NEPAL:NO MATTER HOW early it is when you get up in the morning while trekking in Nepal, there will always be women who have got up hours before you. When you look out, your eye will be drawn upwards at first to the sun etching gold along the jagged snowy rim of the Himalayas. Then you'll look down, past the brown hills and the luminous green of the rice terraces, to the grey stone path. You will see women in long, vividly coloured longhis already hurrying on their way back from the forests or the fields, bent under a basket of firewood or hay. They will still be labouring when the moon turns the mountains silver that night, writes Susan McKay
Nepal is one of the 10 poorest countries in the world, and these rural western women, many of them from the low Hindu castes, are among its poorest citizens. One day I watch a tiny girl and her brother playing outside their cottage. She loads a wicker basket with grass and flowers, hoists it on to her back, and bends over as if it is heavy before running around the garden. Her little brother has big leaves on his shoulders like wings. She snatches them and puts them in her basket. She’s having fun, but by the time she’s a few years older, this will be her life. She’ll work for her family and later for her husband’s family, she’ll never own anything, and no one will consult her about any decision, in the home or in the community.
The women who work for the Chetri sisters seem to occupy a different world. I have two companions on this trek; Annie, from France, and Solange, from Brazil. Our guide, Saru, and her assistants, Pushpa and Rachana, stride out confidently, singing and laughing, taking photos on their mobile phones, teasing Padam, our only male staff member. “We empower women through adventure,” says Nicky Chetri, one of three sisters whose names, Lucky, Nicky and Dicky, seem at odds with their dedication to transforming women’s lives.
When they set up their Three Sisters Adventure Company in 1994, trekking was a male industry, and the first guides they trained were denounced as “loose women”. Fourteen years later, there are waiting lists for their training courses. The jobs they offer pay four times the average Nepali wage (which is less than €200 a year), and conditions are good. Three Sisters staff carry one rucksack which must weigh less than 12kg. A lot of the male porters we see are appallingly overburdened. They hurtle along the paths, bent double under loads that often include two heavy rucksacks bound together with another bag on top. Most of these men wear plastic flip-flops. The owners of the rucksacks saunter behind in hiking boots that cost far more than most porters earn in a year.
IT’S FREEZING, AND in the black sky the stars are like knives when we set off from our lodge at Ghorepani to climb Pun Hill (pronounced “poon”). We are going to see the sun rise. This is one of the big set pieces of trekking in the Annapurna region. Our guides were partying last night and slept in, so we are late and Saru herds us up the steep path like sheep. There are glimpses of dazzling, moonlit peaks on the way, but when we arrive at the top, at just over 3,000m, dizzy and late, the sun has begun the show without us. We get over this. It is magnificent, as peak after peak emerges into rosy light, from the vast bulk of Dhaulagiri, to Nilgiri, like a great, draped ghost, to Annapurna and the sacred Machhapuchhre, known, for its shape, as “the fishtail”.
There’s probably a couple of hundred people here, many of them crammed into a ramshackle viewing platform that looks like an army lookout post from the 1970s. Everyone is taking photographs, except one couple who are kissing, and the Nepali lodgekeepers who got here before everyone to set up their tea stall. An imperious American woman instructs her guide on how to take shot after shot of her with Annapurna in the background. A crowd of young Nepali men take off their shirts and ham it up for the cameras, shouting and cheering. On the way back down we see that the sides of the path are full of tangles of wild blue flowers like the Irish harebell. We meet a series of young women, all dressed up in green saris and necklaces, with elaborate make-up, heading up. Pushpa, who is from a village near here, explains that they, like her, are from the Pun ethnic group, and that they are taking part in a documentary film. Our drabness, in our heavy boots and fleeces and dun-coloured trekking gear, is shown up by their glamour.
BACK AT THE lodge, we sit out in the sunshine on the terrace with hot sweet Nepali tea and freshly baked rounds of delicious Tibetan bread. Saru translates for me so I can talk with Mina Pun, whose family runs the lodge. Mina was working for a farmer across the hill when a young man from Ghorepani came to have a look at her. His parents had arranged their marriage with hers. “He came back to them and said, ‘I like’,” she says, and laughs. She was 22. That was 23 years ago.
Mina works in ways that have scarcely changed in generations. She gets up at 5am, unless it is her family’s turn to run the tea stall at Pun Hill – this is organised on a rota of local lodgekeepers – in which case she’s up at 3am.
“I start the fire, make tea, heat water and clean the house. I make breakfast for the guests from 7am on, and then I go to the forest to look for wood,” she says. “After that I take care of the buffalo, get food from the garden and then I make lunch from noon until 3pm. Then I go to the jungle to cut grass for the buffalo. I milk her, and then I feed the chickens. I make dinner from 6.30, we eat at 8.30 and after that I wash up and go to bed.”
