BACKPACKING ASIA

            BACKPACKING in S.E. ASIA, FOR ADULTS


During the summer of 1989 instead of enjoying holidays I was working all hours on the reline of a blast furnace, in particular directing the replacement of the electrics and the computer control systems. That spring we had made the acquaintance of a colourful young couple who regularly visited Nepal and like someone from Danziger's Travels had taken to wearing native dress, a rather bizarre sight in Swansea. They argued convincingly that if masses of young people could travel independently around the world why couldn't someone of our age and experience!. The gauntlet had been thrown down, picking it up changed for ever our concept of holidays.


In the spare moments of that reline it all started to come together, I badly needed a complete break, October/November was ideal trekking time in Nepal, all that was needed was the courage to take the plunge. We bought a Lonely Planet for Nepal, booked a flight via Trailfinders and decided to dive in the deep end by not booking accommodation even for the first night. At the time it seemed like a big gamble, so with a feeling between trepidation and excitement husband and wife joined the inaugural flight of Nepal Airlines from Gatwick to Kathmandu, free champagne soon held those fears at bay.


We were in no way prepared for the culture shock which greeted us the next morning, our first ever day in Asia, but in retrospect we should have found it reassuring for in Asia as elsewhere if you have money someone will cater for your needs. On walking out of the airport we were suddenly in the midst of a huge throng of young touts trying to persuade us to look first at their hotel or guest house, the problem was no longer one of finding a place to sleep at a reasonable price but which one to try first. We allowed ourselves to be hustled by Shim, a very pleasant  precocious young lad, who took us to the Nepal Peace Cottage where we had a large clean if simple room for  $10 a night. It was close to Thamel, a district of budget accommodation recommended for backpackers. Then began the period of acclimatisation with Asian poverty. We felt that eating and remaining healthy were incompatible but the delicious taste of organic food quickly won us round, though for the first time in our lives we stuck to a mainly vegetarian diet.


Next we started to make our way about by public bus, which being unable to read Nepali script seemed daunting until we realised that reasonably accurate phonetic pronunciation of the place name is all that you require. That was a big step forward because it put us amongst the local people and added a new dimension to the experience, something that many backpackers miss by relying on arranged tours.


After a few days finding our feet we hired a guide and two porters for a fifteen day trek  through the Annapurna range to Muktinath close to the Tibetan border. That trek remains the highlight of our life, for the breathtaking scenery, the clarity of the colours, and for the intimate insights it gave into the lives of an impoverished but dignified people. Two examples will serve to illustrate those experiences. Whilst
following a little trekked route from near the Annapurna Base Camp to the Kali Gandaki gorge we set up camp by a roaring river. I was sitting outside the tent mending a tear in my shorts when a worker returning from a tiring day in the fields spied my needle and thread, he was delighted when I made him a present of it together with half  of my supply of thread. Towards evening several days later we were passing through a small village when it started to rain, Zantibar our guide arranged for us to pitch tent on the turf roof of a house as there was no space inside, that evening there was to be a gathering of neighbours for a ceremony connected with the death of a young boy. We were invited on the understanding that it would last four hours and the doors would be locked, they were and powder was scattered on each doorway to detect footprints of intruding spirits. All evening the 'priest' of this mountain religious ceremony kept up an insistent drumming, whilst he led the party through a complex ritual which involved taking blood without killing a chicken, quills, a small wooden stairway (presumably to heaven), the holding of sickles by the men (presumably symbolic of work), taunting a small boy (presumably his brother) until he wept, with periodic checks on the integrity of the thresholds. They wanted me to take photographs  which I did with little hope of success, since the large room was lit by only a single oil lamp and I had left my flash in Britain. However there was a low dividing wall in the room and using this as a stand I got some remarkable if badly underexposed records of an evening quite outside my experience. My main regret is not having learnt Nepali, a little language would have gone a long way to help understand the events of that night.


Kagbeni which is built as a twisting warren in an attempt to keep out the cold piercing wind remains one of the most fascinating places I have ever visited and my favourite photograph, of the valley and the snow-capped mountains, was taken during my early morning constitutional in the fields. We had followed a trade route to Tibet still plied by donkey trains and porters with huge loads from a tropical climate in Tatopani to icy mornings in Muktinath. At just under 4000 meters we were less than half as high as Everest and yet already feeling the effects of altitude - climbing in the Himalayas is something else again. All that was seven years ago and yet it remains as crystal clear as the fantastic mountain scenery.


