WALKING THE HIMALAYAS
Levison Wood
Hachette India
289 pages; Rs 699
Levison Wood is an inveterate walker. Last year he trekked 1,700 miles across the Himalayas in six months, starting from northern Afghanistan, and continuing through Pakistan, India, Nepal and ending in Bhutan. The result is Walking the Himalayas, and a much-watched television series in the UK. Earlier, in 2014, he had trudged 4,000 miles along the length of the Nile, from its source in Rwanda to the shores of the Mediterranean, which too had led to a book - Walking the Nile - and a successful TV series.
The 33-year-old Mr Wood, a former British Army paratrooper, is a full-time travel writer who draws inspiration from Kipling's stories, and from figures such as T E Lawrence, Francis Younghusband and David Livingstone. He has been charged by a hippo, survived an accident in which his car fell into a 150-metre ravine in Nepal, got lost for an entire day in Kashmir, and was mistaken for a Chechen terrorist by Russian soldiers just after the Beslan massacre in September 2004. Yet, he confesses that the thought of doing a nine-to-five job terrifies him.
After the rigours of his Nile walk he was mentally preparing to hang up his walking boots at least temporarily, when an Indian-origin friend persuaded him that life in the suburbs of London would be too dreary. He then decides to walk the length of the Himalayas, which he had seen as a 19-year-old in 2001. Having been hooked by their power and majesty, "I knew that I would have to return," he writes.
He is not interested in setting climbing records, but wants to figure out just what the mountains mean to those who live amidst them. Starting at the beginning of the Wakhan Corridor, a remote valley in northern Afghanistan that marks the start of the Greater Himalaya range, he traces - so his guide tells him - the route Bin Laden took when he escaped from Afghanistan in 2001. They walk along the Karakoram Highway, built by Chinese engineers, which follows a branch of the ancient Silk Route.
Mr Wood's style is conversational, and he throws in bits of contemporary politics and history of the regions he walks through, drawing sympathetic portraits of the peoples he comes across. He is mostly non-judgmental - only observing, recording and describing. Yet he is also given to making naive and simplistic statements, like the following: "Unlike India, which regards China as a sworn enemy and threat to its sovereignty, Pakistan has embraced Chinese economic expansionism." And on arriving in Srinagar, Mr Wood describes it as an "infamous city" for no stated reason.
Mr Wood is at his readable best when engaging with members of local communities. He meets Kyrgyz nomads (among "the last true nomads in the world"); a Gujar nomadic chieftain who asks him if he is a nomad and then believes him to be destitute because he owns no sheep; and people of the Hunza valley in northern Pakistan, Ismailis who like to claim descent from Alexander's soldiers, and whose dialect is quite unlike the Pashto, Urdu or Farsi spoken in neighbouring areas.
Mr Wood's conversation with his Kashmiri guide Mehraj, however, should give all Indians pause. Mehraj says categorically and yet apparently without rancour that he is not Indian but Kashmiri, that "Indians come here to occupy us", and that "we want our independence back, like we always had".
Two days after crossing over into Nepal, a jeep ride almost turns into Mr Wood's final journey, as the vehicle's brakes fail and it plunges 150 metres into a ravine. Mr Wood is flown to London where a fracture in his upper right arm is set right. Fifty days after the accident, he is back in Nepal, and carries on from where he had left off, but not before thanking the doctor at the village clinic who had administered basic first aid after the accident, and making a small donation.
Mr Wood doesn't know what to make of Bhutan. He finds Thimpu, the capital, "eerily quiet", sterile and "almost like a sanitised version of a Swiss Alpine resort". The Bhutanese government gives Mr Wood a tight timeframe of one month to reach Gangkhar Puensum, his final objective on the Tibetan border, and insists on providing him with a minder - the only country to do so during his six-month expedition. In a country that boasts of its gross national happiness, the Bhutanese do not strike Mr Wood as particularly happy.
On finally reaching Gangkhar Puensum, Mr Wood feels an overwhelming sense of relief that he no longer has a goal, but can walk back at leisure and take in the beauty of his surroundings, grateful for just the air he is breathing. He takes some memories back with him with satisfaction: an audience with the Dalai Lama in McLeod Ganj during which the holy man suggests a way to get to Lhasa by gaming the Chinese system; the sheer spectacle of the Kavad Yatra in Haridwar; and an encounter in Rishikesh with a charismatic spiritual master, whose personal assistant urges him not to "forget to like us on Facebook"; while other sights are seared into his memory, such as the scenes of devastation he sees close to the epicentre of the earthquake that struck Nepal in April 2015.
