WILD in the Himalayas. Loves and tragedies from Paris to Kathmandu. (Travel)

By Francisco Po Egea

“What am I doing with my life? I am about to turn 40, so I still have the other half left. And I want to live, to live.”
A radical change. Francisco quits his profession as a high executive in a multinational company, flies to Nepal and embarks on a six-month adventure across the Himalayan Mountains. At the end of his trip, he meets a dying mountaineer with whom he will share the next eleven days, suffering through among furious storms and eternal snows, while waiting for rescue. It is a time of reflection, remembering those unique experiences and moments which have made him who he is now.
Adventures, love and erotism, travels and exoticism in this autobiographical novel based on his own life. From his childhood in post-civil war Spain and his encounter with the republican guerrillas to his first tastes of freedom as a young man in a bohemian Paris. From his life as a high executive and his great romances to his adventures in Kashmir, Ladakh, India and Nepal, his encounter with the world of drugs in Kathmandu and his journey across the Himalayas, loves and tragedies included.
The readers have said:
"I have just read your story and it captured my imagination, I could barely put it down. I finished it in 3 days - good for me. It was an enthralling, engaging and occasionally moving tale. You certainly kept your souvenirs pristine and your writing, with so many references and quotations expertly inserted from the greatest writers along with your thought-provoking phrases and ideas, was of the highest order." Richard B.
"I have just finished reading your book which I thoroughly enjoyed! I loved how you knitted together the theme of your rescue of “Jack” with your reflections on the mountains, nature, culture and philosophy, mixed with stories of the loves of your life. You had the courage to abandon the world of “managerialism” and to reinvent the nature and quality of your life. Bravo and thanks for sharing your experiences and thoughts in your delightful book!" David G.
"Your book left me puzzled: In the end, I could not decide, which of the two you love more, the mountains or the women? Yet you gave the answer anyhow: One can love both with the same intensity, without taking away anything from the other. I was really touched by the gentle, respectful and caring tone of the portraits of you different girls/women/female friends and finally wife." Stefan C.
"This is a great read, hard to put down if you like travel, adventure and love. The story, beautifully written, of a middle aged executive moving to the foothills of the Himalaya and running into extreme circumstances is very moving when he remembers his past love life and the lovers he has left behind." Patrick B.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Francisco Po Egea
• Release date: Oct 12, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463985144

Francisco Po Egea

Francisco Po Egea (Zaragoza, Spain). Industrial Engineer and MBA INSEAD (Fontainebleau). Ten years as a high executive in multinationals in Madrid and Paris, which he changed to become a globetrotter, writer and photographer. For 35 years, he has travelled through Asia to its most hidden corners and to many other parts of the world, alternating adventure trips with luxury hotels. He has published hundreds of articles in the best travel magazines in Spain and in El País (no1 Spanish newspaper). He is the author of the books: “De Ejecutivo a Trotamundos”, “Islas Mauricio y Rodrigues” (Laertes), “Grandes Hoteles de España” (El País/Aguilar) and “Los 100 hoteles más románticos del mundo” (Formentera). He has received several awards for his articles: The France Award (3 times), the Veneto Award and the Mexican Silver Feather Award.

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WILD in the Himalayas

Loves and tragedies from Paris to Kathmandu

Francisco Po Egea

Copyright: Francisco Po Egea, 2018

ISBN: 9781980778837

Smashwords Edition

Original title: De Ejecutivo a trotamundos

Translated from the Spanish by Cristina P. Wenger

Cover design: copyright Pablo Rodriguez

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To Barbara and Cristina… My wings

At the beginning of time, the mountains had wings. They flew into the distance, crossed rivers and seas, oceans and continents and landed where they wished. But one day Indra, the Vedic god of lightning and storms, jealous of so much freedom, cut off their wings and held them to the ground. The wings, free but without a will of their own, became helpless and turned into clouds. This is why they float forever around the mountains.

Rig Veda (1400 BC)

Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. Do not believe anything because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything because it is written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and the benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.

