Day 1
We took a jeep an hour north from Uttrakashi along the Ganga valley, stopping for a roadside Aloo Paratha breakfast. We passed a dam, a government-funded hydro-electric project that supplies power to Uttrakashi and Rishikesh.
The Ganga’s course is heavily modified. At parts it splits into a high and low channel. There is earthmoving equipment seen regularly along it’s banks. I’m not sure if they are harvesting rocks and gravel to build roads or engineering the course of the river. You do see piles of rocks on the roadside and men engaged in breaking them into smaller rocks with hammers - the work of slaves and convicts.
As we entered the village from where we would start, the guide diverted this way and that to greet people. The cook smiled at me and said “many friends”. Our guide's chivalrous nature and regular jokes with both me English and his crew in Hindi make him a likeable fellow indeed. He has a round nepali-looking face (though he is Indian) and wears a polo shirt, jeans, and neat trekking boots.
Also in our party is the cook, a sly, friendly man I walked beside for most of the day today and two porters.
One is a real old man of the hills. he must be at least 65 and is still putting a giant load on his back, the bulk of the weight anchored via a strap on his forehead. I imagine his family at home pleading with him to hang up the boots, but he protests he’s got another good ten years in him and prides himself on the fact he has not lessened his load since thew day he was 21. He wears a red beanie, a smart blue shirt and pants with a pinstripe vest over the top (unbuttoned). He has a necklace with a small religious icon as a pendant. His boots are sturdy and cheap. He pauses during conversation (in Hindi) at intervals to suck some spit that has collected in the corner of his mouth back to where it can be swallowed. He has a bung eye, it’s aperture enlarged and watering.
No-one carries or drinks water, there is an empty bottle affixed to the top of the porters load to fill at creeks at each camping spot.
Eventually we climbed above the tree-line. The very top portion of the hills are grassy. Buffalo graze and wildflowers grow. In winter you can ski here, though there is no lift, so a day’s skiing is two runs.
One of the guides said we might encounter nomads. These people (Gulur) live in the hills and come down to the cities of Rishikesh and Haridwar for winter. Their diet is mainly milk. They get married at 13 or 14 and the women are very strong, so I am told.
I asked what language they spoke and if they are Hindu? They speak Hindi but are Muslim was the reply, with the added Hindu element of abstaining from beef. We never spotted them in any case so remained as mysterious as they were described.
In the distance are tall snow capped peaks, visible early in the climb but disappeared as we ascended into the mist and cloud. Tomorrow we will walk across a large meadow which offers a great view of them, depending on visibility. I have seen photos in the trekking offices’ wall.
I feel a little uneasy having commissioned four men, and hoped that the crew felt some enjoyment additional to the obligations of employment, around the campfire spinning yarns.
Frued’s argument is that culture exists to shield us from nature, and religion exists to humanise whatever effects nature still has on us. When camping one feels especially at the mercy of nature and is thankful for any small cultural blankets to wrap oneself in.
We have our human-companion animals to help us. Horses and dogs have no wild life to escape to - they remain in range of their human companions though no rope holds them and they are free to run away. Our guide is adorably enthralled with the horse-baby, who runs around clumsily near it’s mother. It is three months old. At night they must tie it to it’s mother because there are snow leopards who endanger it.
I saw two of the nomadic people on the top of the hill. Their shaggy black large dogs patrol our campsite and mark their territory next to out tent. I asked the guide if they were dangerous. “Yes, nighttime” he simply replied.
Day 2
Each horse wears a bell around it’s neck. I suppose so they can be found again if lost. The bells sound at a number of different pitches and form a delightful symphony together, not dissimilar to wind chimes. As I was sleeping the night before two were sounding a semitone part.
They day was marked by several encounters with the nomads as we passed their homes along the track. I found out they are not indigenous to the mountains as such, migrating here 40 years ago. The children do not go to school and tend to the cattle herds instead. Each day they sell milk in the market of a village nearby, or travel by motorcycle to Uttrakashi to trade there. The milk is known to be pure and not watered down.
We stopped at one of the family’s homes to take lunch. They heated milk over the fire for us - sweet and thick. It was raw and unlike any milk I’ve had from a plastic carton taken out of the refrigerator. It was unsettling until the last gulp whereupon I craved more immediately.
The hut had four people living within; a mother, a shawl around her head, her baby, plump and snotty-nosed, and two men: the taller one wearing a small analog wristwatch and a #3 haircut, and the shorter with puffy, weeping, closed up eyes; one moreso than the other. Their dress was arabic in style, revealing their Islamic faith.
I considered the role of milk in adult human nutrition.
It is true that no wild animal drinks milk as an adult - cows notably eat grass and turn it into milk for it’s calf. But a calf drinks nothing but for the first portion of it’s life, and it is sufficient to build all the matter and tissues in the body - hair, bones, brains, eyes, hoof. We are not so different from a calf; we have all the same basic tissues - therefore milk must be nearly sufficient to make up a diet.
The arguments levelled against milk are that it contains an oversupply of certain nutrients, particularly fat and hormones, that suit the requirements of a baby more closely than adults. But in this context, where people are working the land to gather any food they can for survival, living out of a wooden hut, and walking up and down a mountain each day, an oversupply of anything is not a concern, so milk is something to be lived off, as a replacement to grains for example.
There are other foods too. We stopped earlier to gather a fleshy spring-onion-like plant, with thick flat leaves.
We also picked wild strawberries - tiny, the size of a regular blueberry, but fresh and sweet. The joy gained from each tiny mouthful, however, is about equal to the effort of stopping, bending down, and picking one.
