The mountains of Kashmir must be the most beautiful in the world.  They are covered in forest to the tree line, grasses and greenery beyond.  Shepherds herd huge flocks of sheep and cattle through the hilly parts and gypsy huts dot the many rivers and lakes. The closest mountains I could compare them to are the Swiss Alps in summer, but, in my experience, the alps lack the drama and intensity of some of the Kashmiri peaks, as well as the height.  I just came down from an eight day hike in the mountains and we spent most of it at 4000 meters, hiking up to 4800 meters to pass between peaks easily topping 5000 with views of others that must have been higher.

The Himalayas are tremendous.  They are the barrier between the two major countries of my journey, the physical manifestation of the crushing meeting of these two landmasses.  Long before India and China were nations, the huge tectonic plates on which the two nations now lie were colliding.  The force of this collision thrust up these mountains, the highest in the world.  As I walked among them and considered this, it brought home to me the smallness of all human endeavors.  Imagine two cars crashing head on in slow motion, their front ends buckling in the impact, shooting up spikes of bent metal.  This is the creation of these mountains, but the impact is so slow that the mountains rise at 1 cm per year, far slower than any slow motion we could imagine, yet the force is so huge that it creates mountains larger than humans could dream to construct.  And this crash has been occurring for millions of years, longer than humans have existed on the earth. This is why I think environmentalism is improperly aimed with slogans like “Save the Earth.”  If we eradicate ourselves through global warming, nuclear war or some other “earth-changing” event, mother nature will wash away all traces of our errors in half a blink of her eyelid. We’ll be the ones who failed to be saved.

The Himalayas are also interesting to my trip for the way they blocked the two countries I’m visiting from each other.  The whole India-China border is delimited by these giant mountains and they’re virtually impassible.  If there remains in the world an unexplored region, the Himalayas are probably it.  The major highway between Srinigar and Leh across Kashmir is a single lane with speed bumps.  The 460 KM journey takes two days at 10 hours per day.  The map of the hike I took in the mountains shows that, for all intents and purposes, there is nothing there.  The village I started at has maybe twenty buildings and is the only dot on the map.

The hike itself was intense.  Those of you who have seen me in the last few years know that a computer job and non-stop coffees with cream and sugar have made me a bit of a fatty.  I’m still 40 pounds over what I was when I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro.  On day one, we set up base camp in the town of Naranag.  It has an interesting ruined Hindu temple which I visited, but I mostly rested because I had a sore throat and was worried I would get sick on the mountain.  The next day, with a little bit of a cold in my chest, we went UP UP UP.  1500 meters of ascent winding up a very steep hill from 2500 meters to 4000 meters.  I was huffing, I was puffing.  I did not blow anything down.  But I was exhausted once we reached camp.  The trek was beautiful as we went up through a leafy forest and then broke through into a huge green meadow.  I spent most of it looking at my shoes and into the ground when I sat down though.

The following day we did a short day and hiked about two hours to Gangibal Lake.  This is actually a couple of lakes hovered over by a large peak with a glacier.  Our pony men set up our camp and one of them, Ismael, took me around the other lakes.  Ismael is a very interesting character.  My group consisted of four of us.  Me, my guide Nabi who works at the houseboat, Omar, the young ponyman with two ponies and Ismael, Grandpa ponyman with two ponies.  Ismael is what Nabi called a “gypsy” but really, I think the correct term is Pashtun.  His people came from Afghanistan years and years ago.  He doesn’t know how old he is, but he thinks he’s probably around 75 or 80.  He has two sons in their forties or fifties.  Omar, who is 27, has known Ismael his whole life and says that Ismael was an old man when he was a young boy.

Ismael is also a good Muslim, so not only did he walk the whole way, set up and break down camp, handle his ponies and collect them in the morning, he did it all while following Ramadan. That means no eating or drinking, even water, from sunup to sundown, and strict adherence to prayer 5 times daily.  Nabi is also a Muslim, but he admitted to me that he wasn’t the best, and he dropped Ramadan for the purpose of staying fit on the mountain.  Seventy five-ish year old Ismael had no problem.  I didn’t get the greatest picture of Ismael, but you can see him in the bottom left of the picture to the left of this paragraph.  Nabi shows up in quite a few photographs, often because as my guide he was standing in front of me =P

The fourth day made me want to die.  We hiked up the pass to 4800 meters.  By the top, I really felt like I was going to pass out.  Then we scrambled down across boulders and rocks covering streams where I sometimes felt like I was rock climbing instead of trekking.  After that it was about five hours of flat walking to camp.  We passed two Army outposts where I had to stop and answer all sorts of questions, including “what is your profession?”  How that relates to me trekking in the mountains I don’t understand.  I mean, I guess they’d like to know if I was CIA or Army Special Forces, but if I were (and you all know I’m not…) I think I would probably say accountant.  These guys live in tents on the side of a mountain four days walk from anything.  It’s not like they’re gonna check.

Part 2 in another post…