She doesn’t get much time to herself, she says. “I am already old and it is a cold place. I like to sit in the sun, like now.” She laughs, jangles her gold earrings and wiggles her toes. Like many of the women, Mina wears flip-flops with socks. Saru strokes her hair affectionately.
A mule heads for the pump, where one of Mina’s two workers is scrubbing clothes. Mina jumps up and shoos it away. It is a hard life, but tourism has made families such as Mina’s relatively rich compared with the subsistence farmers around them. Her children will have an easier life, she hopes. They are at boarding school in Pokhara, several days’ walk away down the trail we’ve followed.
The Annapurna Conservation Area Project (ACAP) was set up 20 years ago to protect the environment. It promotes ecotourism, and advises local people on issues such as the use of solar power and water treatment. Tourists pay a small fee to trek, and are urged to respect local traditions and avoid leaving litter. There are a series of stations at which clean water can be bought, avoiding the use of that global scourge, the throwaway plastic bottle. Nepalese cooking is traditionally done on wood-burning stoves and the success of the trekking industry has led to serious damage in the rhododendron forests. Now people are allowed to collect only fallen wood, and lodges are encouraged to use kerosene.
Some changes have been easier to make than others. The Chetri sisters have just won a National Geographic award for sustainable tourism for their eco-friendly practices and for making tourist dollars work for people who are on the margins of the economy. However, some battles are far from being won. They were disturbed when they started their trekking company to find that many of the lodge owners employ child labour. They now run a small home in Pokhara for children they’ve rescued, but they can accommodate only about 20, and a recent survey found that more than 200 children are currently working in the Annapurna region alone.
In one lodge, a tousle-headed boy of about eight serves us dinner at night and breakfast again in the morning. He’s wearing a torn pink T-shirt with an “Obama – Hope” sticker a tourist gave him. Sometimes we see the smartly dressed children of lodgekeepers setting out for school while the working children mop the floors and make the beds.
At the Red House Lodge in Kagbeni, a little girl carries Pema Dhoka Thakuri’s baby daughter in a sling on her back and a load of sheets for the wash in her arms. Pema is ambitious for her own girls, but defends the employment of this child. “I found her on the streets in Pokhara,” she says. “She was in a very bad situation. It is better for her here with my family.”
THE TRAIL IS wonderful. On our first evening we have to climb thousands of steep stone steps. It is challenging and exhausting, but we are constantly diverted by the sights and sounds of this beautiful country. Every day the landscape changes. We watch a man using an old wooden plough led by buffalos, women laying out red chillis to dry, children playing with bamboo bows and arrows. We listen to a man singing a lullaby to his baby. We see huge yellow and turquoise butterflies, and little black birds that suddenly display glossy red tail feathers.
For all that Nepalese people are endlessly industrious, they find time to be friendly to passing strangers, greeting us with the blessing, “Namaste!” Cheeky children call out, “Namaste! Sweet?” But they don’t push it and run away laughing when no sweets are forthcoming. The ACAP urges tourists not to give money or gifts to children because begging demeans them.
There are dahlias and chrysanthemums in the gardens, and most houses in the countryside have some sort of packed vegetable patch, however tiny, and a few fruit trees.
There are waterfalls, the most spectacular of them at Rupse Chhahara. We sit in the garden of a small teahouse at the foot of this exhilarating torrent and drink fragrant tea made from chunks of fresh ginger. Most thrilling of all are the constantly changing views of the great, austere white mountains. By mid-morning they have a spume of snow at their peaks, like a white silk Buddhist prayer scarf.
There are no roads to these remote villages at present. You can walk or you can travel by mule. We get used to stepping swiftly aside when we hear the lovely soft clang of bells that signals that a mule train is approaching. A mule is a rough beast who will plough through you with no hesitation. Most of them are heavily laden with beer boxes full of apples coming down from the orchards at Marpha, or consignments of salt, Coca-Cola and cigarettes going up to the mountain lodges. Sometimes big cages of live chickens are balanced on the packsaddles. The lead mules wear triangular head pieces made from brightly woven carpet, and some have tassels and a jaunty cockade of orange dyed into their mane.
But the road is coming. Already there is an unpaved track, along which buses and jeeps jolt and lurch. Known to local people as “the motorway”, this connects some of the villages with Pokhara, and there are plans to extend it into the heart of Annapurna. It is welcomed by many as a necessary modernisation, but others fear for its effect on trekking, one of the mainstays of a fragile economy. Walking on the road is miserable. Every vehicle that passes churns up thick, choking dust.
AS WE HEAD up towards the Tibetan border, the landscape becomes harsher, and the wind scours through the valley of the Kali Gandiki river. The narrow streets of Tukuche, with its tall stone buildings, are a welcome respite. Kalpona Sherchan runs a distillery in the village, its interior a lovely series of old stone buildings and tiny courtyards.
“My husband’s father and his grandfather before traded salt from Tibet,” the elderly woman tells me. “My husband went to Japan to learn the technique for distilling, and we brought the still from there. It is all copper, and very heavy. Many people and many mules brought it from the airstrip at Jomsom. My husband died after one year. I cried for a long time. Then I sent my son to Japan to train, and we went on.”
