a journey into Tibetan Buddhist landscapes of Nepal’s Tzum Valley and Ganesh HImal  

The River

Crossing the long suspension bridge at Arugat Bazaar marks the beginning of our trek. This is where the road ends. This is where all contact with the outside world becomes virtually nonexistent. My three companions and I have chosen this trek precisely because of its isolation, as it takes us to the remote Tzum Valley, an area near the Tibetan border that the Nepali government opened up to trekkers only three years before.

For the first five days, we walk along the Budhi Gandaki that comes down from the Manaslu and Ganesh Himal mountain massifs. There is something reassuring in following a river - it leads the way, even when we are walking in the opposite direction of its flow. It sets the rhythm of our walk as it expands and contracts. In the lower, tropical regions, the river is wide and slow moving and the trail is close to the grassy riverbed. Even here, the river can narrow, roaring through a gorge, falling over rocks and the path climbs to bypass the gorge or is carved into the cliffs. This is where I struggle to overcome my fear of heights, as I move, step by step on the narrow ledge, high above the raging waters.

At times, the river widens again and the path dips down to the gravel bars near the meandering stream. In summer, the river swells from the monsoons and melting snow, making this route impassable. On the sandbanks at Yaru Bagar, we stop for lunch at the simple bhatis – nothing more than temporary wooden sheds, clearly set up only in the dry season to prepare dal bhat – rice and lentils, sometimes with a few curried vegetables – for passing porters, villagers as well as trekkers.

I love the way that trekking in Nepal has come to rest on the age-old infrastructure of footpaths, bhatis, and porters, developed to answer the needs of the local villagers in this mountainous landscape without roads and vehicular traffic. In time, the villagers have expanded their bhatis into teahouses to absorb the trekking economy, which mostly benefits the locals, and not some distant entrepreneurs. There are basic teahouses all along the Budhi Gandaki on the Manaslu route, but as there are few in the recently opened Tzum Valley, we decide to go on a tenting trek, supported by an affable team from a Nepali trekking company.

For years, after my first trek in Nepal in 2000 around the Annapurna massif, I felt a call, a deep necessity to return to the Himalayas. At the same time, I worried that I would no longer have the stamina for a strenuous trek in high altitudes with its innumerable ascents and descents. I was not getting younger. But most of all, I was overwhelmed by my fear of heights, especially on those narrow cliff-edges above the river, or while crossing slippery landslides that bury the well-trodden paths. It took ten years for my desire to prove stronger than my fears.

What I love, and long for, in the trek is not the reaching of a particular site, however spectacular. It is the act of trekking itself, the day-in-day-out moving in a completely different timeframe that is unstructured and unpredictable, when the world outside simply ceases to exist. It is the total immersion in the journey. It is to be suspended in a liminal state - a concept I am borrowing freely from the study of ritual and pilgrimage. It is to be outside the threshold of the familiar.

The river is, perhaps, the perfect paradigm of what I seek in the trek - its pulsations, its flow lift me into that dreamlike, liminal state of mind. It embodies the continuity of time, time not broken up into minutes and hours. Its streaming is constant, it might slow down or pass over obstacles, but it never stops. It calls you to enter inside that flow, with its stretches of meditative calm, and then surprising you with a dramatic climax when you come upon a narrow gorge with a thunderous waterfall.   

The architecture of pilgrimage

At the fork with the Syar Khola, we leave the Budhi Gandaki. Here, the bridges on the side streams are smaller, sometimes wooden cantilevered constructions, often with missing planks, where you can see the currents churning down below. The prayer flags are many, as we get into increasingly Buddhist areas, invoking the help of the spirits that is certainly needed to make it safely across.

On the seventh day of our trek, we start the steep, endless ascent to the Tzum Valley. I am exhausted when we finally reach the village of Chokung Para. The large village kani gate, flanked by an ancient holy tree, welcomes us, and the serenity of the place already begins to restore my strength as I pass through that gate.

Below the village, the fertile Tzum Valley stretches out along the Syar Khola, now a gentler stream. Green wheat and barley fields disappear into the distance, with snow-capped mountains rising on each side. Set off by the leaden skies, the glaring white of the mountains, the strips of brown-black earth and the dark stone buildings, the fields seem to glow in an almost unbearable green.

Tibetan Buddhists have long considered the isolated Tzum Valley to be a bauyul or sacred hidden valley. It is dotted with monasteries, convents and shrines. The golden steeples, the prayer flags in the five colors of the elements; the striking red-brown band on the whitewashed walls of all religious buildings turn the gompa into a focal point in the landscape, standing out against the often grey and cloudy skies. Inside the gompa there is an explosion of color, with painted ceilings and ornate woodwork and images of deities carpeting the walls.

