Nepal: Trek or treat?

The leeches are tenacious. The bandits are so efficient they give out receipts. But the porters are properly paid. Stephen Goodwin joins a demanding, high-altitude trail that gives something back to Nepal

If this was "Fun-Fun", you could have fooled me. The Maoists had cut off the beer and the monsoons didn't seem to know that their due season ended weeks ago. We had taken shelter in a lean-to recently vacated by incontinent goats. Beyond the curtain of rain was a village of thatched homes perched on terraces high above the Kabeli Khola river in eastern Nepal.

If this was "Fun-Fun", you could have fooled me. The Maoists had cut off the beer and the monsoons didn't seem to know that their due season ended weeks ago. We had taken shelter in a lean-to recently vacated by incontinent goats. Beyond the curtain of rain was a village of thatched homes perched on terraces high above the Kabeli Khola river in eastern Nepal.

In a land without roads, where all travel is on foot, the next village arrives slowly and is keenly looked forward to. I had expected more of a place blessed with the upbeat name of Fun-Fun if, indeed, that was the name of our lunch stop. Our various maps had Fun-Fun in two different locations, separated by the 1,000m deep valley of the Kabeli Khola. But these were minor matters. An adventure, after all, is by definition an undertaking where the outcome is uncertain.

It was day three of a trek to the base of Kangchenjunga – third highest mountain in the world. Unlike the trails in the Everest region or around Annapurna in the centre of Nepal, it is not a heavily tramped area and there are few trekkers' lodges or tea houses. In the first week, we met only three other small parties. In the jungly foothills or camped by high tarns, it is still possible to experience the same wondrous freshness as the first mountain explorers of a century ago.

Six days on from Fun-Fun, the rain was a distant memory. We stood at Oktang gazing up to the hanging glaciers, bare rock and snowfields that form the south wall of Kangchenjunga. No buildings at Oktang. Just a shrine or "chorten" of piled stones and ice-fringed prayer flags perched on a moraine ridge above a mighty glacier. Either word, shrine or chorten, will do, because this place embodies the easy blending of religions that is a feature of Nepal. Rusting Shiva tridents rise from the stones to denote it as a Hindu shrine while the frozen flags commit Buddhist prayers to the mountain winds. Mahesh, our Hindu sirdar, adds a few more stones to the edifice; sherpas Pasang and Suriya, both Buddhists, offer tiny withered flowers.

Beyond the shrine (at about 4,750m) was a raw mountain landscape where the peaks themselves seemed to radiate a humbling power. Flocks of wild "blue sheep" or bharal graze the valley sides, but though sighting the rare creatures is a special moment, they are, disappointingly, no more blue than the river Danube. The mountaineer George Band, who in 1954 made the first ascent of Kangchenjunga, told me that on a recent return to Oktang he came upon fresh tracks of snow leopard and the bloody remains of its meal of bharal mutton. Band said he had the "eerie feeling" of being watched by the elusive cat.

Oktang was only the first of a succession of magical days as we wound our way by ridge and valley to the even more imposing north side of the Kangchenjunga massif. "We" were a group of seven trekkers, aged from 30 to 70, with a sirdar, three sherpas, four kitchen staff and 19 porters brought together by the excellent Specialist Trekking Co-operative (STC), founded by mountaineer Doug Scott and his wife Sharu to get a better deal for porters and sherpas. Porters are decently paid for carrying our western comforts on their backs, and a hefty slice of any profit goes into the hill villages though the charity Community Action Nepal (CAN), another Scott initiative.

Doug, now 60, was the first Englishman to the summit of Everest in 1975 and four years later was part of a bold ascent of Kangchenjunga from the North Col without using bottled oxygen. CAN is his way of putting something back into a country that has inspired and shaped his adventurous life.

Across the poorer "middle hills" of Nepal, away from the tourist tracks, the charity is spending more than £100,000 building schools, health posts and small "gompas" (monasteries), providing clean water and funding a dozen teachers and four nurses. The aim is to create partnerships, enabling local communities to improve their own lot rather than just giving hand-outs. Most of the work is carried out by Nepali staff with additional specialist input from western volunteers. A Hampshire GP, Rob Lorge from Overton, has just completed a five-month stint bolstering the work of nurses at remote health posts.

Before returning to the trek, let's deal with a question that must trouble anyone planning a visit to Nepal these days. Is it safe? The Himalayan kingdom is beset by civil strife. Maoist guerrillas have taken control of many rural districts and fought pitched battles with police and the army. The death toll is awful – almost 3,000 over the past six years. Worried foreign visitors have stayed away in droves, particularly Indians (resented neighbours) and Americans (post-11 September). Yet Nepalis are as welcoming as ever, and though the Foreign Office advises travellers to check on possible trouble spots and steer clear of large gatherings, it is not saying "Don't go".

The Maoists have kept to their word not to harm tourists – knowing the well-being of many ordinary Nepalis depends on them – but there have been isolated robberies. Indeed, our own group was "taxed" at gunpoint by a band of guerrillas. Put like that, it sounds dramatic, yet we Westerners were not personally menaced, and Mahesh, who as sirdar was at the sharp end, treated it as just another of life's petty trials.

A bizarre chitty was issued by the Maoists thanking STC for its "donation" of 5,000 Nepali rupees (approximately £50), "gladly given". Mahesh wastold to produce the receipt if stopped by any other guerrillas along the trail, but we encountered nothing but smiles and gentle hospitality for the next four weeks. STC bore the ransom without complaint and did not try to pass on the cost to us clients. The restriction on alcohol, demanded by the revolutionary women, was irksome but applied patchily. In one village, beer was smuggled in after dark under a coat, while in the higher villages entrepreneurial Tibetans took no notice of the prohibitionists.

