In Pursuit of the Modern Pilgrim on Thorong La, Nepal

Pending publication

My chest was about to explode. 

“What to do brother?” Prajil, my guide, asked - hand outstretched, “what to do? We must go now, the wind is picking up”.

I tightened both hands on the hiking pole and heaved myself standing.

The storm the night before had turned the snow on the pass to porcelain; it broke and anchored me to the spot with each drag of the heel. It was nearly 7am and I had been walking for almost 4 and a half hours. I was closing on 18,000 feet up. More importantly, I was nowhere near halfway to the Holy City.

The journey of the pilgrim has long captured literary imaginations. From Chaucer to Stevenson, Krakauer to Coelho, the pursuit of meaning along a shared path inspires many an idea of what, exactly, such walkers must be thinking - if anything. But pilgrims were changing.

A notebook was helping me to work this out. It was also helping me to track my progress along the route. The time had come for ‘Thorong La’ - the highest walkable pass in the Himalayas. Today was also the day we would end in Muktinath - both the world’s highest temple and one of the most sacred sites for Buddhists and Hindus anywhere on Earth. I figured if I would find answers anywhere, it would likely be there.

We had left our teahouse, a timber box perched like a goat on the Eastern side of the mountain, at 2.30am. We wanted to reduce the likelihood of wind on the pass. I had departed with my guide, Prajil, and between us we shared a single set of crampons and two hiking poles. 

Via an avant-garde ballet of cautious toe-tapping and pirouettes on the icy corners we had made it from Thorong Phedi to the High Camp that led onto the real climb. We navigated clumsily and, like a drunk with two candles, bounced our head torches against the shadow of the mountain as we ascended. Breathless, I came heavily to a criss-cross hairpin trail that was hidden beneath the snow. Finding the custom too uncomfortable, I had opted to carry my own things, but the porters of other pilgrims raced up and past us on the narrow bends: no torches, makeshift crampons of string under sole, and a good three times the carrying weight behind a canvas strap on their foreheads. 

As the sun began to shape the day, throwing the white dunes and black tips into golden and then dazzling clarity, an ant line of brightly coloured backpacks made hemlines of the white expanse that lay on ahead. 

Over the course of the days preceding, I had interviewed four trekkers and none of them had led me to any real conclusions as to what we were all doing here. What seemed to thread between them however, was that each had something - a central concern - to consider and resolve. 

Brian, slick haired and stubbled with a deep Cockney lilt, had seen the trek on social media:

“Good excuse as any to quit smoking and drinking mate”, he said between sips. 

“Oh yeah?” He lit a match.

“Yeah mate, only problem is I’ve brought them both with me”.

Elijah and Annie, their two daughters in tow, had been using the time to re-connect. As the girls grew older and more distant, a pilgrimage, like the bridges of steel wire, bound sticks, and wrought iron that we’d spent the week clambering across, could bring them all back together - they hoped.

The final trekker had been the most puzzling. Along the approach to Leddar, amidst the smokey cackle of incensed pine and juniper bushes, Colorado Kyle had told me that he was deciding whether to be a good person - or not. 

“We call it ‘farming potatoes’ in the office”, he told me, “but it’s basically just coding”,

“What are you coding?”. He paused.

“So, basically it’s just government work. I studied Philosophy and Computer Science, so really it’s a good marriage of my skill-sets”.

“But what exactly is it that you do?”

“I… Well I programme autonomous weapons systems for the United States military”, he conceded.

We’d walked on in silence for a moment or so before he picked the conversation back up:

“The thing is, and that’s kind of why I’m out here… the world’s sort of messed up right?”

“Right”,

“So, and dude my College professor said this straight up, why not just go out there and reap whatever you can from it so that you can be a good person later down the line and have the means to do something about it?”

Kyle’s pilgrimage was certainly a moral journey of a sort but not along the sort of trajectory of introspection I had been expecting. We changed the subject and I hadn’t seen him on the trail since.

