Tagne 2001

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Dan's Diary

Day 12 - Monday 9th July 2001

Setting off on the last full day's trek

Dogs had been barking through out the night waking me numerous times. I lay there alert, listening to their barks getting louder as they neared the tents. My heart was in my mouth as I tried to work out just how close to the tent they were. I hurriedly tried to plan what I would do if they attacked but thankfully the barking faded into the distance once again.

The usual "morning sir" marked the arrival of a warm cup of tea at 6am. I made it out of the tent some fifteen minutes later to find typical British weather. The clouds were thick and low, covering the scree slopes that rose up the side of the valley. The Chandra Tal lay quiet and still. We could so easily have been in Scotland, camping by a Loch.

I packed my things and had a wash. The horsemen rounded up the donkeys and brought them to the campsite. They were intrigued by the cricket stumps which had been left out, and used them to scratch their backs. Steve emerged from his tent and promptly threw up.

Muesli-type cereal, roti and liver was awaiting us in the mess tent at 7am. No prizes for guessing where the liver had come from. I stayed off the liver after the previous evening's consequences of eating something I didn't really like. With Steve and Andy not eating I was worried about leaving all the liver after all the trouble they had gone to, to prepare it. Fortunately Jon and Alan liked it and tucked in, making up for the rest of us. Sonam brought some omelettes, which I tucked into. Alan reckoned he hadn't been drinking enough and planed to resolve this problem. Andy and Steve still hadn't grasped the idea of packing and emptying your tent before breakfast, so the porters could take it down while we had breakfast.

A break for "tiffin"

So after breakfast, Andy and Steve finished packing while we took down their tents. Narinder got up and complained about being ill. This illness wasn't for altitude, but from alcohol. Was this the cause of his screaming the previous evening?

We left camp at 8am and headed up the valley across a flat grassy plain. There was silence in the air. Everything was so quiet and still. There was no wind and the sun was trying to poke through the clouds. We dropped down into and ascended out of several dry gullies, carved by seasonal rains and littered with rounded boulders. Narinder pointed out a snow cutter bird waddling across the screes with her siblings.

We hadn't been going long before Andy, Steve and Alan started to drop back. We stopped at 8:45am to let them catch up. Ten minutes later we were on the move again, this time at a slower pace. Andy was sick shortly afterwards at 9:10am. This was not a good start to the day. I could tell it was going to be a long day. Once he was ready, Andy continued this time at his own pace out in front. We followed on behind, at a painfully slow pace. I resorted to sitting on a rock and writing my diary, while Andy and the others continued. I would soon catch up with the group and repeat the whole process.

By 9:23am Sonam had already caught us up, testimony to our slow pace. Jon gave Andy his walking poles. He said they helped him, but didn't do much to the speed he was walking at. There was a lovely smell of wild mint in the air. The river could be heard raging hundreds of feet below us in the bottom of the valley. We crossed a small river and followed the small path through several boulder fields. Bizarre pillars carved out of the sand and boulder river cliff stood up to 50ft high by the side of the river. At first they looked manmade, as if part of building ruins, but I couldn't see how or why anyone would build a building there. I concluded the river probably carved them.

We play follow-my-Leader

We stopped at 10:30. By 10:45 we had stopped again. I lay frustrated behind a large boulder. At 10:58 we stopped for the third time in the space of half an hour. We were going nowhere fast. Occasionally I would look up at the peaks straight ahead, on the far side of a bend in the valley. They slowly got closer, but reference to the map told me the bend in the valley was only the halfway point. The snow was thin and sparse on the peaks, confined mainly to gullies. Glaciers formed tongues of ice in the valleys below.

We stopped again for another ten minutes at 11:25am. The donkeys could be seen catching us, and fast, before they dropped down out of sight, into a gully to cross one of the streams. By 11:45am we had stopped so many times I had lost count. Andy fell to the ground, lying exhausted on a grassy knoll. After waiting some fifteen minutes for him to recover, we decided to have lunch.

I had peanut butter, tuna and hard-boiled egg rotis, along with a selection of nuts and boiled sweets and a chocolate bar. Our donkeys arrived and tried to walk all over us. Sonam jumped up and directed the ponies around Steve and Andy, both of whom lay motionless on the grass. Neither had any lunch. Our three porters and the cook followed on behind the donkeys. The porters were relieved to get our heavy rucksacks off their backs. They joined us for a piece of cake before continuing at 12:55pm. This didn't make me very happy. I didn't like being passed at the best of times but to be passed by a porter carrying twice as much as we were was hard for me to take.

