A Long Walk in the Himalaya: A Trek from the Ganges to Kashmir Read online

  A LONG WALK IN THE

  HIMALAYA

  A LONG WALK IN THE HIMALAYA

  A TREK FROM THE GANGES TO KASHMIR

  Garry Weare

  First published 2007

  This e-book edition 2011

  Transit Lounge Publishing

  95 Stephen Street

  Yarraville, Australia 3013

  www.transitlounge.com.au

  [email protected]

  Copyright ©Garry Weare 2007

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher.

  Every effort has been made to obtain permission for excerpts reproduced in this publication. In cases where these efforts were unsuccessful, the copyright holders are asked to contact the publisher directly.

  Maps by Ian Faulkner

  Photographs: Garry Weare/Lonely Planet Images

  Design by Peter Lo

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-publication data

  Weare, Garry.

  A long walk in the Himalaya : a trek from the Ganges to Kashmir.

  Bibliography.

  ISBN 9780980846270 (e-book).

  1. Weare, Garry - Travel. 2. Himalaya Mountains -

  Description and travel. 3. India, Northeastern -

  Description and travel. I. Title.

  915.49604

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 The Man Who Lived in Paradise

  High Passes to Manali

  2 A Camp High Above the Ganges

  3 The Pilgrim Way

  4 A Summer Ramble in the Himalaya

  5 A Road to Tibet

  6 A Village Called Mudh

  7 Traversing the Pin Parbati

  8 A Sojourn in the Kullu Valley

  Heading North to Leh

  9 In the Footsteps of The Gaddi

  10 Wandering Zanskar

  11 Beyond The High Passes

  12 The Flight of the Wind Horse

  13 The King’s Palace

  Traverse to Kashmir

  14 Exploring the Hidden Valleys

  15 Where Three Worlds Meet

  16 A Short Walk Down the Sindh Valley

  17 New Maharajah’s Palace

  18 Kashmir—Unfinshed Business

  Bibliography

  Introduction

  Garry Weare is enigmatic, funny and he has an enormous conscience. He brings into the story of his Himalayan traverse a succession of vignettes about people’s lives that he meets along the way, relevant history, natural history observations and a delightful sprinkling of his inimitable sense of humour. The warmth of his relationships with his old Kashmiri friends and various people from the trekking fraternity adds a wonderful dimension to this journeyman’s tale. And slowly but surely Garry tells us why he eschewed the company of old friends like me, with their ample supplies of single malt whisky and chose instead to trek the remote trails of the Indian Himalaya with his ponymen and ‘fresh batteries’ who were long time colleagues and mountain guides. From his thirty years in the Himalaya. Garry, or Guru to many of his old buddies, is well known in the western Himalaya and in the Himalayan community in Australia. Guru Weare—Raja Weare by his own confession—tells us of his five-month long trek across some of the world’s most beautiful and rugged terrain, and his deep love and empathy for its culture and people.

  His references to requiring the services of the best tailors for repairs to his favourite shirt in half a dozen bazaars across the Himalaya and later turning down a lift from a steamroller driver as he triumphantly trekked the roadside into the Vale of Kashmir are marvellous examples of Garry’s quirky and eccentric nature. His description of his progressively svelte physique and flowing grey beard is an inspiration to those of us forging our way through our fifties and, earnestly hoping wisdom follows suit. This book is a delightful read by one of the finest true gentlemen I know.