Regular trade from the backpacking community ensures easy availability of budget accommodation sold in local currencies often of surprisingly good standard, so budget travelling is not really that much different to International B&B. If you limit your area of exploration and get moving straight away it's amazing what can be done in three weeks. Three backpacking trips in succession to Thailand the first to Bangkok, Chaing Mai and the Golden Triangle; then northeast to Loei for the fabulous cotton festival and the campers hill retreat  of Phu Kradung; and finally south to Hua Hin, Krabi and the island paradises of  Ko Pipi and Ko Lanta. I had mastered the first dozen Linguaphone lessons of  spoken Thai which added enormously to the experience and led directly to making a whole group of friends whilst on Phu Kradung, with
whom we now stay when in Bangkok. We had begun to break out of the confines of the enclaves created for first world backpackers whilst still making considerable use of  their infrastructure.


Next to Sarawak and the fantastic caves at Niah, inhabited by bats and incredibly brave nest collectors during the day and swallows at night, with  spectacular shift changes at dusk and dawn. Having followed an overland route on logging supply trucks we found ourselves past Belaga, the normal limit for tourists, and on a small express boat heading up the Balui river, the driver having invited us to stay at his longhouse. Not the usual impersonal express boat of the coastal regions with it's constant blare of Kung Fu movies, but one full of lively native people in their brightly coloured clothes with feathers in their hair like Red Indians, they cheered when we went below. With Mane, a young American, and many of the locals I spent the next few hours on top of the boat helping consume a crate of Guinness whilst the boat fought it's way up a series of rapids, watching with delight the women who met the boat in their large circular highly coloured sun-hats and erstwhile fellow passengers with loads on their backs ascend the huge notched tree trunk ladders to the longhouses high above the river. The next day the driver on his day off  took us even further up river in his own small boat to witness wild boar hunting with dogs and wooden spears, we dined off one that evening, not a culinary triumph but an experience nonetheless.


Backpacking, surprisingly still almost entirely the domain of the young, offers a great deal to any one prepared to take the rough with the smooth for the sake of moments of sheer magic. The privations will be nothing new to those who enjoy camping or mountain walking or off shore sailing, the rewards remarkable for those interested in other cultures, languages or wildlife. It's not just the local people who are enthralling, many of the backpackers are a delight to meet as well. Don't be put off by Redmond O'Hanlan who starts most of his writing with a catalogue of dreadful diseases, no doubt they exist but then so does BSE.

I took early retirement this spring so all those short trips have opened the way to an interesting retirement with budget travelling as a major activity, the main extra cost is for air fares. We have just returned from Sumatra and will next visit Rajastan. We must find time for a return trip to Nepal before it is physically beyond us, if only to deliver those photographs by hand. An enduring memory of that first trip is of an elderly man, who needed a stick to help him walk, battling  over a section where a mud avalanche had destroyed the path, he had first made the trip to Muktinath eight years earlier and he made it again, if we are quick we won't need a stick.





                            Brian H Corbett

ALL CHANGED AT KATHMANDU (1989)

ALL CHANGE AT KATHMANDU (1989)               


Old timers have so many journeys to choose from. Cycle touring on the continent the year before O levels made me the first family member to be bitten by the travel bug. Emigration to Canada on graduation from Imperial College left me with a love of wide-open spaces and an intolerance of long cold winters. Walking with a young family in the snow along part of the Offa’s Dike path led to the first of several holidays backpacking the long distance footpaths of France. But it wasn’t until 1989 that we first tried backpacking in the Lonely Planet sense, and that introduced us to an enthralling, economical, mode of travel. I had dreamed of Nepal, ever since Everest was conquered in my last year at school.


The opportunity arose from the unusual luxury of a month’s vacation, shortly after all three kids had left home There was little time for pre-planning except the purchase of the appropriate Lonely Planet (LP) - still slim volumes of essential information needed by real travellers! Joan got physically fit at the local gym. We were determined to jump in at the deep end without even booking a place for the first night. As it happened it was the inaugural flight London - Kathmandu piloted by the king’s nephew, and champagne was served even to economy class.