The ponies negotiate their way around Steve and Andy

We got moving again soon after 1pm. We managed half an hour before having to stop. We had reached a large stone seat, marking a viewpoint at the apex of the bend in the valley. The stones had been super-heated by the morning sun. I felt a burning sensation in my thighs and started to worry whether my shorts were flame retardant. There was a short steep section up to the seat. Jon and I sat as Alan and then Steve made their way up. Andy sat on a rock at the bottom working up the energy needed to reach us. Some fifteen minutes later he reached us and sat heavily on the bench seat. We watched three other people on the other side of the valley. They were on the wrong side of the valley and the river was far too big to cross. The nearest bridge was two days walk away, down the valley at Batal, or two days up the valley at the foot of the glacier. They were heading upstream across the foot of a large scree slope. Narinder said they were shepherds but I wasn't convinced, as they didn't have any animals with them. I gave Andy and Steve the last of my water, since they had used all of theirs. I had been desperate for a drink myself but I would do anything to make them go a little bit faster. I put myself onto fluid depletion mode.

I gave Andy two Ibuprofen before moving on again at 2:10pm. The path traversed across a steep scree slope, which dropped away out of sight below us. A brief stop was taken half way across the screes. We watched the three people on the other side of the valley struggle to cross a couple of streams that ran down the side of the valley from the snouts of glaciers above. One chap walked halfway up the side of the valley until he found a suitable crossing place. The valley was so large that the people appeared as dots, occasionally getting lost against the background of scree. They stopped after crossing the streams and appeared to be watching us. Then they started whistling and shouting and continued to do so as they walked upstream. We followed them on the other side of the valley. Thoughts ran through my head. What if they were trying to tell us something, trying to get some help, or even wanting to cross the river. I came to the conclusion their wasn't much we could do, and put the thought out of my mind.

Crossing a small stream

Andy and Steve stopped by the side of the path to fill up their water bottles from a stream at 3pm. I did likewise, not that I wanted water any anymore, but in case Andy and Steve ran out again. By 3:19pm we had stopped again, this time while Steve cleared his bowels. Two minutes later he came up the slope to join us and promptly vomited. All credit too him, he didn't waste any time and we kept on walking. At 3:40pm Steve frantically tried to take his shirt off, Andy helping him. It turned out a buzzing insect had flown in down his open neck and bitten him.

We stopped again at 4:09pm. I passed the time by dropping iodine into the water I had collected from the stream. The path could be seen ahead, crossing the screes before descending down to the bottom of the valley and river level where it crossed a flood plain. We started to walk again. The sun was very hot. I felt as if I was being roasted like a turkey. I applied some more sun cream to my face, getting it all over my hands, which then rubbed off onto my diary. My black biro refused to write on the sun-cream fingerprints on my diary but my blue biro would. I wondered to think why this was, but I couldn't come up with an answer.

We climbed up over a small spur on the valley side and could see our distinctive orange tents being put up in the distance. The pace quickened, now we had something to aim for. The path undulated up and down the base of the scree slope; the river raced wildly 100ft below, waiting to catch anyone who should fall.

"It's just round the next corner.."

Base camp was reached at 4:50pm and boy was I glad to be there. I wasn't too keen on having it as a Base Camp, for there were big boulders everywhere. We were camped on an old riverbed. The last few tents were going up. I drank a full litre of water and then headed to the mess tent for tea, cake and biscuits. Steve took some dioralyte and Narinder was on the paracetamol for his alcohol-induced headache. I felt like a radiator as I sat in the shade of the mess tent trying to cool off.

Soup was served at 6:20pm. It was green today but tasted exactly the same as yesterdays. We debated whether we were actually at Base Camp or not. According to the map we were at Topka Gongma. This was where we wanted our Base Camp to be set up but Sonam told us we were trekking to Topka Yongma the following day. The map showed Topka Yongma as the next side valley to join the main valley and another days walk up the main valley.

After telling them it wasn't worth it, Jon and Andy walked up to the mouth of the Tokpo Gongma valley to have a look for a better campsite. They returned confirming what I had thought. All they saw was another ridge. I sat there thinking, "Now there's a surprise. What did I tell them? They wouldn't listen to me." And felt quietly smug.

Sonam brought us tea at 7:15pm. We ate rice with mutton momos. And some curried vegetables. We discussed the confusion over Base Camp with Sonam. He told us that we were actually at Topka Yongma, Yongma meaning lower and not Topka Gongma as marked on the map; Gongma meaning upper. So when he'd said we were going to set up Base Camp in Topka Yongma he had actually had the same plans as us but was calling the valley by a different name.

The wind had got up again and was blowing into the mess tent. Sonam tried repeatedly to peg the door down as the zip was broken but got frustrated when it kept coming out. The campsite was shared with another group. They had two tents. I had only seen a chap with a balaclava on, and two German women. We speculated about the various possible nationalities of the bloke and decided he was most likely to be a Pakistani terrorist, who'd kidnapped the two Germans. Alan didn't eat or drink much. It was his turn to have a bout of diarrhoea. Everyone was tired and had retreated to their tents by 8:30pm.