Ode to the Himalayas

📍Bangkok, Thailand (Issue 202)

The spectacular view from Annapurna Base Camp.

Being so full of rocks and very heavy, you'd suppose (owing to gravity) that the Himalayas would sink back into the sea.

You'd think so! But, in some vigorous rejection of entropy, the Himalayan range continues to climb one centimetre every year toward the dizzy heavens. Only 50 million years ago, the Indian subcontinent loitered somewhere south of today's Sri Lanka. And look at her now! For 50 million years, a mere blink in astronomical terms, India has hurried northward, plunging into the heart of the great Eurasian plate and squeezing away the (now drained) Tethys sea that stood between them. From this romantic tectonic crash, a thin ridge has sprung up some eight kilometres high—the monstrous Greater Himalayan Range! So uninviting as to be alluring. And we forget (because it was before our time) that our Herculean mountains were once little more than the quaint Chilton Hills or, just before that, the Malverns. Since then, silently and dilligenlty, they've been busy in their crushing and pushing upwards and churning towards the stars. From our limited perspective, the mountains look dead, horribly tranquil in eternal birth and death. But from another, longer perspective, they have been climbing up with divine force and are now at the very top of the Earth.

I was happy to visit them.

Being so big, so ghastly and impenetrable, the Himalayas are impossible to cycle over. Yet they remain beautiful and inviting because they are disinterested and infamously cruel. I could not refuse temptation. And so, my loyal and radiant green bicycle has hardly been touched for three months. Instead, I put on hiking boots and a bucket hat, and I headed by foot into the lowlands which are infested with primary forests. From there, like being born from pre-historic times, I wandered up tracks onto a different planet: A rockier and whiter planet that hovers above the Himalayan tree line.

I have met with both sides of the Himalayas. On the northern side, I visited Ladakh, which is very north of India and looked over Mustang in Nepal. These areas are shielded from the monsoons that rotate northwards from the Indian Ocean. This northern flank is red and dry and full of dust. It's dehydrated, thirsty, and fed only by intermittent glaciers, which quench the Ladakhis' extensive irrigation ditches so that patches of desert are luscious and full of food. Overwhelmingly, however, the northern slopes remain a blood-red desert, four thousand metres above the sea. This face carries independent energy: travelling from the south, from India or Nepal, to reach the northern slopes, the prodigious peaks have first to be crossed in 5,300 metre passes on roads that should not be called roads and are closed for many months of the year when the cold sets in. There is a certain aggressive nature to the choking dry dust that fills the valleys and only wets when a particularly large monsoon doesn't entirely exhaust on the southern slopes. The northern side has harsh militarised boundaries to defend against Chinese or Pakistani encroachment into north India. Thousands of military vehicles and smiling soldiers give the Martian landscape a post-global warming, apocalyptic feel. There is an isolated and brave nature to these plains that conjoin the great Tibetan plateau (Tibet floats monkishly between four and five kilometres above sea level, a tangle of mountains and uplands within which sits Lhasa). The north side does not say welcome nor go away; it simply exists in irreverence to the human visitors that trek upon it or drive about in military trucks. It'll all be quite the same after I've gone, and the mountain knows as much; they are not harangued by my boot prints, which blow away, or my gracious appreciation when sitting under the stars, eyes full of tears, in some hidden valley of Zanskar or Markha.

Let's turn to the southern side, which is entirely dissimilar: it carries dramatically softer energy. It's wetter; the monsoons crawl up the south slopes until late September, wringing themselves out over Dharamshala, Manali, Pokhara and Baglung. It's green and fertile, and the air is less frigid and more humid. It's sweatier. As we climb the southern slopes, Hinduism in south Nepal and India is replaced by Tibetan Buddhism. Buddhism up here is thousands of years old and remains undiluted by the 'development' of the rest of the world. Development? —who needs it! Certainly, there is no need for 5G or The Washington Post when eating Yak's cheese and drinking Butter Tea while contemplating peaks. There is compassionate air on the south-facing, sun-facing slopes. Around the next corner often flutters a string of coloured flags reading Om Mani Padme Hum, welcoming us towards those ghostly white heights that shine yellow at sunrise, always set against a cold chemical blue sky. I was invited to the mountains from the southern side, and from here, I first glimpsed the beauty of Makalu, Manaslu, and Annapurna and more. The southern slopes almost have open arms, and like singing sirens, they call out to tens of thousands of us, saying something like, "Check out the view from up here."

We don't hesitate, so there is no shortage of tourists! But the tracks over these considerable mountains are so tiny that the tourists (even the groups of fifty South Koreans) disappear to nothing under an eight thousand metre ridge.

I have discovered that it's a great relief to feel negligible. We spend our whole lives trying to become Very Important on a human scale. And then we visit the Himalayas. Her name comes from Sanskrit Himālaya, the abode of snow, from hima (frost) and ālaya (dwelling). We visit as if entering someone else's house, a frosty stranger's home, but that planetary-sized entity is eight kilometres tall (4,100 times taller than me), and in a footstep, I vanish. My bigness is replaced by being impossibly small. Why, I wonder, was I trying to be so important anyhow? What else is there to do but appreciate these cold, rocky outcrops? As de Mello says, "You are so proud of your intelligence; you are like a condemned man, proud of the vastness of his prison cell." Why did I want my name in the prison newspaper anyhow? I began to wonder. We are very proud of our bondage! The transcendent mountains help us escape our chains because we realise we are small enough to slip from them.

And yet, as I climbed towards Annapurna basecamp in the biting pre-sunrise cold, I couldn't help but examine the stars above me. I was now so little that I had disappeared into the sky and walked among it. Don't we go to the mountains to visit the stars anyhow? Surely we do! Thousands of galaxies and suns were strung across the blue-black roof. There, I spotted the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy, 25,000 light years away. Beyond it, the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy seemed so close, but it sat 45,000 light years beyond Canis!

Is four kilometres significant against such a stellar distance? Yes! There were Dwarfs and Red Giants and all, easily within an arm's reach for the first time, each a million miles wide and so weightless I could scoop up handfuls and carry whole universes away in my pocket. On that breathless cosmic plateau, I was reminded of Jack Kerouac's quote: "Thinking of the stars night after night, I begin to realise 'The stars are words' and all the innumerable worlds in the Milky Way are words, and so is this world too. And I realise that no matter where I am, whether in a little room full of thought, or in this endless universe of stars and mountains, it's all in my mind."