The moment we passed from the airport to the street we were unleashed into another world. A mad throng of touts attempted to snatch our attention, all offering accommodation. ‘Come with Me, Looking is Free.’ Overwhelmed but still determined to do our own thing we lifted our rucksacks into a crowded service bus and sat on the engine compartment. We had a vague idea that an area called Thamel was to be our destination, though god alone knew how we would recognise it if we saw it! Not only could we not understand a word, we couldn’t read Nepali script either. Give me the deep sea, a compass and a sextant any time!  


But just as the bus was about to depart Shyam, one of the youngest and most enterprising of the hustlers, jumped on knowing he had outwitted the competition. And so we ended up in a large bare room for two at Nepal Peace Cottage, adjacent to Thamel, for the princely sum of $10 a night (five times the going rate for backpackers, who operate in local currency anyway). But it did include breakfast on the roof overlooking a small rice paddy and Kathmandu city. Almost immediately the manager set about selling us a trek with guide and porters, but we wisely resisted the hard sell until we had got our bearings.


Narrow unmade streets packed with exotic colour and life, street markets, cows wandering as they pleased, a herd of goats climbing the steps of a footbridge across Kathmandu’s only dual carriageway to reach their fate at market. Scary red meat butchered and sold on blood-cleansed doorsteps in narrow streets. Mouth-watering displays of sickly cakes covered with flies. Slops thrown from the wooden balconies of carved houses to the street below - positively Elizabethan. Boys rummaging through the evil smelling detritus in steel skips searching for reusable plastic bags, whilst men pee-d against the sides.


‘Peel it, Boil it, Cook it, or Forget it’, is the traveller’s motto. We had never seen hygiene like it and wondered how to survive. For the first day we lived on bananas. I even struggled to peel them one-handed without contaminating my right hand, like any true member of the Indian continent. But how do you build up resistance without exposure to sensible amounts of infection? Gradually we relaxed to rediscover the enhanced taste of traditionally reared and cultivated food. The intense taste of real eggs and chicken scarcely remembered from our youth. The marvellous quiches and lasagne sold for a pittance in Narayan’s Italian restaurant, buffalo steak, vegetable Biryani, Tibetan food, Freak Street, cakes and tarts in Pie Alley. Food cooked to tempt the western pallet was a happy leftover from the hippy invasion of the 60’s.


But it was company as well as the food that led us to these backpacker haunts for they were full of the most interesting adventurous young people. In comparison to today backpacking was still a minority activity. For networking - these were venues par excellence. They were the streetwise explorers - we were the uninitiated oldies. But they did concede, ‘I just can’t imagine my parents doing this’. Few were over thirty and very few under twenty-one. We vowed to try, their way of travelling and their guest houses next holiday.

If they hadn’t been trekking then they were currently planning to go. Several had luxuriated in personal service on a Kashmir houseboat for £1 a day. Some had been to Tibet, which was still difficult to enter. Almost all spoke highly of the friendliness, ease of travel and wonderful food of Thailand, still largely unknown in Britain. India we learned was difficult but the initial loathing soon turned to loving. Nepal by contrast was so relaxing. Their talk inspired us to go and explore the north, east and south of Thailand over several holidays, then mainland Malaya and Sarawak on Borneo. On retirement we spent extended spells in India and Sumatra before rheumatoid arthritis threw us off course for several years. More recently Osama Bin Laden has emphasised the attraction of the Catholic countries in Central and South America - Peru and Mexico so far.


Desperate poverty was something we had never previously encountered. Yet there is something very colourful, very picturesque, very human about it.  But beggars, their arms and legs eaten by leprosy, penetrate the conscience of even the most hardened tourist. They spent the day in the most unlikely places. But who benefits from your charity, the leper, the carer, or owner of a meal ticket? Who places him in the full sun on top of a bridge from which he could not escape in a month of Sundays? Never had we experienced hassle like it from the street sellers in imperial Durbar Square. Trinkets, ornaments, jewellery, trumpets, prayer wheels, drums and swords were for sale everywhere. We dare not take a speculative interest in anything, let alone ask its price, for the certainty of being pursued for hours with desperately reducing prices till the salesman was near tears, thinking we had mislead him.


