Traveling Light

Bon Courage

On Friday, we drove to Munshiari, where 400 centimeters of rain each year water the lush ferns that fringe its gushing streams, and the leaves of the horse chestnut trees are a glowing spring green.

The Panchuli peaks loom over the valley, and old trading routes snake north, to Tibet. In the east, the river Kali marks our border with Nepal.

From this north-eastern corner of Uttarakhand, our friend Mohit Oberoi will traverse the ridges and valleys of the Himalaya, through the Alpine pasture of Bedni bugyal, over the Kuari Pass, and into Joshimath. Above the watershed of the Ganga, passing the shrines of the Panch Kedar, and into the upper Yamuna Valley. On to the rich, well-watered pastures of Himachal, into the rain shadow of Spiti, over the highest Indian village of Kibber, over the Perang-la, crossing the infant Sutlej, then north onto the southern shores of Tso Moriri, in Ladakh.

This morning, Mo left our home stay in Sirmauli village, with Hanumant Khanna, who will run with him to Auli.

Run? You ask…

How can you run with a fully-loaded trekking pack?

You can't. You have to strip your gear down to the barest essentials, stuff it all into a runner's pack. 

Out goes the tent, to be replaced by a tarp (from 'tarpaulin') which will be stretched over the trekking poles. No change of clothes, just one of everything, each item's weight detailed to the last gram - an undershirt of fine merino, a lightweight shirt, a skinny down jacket, and a waterproof parka. The sleeping bags compact into a tiny capsule, but are rated to -9 degrees. 

"Food?" I ask Mo.

"Only for a couple of days at a time; if you move fast, you can cover a lot of ground, and get to the next village"

The logic is exquisite: the faster we travel, the less we need to carry; the less we carry, the faster we can travel.

There may be some lessons here for the soul, for our cluttered lives, our cluttered homes.

I had written about traveling light about twenty years ago, just after a trek to Rudranath with TR, who loyally archived this piece, reflecting on an earlier journey, over the Perang-la, the pass which Mo will cross from Spiti into Ladakh: 

At the pass I found instant coolth in the shade of a rock, and instant gratification in a large slab of fruit-and-nut chocolate. Basic needs satisfied, I allowed my eyes to feast upon the snowfields sloping down to the valley, and beyond, the soft undulating camel-brown of the Central Asian plateau, broken by gentle sprinklings of white on the larger mounds, all topped by a vast canopy of pastel blue.

Shubhendu purposefully donned his dark glasses, Kai took one more photograph, and we went crunching into the breech, my task limited to planting my size 13 feet in the preceding tracks. Behind me, our pack-donkey was not finding the going so easy, and before long, had sunk belly-deep in the sun-warmed snow. Clearly, this was not going to work.

We headed back to the pass and examined the alternatives. The donkey’s load was down to about 15 kg., and now that we had crested the pass, surely we could carry an additional 5 kg each, Shubhendu suggested. Kai and I reluctantly agreed. 

"No way" said the donkey’s owner, faced with the prospect of giving up his contracted payment. "I’ll tie the donkey here, and carry his load till you ford the river." 

This I could not countenance – the ford was two days ahead, and I would not be party to leaving a lone donkey exposed to the elements, perhaps to a snow leopard. I realized how much our money meant to his owner, and so agreed that we would camp that night at the pass and negotiate the snow early the next morning, before it was softened by the sun. 

Up at four a.m., I unzipped our tent-fly, and stepped into the fairy-tale miasma of a white-out. I didn’t bother to wake my sleeping mates – this trekking party wasn’t going anywhere, not today. The first snowflakes floated down, soft and silent. Then they came in urgent flurries, propelled by sudden gusts of wind. The breaks between the flurries shortened, then disappeared, and by mid-morning, our little green tent was being buffeted by a full-scale blizzard. It groaned and creaked, and more to the point, leaked. At least one of us was diverted by the urgency of keeping our refuge dry. The others continued to contemplate the grim future.

One of my contemplations had to do with baggage. In the early days of planning our expedition, Shubhendu had floated the thought that we feed ourselves as traders along this route traditionally had done – with tsampa, or barley flour. The notion was romantically appealing, but I had rejected it in favour of the familiar Maggi noodles and cheese, the soup powders and khichdi that had long been the calorific backbone of my treks. Now with our survival in question, I allowed my mind the flaccidity of the ‘what-if’ questions. With only the tsampa to carry, there would have been no donkey; without the donkey, we would have been in the valley….

The storm evaporated by evening, but the inquiry into the nature of baggage didn’t. For many years thereafter, I found myself pathologically miserly when it came to packing a backpack – Towel? Never bathe on a trek. Soap? Likewise. Book? Nonsense, there’s enough in nature to stimulate your mind. Notebook? You’re not going to write a travelogue any day soon…..By this determined process of paring down, I must confess that even the humble toothbrush was eliminated from my list of essentials.

And, yes, it was the last time a four-legged creature was part of my trekking party.

Several times in the decade that followed, I shepherded relatively large groups on walks into the wilderness, and the equipment lists I circulated reflected the same Spartan approach to gear. Just to underline the point, whenever we encountered an ascetic on the trail, I would point out the frugality of his raiment, the absence of food supplies. And I became decidedly sniffy about those of my party who carried such superfluities as nail clippers, or face cream, or - horror of horrors - cologne.

This autumn, I squeezed six days out of Delhi to go walk in the Kedar region. Out went the equipment list once more, to an old friend who had never been on a trek before. Off he went, in search of a pair of trekking boots and thermal underwear ("Is it going to be that cold?"). 

"Any particular CDs you want me to carry?" he phoned me another day. I bit back the temptation to say this was unnecessary – after all I had promised him that we would have porters, and he would have to carry nothing.

"I’m carrying my Jew’s harp", he called another day, recalling the peculiar resonant twang that would mysteriously arise from the rear of our lecture hall in the 70s. 

"What about a whistling stick?" the ingenious hollow piece of wood that sings when it is twirled. 

TR’s mood was infectious, and for the first time in a decade, I packed a toothbrush. Then a notebook – the slimmest I could find, but a notebook none the less; after all, I had been commissioned to write part of a trekking guide. By the time I found myself packing the latest addition to my bookshelf, I knew something had changed, forever.

Three days later, we perched on a pass, and the younger of our porters joyfully twirled the whistling stick; TR twanged along on his Jew’s harp. This was the high life! Perhaps I should have carried a little hand-drum along…... 

That night, we reeled under the dazzle of the Milky Way, then retreated to our sleeping bags and the wonderfully elevating sounds of Ali Farka Toure. A Discman is not really that heavy, I thought. And suddenly recalled that I had begun this trek with the ultimate travesty – commandeering a mule to carry our supplies on the first day up from the roadhead!

So many ways to travel.

As long as you do it with purpose, and joy.