  Peter Hillary

  CHAPTER 1

  The Man Who Lived in Paradise

  It is sometimes said that it is best to get the disasters over early in your life. I can appreciate that. In 1973, as a young man of twenty-five, I arranged my first Himalayan trek to Kashmir in northern India. I had already trekked extensively in Kashmir and Nepal, but after spending two years teaching English in colleges in Yorkshire I had become increasingly restless to return. This would be my first venture into the heady world of adventure travel. Advertising in the personal columns of the Times I sought six hardy souls to share costs and undertake a trek from Kashmir to the Buddhist region of Ladakh. Rumour had it that the Indian government was about to de-restrict Ladakh, on the politically sensitive borderlands of Tibet, and permit foreigners to travel there for the first time since 1947. Since trekking in Kashmir in 1970 I had read as much as possible about Ladakh. From all accounts its culture and history were similar to that of Tibet, a land at the time completely off bounds to foreigner travellers. Ladakh—also referred to as Little Tibet—would be a great alternative. I had little problem convincing a group of trekkers to join me. Five months later we were all in jail.

  After travelling overland from London to Kashmir and spending a week trekking through the mountain valleys, we traversed a remote glacial pass and took our first steps into Ladakh. At first all went to plan. Reaching the first village the local police sergeant welcomed us. He assumed we had all the relevant documentation. The following day we wandered up a ridge and met a yak train of Buddhist traders intent on reaching the markets of Kargil, the largest town some 60 kilometres down the valley. On our return the sergeant was waiting for us.

  ‘Sir you are not allowed here, you must go back to Kashmir or come to Kargil.’ After considering the alternatives we decided on the Kargil option. Fair enough we thought, from there we might even be allowed to get a bus and visit Leh, the ancient capital of Ladakh.

  The following day, after several hours’ march, we caught a ramshackle bus that five hours and one breakdown later trundled into the Kargil bazaar. This was where our luck ran out. Arriving at the police station, we found the policemen brushing the dusty courtyard as if their lives depended on it. Our arrival coincided with the annual visit to Kargil by the Director General of Police for the State of Jammu and Kashmir. At 4pm that afternoon a convoy of jeeps sped through the main bazaar to the station. A line of policemen stood to attention as a kindly gentleman, with twinkling eyes and a well-trimmed silver moustache stepped out of the first jeep. Hushed voices informed him of our presence and, after a cursory inspection of his men, he approached us.

  ‘I believe you have been trekking?’ he asked.

  I explained something of our route.

  He nodded, asking the condition of the pass we had crossed.

  The Director General seemed impressed and not particularly concerned that we had broken the law. All seemed to be going well. Just a ticking off, I thought until the inspector’s aide-de-camp arrived on the scene.

  ‘But sir,’ he piped up with the assumed importance possessed by so many self-righteous young prigs in uniform ‘even if they have stepped just one foot into Ladakh they have broken the law.’

  Even in 1973 zero tolerance had meaning. Unconvinced the elderly Director General stood his ground until the prig in uniform started to re-iterate our misdeeds. In the end, the prig had his way and we were detained at the pleasure of the Kargil constabulary for ten days awaiting trial. In the realms of legal drama this would
not rate on prime time TV. On the day we were to be sentenced we were escorted into the court where the magistrate read out a prepared statement. He consigned us to imprisonment until the rising of the court—literally until the end of the day. That was the deal. The magistrate smiled at us and announced how much he and his fellow officials had enjoyed our company, before inviting us to join him for dinner that night. The next morning the police escorted us by bus back to Srinagar the capital of Kashmir. It was not the most auspicious start to my career organising and leading treks in Kashmir.

  Returning in 1976, I stayed on a houseboat in Dal Lake from where I would lead small trekking groups into the mountains for the next thirteen years. It had taken a few strokes of luck for my plans to materialise. After returning to the UK in autumn 1973 I was broke. One overcast afternoon I was thumbing through a copy of National Geographic magazine that included an article on the life of young men working in the Australian bush. Two months later I was on my way.

