The Other Side of Everest

by Matt Dickinson

  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 faraway 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&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 that 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 rain clouds 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 and a carpet with a swirling psychedelic design guaranteed to induce nightmares.

  The restaurant was in the basement, next to a deserted bar that 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 that was so flat it contained not a single bubble of gas. Back in the room, trying to get to sleep, I battled against a wave of nausea for two hours and then succumbed to a violent bout of vomiting and diarrhea that 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 onto 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 that 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 Land Cruisers and a truck. This was our official transportation, provided by the Tibetan Mountaineering Association at an exorbitant cost to be paid only in U.S. dollars.

  After a military checkpoint, we crossed the dangerous landslide zone above the town. In heavy rains, the mountain has been known to avalanche lethal rocks and mud down onto 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 that 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-meter (164-foot) gain. “Two thousand three hundred meters,” he told me, his eyes glued to the dial.

  After thirty kilometers (eighteen miles) or so, less than an hour from the village of Nyalam, the road began a more serious climb up a mountainside that was scarred with old landslides and avalanche debris. Giant bulldozers were rebuilding sections that had recently been swept away, and on one or two of the more fragile “squeezes” we got out of the Land Cruisers and walked to avoid overloading the delicate track. In fact, the whole mountainside was completely waterlogged with the meltwater of the previous winter snow. With virtually no vegetation to bond the shaley earth together, the road surface 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 onto 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-meter (26,286-foot) peak. Like Zangmu, the town is modestly arranged around one erratic high street that is flanked by lodges and teahouses. Some boasted ambitious Christmas light displays that 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 acclimatizing 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 kilometers (eighteen miles) 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. Th
is 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 children 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 meters (15,091 feet)—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 acclimatization is one that cannot be hurried; this was just the first stage in a carefully designed program that would enable us to live for two months above 5,000 meters (16,404 feet), and eventually to go very much higher. Even here, at 4,600 meters (15,091 feet), 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-kilogram (forty-four-pound) barrel a few meters (several yards) 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 that 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 had 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 meters (16,404 feet). 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 meters (18,372 feet) after a four-hour climb. From this vantage point we had an inspiring view back toward the borderlands of Nepal, where row upon row of 6,000- and 7,000-meter (19,685- and 22,965-foot) sentinels stood guard. The valley we had climbed up from seemed, from this new viewpoint, to be even more barren than it had 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 neighboring peak. At first I thought it was a bear, but when it paused and turned in profile for a moment I realized 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 headlamp 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 firsthand 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 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 labors as effortlessly as the desert soaks up water.

  They worked with the hoe and the plow. They wielded the first by hand, blow after blow, hour after hour, into the stony soil, with their backs bent double and legs astride. The plowshares 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 plow 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 plow into neighboring 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 plowed 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 field-workers and rendering the land even more infertile.

  Only two crops are hardy enough to survive this inhospitable terrain: barley and millet. Along with the milk and meat of the yak, they have become the staple for all human life on the Tibetan Plateau, and without them no permanent habitation would be possible. I watched an elderly man scattering barley seed from a leather sack, his throwing arm moving to and fro in an elegant arc, shooting the tiny white seeds into the air like water droplets from a sprinkler. His actions seemed those of a supreme optimist—or of a madman. But he had seen the same fields sprout and grow every summer season of his life, so why should this year be any different?

  It occurred to me then that when we next passed through the village, on our way back to Nepal when the expedition was over, these dry, dust-shrouded fields would be a blaze of green life. That made our own precarious venture seem a very long one indeed.

  We packed up the camp on April 9 and set off in convoy, east across the plateau on the next stage of our journey through Tibet. The dirt road stuck faithfully to the valley floor for the first two hours, passing villages every five or ten kilometers (three or six miles). That morning, it was not just the field-workers who were busy at their labors; roadworking gangs were also hard at work. Every hundred meters (328 feet) along the road, a pile of gravel had been carefully placed on the shoulder. These piles stretched all the way back to Zangmu, so a major refurbishment was obviously under way. The road gang’s task was to fill the many potholes and corrugations that peppered the track. This they did with the most basic of tools—a spade and rake. They wore face masks against the dust, and thick woollen coats against the cold, but it was still the bleakest of jobs—not helped probably by the sight of wealthy foreigners like us racing past in our nice warm Toyotas.

  By late morning the road left the river and began an abrupt climb up toward the Lalung La Pass, one of the highest road crossings in Tibet at 5,300 meters (17,388 feet). The final few hundred meters made for dramatic driving, with the Toyota lurching along a heavily rutted track flanked on both sides by a meter of wind-hardened snow. The Col itself was festooned with prayer flags tied to the telegraph poles like bunting at a jolly country fair. We stopped at the p
ass to take photographs and to admire views of Both Shishapangma and Cho Oyu—two 8,000-meter (26,246-foot) giants that effortlessly dominated the horizon. Al had climbed them both and he pointed out the routes to us as we shivered in the freezing wind. He made it sound very easy, condensing what had been months of struggle into a few paraphrased highlights, so that both peaks seemed little more than weekend jaunts.

  Just after the Col we passed a traveler on foot, an Indian or Nepalese holy man wrapped in a brown blanket, with bare legs and no protection on his head.

  “Pilgrim,” our liaison officer told us, “maybe going to Lhasa. Maybe tomorrow dead. Many of them die.”

  The pilgrim carried no food or water, yet made no gesture to try and stop us. Our driver raced past, leaving him in a cloud of dust. I was astonished that anyone could survive such cold with so little protection, and how he endured the nights was beyond my imagination. Maybe, as the liaison officer warned, he would be dead before his pilgrimage was complete.

  Descending to the plateau once more, the road began to follow a new river, this time flowing east. The valley opened out into a wider plain, dotted by the ruins of ancient caravanserai and forts. This was greener, lusher land than the valley we had stayed in, and herds of goats—sometimes many hundreds—were grazing on new shoots.

  Suddenly, rounding a corner, we came upon our first view of Everest. Our convoy pulled to a halt and for several minutes there was no sound other than the clicking of cameras and the ever-present rush of the wind.

  Even though it was more than eighty kilometers (forty-nine miles) away, Everest felt close enough to be touched. The fine details of the North Face, more perfectly triangular than I had imagined, were easily visible to the naked eye even at this long distance. Now I could understand why, to the Tibetans, Everest was “Chomolungma,” the goddess mother of the earth, long before Western surveyors determined its status scientifically as the highest summit in the world.