest of the night running to the fetid toilet with acute spasms. In the morning I asked him how he was feeling.

  ‘Oh, fine,’ he said, ‘but a slightly restless night.’ He went on to eat a large breakfast.

  While the border formalities were being completed, we went to some lengths to get some surreptitious shots of the expedition trucks crossing the politically sensitive bridge. We felt rather foolish when we walked across; a group of Italian tourists went in front of us, openly filming the scene with their video cameras and getting no reaction at all from the guards. On the bridge a sign announced that we were 1,770 metres above sea level.

  ‘Seven thousand and seventy-eight metres to go,’ Al said.

  4

  Between the Friendship Bridge and the town of Khasha – or Zangmu, as it is now more commonly known, is a steeply rising three-mile track which constitutes a no man’s-land. Halfway up, a team of shabby convicts were engaged in forced labour, under the watchful eye of an acne-faced guard. One of the prisoners was chipping at a huge boulder of stone, producing chips for road-building. His pile of gravel was about a metre high. As we passed, he looked up and waved. He had an intelligent, refined face. I wondered who he was and what crime against the people he had committed to deserve such a punishment.

  At the top end of this stateless zone we were met by smiling representatives of the Tibetan Mountaineering Association – the ‘host’ organisation responsible for our transportation and official paperwork. At the border itself we unloaded the equipment from the truck and waited, sleeping on the kitbags, for most of the day while customs and immigration were sorted out in a glass-fronted office building which wouldn’t have looked out of place in Milton Keynes.

  Brian entertained himself by bellowing a few choice encouragements from his perch in the back of the lorry. Luckily, the border guards failed to decipher the true nature of these utterances and the paperwork continued.

  Just before nightfall, the border barrier was lifted and our small convoy drove through into Tibet.

  Roughly the size of Western Europe, Tibet has been occupied by China since the invasion of 1950. Prior to our journey, I had sought out some literature from the Tibet Society of the UK and their publication made for harrowing reading; since 1950, the Tibet Society contends, over 1.2 million Tibetans have died in a widespread programme of imprisonment, torture and executions. Tibet’s unique culture and Buddhist religion have been systematically suppressed, with the destruction of over 6,000 monasteries and public buildings. More than 120,000 Tibetans have fled to become refugees in India, Nepal and elsewhere.

  Just sixteen at the time of the invasion, the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s head of state and religious leader, has for the last forty years pursued a non-violent path towards a solution, but despite his winning the sympathy of the many millions who have listened to his campaign, the Chinese have so far shown little sign that they will leave Tibet.

  We were entering a country which had been occupied by an aggressive neighbour for more than forty-five years and for which no liberation was in sight. The town we now found ourselves in was a perfect example of how uneasy day-to-day life in Tibet has become.

  Zangmu consists of one long street which zigzags up the valleyside in a series of switchbacks. Lined with wooden-built dwellings and shops, it feels every inch the frontier town. Rain had turned the unpaved surface into a muddy quagmire through which pedestrians waded ankle deep, dodging the brightly-coloured trucks and army Jeeps which raced up and down at reckless speeds. Pigs, chickens and dogs, rooted successfully amongst piles of rubbish, and as night fell, rats too came for their share of the spoils.

  The ethnic mix of Zangmu’s residents gave the town, like every other Tibetan place we stayed in, a split personality. The ethnic Tibetans were the most striking – their handsome faces tanned and creased from exposure to the constant winds of the plateau, their felt clothing stained with woodsmoke and yak grease. The men wore their hair in long pigtails, tied with vivid scarlet cloth, the women wore embroidered shawls and beads of glass around their necks. They watched us with glittering black eyes as we waded past in the mud, whispering and laughing at our stumbling progress and bizarre puffed-up mountain clothes.