  On arrival in West Australia in January 1974 I abandoned any pretense of an academic career and signed up with a mineral sands mining company in Eneabba, about 200 kilometres north of Perth. By the end of the year I was musclebound, sunburnt and financially solvent. The following year I worked for a time in Tasmania and then in Darwin in Australia’s ‘Top End’ before meeting in Sydney a young couple who had recently established Australian Himalayan Expeditions, a company promoting treks to Nepal. After a memorable evening of pasta and red wine they got down to business. ‘Why not join us?’ was how Christine Gee and her partner Goronwy Price popped the question. It took me all of five seconds to accept. For me it was the perfect solution. They would provide the administrative and marketing support for my treks while I would spend up to six months of each year leading treks in Kashmir. Each season an increasing number of trekkers would stay on the houseboats for a few days before heading off on the mountain trails. Friendships were made, dreams fulfilled and, for most, the experience exceeded their wildest expectations. It was an idyllic lifestyle, something not lost on one journalist who was later to describe me as ‘the man who lives in Paradise’.

  It was a gun pointing into my taxi—what make of gun I have no idea—that finally convinced me that my heavenly existence in Kashmir was over. It was July 1990 and a member of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front had stopped the car on a lonely road in a remote corner of the Kashmir Valley. Meraj Din, a long-time Kashmir friend, got out of the car. Voices were raised until Din assured a misguided youth that we were simply trying to devise new trekking routes to circumvent the increasingly unstable climate in the Vale of Kashmir.

  The end had been on the cards for three years. In 1987, state elections were held in Jammu and Kashmir. The resounding victory for Dr Farooq Abdullah, the leader of the National Conference Party, augured closer ties with Rajiv Gandhi, the Indian prime minister. It also marked a turning point in Kashmir’s uncertain history. Since 1947 the former maharajah’s state had been the subject of heated dispute between India and Pakistan and even after two wars there was no sign of a resolution. For those favouring some degree of independence for Kashmir the elections were cited as a turning point that precipitated the instability that still leaves its mark across Kashmir.

  I realised that I would have to trek elsewhere in order to make a living. In 1986 I had written the first edition of the Lonely Planet guide Trekking in the Indian Himalaya. I now knew that without Kashmir subsequent editions of my guidebook would look woefully thin. I had no choice but to focus my efforts on the less frequented mountain regions of Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh, the Garhwal and Kumaon located between Kashmir and the borders of Tibet and Nepal. The regions were also ideally suited to a new range of treks that I would incorporate into the World Expedition’s Himalayan program—for by now the company had changed from Australian Himalayan Expeditions to a worldwide adventure travel company. I pursued my research with a passion, crossing new passes and discovering cultures far from the Kashmir Valley. Yet I never stopped dreaming about my houseboat and reflecting on some of the happiest times of my life.

  It was during one of my treks in 1995 that I first toyed with the idea of undertaking an extended trek. I was within a day or so of the sacred source of the Ganges. It was a spectacular one-week trek but for me it was far too short. I was only too aware that no sooner had I put on my boots than I was repacking my kitbag and heading back home. I felt I needed a challenge. Why not, I thought, take a few months off and combine a series of treks into one big one? Before I knew it I was jotting down a list of the treks that I needed to research for the next edition of my guidebook. I then devised a route that would take me from the source of the Ganges to the Trans-Himalayan region of Ladakh. But why stop there, I mused? Why not continue and trek all the way to Kashmir?

  At first the prospect was daunting.

  How could I take five or six months off?

  How could I say goodbye to my teenage daughter and my friends?

  Would I be fit enough? After all I was no longer in the prime of my youth.

  How would I organise the logistics?

  How much would it all cost?

  There were many good reasons to let my dream slip away. But it didn’t. I was determined to trek from Gaumukh, the sacred source of the Ganges to Gangabal Lake in Kashmir, one of the sacred sources of the Indus. It would provide a superb opportunity to re-discover a vast and varied mountainscape, from subtropical forests and verdant alpine meadows carpeted with wildflowers to an almost lunar geography north of the Himalayan divide.