Back at Fun-Fun we were still getting our trail legs. Rain rather than politics was our immediate preoccupation; rain and its accompanying plague at jungly altitudes – leeches, looping up your boot like one of those tiny cylindrical spring toys and attaching their suckers to your leg. Obvious ones you snatch off – I've never had the patient calm to light a match and send them into instant recoil – others you discover later in a bloody pulp where sock meets boot. The Nepali leech generally leaves no itchy wound – unlike the Scottish midge – and disappears as you reach higher, drier ground.

The rewards of trekking through relatively unspoilt country are more subtle. There is a deep atavistic satisfaction in the simple act of journeying day by day through a changing landscape. Fecund terraces of rice, bananas, sweetcorn and squashes give way to bamboo thickets, forests of oak and rhododendron (no mere shubberies these) and, higher, to larches festooned with Spanish moss – the diaphanous drapery of the cloud forest in children's yeti stories. Then, within sight of the glaciers, the last, low, juniper bushes are replaced by sparse grasses and shattered rock.

People change, too. The lower terraces are farmed by Rai and Limbu people, mainly Hindus, who live in thatched, two-storey homes with corn cobs strung from the verandas. But by Ghunsa, the biggest village along the route, architecture and facial features are markedly different. Wanderers from Tibet – Bhotiya people – settled here between the mountain arms more than 300 years ago, building a gompa, now sadly neglected, and substantial timber homes, roofs weighted by large stones. It looks remarkably like photographs of Switzerland, the chalets of the Zermatt valley perhaps, of 100 years ago. One more village, Kambachen, lies just above the tree line, but its inhabitants retreat to Ghunsa when the snow falls. Finally there are a few yak herders' tents, usually a tarpaulin between low stone walls where some giant glacial boulder affords protection from the elements.

In his "canteen" at the pasture of Andaphedi, 54-year old Prem Tshetan Lama showed me the butter and cheese he will "export" to Tibet. Yellow cannonballs of butter are compacted into brick-like pillows weighing up to 10kg and carried on yaks over the mountain passes. "I'm a simple farmer," said Prem, whose grandfather crossed from Tibet decades ago. But perhaps not so simple. Prem owns 15 yaks, the cheese and butter business, and makes "a little bit extra" when trekkers camp on the precious level ground outside his canteen.

Peering through the woodsmoke to the butterballs in Prem's canteen; being drawn aside from the trail by Suriya to see a sacred shrine where a pair of snakes seem frozen in the rock; watching a powder avalanche billow from ice cliffs across the valley. These become the events of a trekking day, absorbed at a pace that allows you to ponder them. One night, camped at the village of Phole settled by Tibetans fleeing Chinese occupation in 1959, three of us and our sherpas danced a wild hokey-cokey with the local Mothers' Group. The bombing of Afghan-istan was happening in another world.

The high point of the Kangchenjunga journey, at a slightly breathless 5,150m, is Pangpema, a grassy shelf above one of the biggest glaciers in the world. Uninhabited for most of the year, it is a place where, as the explorer Douglas Freshfield found in 1899, commentators run out of adjectives. The individual features were not unfamiliar, Freshfield observed: "The Himalayan giants are, with a difference, greater Alps; a glacier is always a glacier; but the scale was far larger and the impression left on the mind one of stupendous vastness."

Kumar Limbu, STC's most athletic sherpa, and I climbed from our chilly camp to a hilltop at just over 6,000m, affording a panorama from the peaks along the borders of Tibet and Sikkim to the glaciers draining the north-west face of Kangchenjunga. A final short scramble brought us to a rocky platform dotted by small cairns built by mountain pilgrims like ourselves.

Sprawled in the sun, the eye was constantly drawn back to Kangchenjunga, its snow terraces forming a great amphitheatre for a natural drama of avalanches, shifting mists and rockfall. Such primordial emptiness. A pennant of wind-driven snow and ice particles streamed from the 8,586m summit. It would be impossible to stand in such conditions and cold would cut through to the bone. The name Kangchenjunga translates to the "Five Sacred Treasuries of the Snow" and yak herders regard the mountain's several summits as the home of gods and demons. As the source of life-giving glacial streams, and destructive storms and furies, this is no sentimental notion.

Freshfield must have contemplated these mysteries on his remarkable seven-week encirclement of the whole massif – a rarely repeated feat. Eventually the Victorian explorer found a comparison that fits as well today. Twilight had already spread over the lower hills, but Kangchenjunga still glowed in the rays of the setting sun – "like a beacon light set on the verge of another and less material world".

Getting there

Specialist Trekking has been reorganised in recent weeks. Anyone wishing to trek and help Community Action Nepal in the process should contact Doug Scott at Community Action Treks, Warwick Bridge Business Centre, Warwick Bridge, Carlisle, CA4 8RR (01228 564488; fax: 01228 564431; email: dougscott25@hotmail.com).

A four-week Kangchenjunga trek costs about £2,000. It is graded as "very strenuous" but should not be beyond anyone capable of hiking over the uplands of Britain several days in a row. Altitude is gained gradually, giving the body time to adjust to the shortage of oxygen, however headaches are common at first. Do not be put off. The cost and occasional pain are amply rewarded.