Walking through the valley, I begin to understand that the countless Tibetan Buddhist shrines act to choreograph the traveler’s steps through the landscape, integrating the spiritual journey with the physical gesture of walking. Kani gates, covered with brightly colored frescoes on their ceilings and inner walls, lead the walker into the village, marking the transition from the wild open spaces to a sheltering place – a movement from chaos to cosmos - and bid the travelers farewell when they resume their journey. The chortens, large stone cairns standing in the middle of the trail, sometimes three or more in a row, can be seen from a great distance, guiding the pilgrims on their trek, assuring them they are on the right path. Long mani walls are covered with stone tablets carved with mantras, mostly Oh Mani Padme Hum, hence the name, mani walls. Passing pilgrims bring their inscribed tablets, in blue, grey, and brown stone, that in time become stained with red-orange lichen, and so the mani wall is a cumulative, living shrine, created by travelers leaving a part of themselves behind.

As we reach higher into the valley, it becomes drier and colder. The villages give way to isolated herders’ shacks and the cultivated fields turn into brown shrubbery. A chorten with a round white stone, like a bald head, crowned by the horns of a bull, looms in the mist, heightening the eeriness of the landscape. The snow-covered mountains on both sides move closer as the valley narrows and climbs towards the border with China-occupied Tibet, a border crossing that is open to the locals for trade and pilgrimage. Yaks and horses replace donkeys and mules as pack animals in these higher regions and here and there, we find plastic wrappers with Chinese characters on our path. Littering is a sign of modernity.

It is gray and windy when we arrive at Mu Gompa, at 3,750 meters. We stay in the austere monastery rooms, as it is too cold to put up our tents and we while away our time reading, cuddling up in our down sleeping bags. We venture outdoors only to have our meals in the warmth of the monks’ kitchen with its open fire.

The next morning, in contrast, is glorious and the warm, soft sunlight casts an orange glow on the monastery and on the maroon robes of the jolly monk who shows us around. At these heights, the prayers sent out by the dancing flags are certain to reach the mountain gods.

 Ascent

Retracing our steps through the lush valley, we hike down to the sparkling, aquamarine Syar Khola that descends from the Tzum Valley and camp in a forest clearing. The steep climb from 2,400 meters to the convent of Langdang Gompa, at 3,700 meters, takes us almost all of the next day. It is the route used by mountain climbers to reach the basecamp of Ganesh Himal, which lies somewhere beyond the convent.

Rhododendrons preponderate in the lower part of the forest – large trees in bloom with fiery red flowers. Then the trail follows winding, precipitous ledges that a returning trekker warned might be scary. Somehow, I am so overcome by the majesty of the mountains, that my fear of heights barely reveals itself.

Again and again I think we have reached our destination, only to realize there is still a long way to go. It is comforting to be accompanied by chortens and prayer flags on tall masts that appear at regular intervals along the steep trail, reminding us not to lose faith. The architecture of pilgrimage serves not only the faithful Buddhists, but enriches all who climb the mountain, offering an experiential string that ties all the shrines together into a meaningful, uplifting whole.

Totally out of breath, I arrive at the convent of Langdang Gompa with its whitewashed walls and the same horizontal terra-cotta band we have seen on other sacred buildings in the Tzum Valley. It stands on a mountain slope above a deep ravine. Across the ravine is the Ganesh Himal range that dominates the view, with its highest peak at 7,422 meters. The location radiates with genius loci, the guardian Spirit of Place.

Twelve Tibetan Buddhist nuns, clad in reddish-brown robes, their heads shaven, live in the convent. They range in age from seventeen to sixty. In this remote mountain retreat, where the nuns have not yet been overwhelmed by trekker-tourism, we are still a curiosity. They welcome us with smiles and nods, and graciously invite us to attend their evening puja. They are genuinely thrilled when we accept – that we are willing to experience what is such a central part of their life.

Feeling a bit awkward at first, we sit in the back, sharply aware of our outsider-ness, yet at the same time intrigued by the religious ceremony, by the beauty of the gompa’s interior and the gentle nature of the nuns. The puja, held three times a day, is divided into sections like movements of a symphony. Different combinations of instruments and chanting alternate with each new section – long dungchen horns stretching out on the carpeted gompa floor, short trumpets, conch-shell trumpets, bells, large drums and hand-held swiveling drums and cymbals, accompanied by intricate hand gestures, while the long and narrow sheets of parchment on which the chants are written, suggest orchestral scores. Each set of instruments is ceremoniously returned to its place after it has sounded its part in the ritual.

