Nepali Journal

Tom McGowan, his wife Shannon, and their four children just returned from three weeks in Nepal. Most of that time was spent trekking in the Himalayas . What follows are his most vivid impressions of the trip.



Every Nepali you meet on the trail folds their hands in prayer, bows, and says "Namaste". You return the same greeting, which has to do with the peace in your soul greeting the peace in their soul. Nepal is a country of people who treat you like a best friend, but with a gentle and deferential manner.

Ten men in a row walking through the streets of Katmandu - some wearing "flip flops" some barefoot - each carry a crated full-size refrigerator on his back, supported by a tumpline (strap) over his forehead. We see 4,000 foot deep valleys completely terraced from top to bottom, irrigated and under cultivation with all earth work done by hand, or with yak or water buffalo, as the steep slope limits each terrace to a width of about six to ten feet.

These are weeks spent without hearing a jet or seeing an engine, a telephone or power line, a road or even a wheel. Wooden plows pulled by yaks in wooden yokes driven by a barefoot farmer through rocky soil.

Poles festooned with white prayer flags flutter in front of every building in the village. Long rock walls built of flat carved mani stones stretched across the landscape. These carvings and etchings done over the centuries, depicted gods and goddesses, mandalas, and words of prayers. In honor of their holy status you must always pass to the left of these walls. I'm concerned that I see very few new mani stones. I ask our Sherpa guide. about it "Ah, the young," he says as he sadly shrugs, his voice trailing off. He is twenty-nine.

A family is gathered around the rock-and-mud hearth on the dirt floor of their one-room home. These people are our hosts and we live with them while we are in their village. There is no chimney, so the smoke finds its way out through cracks in the rock walls and through the woven bamboo mat roof.

The elderly grandmother warms her hands in front of the fire and then holds them on the 3 week-old baby. When the baby cries, she puts its mouth on her breast. The baby's mother is busy making fresh bread, setting it to bake in the coals or on the warm hearth stone.

For a wooden platform on which to sleep and three delicious meals a day they charge us a little over $4.00 each. They think we are fabulously rich. They are right yet in many ways they are richer than we will ever be.

Our typical evening meal consists of homemade bread, tea and Dahl Bat. Dahl Bat is steamed rice smothered in curried potatoes and topped with a thick, peppery lentil soup. It is delicious, filling, and the perfect fuel for both hiking and staying warm. Breakfast is porridge and bread. Lunch consists of vegetable noodle soup with lots of fresh garlic. Between the exercise and the healthy diet, I lose seventeen pounds over the course of the trek. We all feel terrific.


(Back in Point Richmond we make some substantial changes in our diet. One new favorite snack - small red boiled potatoes served whole and dipped in crushed fried red chiles.)

Even though we are indoors, it is so cold we see our breath each morning as we get out of our sleeping bags. We quickly put everything in our packs, eat breakfast, and by 8:30 a.m. we are on the trail. Between the sunshine and the exertion of hiking, it is comfortable to hike in shorts and a short-sleeved cotton shirt on all but the two days it takes us to cross the 15,300 ft. pass (those days are spent in a good deal of snow.)

After a 45 minute lunch stop, we hike for another two or three hours, reaching our new destination sometime between two and four o'clock in the afternoon. This is our schedule for thirteen days straight. It becomes a comfortable routine.

In the ten or so miles we cover in a day, we see but half a dozen pieces of litter. We pick them up, of course. As there are no engines, there is neither air nor noise pollution. The skies are a blue I have never seen.

None of the villages have any sanitary facilities for disposal or treatment of human waste so it all eventually finds its way into the rivers and streams. The rushing water looks sparkling but it contains bacteria very hazardous to the health of the tourist. The lack of litter and of chemical pollution begins to tussle in my mind with my initial shock at the human waste problem.

It is less and less clear to me whether I had come from a dirty society to a clean one, or vice versa. By the end of the trip there is no confusion. I am proud of the West's technological accomplishments but ashamed of what we are doing to our planet.

Barefoot porters carry the sick or disabled on their backs in large woven bamboo baskets; I see a beautiful young girl with black hair and deep brown eyes being carried down toward Katmandu, presumably for medical treatment. What kind of treatment will she get? I smile and greet her but, she turns away. There is a reason she is going to Katmandu, the capital. It has 750 of the country's one thousand doctors (that leaves 250 for the rest of a country about the size of California.)

Imagine mountains six times as high as our own Mount Tamalpais serving as mere foothills for mountains nearly twelve times as high as Mount Tam. The summit of Sagarmatha (Mount Everest) is just slightly lower than the cruising altitude of a 747 jet and is surrounded by mountains nearly as tall.

One morning I stand looking up at Langtang Lirung, one of Nepal's "lesser" mountains. It is 23,042 feet tall, and towers 11,912 feet over me. The map shows the summit to be about two miles away. The sheer magnitude of the mountains quickly put things in perspective. At 6 '3", I am an awfully small particle in this landscape. So are my everyday problems.

As you might expect, so thorough and refreshing a getaway allows time for contemplation. Somehow, out of the wonderful ethers of the Himalayas, two thoughts in particular made themselves known to me. The first is that patience is only a mask to hide a lack of peace. If you are at peace, patience is an irrelevant concept. The second is that every person, thought and thing has a clear label advising of its inherent stress factor, should you choose to get involved with it. We would be well advised to read and assess that label before we proceed.