Nick Williams stood on the Kathmandu airport terminal loading dock surrounded by a pile of camping gear for 20 people, large olive barrels filled with food, several white water kayaks, and a flock of bedraggled, frustrated clients. Williams, a normally upbeat Nepal expedition guide for North Carolina’s Nantahala Outdoor Center, was tired and disgusted.
This was the third day that our group of 20 clients and three rafting guides had lugged to the airport the mountain of gear it took to support that many people for days in the rugged mountains and on the rivers of Nepal. Each morning for those three days we loaded our gear onto a bus and rode to the airport in vain attempts to fly to the destination we had originally signed up for over a year before this trip took place.
We were trying to catch a one-hour flight to a town in eastern Nepal southeast of Sagarmatha National Park, which includes Mount Everest within its boundaries. Each day we were refused permission to fly by the Nepali airport personnel because of dangerously high winds at our destination.
Our original goal was to stay only briefly in dirty, smoky, bustling, exotic Kathmandu, long enough only to recover from the halfway-around-the-world flight. We would then fly to eastern Nepal and take a long bus trip to a jumping-off point for an arduous four-day foothills trek in the shadow of the Himalayas, assisted with our gear by native porters and their Sherpa bosses.
At the end of the trail would be the put-in for a five-day raft and kayak trip on the Tamur River, an exciting Class III-V whitewater run southwest of 8586-meter Mount Kanchanjanga which had been closed for many years to adventurous Western river runners by the Nepali government. We would be among the first to sample its many rapids now that the once-sacred river was again open for business from outsiders.
We never made it.
After three days of trying, Williams and his fellow guides finally gave up. They aborted the original plan – despite the fact that raft guides and porters had been waiting for us at the Tamur put-in for days with no news of our whereabouts – and decided to head by bus for nearby rivers instead. Our group – mostly experienced kayakers and mostly Americans but including two Mexicans, an Irishman, and a South African – took the news calmly and without major complaint despite our disappointment at not being able to accomplish our original goal.
On adventure trips, particularly to the Third World, one must be prepared for anything, including, as was the case with us, not getting the trip you paid for. Fortunately, our group was seasoned enough to know that travelers have to be flexible on adventure trips, particularly in the Third World, where unpredictability is a part of the culture, much less the weather. One must live in the moment and make the best of what comes one’s way. It’s a Buddhist thing.
We may have been flexible, but we also had paid dearly for some outdoor action. Our guides knew this and made sure we were kept busy during our three-day downtime in between trips to the airport. Each afternoon, after the airport non-experience, we took vigorous walking tours of various villages in the Kathmandu Valley, hiked and biked around nearby hills, and visited Hindu and Buddhist temples, museums and other historic and religious sites in the Valley – a variety of activities which successfully kept the least flexible of us too busy and amused to get really irritated that the trip wasn’t turning out the way we had planned and paid for it.
The early trekking part of our trip was not the pure Himalayan adventure we had anticipated but became largely an urban/rural cultural excursion, which in its own right was quite fascinating and certainly wildly different and unfamiliar to us First World types.
Were we disappointed because our trip had changed character? A little, yes – some more disappointed than others – but for the most part, our group knew that any adventure trip can change character because of weather, labor strikes, illness, and a million other things. I once heard the line that “expectations are limitations.” In this sense, anyone heading for an unknown and unfamiliar land should really come with few expectations because the more you have, the more limited and disappointed you will feel if things do change – or, if you prefer the more pessimistic term, go wrong.
Instead of trekking and enjoying spectacular Himalayan views as planned, we were walking narrow, dirty streets, dodging a hodge-podge of beat-up vehicles – small cars, tuk tuks (three-wheeled cabs), rickshaws, bikes, and motorbikes, all crowding at once at stop signs and stoplights to see who would be the first across when the light changed.
We traded clean mountain air for three days of breathing unfiltered, unmuffled exhaust from every form of Nepali vehicle. In the towns, we found an endless, diverse stream of sights, sounds, smells, shops, products, foods, and people to excite the senses, some disgusting to our Western eyes but all fascinating.
We traded mountain trails seldom trod by Westerners for a city and countryside of dirt and refuse. We visited a Hindu temple crowded with worshippers and beggars and inundated with filth. We were horrified to see children bathing in the brown river amidst lumps of unidentified stuff floating about. We saw below us on the edge of the temple by the river a body wrapped in a green shroud awaiting cremation. We were astounded at what we were seeing.
Leaving the Kathmandu Valley, I yelled for our vehicle to stop so we could take pictures of our first stunning view of the Himalayas. The first out, I ran to the edge of what on the Skyline Drive would qualify as an overlook. Happy, I took many photos of this unforgettable sight. Then, warned by a friend, I looked down to find myself unhappily standing inch-deep in a sea of human feces. Seems the Nepali stop here too but not always for the view.
All was not lost adventure-wise. We finally got out of the Kathmandu Valley by bus and headed for some alternative rivers to run. The bus rides were frightening, as we careened along narrow roads precariously close to the edge of thousand-foot mountain slopes. We got to hike some in the shadow of Manaslu, a spectacular 8000-meter-plus Himalayan peak, and we rafted two incredible rivers. So we were quite satisfied in the end, even though these rivers were not the one we came to run.
We were a little wistful at times for the four-day Himalayan trek we didn’t have, and we spoke a little of missing the romance of rafting and kayaking a river that had seldom been visited by Westerners. In the end, did anyone complain that the trip didn’t go as planned? Not enough to matter, because we all knew we were experiencing things and places and people that we would never forget.
I’ve always said this – when things don’t go as planned, it makes for the best stories. If I had gone trekking instead of touring the Kathmandu Valley, I would have missed seeing Joel, my long-time traveling buddy, in a Hindu temple with a python around his neck and a cobra in a basket on top of his head. I wouldn’t trade that sight for anything. I have a funny picture of it on my desk at home, the only photo from the trip not in an album.
Do I treasure these memories of an adventure trip gone awry?
Like no other in my life.
Would I go back?
I am.
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