The wafting scents of burnt juniper offerings, brought in by one of the nuns from the fire outside, infuse the sanctuary and slowly I am drawn into an enchanted musical performance, tingled by the bells, the horns going right through me, my body, and spirit, echoing the dance of the hand gestures. Two hours pass without intermission and I am still there, fully immersed in this journey into liminal time and space. 

Camped comfortably on the slopes behind the gompa, we stay an extra day, taking a welcome opportunity to rest. As the day wears on, we are drawn into the nuns’ daily life, punctuated by the gong that calls them to prayer. They eat their meals sitting in a circle on the cold pavement outside the kitchen door where hot, roasted barley tzampa, spiced with a peppery sauce, is ladled into their orange plastic bowls. In their time-off from praying and other duties, the nuns, of all ages, entertain themselves with paper cutouts and coloring books like kindergarten children; gently shave each other’s heads or play with their two Tibetan mastiffs.

In the warm kitchen, we accompany the cook, a young nun exempt from attending the prayers during her yearlong period of kitchen duty. She speaks some English, which she learned in Katmandu and we manage to hold a rudimentary conversation while she shows us how to grind the peppers for the spicy sauce relished by the nuns. Witnessing a day in the life of the nuns, it becomes ever the more clear that cooking, as well as eating and playing, can be no less spiritual than praying three times a day.

The mountains, so close here, are constantly changing their appearance. In the early morning, the sun casts its red glow on the snow, as if the mountains are burning from within; they turn a sparkling white against the saturated blue of the skies when the sun bursts out of the clouds, or fade away in the eerie mists that turn tall trees into silhouettes of sentinels. The scent of the burning incense rises, the flags send out their prayers into the wind, the gompa’s golden steeple aspires to the heavens – everything here, already so high up, continues to ascend, reaching closer and closer to the gods. 

The way back

On the fourteenth day of our trek, we leave the high altitudes of Langdang Gompa and set out on our return trip. Now we follow the flow of the river, rather than go against the stream. It is by no means a repetition of our in-bound walk, even though the paths are the same. We stop for lunch and pitch our tents in different villages and campgrounds, and we are now facing the opposite direction, seeing the landscape with wizened eyes.

Tibetan Buddhist shrines must always be passed on the left. On our return way, passing on the left means we are walking on the other side of the same shrines, and so we have, in fact, engaged in the circumambulation of the chortens and mani walls, encircling them in the sacred clockwise direction - the direction in which the earth and the universe revolve, according to Buddhist tradition. Therefore, even if, in a linear sense, we return on the same path, we have rounded the circle, leaving the trek with a sense of inner completeness.

As I walk by the river, my back to the mountains, I am filled with a sense of accomplishment. I did it – I overcame the challenges of the trek. Now I know I can do it. I can walk for almost three weeks on paths that descend in order to ascend; I can get by without ordinary comforts, adapting to available conditions, like washing ourselves with a bowl of warm water or laundering our dirty clothes at the village faucet, together with the local women. It is the knowledge that I can follow the choreographed steps of the Tzum Valley pilgrimage, that I can climb 1300 meters in one day to reach the gompa on the mountain, drawing strength from the chortens and prayer flags on the way, my body and spirit as one.

I think about how I have changed. Before leaving, I had been full of fear and apprehension, uncertain how I would fare at age sixty-four and more than ten years older than when I walked around the Annapurna Massif - even though I knew our current trek would not reach the same high altitudes.

My severe fear of heights had almost stopped me from going on this trek when I read in my Lonely Planet guidebook: “The trail is rough and steep and it often literally hangs on a bluff high above the river, and many bridges are in disrepair. Don’t read any further if you have the slightest tendency toward acrophobia”. However, once I started to walk, I became so immersed in the trek that my tendency to break it up into blocks of fear and worry simply faded away.

Rounding the circle of my journey into the high altitude Tibetan Buddhist landscapes, completing the circumambulation of the stone shrines, I have confirmed not only my physical and mental abilities. More importantly, I have strengthened the trust in my readiness to immerse myself fully, to be willing to face the risks, suspending all my worries and preconceptions and to let new understandings emerge. I have deepened the knowledge that I am a woman who is capable of surrendering to the liminal time and space of the trek, flowing with the river, following the choreography of the shrines, entering into the spell of the puja-symphony.

Like the Muslims, who give the title of hadji/hadjah, to the men and women who have returned from a pilgrimage to Mecca, perhaps I should give myself a title – “a woman who walked through the mountains.” I am, after all, a fuller, richer person compared to the woman who set out on this journey.

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