APR-C-11
LAUNCH OUR TREKKING DAYS TO THE MOUNTAINTOP
AND OVERNIGHT STAY UNDER THE STARS AT DHARAMSALA
April 28--29, 2001
WE SCATTER THROUGH MCLEOD GUNJ,
AND THEN BEGOIN HIKE UP TO SUMMIT CAMP
ON TOP OF MOUNT TIRUND, AMID SHEEP AND GOLDEN EAGLES,
THEN RETURN TO MCLEOD, AWAITING RETURN OF THE LOST,
THEN TOUR NORBULINGKA INSTITUTE BEFORE RETURN TO MCLEOD GUNJ FOR TOURIST
SHOPPING AND DINNER
After yesterday’s audience with the Chief Lama Situ Pai in the Sherbaling Monastery, we repeated the “hygiene lecture” in public health and the demonstration of tooth brushing and distribution of the toothbrushes and toothpaste. I was elected the “point person” on this one, and had to show them how to do it—and began with the careful preservation of the wrappers for both toothbrush and toothpaste, so that they did not trash the whole monastery courtyard as the school yard had been when we had done this previously. We then were held back by several more “VIP consultations” while the group was already loaded up into the Tatas, and I was eager to get back, since we were a long way from Dharamsala, with intermediate stops at the Taragarh Palace to pick up our left luggage, and a further stop for diplomatic reasons with Dr. Mehta’s contacts at the new faculty of medicine here—the first in this region, with the professor of medicine, the assistant professor of “obs and gyny” (as the Briticism has it) and the Dean and professor of microbiology. It was important that we stop since it is with them that we will be leaving Christa for her next two weeks experience here. Despite the seemingly good idea of an experience in the leprosarium of Dr. Mehta or the new faculty of medicine for which she seeks my endorsement and evaluation for the grades she needs from the sponsors of her trip, Christa is further complicating this by saying she really wants to join some other institute also so as to be able to take advantage of her presence here to do a two week special course in meditation. Something sounds like it does not compute to speak of an “Intensive Program in Meditation” since I believe that the meditation was an antidote to the intensity—but—this is a New Age, isn’t it?
There has been the first of a medical student class enrolled and they are just beginning their first year of non-clinical studies. The young woman “Obs and Gyny” junior faculty urged us repeatedly to come in and stay for “chai” in the faculty housing complex, despite our protests that we were already far past due in the checking in at Norbulingko institute, and a planned rendezvous with our split off team members Maria and Habeeb who had chosen to go off to Dharamsala separately for some special reasons of their own. We finally prevailed, distributed the last of my cards, with promises that we would be in further contact to support their new faculty undertaking, and began the long and tedious ride to drop off the bags at Norbulingko, and then go on to the same Hotel Baghsu as our first night had used in Dharamsala, to plan our early morning excursion “into the wild.” This would all mount up to after midnight obligations after an already long day—and we had many miles to go before we slept.
We did it all anyway. Dr. Mehta ha a leprosarium he wanted us to see, and I am always interested in this Biblical disease, but we could not manage it. The professor of medicine we had met had also invited us to participate in a cardiology symposium and dinner the following day when I figured—along the change of pace we are about to undertake—we would be camped out on a mountain top rather than dining with a new faculty of medicine seeking linkage with the US institutions we represented—however noble this cause and enthusiastic as I might otherwise be. We are about to be, as Billy Crystal had screamed in the movie “City Slickers”…’ON VACATION!!!”
But not yet, and not quite. Raju, brother of Baldev Kanwer, the Everest Summiteer, had written me a plaintiff letter from Simla last year asking for help with their father. He had developed chest pain, in what sounded like coronary artery disease. As rare as that might be generally in the Indian population, it seemed that his lifestyle had permitted him the luxury of developing this rather typical first world disease, and they had pleaded with me for a letter to the (at that time ONLY medical faculty in Himachal Province) medical school in Simla. They figured that the association with n American professor would propel him upward in the attention he might otherwise not receive, and he might benefit from an operation otherwise denied to many who do not rank the focused concentration of the professors’ attentions. I wrote the most generic letter I could, having no clinical information or any indications for operation or any other kind of treatment, but the very letterhead seemed to secure him some rather intensive interest and he was declared a candidate for coronary bypass after copies of my letter were circulated through whole cadres of physicians at Simla.
He underwent that operation in January, from which he seemed to have made good progress and the chest pain went away with exercise tolerance improved. But he had suffered an immediate setback with a new diagnosis, which sounds altogether too familiar to me—with not only a first world disease and treatment, but a complication, which is characteristically a first world problem as well. It is now described that he had developed a very swollen leg, with shortness of breath, and he was rehospitalized and put on some form of blood thing medicine. He had developed DVT and PE—deep venous thrombosis leading to pulmonary embolus. It sounds like the right treatment has been given, but once again, Raju explained, they would like another letter from me requesting all due care and attention to this problem. I had just pulled out the article I had written and published a longtime ago in the American Family Physician on the subject “Thromboembolism and Its Prevention” so I will write another letter as an advocate for someone I have never met nor received any direct clinical information except the anecdotal data I receive from the family which seems unmistakably clear, so I will hoist this flag up the pole once again, with a reprint or two thrown in so that at least the contacts from me might serve some function as well in continuing medical education.