  The soldiers of the People’s Army did not smile at us. In fact they scarcely looked our way as we passed them in the street. Dressed in their characteristic green uniforms with the shiny row of buttons and the comically oversized peaked cap, they seemed well-scrubbed and, for the most part, extremely young. They had the bewildered air of those who find themselves inexplicably far from home – as indeed they were if they came from Beijing thousands of miles away.

  For them, Zangmu was the end of the earth. They stood in front of the shops, gazing at the goods on display with bored expressions, and sat watching poor quality television pictures in the eating houses where stale Chinese beer and noodles were the daily and only fare.

  The merchants and traders of Zangmu were also predominantly ethnic Han Chinese, lured to the town by the newly flourishing trade with Nepal. They too had the far-away look of people who are trying to put down roots in an alien land. The men, with brilliantined hair and striped business shirts, looked smarter than the town deserved. They could be seen and heard in their offices above the street, talking urgently into crackling telephones, making deals. Their wives and daughters ran the shops below – often little more than cubicles – selling plastic kitchenware, batteries, canned foods and imported western goods like Head and Shoulders shampoo and Coke.

  I watched one of the shopkeepers padlock her doors for the night. Dressed in an elegant silk blouse and pinstriped-pencil skirt, she tiptoed home across the horribly muddy street in a pair of four-inch stiletto heels, hopping nimbly from one dry patch to another to avoid soiling her shoes. Three indescribably scruffy Tibetan youths watched her too, fascinated by the dainty way she skipped across. One of them made a joke which had them all laughing; to them she must have seemed from another world.

  In Zangmu we were only a few miles from Nepal but this was unmistakably China; one of the first things we did was to change our watches to Beijing time, four hours ahead of Nepalese time. Here, liaison officers decided which hotel we would stay in and announced a time for the set evening meal. The hotel was a cold, eerie place, with echoing corridors and missing windows through which the evening raincloud drifted. Flooded spittoons and overflowing ashtrays lurked in the stairwells. The rooms were filled with an odd assortment of Day-Glo green and orange nylon furniture with a swirling psychedelic carpet design guaranteed to induce nightmares.

  The restaurant was in the basement, next to a deserted bar which was barricaded by a padlock and chain. We sat in a depressed huddle around a circular table, eating green vegetables and rice with pork, washed down with beer which was so flat it contained not a single bubble of gas. Back in the room, I battled against a wave of nausea for two hours trying to get to sleep, and then succumbed to a violent bout of vomiting and diarrhoea which kept me in the freezing bathroom for much of the night. Kees, now recovered from his own illness, was kind enough not to complain even though my retching kept him awake for hours.

  Feeling very shaky, I managed to drag myself down to breakfast for a cup of green tea, trying not to notice the nearby Chinese diners who were wolfing down great platefuls of garlic pork with lip-smacking relish. That I could survive. But when the waiter opened a dirty-looking fridge next to me, the smell of rotting meat was so intense I had to escape to the street where I
was sick once more on to a pile of rubbish.

  Most of the morning was devoted to finishing the immigration paperwork. As expedition leader, Simon was entrusted with this and, lacking anything else to do, I went along with him. At the immigration office tempers were seriously frayed. Frustrated by the complicated procedure, and believing (mistakenly) that Simon had jumped the queue, a tour leader with a group of frazzled French clients offered to punch his face in. A shouting match ensued, with much jostling and jabbing of elbows to get to the bewildered immigration officer’s desk. Simon, impressively calm, won the day, and got our paperwork seen to first: a victory which earned him the tour leader’s rebuke, ‘Pah! You English! I see it is not only your cows which are mad!’

  We left Zangmu at 11.30 a.m. in a convoy of three Toyota landcruisers and a truck. This was our ‘official’ transportation, provided by the Tibetan Mountaineering Association at an exorbitant cost to be paid only in US dollars.

  After a military checkpoint, we crossed the dangerous landslip zone above the town. In heavy rains, the mountain has been known to avalanche lethal rock and mud down on to the inhabitants. Hundreds of lives had been lost before building was banned in the danger zone. Even in the light drizzle we experienced that morning, small rocks were on the move. The driver looked carefully above him before picking his way carefully across the slender track which was dotted with loose boulders.

