Life Without Limits, A (11 page)

It was on that trip that I had my first brush with altitude sickness. We had reached 4,500m when we decided we should climb what looked from where we were standing like a nearby hill. But because we were already standing at 4,500m, it was a hill whose summit was 5,300m above sea level. Me being me, I decided to see how fast I could get up it. Sure enough, I beat Billi and Tina to the top and celebrated among the coloured prayer flags on the summit. Well done me.

On the way down, though, things turned nasty. My head felt as if it were in a vice; the blood started to pound against the inside of my constricting skull. By the time I got back to the trekking lodge, I couldn’t lift my head at all. I sat for hours slumped over my haunches, a broken woman. I thought I was going to die, which is far from an unreasonable fear with altitude sickness. I was afraid to go to sleep the pain was so intense, but Billi and Tina looked after me.

A day later, we went up to 5,000m and camped, and I was fine. The problem was not that I couldn’t adapt to altitude; it was that I had gone up too quickly. I may have reached the top first, but Billi and Tina had won the day. At those altitudes, my competitiveness had been exposed as immaturity, and I paid the price. Lesson learned.

There was still plenty of scope for competitiveness elsewhere, though. I entered a few mountain-bike races. I was often the only girl, and I managed to beat the majority of the men. Then, for New Year we went to Pokhara, cycling the 200km from Kathmandu. With rucksacks on backs, we set off at 7 a.m. on the terrible roads, which were a lot of things but flat wasn’t one of them. I just would not give in. One by one, everyone dropped out and finished the journey by bus, except for me and the Nepali mountain-bike champion. We arrived, showered and headed straight out for a night on the town.

And those morning rides with Sonam and his team were a daily opportunity to test myself against men at altitude. Kathmandu sits in a bowl, whose lowest point is 1,350m above sea level. When you cycle out of town, you are straight into the mountains surrounding the city.

I used to get up at the crack of dawn, which is actually an hour or two later than most Nepalese, who tend to rise at 4 a.m. just after the first cock crow has awakened the first dog, whose incessant barking wakes the next, and so on until they crescendo into a canine pre-dawn chorus: somewhat tedious.

With the sun rising over the foothills of the Himalaya, I would set out for the designated meeting spot with the team. The cows meandered drunkenly through the streets, the butchers slaughtered their goats, the Hindu bells rang and the poor children scavenged on piles of rubbish or sat slumped in doorways, breathing glue fumes from paper bags.

Each morning the riders met at a
chiyaa
stall. This milky, sweet Nepalese tea was drunk by the gallon out of vessels washed loosely with a swill of local parasites. I suffered from giardia and other intestinal issues almost constantly in Nepal. But after a couple of cups of
chiyaa
I was ready for anything, and off we would cycle into the foothills around town, where buffalo pulled their ploughs through the terraced paddy fields. We climbed through villages of ochre mud-houses and past elaborate temples. Scantily clad children would fly home-made kites from the rooftops, their freedom and weightlessness a poignant image in a country crushed by civil war. In the distance rose the 8,000m peaks of the Himalaya.

Our morning bike rides usually took two hours, and I was back in time for work. (Well, I hardly ever was, but they didn’t seem to mind my being a bit late. They liked the fact that I was getting out into the local villages.) At the weekend, the rides were longer. It was usually Cornelius, Billi, Tina and me, but others would often join us. We just rode and rode. We ate and drank whatever we could lay our hands on in the villages we passed – usually
chiyaa
, chick-pea curry, coconut biscuits (at four pence a packet) or deep-fried doughnuts. Wherever we ended up at dusk on the Saturday, we would seek shelter, sometimes in the house of a local, sometimes at a monastery. Dinner was always the same, as was lunch during the week.
Dhal bhat
– rice, lentil soup and curry. The Nepalese eat it twice a day. I loved it. Then, on the Sunday we wended our way back to Kathmandu by the most indirect route possible.

We would arrive back in town exhausted, sweaty and hungry, but with spirits soaring. We had no idea how far we had been, how many calories we’d burned, what heart rate we’d maxed out at. There was no data to download or logbook to tick. This was raw and elemental, the way sport and adventure has always been. I’m sure it was the making of me.