She makes clear, fiery brandy from apples, peaches, apricots and cherries from her orchards, carrots from her garden, and oranges from the village of Tatopani. Outside, a small, shy boy is washing bottles in a pond. A small girl is sorting labels in a room next to the still, with its blazing wood furnace. Kalpona’s own children are successful professional people in Canada, the US and Britain, and she has visited them. “I saw a very big sea at San Francisco and the Golden Gate. I was very happy also in London. We did everything and we went on the London Eye, up, up, up and at the top we saw all of London city. At Brighton I saw waves coming in and many people lying in the sun. I was very surprised.” She produces 10,000 litres of brandy a year, and drinks not a drop of it herself.
Kalpona invites us to see her private temple. We take off our boots and enter a red, candlelit room full of treasures. There’s a shrine to Buddha, a prayer wheel intricately embossed with gold, stacks of Tibetan books in silk-covered parcels, tapestries, statues masks and paintings. There’s also a photograph of the Japanese monk, Ekai Kagawuchi, who stayed in the house a century ago. His diaries reveal that his servants “having regaled themselves with local drink even to boisterousness, began a quarrelling . . .” They were fired after it emerged that they planned to kill him. Kalpona says she wanted to repaint everything. “But my son said, ‘Don’t, Mum, these things are old. Leave them be.’ ”
At the High Plains Inn, run by a Dutch man and his Nepalese wife, there is real filter coffee, a rare treat. Shops in rural Nepal are small and basic, and there are no opportunities for browsing. So when, at the inn, we spot a cabinet with luxuries such as Nivea facecream, toothbrushes and postcards, Solange, Annie and I gather around, pointing admiringly, entranced.
Walking along the upper reaches of the Kali Gandiki riverbed, between bare mountains, we are battered by fierce dusty winds, and the only colour left in the landscape is grey. We pass a stall where a skeleton-thin Indian man in a loincloth is selling saligrams, ammonite fossils he has collected nearby. They are arranged on a table decorated with the skulls of sheep.
Just before dark, we reach the oasis town of Kagbeni, where we wander around lanes and alleys that seem derelict, until suddenly we hear the high piercing cry of a hungry baby from one of the buildings. Then we happen upon an enormous statue of a man, white-faced and with scary eyes and a startling erection. It is a ghost-eater, a remnant of the ancient animist Bon religion. Pushpa and Rachana giggle. “It’s Padam,” they say, shoving him, and all three of them fall about laughing.
THE TREK ENDS at the teple at Muktinath, nearly 4,000m up in the mountains. It is ice-cold here in the thin air, and at dinner, braziers of coal are, briefly, lit in the diningroom. The villages in this part of Nepal have a sizeable population of Tibetans, many of them living in refugee camps that have become permanent since the Chinese invasion in the 1950s. Along the roadsides, women weave brightly striped scarves and shawls on wooden looms, and when trekkers pass they come running at them like hens to a bucket shouting, “You buy! You buy!”
At the temple, sacred to both Buddhists and Hindus, we watch Indian women pilgrims performing the sacred ritual of running under the freezing mountain water that gushes from 108 fountains shaped like cows’ heads.
We are flying back from the town of Jomsom, and, in our cold hotel, we meet some of the pilgims, praying fervently for a plane. Most flights have been called off because of high winds.
They are on a tour of religious sites, and had planned to be back in India by now to bathe in the Ganges. One woman from Chennai in southern India huddles in an anorak in the diningroom. She shows me layer upon layer of clothes she is wearing as well as her pink sari. She can’t wait to get back to the sunshine, she says.
IT TOOK US 10 arduous, exciting days to get from Pokhara to Muktinath. The flight back takes just 20 minutes, and to Kathmandu another 40. It is festival time, and I arrive in the city on the night of the festival of Laxmi, the goddess of wealth. The streets are jammed with people, and children are going around in gangs singing and dancing until shopkeepers give them money to go away. Women are making garlands out of tiny orange marigolds and these are draped around shops and gates.
The place is ablaze with strings of coloured lights. Candles and flowers have been arranged in elaborate patterns in doorways to greet the goddess. Shopkeepers have laid out little pathways with bright red vermillion powder and flowerheads, to lead her to their tills.
At the international airport, a lot of those leaving are Nepali men, going back to work as labourers in the wealthy Gulf states. The Maoists who used to promise revolution are now in government with the conservatives. Most people I meet seem hopeful that the new regime will work, and that life for the poor may improve. As the plane flies out of Kathmandu, the lights are like crazily tangled strings of jewels, and fireworks burst into the sky below us like magical flowers.
For more information about Three Sisters Adventure Company, see www.3sistersadventure.com. Research for this article was supported by the Comhar Sustainable Development Media Fund, www.comharsdc.ie