Mountains, Yetis, and Altitude Sickness
- Jul 2, 2016
- 10 min read
Warning! This is going to be a long one.
Our guide for the ten day mountain trek was Hamid Trali, he also works on the houseboat and is the only person I have met so far in India that I completely trust. He works so hard! Three months at a time with two days to go back to his village to see his wife and son. We had a chat with him the night before we left for the mountains when he checked our shoes were ok and gave us some warmer clothes. He also told us about the time he saw a Yeti… (Disclaimer: he swears a lot).
I was camping in Himalaya and asleep in my tent when I heard some shouting my name outside “Hamid Trali! Hamid Trali”. I was like, “Who is this motherfucker? I’m trying to sleep!” So I unzip my tent and go outside and there is a beautiful woman there! I was like, how did she get here?? Then I shone my flashlight at her feet and I was like “Oh, it’s a motherfucking Yeti”. She had beautiful face and amazing body but her feet were huge and hairy. So I said, “Fuck off! You are a Yeti!” I was not scared because a Yeti will only take you if you are one. If you are two or three she cannot take you, and I had two of the gypsy people with me so I was not scared. Yetis do not like fire so I lit a small fire and she vanished.
I went back to sleep in my tent but heard “Hamid Trali!” again, a Yeti always knows the names you are called, Trali is my nickname. I thought “It’s that motherfucking Yeti again”. So I went outside, and she had changed her face but I looked at the feet and could see it was the Yeti. Again I said “Fuck off, you are a Yeti!” and lit another fire so she disappeared.
I went to wake up the horse people so they could see her too but they said “Go away Trali motherfucker, we are trying to sleep. You are dreaming.” I went back to my tent but heard her calling me again! So I got out of my tent and woke up the horse people who also saw her, they looked at her feet at said “It’s a fucking Yeti!” So we lit a huge fire and she did not come back.
A Yeti will try to kidnap you if you are just one so that she can mate with you, but if you are more than one you are safe. I know these mountains so I know where the Yetis are, you don’t worry when you’re with me.
Later that night Greg tried to fashion some sort of flame thrower out of his lighter saying he was going to bring back a Yeti for science.
To get to the beginning of the trek we drove high into the mountains on winding roads with sheer drops and potholes that threatened to swallow the jeep whole. Late afternoon we arrived at a gypsy house and could already feel a difference in the air quality; it was a lot cleaner up here, but it was also a lot thinner. It suddenly hit me that I was going to trekking in the chuffing Himalayas and hadn’t done any cardio exercise for around a year. This might hurt a bit.
The view from this house was stunning, but Trali promised it was nothing compared to what was to come on the trek. He also told us that the forest across the river was where you find bears, leopards, and yeti. So we wouldn’t be going into that one, the only big animals where we would go might be bears, but probably not.
The tent was pitched for us on top of… I’m not really sure what it was. The roof of some kind of firewood store I think? We ate Paneer curry and rice and settled down to sleep. The zip on our tent didn’t work so we could only unzip the top section, getting in and out of it involved some undignified gymnastics.
The next morning an alarm seemed to sound across the valley to wake everyone up, unsure if that included us we tried to ignore it but it just got louder. When we gracefully emerged from the tent it turned out to be a car driving along the roads towards the house, beeping his modified and tuneful horn the whole way. What he was beeping at we never did work out as he was the only one on the road.
The horses that would be going with us had been brought over the night before, couldn’t for the life of us remember the names so we renamed them: Ginger (because he was ginger), Tom Cruise (don’t know why, ask Greg), Mowgli (because he was cute and looked like a Mowgli), Matt (because Matt should be joining us soon) and Bear Grylls (because he wandered away from the rest to look adventurous but people still brought him food).
The climb up the mountain was one of the hardest things I have ever done, I tried not to take too many breaks so my rule was that if I was about to cry I was allowed a break. Greg described this walk as “like I was a fly trying to climb a skyscraper window but my legs were made of lead”. I found some stretches of the trek terrifying. Loose flinty pieces of rock sloping towards a sheer drop on a path the width of half a meter. Although the day was pretty scorching we still walked over some snowy paths, Trali holding my hand in places I thought I would slip.
When we finally arrived at camp the horses had got there long before us and everything was set up. We collapsed in the cooking tent and drank some green tea mixed with cinnamon, cardamom, and a whole lot of sugar. Bloody delicious. We ate some more food then actually began to take in where we were.
I started to get a bit of a headache and felt a bit sick so went to bed without eating tea. I took a couple of charcoal tablets and my stomach settled so I could sleep. When we woke up the next morning it went from bad to worse quicker than I would’ve thought possible. Everyone warns you that you’ll get sick, really sick, at least once in India. For us it happened on the side of a mountain. I’ll spare you the details but both of us were the sickest we’d been for years. We couldn’t even keep down water. The main suspect was either Altitude Sickness or the cheese from the night before, it was prepared on the same chopping board with the same knife as raw chicken.
Both of us were desperate to get off the chuffing mountain but we were too sick to move. There was no question of us walking and the horses couldn’t carry us in the state we were in. Trali called the village to get us some medicine and we had to wait. The gypsy people (Nasir and Riyaz) who were also with us went in search of other trekkers who may have something that would help. About 4pm the medicine arrived and I have no idea what we took. Several pills were offered and we took them all, another trekker had given something to Nasir for my stomach pain and I think that really helped.