Buddha (600 BC)

I think that we too are born with wings, or at least with a seed waiting between their shoulder-blades. A conservative education, social and religious conventions, policies of the leaders and conformism join forces to prevent its development. It needs to be released. In addition to one’s teachers, one must also read and listen to the heterodox and the aesthetes, the rebels and the iconoclasts. They are the ones who change things. You have to travel, see the world with the body and the spirit, without company, without ties and without any return date. In this way, little by little, we will spread or wings.

The author (Paris, 1982)

Chapter I

A journey is always made three times: the first in one's dreams, in the imagination, on maps. A second time along roads, in old buses, in stations waiting for hypothetical trains, in dusty shelters and radiant forests. And, finally, a third, endless time in memory, in the presence of moments which will last indefinitely and which nothing and nobody can ever erase.

Elisabeth Foch

L’Echappée Indienne

Four large birds were circling above us, under an intense blue sky where grey clouds were forming. They looked like vultures. There must be a dead animal nearby, I thought, and then: Hell! It's going to snow again. It must have been around three in the afternoon. The two of us had been walking all morning and had stopped a few hours before because the snow was soft and wet and we were sinking more and more into it with each step. We made the most of the time by sharing out the rice and chapattis left over from the previous night, together with a tin of tuna fish. We wanted to get as close as possible to the pass before sunset so as to be able to cross it the next day before the snow made it impossible and our hopes of getting out of there would vanish.

It was mid-October 1978, and we were in the heart of the Indian Himalayas, in the gorges of the Rishi Ganga – a tributary of the Ganges which drains part of the glaciers of the area – at the foot of the almost impenetrable walls that protect the Nanda Devi Sanctuary, dominated by the peak of the same name.

I had read a fair amount about the mountains of the Garwhal. First in a few libraries in Paris, and afterwards in the library of the enlightened Nepali aristocrat Kaiser Bahadur Rana. His splendid collection of books about the Himalayas was kept in his ancient palace in Kathmandu, accessible to anyone who showed any interest. I had learned that these mountains were especially rich in legends, myths and traditions, being the birthplace of the Hindu religion and the traditional abode of its gods, as well as the earthly setting for their great deeds as described in the Vedas, the sacred books of Hinduism.

Over these mountains reigns Nanda Devi, which at 25,643 feet (7,818 m) is the highest peak in India, one of the most beautiful and isolated, as well as the richest in these legends. A glorious mountain, with its ragged peak like a spear leaning on its shoulder ready to tear the sky or the sail of a vessel made to fly through space. All the routes to the summit, either via one of its faces or its ridges, are long, steep and abrupt: rock, snow and ice. It takes days, even weeks, to reach it from its base, and very few have managed to do so.

Its name means Goddess of Happiness, one of the denominations of Parvati, the wife of Shiva. Until 1934 nobody had found the key to penetrate this sanctuary – in the sense of a place of shelter and protection – and the peak remained unclimbed until two years later. It became the highest peak ever climbed by man until the ascent of Annapurna in 1950. Since then, fewer than a dozen climbers have reached its summit and almost as many have died in the attempt. The sanctuary itself is enclosed within another great circle of mountains and sharp peaks more than 21,000 feet high (7.000 m.) –the so-called outer sanctuary– and can only be reached via two passes 13,500 feet high (4.500 m.), passable according to whether or not they are snow-covered and how much of it they have accumulated.

I had been trekking for several months now, sometimes alone and sometimes together with a porter when I needed to take a tent and food (if there were no villages or shepherds’ huts to sleep in) through the valleys and mountains of the great range, trying to get as near to its central peaks as my limited experience and equipment would allow me: Everest, Cho Oyu, Annapurna, Kangchenjunga, and so on, as well as some of its remotest regions. Had I not been such an optimist – no doubt because so far my adventures had gone well – I would have never dared to embark on my current one, which was to reach the upper edge of the shrine, take a look at its interior and photograph the beautiful mountain and its environment at my leisure.

There was no guarantee that I would manage this, since it involved crossing uninhabited land, outside the usual trekking routes, and where in addition mountain expeditions were extremely rare. There was no doubt that Nanda Devi was beautiful and its surroundings heavenly, but it required a long and complicated trek for the porters to approach its base. Moreover, as it was not an eight-thousander (even though it is harder to climb than several of those) what interest could there be in its conquest in this epoch of marks and records where apparently the only peaks that matter are those more than eight thousand metres high, with Everest in the lead?