  The trek would also enable me to explore three distinct cultural worlds. As Alexandra Drew, at the time in the ‘service’ of the Maharajah of Kashmir, wrote in 1877 in his The Northern Barrier of India, there is no other spot in Asia where the three cultural worlds of Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam meet. That observation still holds true today. On the initial stages of my trek I would share trails with Hindu pilgrims and villagers before reaching the Buddhist land of Ladakh with its ancient monasteries perched on sugarloaf mountains and tiny whitewashed settlements nestled in the deepest gorges. A rugged region close to the bordelands of Tibet from where I would cross a further series of high passes to Kashmir—a fabled land of mosques and minarets—and my houseboat on Dal Lake.

  Returning home to Australia, I set out a day-to-day trekking itinerary on a spreadsheet, including reserve days for inclement weather, illness and unforeseen logistical delays. By my calculations my trek would be around 2500 kilometres long and commit me to crossing at least twenty passes, most in the vicinity of 5000 metres. It would take around five months from the middle of May until the middle of October. (For those whose life in the great outdoors is never complete without a pedometer read no further. While the actual distance on a map between Gangotri and Kashmir is no more than 600 kilometres my trek weaved over passes and through valleys that at least doubled the most direct trekking route, let alone the distance as the crow flies. My calculation of 2500 kilometres is based on a simple formula of multiplying the actual number of days trekking (120 to 130 according to my spreadsheet) by 20 kilometres a day.)

  While I savoured the prospect of undertaking a five-month trek I sometimes found it hard to relate to some of my less energetic friends. ‘Haven’t you had enough of trekking?’ was a common query. For anyone vaguely familiar with the delights of trekking, the Himalaya holds the promise of discovery no matter how many times you return. I wasn’t out to break any records. It was not to be a ‘man against the mountains’ epic. Neither was I attempting to trek the entire Himalaya. Indeed, a glance at a map reveals that I would be covering only a small portion of the entire range. My plan was to complete a continuous trek with time to reflect on what is a spectacular and very special corner of the world’s youngest mountain range.

  The proposed trek was ambitious but by no means original. A century ago it was not uncommon for the British to wander the Himalaya for months at a time. Dressed in tweed outfits and accompanied by a team of helpers and porters t
hey kept detailed journals as they forded raging torrents, ascended steep, forested slopes and traversed high passes. Little was mentioned about hardship. Carrying no more than a flask of tea, a packet of biscuits, a hard-boiled egg and an occasional tot of brandy to withstand the cold they would cross windswept passes that would test the best of us. There was little in the way of back-up. Setting off from the Indian hill stations of Shimla or Mussoorie, they would trek for months at a time, often meeting no more than a handful of Europeans as they made their way over the passes to Kashmir.

  From the outset I decided that I would also trek in a similar style. I proposed to invite a few of my Indian friends and guides to join me on various stages of the trek. I would engage a cook. Each night I envisaged dining out on a steaming hot curry of rice, dhal and vegetables to be washed down with a tot or two of India’s finest non-vintage Old Monk rum. Porters or mule attendants would be hired to carry my inordinate amount of gear. I would also make arrangements to stay occasionally in a simple hotel or guesthouse whenever I reached a large village or trailhead. For the rest of the trek my nylon dome tent pitched in all number of idyllic locations would be home.

  ‘Get a distillery to sponsor you. You could call the trek “A gentleman’s guide to sipping single-malt whisky while trekking in the Himalaya”,’ was mountaineer Peter Hillary’s suggestion. ‘Do that and I might just join you for a week or two,’ he mused. Peter along with Chewang Tashi from Darjeeling and New Zealand mountaineer Graeme Dingle had already claimed a first when they traversed the Himalaya from Sikkim to Pakistan over ten months in 1981. Since then many others had followed in their footsteps.

  Yet, in spite of all the light-hearted banter I was concerned for my safety, particularly in the later stages of the trek when I reached Kashmir. The tragic circumstances involving a group of trekkers presumed murdered in 1995 had broken any illusion that foreigners were immune from danger. Indeed, it seemed at first almost foolhardy to contemplate a trek there. From the outset I told myself that I would not take any untoward chances. If completing my trek through Kashmir proved impossible, well so be it.