  For four hours we followed the precipitous road along the Bhut Kosi valley, rising steeply in low gear through forests of mountain pine, and crossing the fast-flowing river several times by decrepit concrete bridges. Next to me, Tore referred constantly to his wrist altimeter, noting with satisfaction every fifty-metre gain. ‘Two thousand three hundred metres,’ he told me, his eyes glued to the dial.

  After thirty kilometres or so, less than an hour from the village of Nyalam, the road began a more serious climb up a mountainside which was scarred with old landslides and avalanche debris. Giant bulldozers were rebuilding sections which had recently been swept away and on one or two of the more fragile ‘squeezes’ we got out of the landcruisers and walked to avoid overloading the delicate track. In fact, the whole mountainside was completely waterlogged from the melt water of the previous winter snow. With virtually no vegetation to bond the shaley earth together, the result was like soggy porridge sliding down the side of a saucepan. The entire mountain was on the move and we were happy to get off it on to firmer, rockier ground as we rolled into Nyalam.

  Strategically placed on the very edge of the Tibetan plateau, Nyalam sits at the head of the Bhut Kosi valley and at the foot of Shishapangma, the broad-backed 8,012-metre peak. Like Zangmu, the town is modestly arranged around one erratic high street which is flanked by lodges and tea houses. Some boasted ambitious Christmas light displays which brightened and dimmed according to the power of the town’s generator. Most of the residents were Han Chinese – engineers and roadworkers whose thankless task was the constant rebuilding of the valley link to Nepal.

  Here there was some confusion; our liaison officers wanted us to stay in one of the Nyalam lodges for the night, but Simon wanted to drive on for another hour and find a camping place where we could spend a few days acclimatising to the altitude of the plateau. In the end a compromise was reached; the expedition would be planted in a suitable camping place with one of the TMA representatives to keep an eye on us. The rest of the TMA team, and the drivers, would return to Nyalam where they could stay in relative comfort.

  Thirty kilometres from Nyalam, with just half an hour of daylight remaining, we found the perfect camping spot in a scruffy village: a tiny patch of grass ringed by willowy trees. A ragged band of children watched us with open mouths as we clumsily pitched our tents. In the deeper shadows beyond a low wall, the wild-looking adults of the village were also gathered, chatting excitedly as we unloaded the mountain of equipment from the truck. Every few minutes, the children’s curiosity would get the better of them, drawing them right up to us as we fought with canvas and pegs; at this, one of the Sherpas would wave a huge stick in the air and chase them away with a mighty roar. This rapidly turned into a hysterical game of cat and mouse, with the laughing children running for their lives through the glade with manic Sherpas on their tails. It ended, inevitably, in tears, when one of the infants ran headlong into a tree.

  As if by some unseen signal, the villagers all slipped silently away into the night as we finished preparing the camp. We ate in the mess tent for the first time, forcing down rice, cabbage and dumplings even though the altitude – 4,600 metres – had reduced our appetites to a shadow. My stomach had still not recovered from the sickness of Zangmu, so I concentrated on getting fluids inside me, drinking several pint mugs of tea and hot chocolate. We fell asleep to the sound of dogs fighting in the village street.

  For the next four days this tiny glade was our home as our bodies adapted to the thin air of the plateau. The process of acclimatisation is one which cannot be hurried; this was just the first stage in a carefully-designed programme which would enable us to live for two months above 5,000 metres, and eventually to go very much higher. Even here, at 4,600 metres, the gentlest movement betrayed the thinness of the air. Bending down to lace up a pair of trekking boots could result in an attack of breathlessness, moving a twenty-kilogramme barrel a few metres demanded a sit-down recovery period and unpacking a rucksack entailed a wearying effort.