Levison Wood
Hachette India
289 pages; Rs 699
Levison Wood is an inveterate walker. Last year he trekked 1,700 miles across the Himalayas in six months, starting from northern Afghanistan, and continuing through Pakistan, India, Nepal and ending in Bhutan. The result is Walking the Himalayas, and a much-watched television series in the UK. Earlier, in 2014, he had trudged 4,000 miles along the length of the Nile, from its source in Rwanda to the shores of the Mediterranean, which too had led to a book - Walking the Nile - and a successful TV series.
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The 33-year-old Mr Wood, a former British Army paratrooper, is a full-time travel writer who draws inspiration from Kipling's stories, and from figures such as T E Lawrence, Francis Younghusband and David Livingstone. He has been charged by a hippo, survived an accident in which his car fell into a 150-metre ravine in Nepal, got lost for an entire day in Kashmir, and was mistaken for a Chechen terrorist by Russian soldiers just after the Beslan massacre in September 2004. Yet, he confesses that the thought of doing a nine-to-five job terrifies him.
After the rigours of his Nile walk he was mentally preparing to hang up his walking boots at least temporarily, when an Indian-origin friend persuaded him that life in the suburbs of London would be too dreary. He then decides to walk the length of the Himalayas, which he had seen as a 19-year-old in 2001. Having been hooked by their power and majesty, "I knew that I would have to return," he writes.
He is not interested in setting climbing records, but wants to figure out just what the mountains mean to those who live amidst them. Starting at the beginning of the Wakhan Corridor, a remote valley in northern Afghanistan that marks the start of the Greater Himalaya range, he traces - so his guide tells him - the route Bin Laden took when he escaped from Afghanistan in 2001. They walk along the Karakoram Highway, built by Chinese engineers, which follows a branch of the ancient Silk Route.
Mr Wood's style is conversational, and he throws in bits of contemporary politics and history of the regions he walks through, drawing sympathetic portraits of the peoples he comes across. He is mostly non-judgmental - only observing, recording and describing. Yet he is also given to making naive and simplistic statements, like the following: "Unlike India, which regards China as a sworn enemy and threat to its sovereignty, Pakistan has embraced Chinese economic expansionism." And on arriving in Srinagar, Mr Wood describes it as an "infamous city" for no stated reason.
Mr Wood is at his readable best when engaging with members of local communities. He meets Kyrgyz nomads (among "the last true nomads in the world"); a Gujar nomadic chieftain who asks him if he is a nomad and then believes him to be destitute because he owns no sheep; and people of the Hunza valley in northern Pakistan, Ismailis who like to claim descent from Alexander's soldiers, and whose dialect is quite unlike the Pashto, Urdu or Farsi spoken in neighbouring areas.
Mr Wood's conversation with his Kashmiri guide Mehraj, however, should give all Indians pause. Mehraj says categorically and yet apparently without rancour that he is not Indian but Kashmiri, that "Indians come here to occupy us", and that "we want our independence back, like we always had".
Two days after crossing over into Nepal, a jeep ride almost turns into Mr Wood's final journey, as the vehicle's brakes fail and it plunges 150 metres into a ravine. Mr Wood is flown to London where a fracture in his upper right arm is set right. Fifty days after the accident, he is back in Nepal, and carries on from where he had left off, but not before thanking the doctor at the village clinic who had administered basic first aid after the accident, and making a small donation.
Mr Wood doesn't know what to make of Bhutan. He finds Thimpu, the capital, "eerily quiet", sterile and "almost like a sanitised version of a Swiss Alpine resort". The Bhutanese government gives Mr Wood a tight timeframe of one month to reach Gangkhar Puensum, his final objective on the Tibetan border, and insists on providing him with a minder - the only country to do so during his six-month expedition. In a country that boasts of its gross national happiness, the Bhutanese do not strike Mr Wood as particularly happy.
On finally reaching Gangkhar Puensum, Mr Wood feels an overwhelming sense of relief that he no longer has a goal, but can walk back at leisure and take in the beauty of his surroundings, grateful for just the air he is breathing. He takes some memories back with him with satisfaction: an audience with the Dalai Lama in McLeod Ganj during which the holy man suggests a way to get to Lhasa by gaming the Chinese system; the sheer spectacle of the Kavad Yatra in Haridwar; and an encounter in Rishikesh with a charismatic spiritual master, whose personal assistant urges him not to "forget to like us on Facebook"; while other sights are seared into his memory, such as the scenes of devastation he sees close to the epicentre of the earthquake that struck Nepal in April 2015.