We kept down the pills and a bit of water and tried to get some sleep. Long story short we got better and decided we’d worked too damn hard and been too damn sick to leave now. Everyone was so kind, when we started to get hungry again all we wanted was Western food, so Trali made us chips! There is a LOT of salt in Kashmiri food so the simpler the better.
On our fifth day on the mountain we got new people! Four Austrians on a world tour. They arrived on the mountain in converse shoes with no warm clothes and sleeping bags designed for the beach. They had brought a couple of things up with them, including chickens. Live chickens. In a cardboard box. At the start there had been 6, by the time they arrived only 3 were left alive, having pecked the others to death. It was a shock. Animal rights don’t really exist in most of India, this was another example.
As we were feeling better we decided to tackle the trek to Gangbal Lake which sits about 4000km high I think. The trek was pretty fun, though the melting snow made it hard going, a leg could disappear beneath you at any point. Not for Trali though, I swear the bugger floats rather than walks. It was incredibly beautiful.
Most of our time was spent relaxing on the mountain, watching the migration of the gypsy people with massive herds of sheep and goats, or hiding from the freaky weather. It would be boiling hot in the morning, then hail out of nowhere, wind so strong it nearly blew away the cooking tent, then sunny. Then hail. Throughout all of this thunder would be rumbling in the background. Chats with Trali would usually end with “Don’t worry be happy” or “sub kutch malega” – anything could happen.
One day we decided to wash our clothes in the river and leave them to dry on the rocks. That was the day a shepherd decided to drive his herd of goats straight through camp. It was a new experience, defending my trousers from goat attack.
We got pretty up close and personal with the animals on the mountain. We were woken up by a horse shying into our tent, a sheep walking into it at night, and a crow landing on it. When the plates were cleaned after a meal about 50 crows would show up and it would look like a scene from the Omen.
The closest encounter by far was with a Himalayan Mountain Bumblebee. Now this bee had been obsessed with the tent all morning, I eventually had to leave the tent because the constant circling and buzzing was driving me insane. It was no ordinary bee. If Jaws was a bee, it would be this bee. That night we climbed into the tent and were chatting about the day when the buzzing started. We took the torch and carefully checked the walls of the tent for what was making the angry sound. Then we looked down. Then we lifted my hat. Then we found out Greg had been half sat on that f*cking mountain bee! Greg shot up and the bee flew in disorientated circles around the tent. After a moment of shock Greg shouted, “GET OUT OF THE TENT!” and threw himself through the tent door. We spent the next 15 minutes in the freezing cold lifting up different parts of the tent to try to find the chuffing thing. The bee did not survive the night. We didn’t want it to die, but it started it.
After 7 days a shower was necessary. All we had was the glacial melt water in the stream running by camp, and we were desperate. Greg was braver than I was, we filled empty water bottles with river water and he stripped down to his boxers (much to the amusement of two gypsy women sat further upstream). I poured the bottles over him while he washed (and swore) in the icy water. It would have been nice for me to properly wash but in a culture where shoulders should be covered, I didn’t think it would be appropriate for me to get into my pants and wash. So I settled for washing my hair. My scalp went numb. I could wait for a proper shower on the houseboat.
Later that day we sat around with Trali and asked him to write a few things down for us in gypsy. The alphabet looks the same as Arabic so I think the language is a blend of Kashmiri and Arabic, but I could be completely wrong. Trali wrote down his catch phrase, don’t worry be happy, then we started talking about names. Trali had no problem saying my name, but Greg was a stretch and had quickly become Geg. Then Mr Geg, then Geggy, then Mr Geggy. After a few attempts of teaching Trali and the guys how to say his name properly, Greg said; “F*ck it, call me Boris”. Which they couldn’t say either, and it started to sound like something else… so Greg became known as Haggis for the last couple of days of the trip, much to my delight.
Our final night on the mountain we woke up about 1am to thunder so loud it shook the ground. It sounded like someone was trying to tear open the sky. Our tent door had come completely away from the zip by now so we were pinning it with safety pins from the med kit and had a tarp over to keep most of the rain and cold out. It wasn’t long before the tarp was pulled out from under the rocks we held it down with over the entrance. Greg pulled it back down and tried to secure it, by now the thunder and lightning were constant. Suddenly, it calmed and we could relax. I had never been in the eye of a storm before. The peace lasted about 10 minutes before the lashing rain was pounding the tent again and thunder echoed around the valley. I counted 3 lightning strikes in 5 seconds. Thankfully we weren’t washed away or struck by lightning and were up at 6am the next morning to begin our trek back.
The tenth day came so quickly it was sad to leave the peace of the mountains, but the idea of a bed and a hot shower was pretty tempting. Thunder was still grumbling in the background but the weather stayed fairly good, and the previous night’s rain had made a sticky kind of mud that was nicer to walk on than the dusty sand it could sometimes be. The parts of the path I had found terrifying before now seemed spacious and secure compared to other treks we’d gone on whilst up in the mountains where we’d been walking on what was basically slight ripples in the landscape before it turned into a sheer cliff with a raging river at the bottom. I didn’t get any pictures of these paths because the idea of stopping and pointing a camera down the mountain side still puts me in a cold sweat. But trust me, it was next level scary.
We’d set off early in the day to try to avoid too many gypsies bringing their flocks up the mountain. I think we passed around five or six families, some friendly, some not, some begging for food. The going down was faster, but still tiring and my legs felt like jelly by the end. Back in the village we stocked up on water, crisps, and chocolate and waited for the jeep to arrive to take us back into Srinagar.
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