The Peace Correspondent (40 page)

After a comfortable two hours drive, we pole across the
broad, placid Rapti River on a narrow boat to reach Temple Tiger Lodge. One of several jungle resorts in the Terai, it is Nepal's version of a basic African game park resort. Meals are served in an open-air dining area with a huge, tent-shaped thatched roof, and small cabins on stilts are spread out through the forest. Accommodating is summer-camp basic, but comfortable, with kerosene lamps (bring a flashlight or electric lantern) and, once again, hot showers and flush toilets.

With no TV, telephones or discos, evenings are quiet at the lodge, so guests sit around a campfire recounting jungle stories. The Royal Chitwan National Park is a rare conservation success story, a resort guide explains while logs flicker in the fire pit. Until 1951, the area was a hunting reserve where maharajahs mounted on elephants bagged up to 120 tigers in a single expedition. In 1970, the area was declared a wildlife reserve, mainly to protect the one-horned Indian rhinoceros. By then, only 80 of these large, low-slung pachyderms survived. Today, more than 500 rhino, more than 25 percent of the world's population, graze in the park's forests and elephant grasslands, and Chitwan exports them to other reserves.

The park's 46 species of mammals include four kinds of deer, sloth bear, wild boar, leopard, king cobra and the elusive royal Bengal tiger -- but no more maharajahs.

During the day, resort guides take guests on dugout trips down the Rapti River, where the main attraction is observing the avian antics of hundreds of brilliant birds. Binocular-clutching bird watchers whisper in hushed delight as they pick out iridescent blue kingfishers, black ibis and others of the 400 types in this park. Birdsong fills the morning air, and the guide identifies the “brain fever” and the “one more bottle” birds from their calls (which sound like they are singing out these words). In the rising heat, I can identify with the latter's plea.

On long walks through the forest, we spot jungle fowl fluttering on the ground like bright fighting cocks, little brown-horned barking deer trembling like Bambi, long slithery mongooses and
a flash of black as a wild boar crashes through the jungle underbrush. In the morning mist, monkeys cavort in the trees, making fantastic, Tarzan-like leaps from branch to branch, while a crocodile, an ominous dark green flattened shape, basks in the sun on the opposite bank of the river.

But elephant rides through the jungle are the resort's prime attraction, and at the cruel hour of 4 a.m., the call comes for the dawn ride (along with coffee and tea delivered to the door). There is nothing like waking up in the jungle, with its hooting and clicking, crying, rustling, chirping, whistling, wailing and trilling, to make you realize how noisy Nature can be.

Before first light, we step from a high mounting platform onto our ambulatory conveyance. This is not a caparisoned and gaudily painted circus elephant, but a working beast with plain wood howdah, unadorned cushions and simple harness. Four passengers ride each elephant, with the mahout, wielding a thick stick and a vicious-looking long metal hook, squatting on the great beast's neck. The mahout talks to his charge constantly, nudging it behind its mottled ears with his bare foot, urging it on in Hindi (the language of all Nepalese elephants), and occasionally whacking it with the steel hook. The jumbo's jockey orders “aggat” (go ahead), and we head into the dense, dew-wet forest towards a riverbank and down the steep bank, the elephant stepping as delicately as a ballerina.

For several hours we wander through the bush, forest and grasslands where grass higher than an elephant's eye towers over us. The only sounds are the creaking of the wooden howdah, birds singing in the bush and noisy, squawking pheasants flapping from the tall trees. Along muddy paths, we experience the incredible sense of power as the elephant, an animate bulldozer, brushes aside giant trees like bothersome twigs. Across the dry riverbed, other guests perched on their howdahs seem to float on the high grass.

Suddenly, the mahout whispers, “Rhino.” The huge creature is grazing in the dense undergrowth below us, so close it seems
we can reach out and touch its deadly horn. The old male looks as though it was stitched together by a Kathmandu hippie, with great plates of leather stuck on its sides.

Elephant and rhinoceros stand motionless, while we excitedly grab for cameras. When the rhino moves away into the bush a few yards, the mahout guides his steed around in front of it. The rhino moves again, and again we check his path. It is like a giant chess game played with live pieces, with us astride one of the pieces -- the castle.