Conquest. Too grand a word to describe the mere fact of stepping on to a summit for a few minutes: a summit which will immediately become as inhospitable and hostile as it was before, and which will demand of its next conqueror the same amount of effort, or even more –perhaps his life– to permit this fleeting, precarious conquest.

I had read the stories of the first explorers/mountaineers who had travelled to these surroundings in the first half of the twentieth century: Tom Longstaff, Frank Smythe, Eric Shipton and Bill Tilman. Individuals who were devoted to the discovery of these remote lands without thinking about triumph and glory, for the pure pleasure of feeling the freedom of the mountain explorer. I had been very taken with the bohemian and romantic spirit to be found in their writing.

Francisco, Pemba said beside me, the snow’s getting hard again. We can go on now.

He was my guide and porter. I had found him in Joshimath, the village that supplied the whole area and which is also the start of the pilgrimage to the four temples which mark the sacred sources of the Ganges. Pemba was a Bhotiya, a Tibetan ethnic group which like the better-known Sherpas came from Tibet hundreds of years ago and settled on the southern slopes of the Himalayas. While the Sherpas occupy the Everest region, the Bhotiya villages extend throughout the west of Nepal and much of the Indian Himalayas and are also more numerous than the Sherpa settlements. The owner of the hostel where I was staying introduced us, and from the first moment I met him, I felt I could trust him completely. He was of medium height and solidly-built, but with the agility of a mountain goat and the sharp vigilance of a cat. His mountain gear, anorak, trousers and boots, were one or two sizes too big for him, of good quality but well-worn. As with his boots, he must have had them from a member of a previous expedition when it had ended. There was a constant smile on his lips when he talked, and his slightly slanting eyes were sincere and cordial. After a couple of weeks, we had established a brotherly relationship.

His words brought me back to reality. The vultures in the sky went on circling above us. There were around twenty of them now, and they had come down a little lower. Without waiting any longer I got off the rock where I had been sitting, we fastened on our backpacks and set off again. We had only gone on a few dozen steps when a red patch three hundred feet higher up on the same slope, towards the sharp summit of Dunagiri, caught our attention. It was my partner, with the experience of a dozen expeditions, who first saw it.

There’s a man there.

Can't be. It must be a tent or a piece of canvas.

But he said nothing and started walking towards it. When we got there we found a man lying against a rock in a foetal position, face covered in snow and looking lifeless. I could see that he was big, fair, and well-equipped with a red down anorak, climbing trousers and boots. We knelt beside him and brushed the snow off his gaunt face.

Look, Francisco, he’s barely breathing.

He probably hasn't eaten for days, I said, looking at his haggard face. He was not wearing sunglasses. By now he might be blind as well.

And he’s been sleeping out in the open.

We sat him up and started rubbing his body, trying to bring some life and warmth back into it. We had warm tea and tried to get him to drink some, but there was no way we could. His jaw was locked together as if frozen, and even though we kept massaging his face and chest he did not seem to be able to open it. He had not yet opened his eyes.

He’s one of the Americans of the Dunagiri expedition, don’t you think?

Must be, said Pemba. Who else could he be?

After ten minutes we managed to force his lips apart, and very slowly we were able to get him to drink. It took him a while to react, and when he finally half-opened his eyes they were opaque and empty.

He’s dying, said Pemba. We can't carry him back with us.

For all his bluish face, purple lips and frozen beard and eyebrows, I could still see a young, courageous face. He would have parents, maybe a wife and children, friends. This image, just a few inches away from my eyes, became that of José Ignacio, my inseparable school friend, dead in our arms after drowning in a dam when we were sixteen. It had happened during a school trip, and even though we had been forbidden to, we had jumped into the water straight after lunch, with fatal consequences. In my memories, I could still feel his warmth and friendliness. Now I had another dying man in front of me. It was a new tragedy in the mountains like all the others I had heard and read about, stark and impassive. It was not the stage for a tragic emotional event, but a natural, simple one. Memories joined with a feeling of dread and uncertainty. Tears came to my eyes.

Pemba, apparently unmoved, had walked a few metres away. You know the risks when you aim to conquer a Himalayan peak. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.

