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Kailash Manasarovar Yatra – 2

Trekking round Kailash

Kailash Parikrama starts from Darchen and takes three days. The road / path is not motorable and one does it on foot and / or yak. As per the MEA handout Darchen has ISD facilities. We are unable to trace any and are bitterly disappointed. We have reached on a Sunday after the Manasarovar parikrama (no phones for four days) and had hoped for calls home. Darchen is a mix of Tibetan settlements with a hospital of Tibetan medicine, make-shift shops selling curios and rooms rented to tourists for stay. There is also a Chinese guesthouse for the Common People. Tibetan ladies dressed in their traditional finery visit the tourist rooms laden with goods for sale. Bargaining is as much a past time as snooker in Tibet. First bid of 200 yuans may well go for a final sale at 30 yuans, as happened with a dagger etched with Chinese lions in my case.

For the local Buddhists “Kora” is the Kailash parikrama done by the devout prostrating himself on the road with out stretched arms, getting-up, walking the few feet to where his hands had touched the ground, doing namaskar to the Gods and lying down to again prostrate himself and repeat the arduous process till he does a complete round of the 54 km parikrama path. He wears slippers or thick gloves on his hands to protect them while doing this penance to absolve of past sins. We actually later pass several people doing it this way, which was quite amazing in the inhospitable climate of Tibet.

The 32 km trip from Qihu to Darchen is by bus. We are to go from Darchen to Deraphuk, a distance of twenty km of which about ten to Yamduar (literally Gateway of the God of Death) is motorable. Porters and yaks are booked on individual demand of the yatris and are scheduled to meet us at Yamduar.

We load on to a truck. There are no seats in the truck and no steps to get up. We learn to climb onto the wheels and over the side since the back of the truck is shut and not let down for us. The truck ride is an Experience with us yelling like school kids on an outing each time the wheels hit a pothole. The journey takes three hours of bone rattling till we reach the Valley of the Gods.

For those who have seen Mackenna’s Gold, the movie might have well been shot in that valley. Deviation only lay in the waterfalls foaming down the sheer cliffs and torrents rushing through the valley. The Kailash mountain glaciers give rise to four major rivers, Indus, Sutlej, Brahmaputra and Karnali. The streams are joined by innumerable tributaries that turn the ground marshy at places, dotted with clumps of wild flowers. In the following days whenever I got my feet wet wading through the icy flows, I refrained from cursing remembering that the same waters are ultimately flowing through some part of India as the mighty rivers.

The Tibetan porters and yak men are found waiting with their yaks and dogs. A lottery is conducted to allot porters and yaks to the yatris. This is to rule out any chance of favoritism in choice of yaks. In other words if you come a cropper on your yak, you have no one to blame except your luck in the lottery. Having earlier seen only the docile decorated yaks paraded around the Chhangu Lake in Sikkim, my perception of yaks totally changed during this visit. A more viciously unpredictable animal will be hard to find. It moves as per its mood, rushing with surprising speed (for its massive bulk) up a sheer cliff or down a steep slope carrying its hapless and helpless rider screaming unheeded. There is no bridle and no stirrup to hold on and climb up. The yak man dumps you like a sack of potatoes onto the yak. There is no proper saddle either, only a folded blanket to sit on. The back of the yak is too wide for a person of normal height to straddle, so your legs stick out to be smashed against passing rocks if you are not nimble enough to do gymnastics on yak-back. The yak has a one-track mind formatted to read “Breakfast”.

The wild flowers, whose beauty had us waxing eloquent, are rudely trampled and chomped. Without a warning grunt any given yak butts its horns into any other yak at any give point of time, often leading to the latter shedding its rider like an autumn leaf. There is a wooden structure about a foot wide, which serves as a handle for the rider to cling onto to avoid being thrown. The rider gets too terrified sometimes and the fingers simply unclench their grip on the wooden handle. A number of yatris were thrown, but fortunately none suffered more than bruises. I was one of the lucky few who never fell off but had to endure near heart attacks from the antics of my yak and bruised thighs from other yaks’ horns. The yak men do not lead the yaks by the reins, normally communicating with them in a series of sharp whistles. Even the children of the locals learn to whistle early and well. Huge Tibetan mastiffs sprint along acting as night guards at halts. The yaks and the dogs sometimes have running feuds (involving nipped ankles and buttings) to the detriment of the riders. I can personally vouch for the fact that it sometimes takes four adults to control a yak enough even to put the blanket on its back. It is said that a yak becomes docile only when a ring of juniper wood is driven through its nose and it is lead by it. This may or may not account for the docility of the Sikkimese yaks, I do not know. For all the evils yaks are invaluable to cross the Dolma-la, which at a height of more than 19,000 feet, has too rarified an air for us plains-people to breath without panting and gasping.

– Continued  

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