Then again, our sixteen-day bike ride from Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, back to Kathmandu via Everest Base Camp, might also have played a part. Billi, Tina and I pledged to make the trip while we were on our expedition in Langtang. At the end of April 2005, we flew to Lhasa and made our preparations for the 1,200km ride home. We called ourselves the Rangi-Changi team.
Rangi-changi
means ‘multi-coloured’ in Nepali. Our team consisted of Billi, a German; Tina, an Argentinian; Rupesh, a Nepali; Trond, a Norwegian; Chris and Kirsten, who were Danish; and me.

Tibet is very different from Nepal. Where Kathmandu sits in a bowl of lush vegetation, up over the other side of the Himalaya stretches the desert plateau of Tibet. Not much survives there, beyond clumps of course grass, chubby little desert rats and the yaks, which can cope with almost anything. As can the Tibetan nomads, who wander across the land setting up home for two months at a time, before moving on with their train of yaks, dogs and sheep. Tibetans are becoming a minority in their homeland as the encroaching tentacles of the Chinese take greater hold. What began as a violent annexation in the 1950s has become a subtler process of assimilation, as the Chinese move in on the roads and railways that increasingly penetrate the interior. I tried to talk to our guide about the situation, but he was reluctant to be drawn. He did reveal that he had spent three years in prison – for what, I don’t know. On the morning of the day we set off, a few of us visited the Potala Palace, which was the residence of the Dalai Lama until he went into exile during the failed Tibetan uprising in 1959. It made a huge impression on me, standing tall on elevated ground over Lhasa, as if in defiance of the Chinese influence that closes in ever more tightly on the city below. Once it would have been a hive of activity; now, sadly, it is little more than a museum.

That afternoon, we began the long ride home. Arid it may have been, but the scale of the landscape was breathtaking. The plains stretched out with nothing but the odd dust tornado disturbing the peace. Beyond them, the land rose into barren mountains, and beyond those mountains lay the snowy Himalaya.

The going was tough from the start. We lost Trond and Rupesh to altitude sickness on the second day. They were taken by bus to Shigatse, to wait for us there. The rest of us soldiered on. This was Prem’s second tour of duty in the Himalaya and he never let me down, even as we struggled against the stinging dust that was whipped up into our faces by the wind. At the end of the second day, I lay down in my tent with the horrible symptoms of altitude sickness over coming me. We were at 4,800m and had much further to climb, but my body seemed to adapt overnight, even if my sleep never did. The higher we ascended, the lighter my sleep became and the more vivid my dreams.

We stayed an extra day to acclimatise at that altitude, which we spent with a family of nomads, whose temporary shelter of yak skin was just across the river. The ruddy-faced young son taught me how to use a home-made catapult, and inside the tent we were treated to the local Tibetan delicacy – yak butter tea. I’ll try anything, but this blend of hot water, tea leaves, yak butter and salt tested that characteristic to the limit. It’s vile, and it’s ubiquitous in Tibet.

We struck camp on 1 May, but the maypoles of Merrie England seemed a long way away. That particular day was a neat microcosm of the whole trip, taking in euphoria and despair, the heavenly and the hellish. By midday, we had made it to the top of a snowy pass at 5,400m. Tears were in my eyes at what we had achieved, and at the sheer beauty of the terrain we had cycled through, not to mention that which we could see in the distance. Having stopped for lunch at a small settlement of whitewashed houses on the plain the other side, we set off for the next pass that rose from the plateau to a mere 5,000m. This one, though, turned into an interminable slog. We regrouped at 5 p.m., and it was then that it started to snow. On we went, up through the hairpins as a full-on blizzard closed in. Conditions were even more horrific on the descent, as I lost touch with my extremities. The voices of Frank and Georgie rang in my ears: ’When things are tough, you are tougher.’ Just as I thought my extremities could take no more, we came across a building, which turned out to be a workman’s residence. Mercifully, we were able to bed down in the relative warmth of a spare room. We left our bikes outside, though, and in the morning the components were frozen solid. Solution? We peed on them. By 8 a.m. we were on the move again.