  Headaches and mild nausea were experienced by all of us during the first twenty-four hours and two of the team had other health problems; Ned succumbed to the stomach illness which had struck many of us in Nepal and at Zangmu. He feared it was giardia – a form of dysentery – and ate raw garlic to try and kill the amoebae. Tore was suffering from the return of a recurring back problem brought on by an old karate injury in which an opponent kicked one of his kidneys so hard that it was dislodged from its anchoring tissue. After an emergency operation, the kidney was repositioned (more or less) back in its proper location but Tore still worried when back pain struck. It could mean the onset of a dangerous infection.

  On the second day we began our training walks up into the snowcapped mountains that overlooked the village. The first few treks were simple and brief, one- or two-hour scrambles up rocky slopes to not more than 5,000 metres. Most of us paired up in twos or threes for these sorties but Al and Brian both chose to set out alone. The psychology of this intrigued me and I pondered why these two outwardly very different characters would share the desire to train alone. Perhaps they were not so different after all?

  By the third and fourth day, with our bodies better adjusted to the altitude, we pushed a little harder, above the snowline, reaching a minor windswept summit at 5,600 metres after a four-hour climb. From this vantage point we had an inspiring view back towards the borderlands of Nepal, where row upon row of 6,000- and 7,000-metre sentinels stood guard. The valley we had climbed up from seemed, from this new viewpoint, to be even more barren than it looked at close quarters, with the mighty river reduced to a slender silver strand, no bigger than a gossamer thread.

  From the top, I spotted a tiny dot moving halfway up a neighbouring peak. At first I thought it was a bear, but when it paused and turned in profile for a moment I realised it was Brian on one of his solo training sessions. A short while later, far off in the opposite direction, I saw another dot. Al was picking his way along a snow-covered ridge on his way to a peak at roughly the same elevation as the one we were standing on. He paused for a second and I waved an arm in the air to see if he had spotted us. He waved back, then continued his lonely climb, lost, presumably like Brian, in a world of his own.

  That night, Al failed to get back to the camp by nightfall, leading some of us to wonder what had become of him. Simon was not the least bit concerned:

  ‘Don’t worry about Al. He’ll be fine.’

  Half an hour later Al’s headtorch bobbed out of the black night, just as the evening gong was sounded for supper.

  Camping so close to the village
and its fields, we had the perfect opportunity to witness at first hand the daily battle of the villagers to scrape a living from the arid land. It was spring, planting time, carried out under skies of deepest blue, and accompanied by the biting, frigid westerly wind. Each morning at sunrise, the villagers left their stone-built houses for the fields. Old women, mothers with newborn babies wrapped tightly on their backs, men whose faces were stained as black as ebony by the burning effects of sun and wind, the fields absorbed their labours as effortlessly as the desert soaks up water.

  They worked with the hoe and the plough. The first was wielded by hand, blow after blow, hour after hour into the stony soil, with backs bent double and legs astride. The ploughshares were ruggedly simple, fashioned from heavy iron and with weathered wooden shanks, much as they were one hundred years ago in Europe. They ran behind teams of yaks – animals who obviously have all the right strength and all the wrong temperament for the task. The plough drivers beat them with long sticks, and threw stones at their hairy rumps with unerring accuracy, but the yaks still frequently ran amok, fighting, clashing their great heads together, and dragging the plough into neighbouring fields with the driver following on, shouting abuse.

  The fields were small, irregularly-shaped, and bordered by raised channels through which irrigation water was allowed to flow at key times of the day. Every possible scrap of cultivatable land was terraced and prepared for seeding, with piles of yak and goat dung ready to enrich the ploughed furrows when the time was right.

  Taking a handful of the yellow soil, it was hard for me to imagine that any crop could ever find nourishment within it. It was little more than dust: as desiccated and parched as sand. With each new onslaught of wind, the top surface became airborne in a driving cloud, filling the eyes and noses of the fieldworkers and rendering the land even more infertile.