I would probably think the same about any food though, if I had to hunt, gather or produce it through agriculture myself and not obtain it through no greater inconvenience than a trip to the shops and the handover of money. In fact, I had even thought about offering one of the porters some money to gather a bowlful for me so I could eat satisfying mouthfuls, many berries at a time. This would represent the usual fashion I obtain food.
The hut was divided into three zones. In the middle was a earth-floor area, which raised into an earth cooking stove, bench top, and shelves housing clean metal kitchenware.
To the right, divided by a thin log running the length of the home (which doubled as a stool), was the sleeping area, straw covered in blankets. There were more blankets hanging on a rope above. On the other side, which also had a long log sectioning it off (which allows two rows of people to sit facing each other) was an earth-floored area for animals.
Sleeping there was a small cow, it’s front legs folded under itself, like it was kneeling, and back legs gathered at it’s slide. It looked sickly and weak; it’s limbs seemed more flexible than usual; it’s skin looser. Flies feasted on moisture around it’s eyes and snout. Every now and then it’s ears twitched in a vein attempt to evict them.
What was this creature? Was it some miniature sub-species of house-cow, designed to be kept as a pet? Was it’s body withered because it was confined inside all the time, held in by a log at knee height across the doorway, to be adored and cuddled to the detriment of it’s health? Could the thing even walk or did it just sit there?
No, I found out later it was a week-old calf, which explained all of my confused observations.
After leaving the house we stared our descent. We were to be camping by the riverbank. I could see the opposing face of the mountain and the gully seemed an impossibly long way below. Its was raining and steep. The pack seemed extra heavy as it pounded down with the force of gravity with each step. The porters made fast progress, rolling with the downwards momentum of the load on their backs; they ended up so far ahead the guide and I lost them.
When we reached the river I waited underneath a small cave while he went looking. By the time we found the campsite an impressive fire had been built built to negate the rain
The food is excellent - dahl, oily vegetables, fire-roasted chapati, rice, and fresh cucumber and carrot. My only complaint is that I am served first with platters of food around me. The crew does not begin eating until I am finished. This model possibly works better with bigger groups, but it is terribly awkward eating alone, and reveals a class divide between them and I.
The rivet we camped beside carves a deep gorge through the landscape. All vegetation near the waterway had been scoured away, and the banks were raw, loose sediment, interspersed with boulders of all sizes. The hills were shrouded in mist upstream, the trees prolific and untouched.
I have spent so much time on coastlines, it is magnificent to go deep into the heart of a continent, where much water finds it’s way into nonetheless, hangs heavy in the atmosphere and pours down to give life and at times vengeful violence.
We are lucky still to have wilderness zones on earth, despite the masses of humanity who swarm to the cities and expand their frontier of destruction outwards. Mountains, by their nature, will be the last vestiges of wilderness because their slopes defy dominance. Even in Australia, you still see bush covering hills when the surrounding plains are yellow and cleared. Luckily, nature does not have the same bias against settling in mountains and are rich with life.
Day 3
We climbed all day today to the mountain village of Mahji to stay the night. The houses take the fashion of wood or mudbrick walls and plastic sheeting roofs. People light fires in the house and the insides are smoky.When it stopped raining, the young, shy, softly spoken porter and I took a trip to Do De Tal lake, 8km return. The path was flat and ran along the mountain face. We walked in quiet companionship.
The lake itself was worth the trip to see - similar in size and setting as I imagine Thoreau’s Walden Pond to be. Trout broke the surface here and there and sent concentric ripples outwards.
At the mouth of the creek that fed the lake, thirty or so trout were waiting, swimming slowly into the oncoming current for morsels of food to emerge from upstream. They disappeared when I disturbed them trying to take a photo.
In the mid-distance are peaks with gullies near the top that still contain white cracks of snow. Some of them appeared not much higher from where we were and I hoped to stumble upon some to crunch underfoot. The prospect of snow surviving well into summer in small shaded parts excites me very much.
We passed a couple of mountain springs - the very type all bottled water companies claim as their source. One such spring supplies water to Majhi - they have directed it’s flow out of a metal spout that juts out the rock face. Water flows freely and continuously in the order of a litre a second. My water bottle, once filled, is immediately coated in condensation as if just fetched from the fridge.
This evening I was faced with the option of joining the crew on the dirt floor of the hut. In the end, I caved and had them pitch the tent for me in the front yard. Thus, a 3m³ first-world zone was created deep in the third.
The people are poor, but save for the lack of chimneys, life does not seem unappealing. Nature provides the necessary inputs and outputs for survival, such as the water source I have mentioned and ample fodder for cattle. The population density is low enough for nature to deal directly with human excrement - there are no toilets.
Where poverty is intolerable is when mixed with urbanity. The people I have seen living on the fringes of cities - under railway tracks, next to dry watercourses, sewers or rubbish dumps - have it tough. They lack the land required to produce food or keep animals, and deal with many other people’s waste entering their environment as well as their own.
Day 4
Our cook developed a toothache on the second day - he spent that afternoon in bed in pain after he duly prepared all the food. It continued on the third and his cheek was now quite swollen. I tried this morning to convince him to go home, offering to pay for the extra taxi; but he insisted the pain had gone and he would finish the trek.
The weather stayed clear for our walk, cutting along the side of a mountain on a slight decline. When we arrived at our destination - the front yard of a closed hotel in Bibera - a cluster of shacks around a crystal clear creek, with some terraced agriculture (including a marijuana plantation) - it was really quite hot and he sun was blazing.
I went for a swim in the creek. The water was fantastically cold off the mountains. I submerged my head a total of three times and indulged in some rock-hopping and sunbathing. I was appreciative of the simultaneous feeling of hot and cold as I lay wet on a sun-warmed rock, for the blood circulates through all and maintains an average temperature.
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