Most of the days contained highs and lows of epic proportions, geographically, meteorologically, physically and emotionally. But what a high, on all counts, we reached at Base Camp! I found it impossible to look at Everest without crying. When I rounded a corner in the National Park after yet another draining ascent, and the Himalaya hove into view for the first time, tears welled up in my eyes. I couldn’t actually see Everest because it was shrouded in cloud, but just knowing it was there was enough. The next day, after a stay in a delightful little village, we set off for Base Camp. Everest rose majestically in the distance, but it seemed to take an age to reach the base. The rode was so bumpy it was like riding on rumble strips. The vibrations made our arms ache, but the pain paled into insignificance as the mountain drew closer.

We finally made it to Base Camp under an unrelenting sun that blistered my lips. More tears. Base Camp is incredibly civilised, with its rows of tents all colour-coded according to the different climbing parties. There are sleeping tents, mess tents, toilet tents, even internet tents. Billi introduced us to a group leader, and soon we were chatting away with the climbers preparing for the summit. I’m not sure I would ever be able to go up there. It’s not the physical and mental demands, necessarily; it’s more the sitting around, waiting for a window in the weather, waiting to acclimatise to each new level of altitude. That’s what would break me.

We stayed the night at the monastery at Rombuk and spent a further day of rest at Base Camp, chatting to climbers about their motivations and the challenges they face. We visited the shrine, shrouded in prayer flags, commemorating those who have died on Everest. Still more tears. It was sobering to think that one or two of the climbers at Base Camp that day might have their lives taken by the mountain above us, which looked so innocent and charming in the warm sunshine.

The border with Nepal was only three days’ ride away. The contrast in the landscape and conditions from one side of the Himalaya to the other is astounding. One day we were battling into a fierce, cold 60mph headwind, sandblasted for hours by the dust and gravel it blew into our faces, our heads wrapped in layer upon layer of fabric. The next we were cycling through verdant mountains of waterfalls, forests, birds and insects. After a torrential downpour at border control, we were back into our t-shirts floating through thirty-degree heat down the side of the mountains. Tibet and Nepal are stunningly beautiful in their own ways, but Nepal is so much more alive, and it was good to be back.

My time in Nepal wasn’t all sanitation and flogging myself up and down mountains. I have always liked having a calming influence in my life. Tina played that role to a great extent. My relentless competitiveness meant I always had to be the first to the top of each mountain pass when we cycled across the Himalaya. I spent a lot of time waiting for the others. Tina, on the other hand, would never rush. She taught me so much about the ‘smelling the roses’ approach to life, the travelling over the arriving. So too did an older lady called Suzy. I met her through Tina, who was a work colleague. Like Tina, she had an aura of peace about her – an older version of Jude, my friend from South Africa. She wore her white hair in a bob and carried herself with a grace I found very settling.

We became very good friends, and used to meet for
chiyaa
at a café near where I worked. We talked about everything – men, Buddhism, development, films, books. Suzy loves to read (she is a qualified librarian) and recommended a lot of books to me. She also loves to write. Haiku are a particular favourite of hers – a Japanese convention of poetry that consists, in English, of three short lines. She did a lot of work in Nepal with a famous Nepalese poet, Janak Sapkota. They published a book of haiku together. We all attended the launch, where Suzy and Janak gave readings. I found it incredibly inspiring. I loved the simplicity of the haiku and its ability to capture a scene, a moment or a feeling. I started composing them myself, often when I was biking. Sometimes they just came to me; sometimes I had to play around with them a little. When I got home the first thing I did was to write them down. Looking back, they form a kind of diary of my life out there, snippets of feelings and images.

There’s a place called Durbar Square in the centre of Kathmandu, where many of the Hindu temples can be found. I used to go there after work and sit on the temple steps, drinking
chiyaa
.

There was a woman who used to frequent the square. I couldn’t say for sure how old she was – possibly early thirties. She had a daughter with her, who looked healthy, apart from her teeth, but bad teeth are very common in Nepal. And she carried what I had assumed was a baby. It turned out that this ‘baby’ was two years old.