It was easy enough to find the bus station from the map in the LP, but there were twenty buses to choose from and the destinations were written only in Nepali script. LP in hand we approached a driver and pointed to the Nepali script of our intended destination. So it was we found our way to the neighbouring town of Patan. Bhaktapur, temple full and hassle free, was easier - there aren’t so many trolley bus routes to choose from.


By now we knew that we would like to trek the so-called Annapurna Round. But having just twenty days left, not quite enough, and having no idea how we would cope with altitude, we opted for the easier half, up the Kali Gandaki gorge to the Hindu shrine at Muktinath, thus just avoiding the high 5200 metre pass at Thorung La which connects the two halves. (Joan, now mobile again thanks to artificial knees, finally reached that height in Peru last year.) We were certainly in no mood to spoil the trip of a lifetime by carrying heavy rucksacks uphill all day and down almost as much the next, for this is not ridge-walking country. 

Finally we opted for a package with a guide and two porters at 40% of the original asking price.

We left Kathmandu by bus for the 200-mile journey to Pokhara, and then hired a taxi to take us to our first camping spot. We will never forget first light, peering out of our small tent at the snow-white double peak of Macchapuchhare (Fish Tail) glistening in a clear blue sky. Later in the day the peaks would all disappear in a brilliant white cloud of evaporated snow.


Santabir, our guide could speak enough English to explain the essentials of the journey, but non verbal communication was all we could manage with porters Zantara and the teenager Lalbadu, who like us was setting out on his very first Himalayan trek. Imagine a teenager carrying a 40kg basket from a wide strap around his forehead. I could hardly balance, let alone walk, but even that was easier than carrying over 60kg of full beer bottles in a steel crate backpack, or the delicate task of manoeuvring five-foot fluorescent tubes for days up to the homes and teahouses on the Tibetan plateau. We were following a donkey trade route, rice up and wool down, and we soon learnt to keep out of their way, for they stopped for no man, and the gorge was at times a mere thousand metres below.


After a few days it was becoming obvious that Santabir, preferring the easy life, had no intention of taking us to Muktinath, so we stressed that we did intend to go and now needed to walk hard all day. Extra funding was required so that we could stay in teahouses, and there would be no time for Santabir to demonstrate his incredibly fine outdoor cookery skills. From now on it would be Dahl Bhat, boiled rice and a miniscule helping of curried beans. What was left on your plate went to the children of the restaurant; nothing was ever wasted, reminiscent of my childhood in wartime Britain.


One evening as it started to rain we pitched our tents on the turf of a flat roof because there was no room at the inn below. It turned out that a crowd was expected that night for a funeral service for a five-year old boy. They invited us to join forty or so family guests, but warned we would have to stay until the end, since the room would be sealed to keep the spirits out.


The high priest of the animist mountain religion took the service. He chanted, held up and thumped his attractive homemade drum all night. Women sat to the right on carpet mats or lay on mattresses, many breast-fed babies or toddlers, men sat solemnly on benches to the left, with ceremonial raising of sickles. Small clay models of dogs guarded thresholds covered in white powder, which was examined for footprints at regular intervals. The boy’s brother was made to cry in what seemed a heartless fashion, but perhaps it was an aid to help him grieve.  A small drop of blood was taken from a live chicken and sprinkled on each step of a skywards pointing ladder, (we scaled a similar notched tree trunk to get to our tent on the roof). Next morning’s breakfast feast was a vividly coloured selection of rice flour spaghetti, eaten before the before a dignified, men and drum, funeral procession to his grave on the steep wooded slopes leading down to the Kali Gandaki.


What we would have given for a working knowledge of Nepali so we could have understood, rather than merely conjectured on, the significance of that unique ceremony. A lesson learned. Linguaphone taught me to speak, but not read, basic Thai before going the next year, and it greatly enhanced our understanding and the ability to make contacts.


On the return journey a few days later we passed the man of the house as he returned wearily home at dusk with his plough on his shoulders. We stopped and stared. We hadn’t the language to speak - but it didn’t matter, for we instinctively exchanged a thumbs-up sign, probably something he had learned in a Gurkha regiment. The contact was deeply felt. Something of our soul was left in those woods. We dare not go back for fear of spoiling a precious memory, but now almost seventy we backpack on.  


BRIAN CORBETT