We have to try, we can't just leave him here, I said pleadingly. We can set up camp, then tomorrow we’ll see.

He said nothing but started to prepare a platform on the snow. I continued rubbing Jack. I had just baptised him that. When the tent was set up we pulled him inside, and while Pemba prepared some soup and more tea I began to undress him. It was not easy. He had lost a glove and the fingers of his right hand showed clear signs of frostbite; his toes, on the other hand, seemed fine. I rubbed them until some warmth returned and continued with his hands, arms and back. With so much exercise and in such a small space, I was now the one who was warmed up. He seemed to feel it too and began to mumble. We could not understand a word he was saying, so we wrapped him up in my sleeping bag and fed him vitamins, a couple of aspirin, soup and more tea. After this he fell asleep or passed out: it was hard to be sure which.

What about the other American? I asked Pemba. Do you think he’s around here somewhere?

I was wondering the same thing, but I don't think so. This one looks as though he’s been lost a few days now. I’ll climb up that rise and see if I can see anything.

He left me there, thinking: As if it weren’t tricky enough already…What the hell are we going to do now? After an hour Pemba came back.

I didn't see anything. They must have got separated. Or the other one’s fallen off the precipice.

He said it so easily; the easy way he accepted death was alien to me. But I suppose they were used to it, the quiet, reflective porters who accompanied the western mountaineers to the fulfilment of their dreams, knowing there was a good chance that those dreams would lead the explorer to his death. For my part, I had a constant feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach and could feel the bile coming up my throat. But there was no point focusing on feelings and reflections about our uncertain future; in these situations, you live in the present and follow the steps you have to in order to survive.

With this thought, we started getting dinner ready and organising the tent for the night. The three of us had to fit inside it, so we left some of our possessions outside under the protection of the double roof. While Pemba cooked dhal bhat (rice and lentils) on our tiny gas stove, I went out to stand facing the towering mountains I had travelled so far to discover. The last of the daylight was caressing the highest peaks, colouring the pure white snow with a pinkish gold, giving them a feminine and more beautiful touch, while the depths of the gorges started to fill with shadows. I could not help thinking how unforeseen this change in my circumstances was, and how the lucky star which had been with me during my travels had changed since the morning before.

It had begun as usual, with Pemba's soft words:

"Morning tea, sahib."

His words reached me through a sea of puffy clouds where I was resting, surrounded by sensual and semi-naked Apsaras who danced in front of a proud and satisfied Shiva, while down his long hair flowed the waters of the Ganges flooding from the skies on to his head, which according to the Vedic legend had been offered by the God himself to protect the Earth. We were only a few kilometres from the source of the sacred river, and a few days before I had been strolling between temples full of ancient frescos depicting idyllic scenes of Gods entwined with the prominent breasts and sensuous lips of their partners.

Francisco, good morning, your tea, Pemba insisted, loyal to the tradition of morning tea introduced by colonial Britain and still very much kept alive in this area of the Himalayas.

At this point, I bade farewell to the beautiful priestesses and slowly opened my eyes. The white clouds turned into the ceiling of the cave where we had spent the night, discoloured by soot from the fires lit by previous guests, and the altar at the cave entrance. Someone had written on the walls Best five stars in the whole trip and someone else Putain de merde de cave. Typical, I thought, the relaxed humour of an English gentleman and the usual French tendency to complain.

It’s snowing heavily, Pemba warned me.

Through the irregular entrance of the cave, I could see the white flakes falling heavily.

We ought to leave as soon as possible, he added.

Wouldn’t it be better to wait to see if it stops? I grumbled.

If it goes on snowing like this and we don't get to the Duranshi pass soon – he hesitated for a moment – we might not be able to get out of here all winter.

I sat up abruptly, half out of the sleeping bag, and looked at him in surprise.

What? You mean we have to hurry back to the pass we crossed the other day? But the monsoon ended a long time ago!

Yes, that’s right. This isn’t the end of the monsoon, it’s the first snows of winter that seem to have arrived a bit too soon. And who knows whether they’ll just last a day or go on for the whole week? His voice was apologetic rather than urgent.

