Excerpt, Part I

THE BOY LOOKS MORE LIKE AN EGYPTIAN GOD THAN A LO-PA. He is a thirteen-year-old monk who combines his red robes with old trainers and keeps his sweatshirt hood on when he takes me inside the Jampa monastery. I have just reached the ancient Kingdom of Lo in good condition, which means I have won. There was nothing my two Sherpa friends could say to convince me to make the average journey 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 some point, the canyon surrounding the wall became much narrower. As I lost my footing for a second my attention immediately shifted to the Kali Gandaki River’s roaring deep below us.

The gompa is overlooked by a giant golden Maitreya, the future Buddha, the savior one finds in all religions. The light from the opened gate reflects on it and leaves the rest in darkness. I turn on my cell phone lantern, and we start circumvallating it to see the wall frescoes. One by one, I illuminate the five great Buddhas and mention their names out loud as I pass them; White Vairocana, green Amoghasiddhi, red Amitabha, yellow Ratnasambhava, and blue Akshobhya. Like all Tibetan imagery, they are old vestiges of animistic origins. Each represents a cardinal point, an earth element, an animal, a different mudra, a mantra. They are the five prayer flags that flutter in the mountains to fill the wind with their essence. The five skulls on the demons’ crowns represent the five primary negative emotions, and each of these Buddhas teaches you to neither struggle against those emotions nor deny them, but to transform them into skills. The light from my lantern 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 could take a picture hoping that being alone, he will find the forbidden attractive. But these are not children. To let 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 repressed, placing my hand on the monk's shoulder to walk. They move me. Nobody has seen the cracks the earthquake made inside me or could imagine why I still feel them. But they are the main reason why I decided I would not postpone coming back, not by a single year.

Upper Mustang had been my goal since the end of 2014, when I first started 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 region remained an independent Kingdom until Nepal claimed it in 2008, after the monarchy was abolished and Nepal became a Federal Democratic Republic. Although Upper Mustang culturally and geographically belonged to Tibet, the Kingdom had annexed to Nepal at the end of the 18th century to fight on the Nepalese side during the Sino-Nepalese War between Tibet and Nepal. The Tibetan culture and identity survive today, while in Tibet, it is being shattered by China.

For centuries, the salt from the great Tibetan lakes and India’s grain and spices made Upper Mustang a prosperous trade center. The major trade route caravans would join the livestock that nomads took from the rain shadow country to greener pastures. Not only gompas and stupas but fortress ruins and the walled city of Lo are a testimony 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 Bon Buddhism and was born and raised in Humla, a region bordering Tibet, the highest, most remote, and one of Nepal’s poorest. We did the Humla-Tibet traverse together twice. Those were my first journeys, and I didn’t start the easiest way. It was during wartime.

At the airport waiting for our flight to Jomsom, Yangsor is constantly reminding me of how 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 some 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 asphalted. Do you remember the Guge frescoes you wanted to explore? Now the Chinese built a stairway and sell tickets to get there.” He tries to avoid giving news about Tibet, although I’m aware The Kailash I traveled to several times doesn’t exist anymore. Progress is necessary, life in the Himalaya is extremely hard, but this progress comes together with a complete disregard for the traditions, with religion and minimal advantage for Tibetans. Yangsor’s memories remind me how fragile what I’m going to experience is. With the Tibetan culture in peril due to China's control, the Dalai Lama has called on Mustang and other ethnically Tibetan Himalayan regions to preserve his peoples' way of life. Nevertheless, in the last decade the Nepali government has built a new highway connecting Mustang to Cina and Nepal’s modern infrastructure. It brought electricity and a few other conveniences, but I know from traveling to Nepal during the most decisive moments in the last 12 years, how effective China has been in getting the Nepalese 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 further where the canyons made it impossible to build anything.

On the fifth day, we are slowly ascending a large hillside when I heard a strong rhythmical rumbling filling the open air. “What is that?” I ask. A Puja ceremony is starting down there. I turn to take one last look to the Tsarang Gompa and the fortress ruins surrounding it. In its façade, the white, olive, and ochre painted stripes indicate it belongs to the Buddhist Sakya tradition. For a moment, I had thought the drumming was coming from the blood pounding in my temples.

It is not an alpine journey, but one into a high altitude desert. The pockets of green from the scarce terraces in Kagbeni reminded me of the vineyards grown out of the Canary Islands’ volcanic soil. They also use stone walls to surround the crops and protect them from the strong winds, a symbol of perseverance. When we were caught in a sandstorm while climbing up the slope opposite the Renchung caves the previous day, I heard Yangsor already on the top shouting to me too. Once I´m standing next to him, I recite, “I’m from a windy place, and the day I was born, a Sirocco wind had turned the sky completely red with Sahara sand.”

Kebi laughs. This region area requires a minimum of two foreign travelers, and I did everything to make the trip without a group. Just two months before, the Nepali authorities imposed 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 visa permit, we are bound together by the day of arrival and departure, but we never met. When Yangsor introduced me to Kebi in Kathmandu, I could not help but compare our shoulders’ width. Mine were probably twice as broad as his, but he ended up carrying the heavier weight, cooking while singing and defending me against condescension as Yangsor cannot help treating me like a Nepali sister.

As it happens with meditating, hard walking for long hours is not always peaceful. In 2005 before my first journey to Tibet, I started practicing meditation in a Meister Eckhart Institute. My mentor was a Catholic priest who would soon be excommunicated for inviting poor people to his church and teach them Zen meditation. The German theologian and mystic whose name was adopted by the Institute, had died waiting for a heresy verdict for he merged Eastern mysticism with Christianity. However, Meister Eckhart is now considered one of the greatest theologians in history. 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 could learn to be present. He also told us of a man he meditated with who suddenly stood up and smashed his meditation bench against the wall and never returned.

In Upper Mustang, I have to deal with my anger for things that I linked to Nepal and the earthquake. Sometimes I realize about 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. Tibetans believe demons carve these gorges and mountains. Sometimes, I succeed, and the rhythmical pull from the ceremonial drums fills my mind for hours.

We climb the Nyi La pass at 13,000 ft, and from the top, Yangsor points at 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 ramp bordering 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 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 dry golden poplar glove. We cross a tree trunk bridge and enter Drakmar. I have an eerie feeling walking the maze of allies through the deserted medieval whitewashed houses. The autumn leaves are blown inside as we pass a curious Tibetan mastiff whose sleep had been disturbed, a village fountain with a bucket full of clothes to wash, and two ponies tied up in the shade. There is nothing else in the hamlet. Then, I raised 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 of 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 the Mustang’s snow peaks, desert canyons, and grasslands. Padmasambhava prevailed, and he scattered the demon’s body parts across Mustang; its blood formed towering red cliffs, and its intestines tumbled to the wind-scoured earth east of the peaks, and with her red heart, he built the Ghar Gompa. It is the oldest monastery in Upper Mustang and the only one of the Nyingma School.

The same copper red that distinguishes the monasteries from the cluster of whitewashed houses is the same that nature gives to the fluted mountains in Drakmar mountains as if claiming, “These are the real temples, these are the real Schools of Buddhism.”