For these intercessions, the family is asking that when I next come to India on one of the two trips in the next months, could I please come to Simla and meet the family and particularly the father so that they can thank me for my role in his care? This might be a long detour from Ladakh, but might be closer in the Spiti Valley trip, although, I am leaving directly from that one to go to the Kathmandu connection to Lukla and on up the Kumbu to Namche Bazar on the Everest Trek.
After we had g back to the Taragarh Palace and got our bags—with some of us having not even packed them up as yet, so that the others of us were, once again, back into the Rose Garden and another wait over “chai” we finally got underway toward the bag drop at Norbulingko Institute, where we would be registering in, but not really there very long, since we would not get back until well after midnight tonight, and although we would retain our rooms, we would be sleeping on a mountain the following night, far from those bags we had dropped off in the Norbulingko Institute—so we are getting a bit multicentric here.
At long last and late, we pulled up to the Baghsu Hotel to find that Habeeb and Maria were there, the former having characteristically swept along two senioritas he had encountered along the way. They were Peruanas, and we had a Spanish conversation about the areas of Arequipa, where one of them was from, and Volcan Misti overlooking the town with the two other volcanic peaks joining it, and the Inca Trail up to Macchu Piccu. They were surprised to hear that I should know about Peruvian places, and we bantered for a while in Spanish—except Maria, who was still very leery that anyone should discover where she was from, although we had all referred to her, even directly, as “The Cuban woman.”
Upon our arrival in the hotel garden at the long table where we awaited some dinner served to us along with Godfather beer, a far more annoying interloper was a very drunk and ugly American at another table who announced that he was from Colorado and he wished to be delivered of the opinion—having concluded that this was a high level medical delegation—that “he thought all doctors sucked.” He, apparently from those who had talked with him before he had slipped so far into the bag, was accompanying a group of high school students as a guide for this junior group whose parents had enough money to send their darlings out into the world to meet the Nobel Peace prize winners, and they are here to get two of them—the woman Joni Roview who was active in the organization I had also tried to help who are interested in banning land mines, and the Dalai Lama.
Now, I am no stranger to the Nobel Peace Prize myself, having been a part of three organizations who have won it in successive years—the IPPNW (International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War), the Land Mine Ban Group with whom I worked closely in Mozambique, and MSF (Medzins Sans Frontieres). Besides, I had even been nominated personally as a candidate to receive the Nobel Peace Prize by Gordon and Maeve Hersman in Johannesburgh South Africa. So, hearing a fellow who was wobbling at his table leaning over to snatch whatever bits he could hear from us and yelling that we were all money grubbing bastards, while he was in pursuit of some considerably higher standard of nobility for humanity was a bit vexing. But, I figured, we would not have to concern ourselves with him too much longer since he seemed ready to pass out, and I had hoped that it might be sooner rather than later. It was, however, later, by two days when he had surfaced again—this time further into an even more obnoxious booze-induced rant.
No matter, since I was eager to retreat toward Norbulingko to repack for the trek that would begin tomorrow, and had no wish to sustain salvos of blubbering incoherence nor return them in slightly more polished phrases toward one of the uglier excuses for an roving American ambassador we would meet, giving a perfectly good state a bad name. As we left the garden of the Hotel Baghsu, our haranguing critic was out cold. But, then, we were all asleep in the bouncing Tatas with the exceptions, I hoped, of the drivers as we made our way down the mountains to our brief respite in the Norbulingko Institute.
AND, NOW FOR SOMETHING ENTIRELY DIFFERENT:
OUR TREK UP TRIUND
We may have been exhausted on our return to Norbulingko, but with the dawn and the birds, I was up and wandering around the “Jewel Fountain” the name given to this smaller replica of the Dalai Lama’s headquarters in Lhasa, Tibet (which probably no longer exists since the Chinese occupation). I could see the Dhaulidahr Range in the clear morning light from the rooftop of the Guest Quarters in which we were staying, and knew I would be climbing up and into it shortly. We gathered slowly as one after another emerged. Some of the group were no doubt thinking that they were arising in order to take yet another bouncing ride over roads perhaps most charitably called “secondary” in return to Dharamsala for the start of our trek. Although the trek might have been the reason to wake up, the ride to the start of the trek was more probably an incentive to turn over again. In the bedside stand next to where I parked my packed suitcase, taking out only a hat, the photojournalist vest and a few rolls of film, I noted that there was a book “The Teachings of The Buddha” where the Gideon Bible might have been in an American roadside motel.