The sun was by now all the way up. I fumbled with my pole through green woolen mittens, and retreated further into my layers. The occasional static charge in my brain would stop me in my tracks, as though someone hiding in the mountains were fiddling with my channels. My face was entirely covered, but even so the air hurt. With a sound halfway between a goose and an asthmatic Eeyore, I wheezed my way with each leaden step onwards and up. Onwards and up. 

How could it be that the air was so thin and yet to move through it was like treading treacle? 

In the distance, the ant line had conglomerated around a signpost adorned with prayer flags. I recognised the site from photos as the top of Thorong La. Together with Prajil, I slalomed the high-fives and the teary hugs towards a musky dark cabin that sat 20 feet or so away and ordered some ginger teas to aid with the altitude. The first part of the day was complete. We had ascended, in a sense. The thin air had stripped away what was external. What was left, if a little deluded and induced by lack of oxygen, certainly felt in that moment like a place where the hard and worldly could brush up against something more transcendental. At least for as long as you could keep breathing… 

People I’d never met were clapping me on the back. Beneath the chapped skin and the eye bags, the hoarse vocals and strained postures, this congregation of modern pilgrims were jovial. I glanced at Prajil, this being his fourth time up here this year already, and smiled. He nodded:

“Let’s go”.  

True to cliche, it was all downhill from now on. The road to Muktinath on Thorong La’s Western slope was suddenly no longer white. Animals began to appear. White mules with arab straps cantered and wild sheep with blue hues lolloped across impossible footholds on the hills in the distance. We began to shed layers as the cold winds dropped, unable to escape their lofty confines and follow us. 

“Namaste!” came a collective voice, Sārnuhōs!”

I looked down then stepped aside. Four young men were approaching from up the staircase. Hoisted upon their shoulders was a pale faced old woman in a purple sari under blue wool. With anxious eyes behind her head scarf, she looked down at me grimly, gripping the iron railings of her ride as it scuffed and jumbled it’s way to the holy place. I looked past them. More! One, two, four, eight… I lost count. A queue of gore-tex and hard-shells had formed to let the dizzy pilgrims pass. They were newcomers to the altitude, having been driven straight here en masse. As such, they were unaccustomed also to the nausea and brow pain that the height brought with it.

The two sides navigated carefully past one another in opposite directions. The walkers, mostly Western, vied for space on the narrow steps as devout believers ascended, Emperor-like, to their final destination. So that was an option this whole time! I looked around me at the weary individuals who had just conquered a pass for themselves, and then back at the fast-track devotees - dizzy but genial and excited in their shared reason for being there. This was a pilgrimage for them in a very different sense; theirs had a meaning defined.

We descended. Soon we were past the Sadhus and the donkeys, traipsing into town. The dusty roads and swing doors, along with rock-faced men on big horses made for a convincing Eastwood scene. All that had been replaced was the leather and brim for tassel and wool. With two bucks strung up outside and a pipe-smoking ascetic guarding the roadside porch parallel, we found a tea house a little way in. THUMP. I landed on the front step.

Beneath the taxidermied head of a white yak adorning the entryway, I pulled out my notebook. I needed help making sense of this feeling.

It has been said that landscape on a walking tour can be reduced to an accessory. For me, the precise meaning is elusive for the boot-clad and outer-wear bound; the mile-treaders in search of something in amongst the grassy cobbles, and ice and sand. 

Why is it that the foothills of the Annapurna swelled this year? If you ask me, the elusiveness itself is to blame. The modern pilgrim searches for meaning precisely because he knows he cannot find any. He does not want to. His is not a road prescribed, but rather a road blindly sought. For those that shared my path, the enthusiasm of each day’s departure was tuned to the anticipation of arrival. Yet, in amongst the hours of unrelenting pursuit, the little gleamed was lost and what remained - red-raw and strained, unconscionable but uncomplicated - were walkers who walk for, well, no reason at all. 

In that recess of meaning, as up in the thin air of Thorong La, the modern pilgrim can be found. I’ve seen it.