With this prospect in mind, we hurried through a breakfast of cereal and powdered milk diluted in water, packed our bags and at around seven started walking. Not going deeper into the gorges of the Ganges and the walls that would take us up to the sanctuary of the Nanda Devi, according to my initial plans, but retracing our steps to the Duranshi pass and the dangerous Satkula gorges, which we had crossed a few days earlier on our way.

While we trudged along surrounded by snow, I recalled the idyll of previous days. From the last pass, we had descended more than three thousand feet to meadows encircled by birch and rhododendron, dotted with gentians, tiny poppies, primroses, lilies and wild irises covering the whole spectrum of colour. Corollas and petals, pistils and bulbs alive with insects sang the great fornication of chlorophyll while dragonflies pursued one another in their game of lovemaking and bumblebees buzzed around confusedly. We had seen golden eagles dominating the skies, bharals or blue Himalayan rams with their large twisted horns picked out against the rocks, and Imperial pheasants scampering in front of us, barely startled by our presence. Under that stratospheric sky, where a few white clusters wandered dreamingly, each step was a taste of all those visions and essences, while our nostrils absorbed all the fragrances and turned the entire walk into a voluptuous symphony.

I had been delightedly taking pictures of the flowers and the eagles caught in a moment of their soaring. I had waited patiently for the rams to lift their heads so as to portray them in their pride and dominance and had been frustrated by only being able to photograph the pheasants' rear ends as they ran into hiding.

But today the atmosphere was completely different: a menacing grey. Accompanying our steps came the thundering of the river, smoothing out the rocks and raising whirlpools of foam with its impetuous current, covered by a threatening dark sky that hid the peaks and turned the trees into ghostly silhouettes. Inevitably I thought about how the dangerous path at the top of the pass had seemed to fly during various stretches, hundreds of metres in all, above the bottomless precipices visible from the Satkula or Seven Gorges. I remembered how on our way there we had had to stop at the start of one of these flights to give way to a group of twenty porters who had already begun their crossing.

We could see them edging closer, one after another, pressed against the wall, with their heavy baskets and massive packs on their backs: their slow steps, with their torsos leaning forward under the weight and their eyes fixed on the ground, searching for safe footing. The sirdar reached us first, and Pemba started talking to him while I took pictures of the porters and Nanda Devi, which loomed above the other mountains in the distance.

Suddenly, something unexpected. A clattering of stones. One of the last figures leans dangerously away from the wall. It looks like a rock. Or perhaps two of them? But it is a porter and his basket; separated from each other. A scream. Another. Both shapes fall. They crash into the ground on an eighty-degree slope. The basket explodes, and pans and packages fly everywhere. The man hits the ground with a dull thud. Silence. He keeps falling and disappears.

The screams of his companions echo in the gorge. They call again and again, but no-one answers. They argue among themselves, and Pemba translates. One of them, his brother, wants to go down to look for the poor man. He calls for a rope. The sirdar replies with more shouts. There is no rope. They have none. Nor do we. There is no way we can help them. The cries continue unanswered. One after another they arrive at the ridge where we are standing. They unload their packages. Some are still arguing; others remain silent. They have decided that two of them will run up to Lata, the village we started from, to get some ropes and try to rescue their comrade. All the same, they do not believe that he is alive.

The sirdar talks and Pemba pass what he says on to me. They were on their way from a failed expedition to climb Dunagiri (23,182 feet; 7,066 m) –which loomed on our left, a few days walk away− and the sahibs had taken the ropes with them for climbing. But the two Americans had not returned. They had waited for them for several days, then decided to go and look for them, but had only found one of their rucksacks abandoned at the foot of the wall. They had started on their way home, convinced that the mountain had claimed two new victims.

What with these memories, Pemba’s haste and the worry on his face that morning, I started to realise the situation I was in, one which was surely outside my experience. But we had to go on, climbing non-stop. It had taken us six days from Lata, the last inhabited village in the area, to get to the cave in the river gorge, halfway between the last pass and the edge of the inner sanctuary. We had crossed the gorge and the pass on the evening of the third day but had set up camp soon afterwards. So that we would need at least four days to reach the pass again, if not five, bearing in mind that the greater part of the journey was now uphill and on snow. If it went on snowing as hard as this there was no doubt we were going to get lost, and if we did manage to get to the wretched pass it would be impossible to cross.

