TRAVEL NARRATIVE
Reaching Tangye, Upper Mustang. ©Vanessa Martín Quintana
10 min read
Excerpt, Part I
THE BOY LOOKS MORE LIKE AN EGYPTIAN GOD THAN A LO-PA. He is a thirteen-year-old monk who wears old trainers with his red robes and keeps his sweatshirt hood up when he takes me inside the Jampa monastery. I have just reached the ancient Kingdom of Lo feeling strong, and that means I have won. There was nothing my two Sherpa friends could say to convince me to follow the usual itinerary and end it here as all the other groups we have met along the way. I felt so much joy when I came close to the city walls that I rushed around them, searching for the northeast corner gate. At one point, the canyon beside the wall narrows sharply. As I lost my footing for a second my attention immediately shifted to the roar of Kali Gandaki River deep below us.
A giant golden Maitreya overlooks the gompa, the future Buddha, the savior one finds in all religions. The light from the open gate reflects off him and leaves the rest in darkness. I turn on my cell phone lantern, and we start circumambullating it to see the wall frescoes. One by one, I illuminate the five great Buddhas and say their names aloud as I pass them; White Vairocana, green Amoghasiddhi, red Amitabha, yellow Ratnasambhava, and blue Akshobhya. Like all Tibetan imagery, they are vestiges of older animistic origins. Each is associated with a cardinal point, an earth element, an animal, a different mudra, a mantra. Their colors reappear in the five prayer flags that flutter in the mountains to fill the wind with their essence. The five skulls on the crowns of wrafthful figures represent the five primary negative emotions, and each of these Buddhas teaches you to neither to struggle against those emotions nor to deny them, but to transform them into skills. The light from my headlamp falls straight upon their faces. I see equanimity in their smiles and intense compassion in their gaze, and it is intimidating to know their meaning. Their laser glare seems to ask me, “Have you done your work yet?”
I see the chalk circles among them, and when I look closer, I realize they are encircling cracks in the walls. “From the earthquake?” I ask. The boy nods sharply. Each time I see one, I ask if I can take a picture hoping that, because we are alone, he might find the forbidden attractive. But these are not children. Lettting me visit the second floor where the Tantric figures are, is out of the question, even for him.
I have to refrain from touching those thin cracks the same way I have restrained myself from placing my hand on the monk's shoulder as we walk. They move me. Nobody has seen the cracks the earthquake made inside me or could imagine why I can still feel them. But they are the main reason I decided I would not postpone coming back, not by a single year.
Novice monk in Lo Manthang. ©Vanessa Martín Quintana
2
Upper Mustang had been my goal since late 2014, when I first began editing a book titled Mustang: The opened gates to the forbidden Kingdom, a German book about a pioneering journey that took place in 1992 just after the region, a demilitarized zone for almost forty years, opened to the world. The Kingdom of Lo had long retained a degree of local autonomy under Nepal, and its royal title survived until 2008, when Nepal abolished the monarchy and became a federal democratic republic. Although Upper Mustang is culturally Tibetan and geographically part of the Tibetan plateau, the Kingdom had been incorporated into Nepal at the end of the 18th century and fought on Nepal’s side during the Sino-Nepalese War between Tibet and Nepal. The Tibetan culture and identity survive today, while across the border in Tibet they are under intense pressure under Chinese rule.
For centuries, the salt from the great Tibetan lakes and India’s grain and spices made Upper Mustang a prosperous trade center. Caravans on the major trade route moved alongside livestock driven by nomads from the rain shadow country to greener pastures. Not only gompas and stupas but fortress ruins and the walled city of Lo are a testify to its past economic hegemony and its enmity with the neighboring Kingdom of Humla.
Yangsor is a Lama, a clan within the Tamang people. He practices Bön and was born and raised in Humla, a region bordering Tibet, one of Nepal’s the highest, most remote and poorest. We did the Humla-Tibet traverse together twice. Those were my first journeys, and I didn’t not choose the easy way to begin. It was during wartime.
At the airport waiting for our flight to Jomsom, Yangsor is constantly reminding me of how much that traverse has changed under Chinese influence. “Do you remember how excited you were when our small aircraft landed straight into the mountains? Now there is an airstrip and quite a bit of traffic there. Do you remember the Land Rover accident we had when we were driving on the dirt road from Kailash? Now it is all paved. Do you remember the Guge frescoes you wanted to explore? Now the Chinese have built a stairway and sell tickets to get there.” He tries to avoid giving me news about Tibet, although I know the Kailash I traveled to several times no longer exists. Progress is necessary. Life in the Himalaya is extremely hard, but this kind of progress often comes with a disregard for tradition and religion while bringing Tibetans little benefit. Yangsor’s memories remind me how fragile what I am about to experience is. With Tibetan culture under pressure in Tibet, the Dalai Lama has called on Mustang and other ethnically Tibetan Himalayan regions to preserve their way of life. Nevertheless, over the last decade the Nepali government has built a road corridor linking Mustang more closely to China and Nepal’s modern road network. It has brought electricity and a few other conveniences, but I know from traveling to Nepal during some of the most decisive moments of the past 12 years how effective China has been in getting the Nepali government to carry out its policy of control. What I see in Upper Mustang is a crude, unpaved road following the ancient Salt Route footpath. But I have to travel farther, where the canyons have made road building impossible.