As I walked around the roof getting an upclose view of the Dhaulidhar Range (like a “borrowed background scene” in a Japanese Garden) I took a GPs reading of NORB 32* 11.54 N, and 76* 21. 27 E. The breakfast was prolonged and the slow start got even slower as various things that might be needed were recalled and one after another went back for sunscreen, handkerchief for headcover, sunglasses, hiking boots, etc. By the time the gang had been reassembled, it was very late in the morning, and then the number one objective of the day was determined to be a round of shopping, yet again, in McLeod Gunj before we set out on the upward trail. As the others walked around McLeod Gunj yet again to get more than the postcards I had bought on the first pass, I thought if I had known, I would have carried the disc of the messages I had prepared thus far to email---if, once again, I might have been able to coax the ISP to try
When the shoppers returned, and blood sugars were checked and propped up in anticipation of the climb, we set off on a walk right from the center of McLeod Gunj, since we had elected not to await the Tatas with their loads of our camping gear which would go up the mountain by donkeyback. I had left my hat and photo vest in Ravi’s vehicle as it had been sent to pick up the tents, so I had hoped to rendezvous with it later, and we began climbing the duty roads, passing garbage tips in which monkeys were scavenging. We were told to “takeoff up the mountain---there is only one trail and you can’t miss it.” Upon baking up some time later, we can quite confidently allege that there were multiple trails, some which looked bigger and in better repair leading to a series of residential houses where the Indian equivalent of flower children were hanging out in the noonday sun banging on bongos and smoking fine weed. When we had reversed and struck the other trail, the main group had already been underway for some time, but at a slower pace, so that we caught up and passed them. They had recommended a trailside stop for a lunch break, which we did while still in the forested area, with Mcleod Gunj behind us in the valley, and rhododendron forests in flower ahead of us up the trail. I peered into the shade of the rhododendrons and could see bright patches of color. Two thirds of these were rhododendron blossoms, and one third of them proved to be furtive Indian women in saris collecting firewood in baskets, apparently illegal since they did not appear to want to be seen while doing it.
We passed through the lunch stop up to a tea house, that proudly advertised itself as the “oldest Tea House in continuous operation at the half way point up the trail of Mount Triund”—it proudly harked back about eleven years. The stop there was useful, since each of us picked up the ubiquitous bottle of water from which we sipped as we went. I was looking up, figuring how much like the “Dead Woman Pass” trail this resembled from my Inca Trail backpacking trek in Peru two years ago. As I came around a bend in the duty trail and could see, once again, the snow-capped peaks ahead barely peeking over the foothills in which we were hiking, I saw a moving tan/brown carpet coming my way. The flowing tide was not quiet, but was bleating occasionally, as a small blob broke away from the mass and could be identified as a sheep, which would perch on a rock, trying to make up its slow mind about which way to jump to avoid being left alone as the swirl of its fellows parted and flowed downhill on either side of the rock. Far to the rear were shepherds who would give out a singsong shout, which the sheep seemed to recognize as a signal or just the assurance that he was still back there. “My sheep know me and hear my voice.”
As the shepherds came into view, they looked not different from the sheep—also tan/brown and wearing a dirty wool shirt/jacket, with a rope around the waist and a whip in one hand. Each of them I saw was also carrying a lamb, which for one reason or another, could not compete in the move downhill, and were getting a free ride, reversing the great chain of being, using man as the packstock for their trip through the mountains, There must be some great satisfaction in that for the sheep who are doing their best to appear dumb, but are quite savvy enough to figure out how to get a ride from a gullible higher order being!
I took a few pictures of the sheep and shepherds as I ascended, rather than shooting randomly at the mountain scene, since I also figured I would be seeing quite a bit more of that as I got higher, above the treeline which had screened some of it from me, and would be spending the night staring out from the summit. Digging in, I reached a grassy knoll at the summit crest, where there were good camping spots between large boulders and there were adjacent stone structure that shepherds probably used a summer pasture quarters, as well as a building that looked like a US NPS concession building built as a shelter in storms, with a porch on it.
We flopped down between rocks and rested in the warm afternoon sun. I pulled out the GPS and marked TRIU at 32* 15.24 N and 76* 20.00 E where we had lunch 1.82 miles form Dharamsala at McLeod Gunj at 192*, and now at the summit, I marked TRIN at 32* 15.47 N and 76* 21.05 E This puts us 110 miles from CHAN at 166* and 259 miles from DELI at 168* As rigorous as the climb may have seemed, the great circle route shows very little distance from McLeod Gunj which we can barely see in the valley below us, only 2.66 miles away from our camp site at 212* As I turned from the valley view to the Dhaulidhar behind my tent, I could see the Baghsu Falls cascading from the snow fields, which clears up the mystery of why our McLeod Gunj hotel had this name.