If I had not stayed that extra week in Leh with Hildegard, waiting to see whether or not she would be evacuated by plane to Delhi, I could have started the trek one or two weeks earlier and would not have been in this mess right now. I thought of her permanent good humour and her snub nose between those clear, serene eyes. No, that was hardly fair. I had stayed because I liked spending time with her. I remembered her reluctance to speak well of herself or ill of others: a generous and gracious dove. She had been an exceptional travelling companion, with her good judgement and her good heart. I wondered what had happened to her in the end. For a moment I forgot about danger and uncertainty and began to hum a Jacques Brel song in her honour: Y en a qui ont le cœur si large qu'on y entre sans frapper... (There are some who have a heart so wide you can enter without knocking ...)

Ah, my times in Paris! Every street in the Latin Quarter, Saint Germain, Montparnasse, the banks of the Seine, the Opéra and even the Champs-Elysées brought back some memory. A café, a bistro, a cinema, a vision, a meeting, an embrace, a longing, a kiss… They were so different from each other, the two periods of my life I had spent there: the first young, naïve, without much money but full of enthusiasm. The second, by now a mature adult, with a good salary, relationship problems and professional disillusionments. I certainly preferred the first with its lessons in life, its revelations and its surprises.

They say cloudy days are better for contemplation than sunny ones. It was certainly true in my own case. When I was about to turn forty, I started to consider my past life and all the things I still wanted to experience. I thought of my mother and her despair if I never returned; of my father, who had never understood why I had suddenly quit my career after so many years of studying and working to become a senior executive in a great company, only to throw it all away. And Ursula: would she now realise that she loved me more than anything else and wanted to live with me even if that meant leaving Munich? And did I still want that? A six-year relationship with no visible future. Agreements and disagreements. Idyllic moments, ecstasy and frigidity. A love as sharp and rugged as a saw, with sharp peaks and deep grooves. And yet at the end of the day we always ended up together again. But when I went back home she would probably say: Francisco, you’re the one who left. And it was true. For her the truth pure and simple; a more nuanced one for me.

And Monique? My sweet, fragile last-minute love. So idealistic and so much in need of affection. It had hurt immensely to leave her in Kathmandu a little more than a month ago. But I had had to do it. And I had only left her for a few days, in good hands, safe from the temptations of the drug addicts who swarmed around Freak Street and the seedy streets round Thamel, waiting for her flight back to Paris. There we would soon be reunited.

The trek required all my attention, so I made an effort to leave these memories behind. The path climbed steeply from the gorge through the meadows, which were now covered in snow and rocks which we made our way around carefully, flanked by giant firs and rhododendron bushes. We had had to cross the sacred Rishi Ganga river over a slippery log lodged between the two banks. Beneath us roared the current. A swim in those turbulent waters might rid me of all my troubles, I thought. What with the present situation, my fear of the immediate future and the Gods, both good and evil, who lurked around every corner, no wonder I was questioning my own highly rational convictions. Pemba crossed the river with ease, stepping delicately on the precarious bridge. As for me, I shamelessly crossed it on all fours, at times hugging the log, after which dear Pemba went back to fetch my rucksack after first leaving the bag with all the supplies on the other bank.

Five hours or so later we stopped to have some lunch: leftover rice from the previous night, a tin of sardines and some chocolate. Shortly after we set off again it stopped snowing, the sun came out and lit up the forest and the peaks, warmed us up, fed our hopes and even put a spring in our step. Just before sunset we set up camp, cooked the usual rice and lentils, with tea and biscuits for dessert, got into our sleeping bags and set about waiting for morning to arrive.

When we woke it was snowing again. At our altitude, around 12,200 feet, it was already about a foot thick, but in the cold of the morning, it was still hard so that we were able to make steady progress. However, as the temperature rose and the snow-layer grew thicker, our boots sank deeper and deeper with each step and our pace slowed. Around twelve the sun came out, the snow turned very soft and we decided to stop for lunch. We estimated that we were almost halfway to the pass, so that if we walked until nightfall, if the situation did not get any worse and it did not snow the next day, we would be able to make it by the end of the afternoon. It was then, when we set off again, that we found Jack.