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The great outdoors

TREKKING IN NEPAL

My wife Sue and I were in Pokhara, Nepal. We were in Nepal as part of our two-year around-the-world trip.

We'd already spent three months in India and this, the second country on our itinerary, was to prove very different but nonetheless exciting; excitement, of course, coming in many varied forms.

We were relaxed, sitting in spring sunshine at a table on the roof terrace of our 'hotel', a no- star backpackers! We were sipping good French red wine - cheaper to buy here than in supermarkets in Brighton - and all but gobbling the cheese and bread we'd purchased to go with it; this reminiscent picnic being our reward to ourselves for having completed an arduous, though unforgettable, 12-day trek to the Annapurna base camp and back.

I was browsing through the hotel copy of the local newspaper (four sheets thin) while Sue was avidly looking through the just-developed photos, a pictorial testimony to the beautiful, diverse and awe-inspiring landscapes we'd witnessed on the trek.

Rhododendron forests were budding and promising to very soon burst into bright red blooms; to contrast, poetically, with the rugged, imposing skyline above the snowline which itself was different with each passing hour.

Picture, in the sparkle of the rising sun at daybreak, Cornish vanilla ice cream painted in rough peaks on to a crisp navy blue tablecloth, hung as a mural, the whole then glorified by nature's own spotlight!

At dusk these 'ice cream' peaks that had been varying shades of white throughout the short day, became quickly dark, sombre and aloof, before blending into the night and merging into each other as if lending ears to the whispering of the day's secrets, of which one instinctively knew there must be many.

Other photos recorded village folk, no longer nonplussed but now apparently eager to put their best faces forward for the benefit of ourselves and other backpackers moving stiffly and achingly, for the most part, in both directions, with or without Sherpa guides.

Sue and I had decided, after much heated debate, to hire a guide, a local named Dave (very Nepalese!), and as I refilled our glasses and cut another slice of cheese, Sue showed me a photo of Dave and me posing resplendently in front of Tibetan prayer flags which were all around the memorial to Anatoli Boukreev, a famous/infamous Russian climber/guide. Nice picture.

I turned back to reading the Kathmandu Post where a small headline caught my eye - four missing in avalanche. I read on. I shuddered and felt the blood drain from my face as I learned and related to Sue that four people - an Australian couple, their young daughter and an Israeli - all trekking without a guide, were missing, believed killed by an avalanche near the Annapurna base camp.

We'd crossed the path of this very same recurring avalanche but two days previously. Until then I'd believed, somewhat naively, that an avalanche was nothing more than a fast-moving mass of fluffy white stuff, albeit cold, and that if one kept one's wits about one, one could with a little luck climb or clamber out, dust oneself off and be home in time for tea and crumpets!

How wrong could I be (Sue too, she told me later)? The reality we both discovered as, urged to hurry by our anxious guide (who I thought at the time was being alarmist despite rumblings from not too far away), we made our delicate way as quickly as we could across a 12 inch wide, 40 yard long ledge, a gorge filled with many huge chunks and boulders of solid ice, any one of which if it made contact, would cause wipe-out.

These blocks had apparently fallen only a little earlier, the narrow path we'd sped across having only very recently been carved by the feet of a few Annapura base camp-bound Sherpas brave enough to cross (many others, we learned later, turned back and went a longer way round). '

Precarious' springs to mind; a bit like trying to run across an ice rink in flip-flops with a lot more risk! And this was the very same place where the four unfortunates perished! I shuddered again as I contemplated my air of nonchalance, born of ignorance, which now gave me more just cause to gulp the French red - a toast to our knowing guide and to my wife for insisting we use him.

We might well have been crossing two days later without him!

by Jeff Sykes