Finally, the rhino, checkmated, bolts, dashing through the jungle in a noisy retreat. It is the end of the game, and will make another great fireside story.

Squeezed into the little Dehavilland Twin Otter droning towards the high, craggy Himalayas, I am reminded of Lost Horizon. James Hilton's 1930s novel starts with a group of people kidnapped in India and flown to Shangri-La.

“All afternoon the plane had soared through the thin mists of the upper atmosphere, far too high to give clear sight of what lay beneath,” Hilton wrote. “Sometimes, at longish intervals, the veil was torn for a moment, to display the jagged outline of a peak, or the glint of some unknown stream. Far away, at the very limit of distance, lay range upon range of snow-peaks, festooned with glaciers, and floating, in appearance, upon vast levels of cloud.”

Today's flight from Kathmandu to Lukla, staging point for Everest climbing expeditions, has that same, somehow dated sense of adventure, of approaching a remote and near unattainable place. Viewing the craggy white rampart of the world's highest mountains from the small, basic aircraft, I am as awestruck as the book's kidnapped passengers. “The plane, on that stupendous stage, was droning over an abyss in the face of a sheer white wall that seemed part of the sky itself until the sun caught it…”

After a bumpy, but stunningly scenic, 40-minute flight, it appears we are heading straight into the mountainside, with no air strip visible from the passengers' windows, and no chance of turning back. Suddenly, the STOL (short take-off and land) plane touches down on a dirt airstrip the size of a football field
that tips sharply upward, rising almost 200 feet. This is white-knuckle flying.

When the doors swing open, we step into a truly awesome setting, a little niche or terrace in the mountainside surrounded by stunning, rugged peaks. Here at 2,804 meters, the air is clear, fresh and cool. A Russian Sikorsky helicopter that looks like a veteran of the Afghan war is parked on the gravel apron, and dozens of hard-core mountaineers are gathered around the airfield. It reminds me of when I lived in Vanimo, Papua New Guinea, working as a malaria control officer, and the entire town gathered to meet the weekly plane.

There is a great sense of purpose here, of action and energy as climbers prepare for their high-altitude, high-adrenaline expeditions, unloading their packs, boots, ice axes and camping equipment from the plane while others board.

Lukla, a scattering of stone buildings topped by fluttering prayer flags, has a wild, remote end-of-the-world feel. Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to climb Mount Everest with his Sherpa guide Tenzing Norgay, had this strip built, but on his historic climb, he walked all the way from Kathmandu. A mountain guide says it is several days' walk to the nearest road, and I don't want to be stranded here, so I check in the ramshackle Lumbini Airways office to make sure I can get back today.

The Sagarmantha (Nepali for Everest) Resort, where I stop for tea, is a rough, but pleasant lodge with furniture made of sula, a local wood similar to pine, and bare wood floors. About 30 such lodges operate in Lukla, a surprising number for a village of only about 1,200 people - Sherpa, Tamang and Rais, as well as some Tibetans.

Crossing the field and squeezing through the barbed wire fence built to keep the yaks out, I walk down the only street. In this one-industry town, men are packing yaks, porters are hefting huge woven baskets and numerous intense and earnest climbers are setting off on treks up to the mountains. The guest book at the park information office shows that most visitors stay for a
few weeks up to several months. I meekly fill in “three hours” under “length of stay.”

In a few minutes I walk to the end of the busy town, stopping where a stupa topped with prayer flags snapping in the brisk mountain breeze marks the start of the trail. From afar comes the rhythmic ringing of yak bells, the whistles of the herder.

Back at the field, I settle in to wait for the flight. An hour after the scheduled arrival, the blue sky is still empty, and I recall the anxiety of sitting on my patrol box in remote Papua New Guinea airstrips waiting for my chartered plane. Finally, the siren sounds to announce the aircraft is approaching, and I see a tiny white speck against the dark green of the mountain. The turboprop aircraft, built to land on remote spots in northern Canada, comes down at a steep angle, kicks up dust as it hits the runway, roars up the steep slope and taxis to a stop.

Taking off is a real rush, as the plane revs up and bumps down the short dirt strip, lifting off just as it appears we will drop off the edge of the mountain. This is adrenaline enough a sport for me.

Back in Kathmandu, it seems positively tropical.