Descending from the Moon

Emerging from the environs of Everest is like clambering off of the moon and slowly swooping back in a long curve toward the atmosphere over the course of several days, like Chuang Tzu’s big philosophical bird. Our first night is spent in Tingri, a godforsaken little concrete outpost that is as middle of nowhere as it gets. Even in the desert a day outside Timbuktu I felt I hadn’t quite made it all the way because I still could have gone fifteen days further with the Tuareg by camel to see the salt mines hidden in the Sahara’s bowels, but everything beyond the bumfuck little town of Tingri is closer to, not further from, the familiar. The mountains around it are craggy and barren, the hotel is a broken-down dump torn from the set of a 1970s slasher movie, and the one-storey concrete block housing scattered about bespeaks the breakdown of liveability. The one thing to do is wander about and watch the villagers tend goats. At one point a woman goads a cow away from a precipice and leads it back into the yard. The stars are again magnificent at night, but we are warned not to wander the street (singular) because there are packs of wild dogs.

So we’re left to Google Sky Map it from the hotel stoop, and for the first time I see & identify all twelve astrology constellations, including my own Capricorn, which is disappointingly modest. Also seven or eight shooting stars, until I run out of wishes. The food at the hotel is good Chinese home cooking, but something makes me very ill and I spend the next day getting sick all over some of the most beautiful places on Earth. First there is the final mountain pass: 5500 meters high, clotted with rope lines of prayer flags at the top and with an unbeatable vista of a dozen different ice mountains. I spend 20 minutes searching for somewhere to go to the bathroom, but every bit of cover is a holy place of some sort and I’m not that much of a jerk; I’m captured in one bit of tourist video shambling off in the distance like some trailer park denizen’s amateur footage of Bigfoot.

Then we start the border descent – if you were to bike this route you would spend at least two days going downhill. Interspersed at regular intervals are stone medieval ruins of forts overrun in distant centuries by the Nepalese or English. After a couple of hours there are bushes that can spare enough energy to bother changing colors in autumn. Then there are trees, real trees! I’d forgotten them so thoroughly I didn’t know how much I missed them. And more and more trees, the mountains are still big but are covered with them now, great operatic cliffs draped with vines and wildflowers, and with waterfalls spilling over them at regular intervals, like the lush mountains of Sichuan. We’ve arrived at Paradise.

The Chinese government is busy improving the roads, which are perched perilously over the precipice of a massive canyon and were previously prone to deadly landslides. Unfortunately, this means they’ve closed off our little one-lane road at one point for the next six hours, until dusk. So we get out with our backpacks and hike through the remote, mountainous construction site (though I still feel like crap) with its blue tarp tents and its little canvas canteen, its waterfall-powered cement machine and its dozens of Nepalese laborers hacking the rocks apart above us, chopping up the road and carrying it off, and setting concrete blocks with steel supports to be laid later in the day, hardhat Chinese engineers talking through some technical quandary here in the middle of nowhere, and a couple of waterfalls thrumming above us and right onto the old road. Then further across the pristine canyon and down into the snaking, one-lane border town of Zhangmu, which follows the looping road for well over a kilometer and continues across the border on the Nepalese side with another name.

Zhangmu is a singular place, hugging the road along the side of a mountain like a ghetto Positano, with little more than storefront shops, ratty tourist hotels and the occasional brothel. It’s a bit Wild West, with Chinese, Tibetans and Nepalese rubbing shoulders along the many bends in the narrow road as it repeatedly doubles back & descends. The water here is from little rivers that flow down the side of the mountain, and it’s pretty unhygienic; water from one is used to power a small tsampa mill at one point, further down you see the same stream being peed in from a hut, someone’s washing clothes in it at the next bend and further below you see someone drinking from it. Our hotel is a notch better than Tingri, but that’s a low bar to set; one restaurant’s food is edible but the whole place reeks of yak grease and so do I afterward, even after showering. So why do I love Zhangmu so much? In a word, it is awesome.

Next morning the border opens and we’re off across the Friendship Bridge to Nepal. The Chinese border post is busy with Nepalese day-laborers going the opposite way, and though they do search our luggage they’re extremely polite. My temporary travel partner Rany Ng’s Tibet permit apparently expired the day before and so I prepare to call her parents and inform them she’s in prison, then call Google and tell them I’m happy to take her job and her equity, but thankfully the Chinese let her go and we’re free to continue. Our Tibetan guide, who so annoyed me throughout the journey, waves us a doleful goodbye as we cross into another country and I’m suddenly struck by how limiting his little forays from Lhasa to the border must be, and get some insight into why he seems so bored by it all. He blathered on in places of worship, incessantly hit on and at one point proposed marriage to Rany and I’m pretty sure spent every night of our journey in one brothel or another like a little Johnny Appleseed of VD, but he did take me out for a really good pub crawl in Shigatse, and for that I thank him, dumbass though he may be. And in Tibet you’re required to have a guide, so he did make this leg of the trip possible.

Paradise continues on the Nepal side but the vibe is different. The people look markedly different ethnically for one, and there are dozens of huge, colorful trucks parked along the road that you have to navigate around with your luggage. There is more chaos and yet somehow less stress, like you can breathe a bit more easily. Everybody’s chilled out and hanging by the side of the road all the way to Kathmandu. We acquire a Nepalese driver and start journeying south through an especially lush stretch of the Himalayas for an hour before all traffic stops. So we get out and wander past fifty or so trucks and see a bus that went off the road the night before, teetering on two wheels (one front and one back) with its ass up in the air blocking traffic and its front-end pointing perilously straight down into what can truly be called an abyss. You think of all those people you see riding on the top of every bus in Nepal and wonder if they all made it off alive or not. And look, there’s a suspension bridge that advertises bungee jumping just 100 meters further! We bless our luck – like a sign from God! – run over and get ready to bungee jump for the first time in our lives, but the operation has been closed because there are too many people milling about, and my faith in divine interventions that involve catastrophic bus accidents is shaken to its core.

As we wait for our car to carefully slide its way along one side of the cliff past the accident – which involves slowly driving UNDER part of the bus without hitting it and knocking it into the canyon – we meet an innocuous little Brahmin police officer who asks us for a ride home as he’s been at the site of the accident all night. A very sweet, mild guy, seems respected by his community, harmless really. You have a hard time imagining him swatting a mosquito much less forcibly taking down a perp. He’s a fine person but I start getting alarmed when he tells me he’s been selected for UN peacekeeping work to train the police force in Haiti and potentially the Sudan. He’s off to Haiti in a few weeks! Because, he says, they need training and Nepal wants to help.

Ladies and gentleman, from a UN system veteran, here we have a case study for why UN missions rarely work as well as they should. This little dude may be just fine in his home environment, but having experienced the Haitian police force in action I can authoritatively confirm that he’s dead meat the minute he hits Port-au-Prince. You can only laugh. He asks if they speak English there and I watch him grow bewildered and his eyes glass over in panic as I inform him they speak a sort of combo dialect of French and West African languages. The sad part is he’ll probably be over there talking softly and overly politely in his OK-but-not-exactly-stellar English to a translator who will “sort of” understand him and relay the general sense of his lecture to a bunch of quasi-reformed Haitian cops crammed into undersized school desks in a sweltering, windowless classroom, listening to him yammer all day about being more polite. He seems a bit worse for wear as a small glimmer of reality sets in, but he has a “gentle but stiff upper lip” vibe going and gives us a little goodbye wave without commenting further. I do hope he’s OK, he’s a remarkably sweet fellow, and may be in my beloved but troubled Haiti right now.