On the fifth day, we are slowly ascending a large hillside when I hear a strong rhythmic rumble filling the open air. “What is that?” I ask. A puja ceremony is starting down there. I turn to take one last look at Tsarang Gompa and the fortress ruins surrounding it. On its facade, the white, olive, and ochre painted stripes indicate it belongs to the Sakya tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. For a moment, I think the drumming was coming from the blood pounding in my temples.
This is not an alpine journey but one into a high-altitude desert. The pockets of green from the sparce terraces in Kagbeni remind me of the vineyards growning out of the volcanic soil in the Canary Islands; there too, stone walls surround the crops and protect them from the strong winds, a symbol of perseverance. When we are caught in a sandstorm while climbing the slope opposite the Renchung caves the previous day, I hear Yangsor already at the top shouting to me. Once I’m standing next to him, I recite to myself: I’m from a windy place, and the day I was born, a Sirocco turned the sky completely red with Saharan sand.
Kebi laughs. This region area requires a minimum of two foreign travelers on a permit, and I did everything to make the trip without a group. Just two months before, the Nepali authorities required the company of a certified guide to trek this restricted area. These new rules responded to a blizzard that killed 39 trekkers in 2014 in this Annapurna region, followed by the earthquake disaster a year later. Kebi is not acting as a guide. He has only been to Upper Mustang once before. In the same way, my foreign partner was a woman who wants to travel by motorbike. We share the permit, we are bound together by dates of arrival and departure, but we never meet. When Yangsor introduced me to Kebi in Kathmandu, I could not help but compare the width of our shoulders. Mine were probably twice as broad as his, but he ended up carrying the heavier load, cooking while singing and defending me against condescension as Yangsor cannot help treating me like a Nepali sister.
As with meditation, walking hard for long hours is not always peaceful. In 2005, before my first journey to Tibet, I started practicing meditation at a Meister Eckhart Institute. My mentor was a Catholic priest who would soon be excommunicated for inviting poor people to his church and teaching them Zen meditation. The German theologian whose name the institute had adopted died while proceedings over alleged heresy were still unresolved. Centuries later, his writings would often be compared with Eastern mystical traditions. However, Meister Eckhart is now considered one of the greatest mystics of the Middle Ages. Before we started meditating, the priest had warned us that we would go to places in our minds we would not want to inhabit before we learned to be present. He also told us about a man he meditated with who suddenly stood up, smashed his meditation bench against the wall and never returned.
In Upper Mustang, I have to deal with my anger over things that I link to Nepal and the earthquake. Sometimes I become aware of those thoughts just because I’m swinging my trekking poles violently. Then, I stop, gasping for breath, watch the landscape from a high pass, and remember I’m traveling through the deepest canyon in the world. In Tibetan legends, demons carve these gorges and mountains. Sometimes, I succeed, and the rhythmic pulse from the ceremonial drums fills my mind for hours.
On the way with Kebi Gurung. ©Yangsor Lama
We climb the Nyi La pass at 13,000 feet, and from the top, Yangsor points to a huge amphitheater and tells me we are in the land where the Khampa Tibetan resistance hid for decades. Then, he points to the horizon and adds, “the Tibetan border.” We descend the slope skirting the amphitheater, and suddenly the waterless monochromatic landscape becomes a colorful mandala of layered mountains. Most mountains have the shape of arteries spreading in all directions; there are rock pinnacles of a pristine white alongside yellow and gray pillars. Rust-colored sandstone grades into an unreal light blue hue. I have only seen such a combination of colors in volcanic soil. The thin air makes me see the distance so clearly that I can add the snow-capped peaks to this desert vision.
Hours later, in the sunny afternoon, the desert landscape turns into a small oasis where we follow a stream surrounded by a grove of dry golden poplars. We cross a tree-trunk bridge and enter Drakmar. I have an eerie feeling walking through the maze of alleys among the deserted medieval whitewashed houses. Fall leaves blown through as we pass a curious Tibetan mastiff whose sleep we have disturbed, a village fountain with a bucket full of clothes waiting to be wash, and two ponies tied up in the shade. There is nothing else in the hamlet. Then, I raise my head, and above the flat-roofed houses, I see fluted cliffs of an intense red, full of caves. It is difficult to believe that in Upper Mustang, the mountain colors are caused by erosion and not painted by hand, but this time I know a legend that explains it. When the Indian saint Padmasambhava introduced Buddhism to Tibet, he found that a Tibetan demoness had destroyed the foundations of a Buddhist monastery under construction in central Tibet. He pursued the demon west, deep into Mustang, and the two fought in the sky among Mustang’s snow peaks, desert canyons, and grasslands. Padmasambhava prevailed, and he scattered the demoness’ body parts across Mustang. Her blood formed the towering red cliffs, her intestines tumbled onto the wind-scoured earth east of the peaks, and with her red heart he built Ghar Gompa. It is the oldest monastery in Upper Mustang and belongs to the Nyingma traditions.
The same copper red that distinguishes the monasteries from clusters of whitewashed houses colors Drakmar’s fluted mountains as if claiming, “These are the real temples, these are the real schools of Buddhism.”