A trip to the hills never seems complete without a view of one of the eight-thousanders, the fourteen peaks which poke up into the edge of the atmosphere in our times. In these four days of constant rain in Sikkim, that was the one thing that remained at the back of my mind: a niggling feeling that something was not right in spite of the many birds that I added to my life list.
The rains had destabilized a part of the highway between Bengal and Sikkim which had been damaged by last year’s glacial outbreak flood. It had been repaired enough that there was a trickle of traffic through it the day before we were to leave. But more rain at night had dislodged boulders and the road bed had begun to slide. So instead of taking the direct highway, we had to wake before dawn to take the picturesque route over a ridge into Kalimpong. As we passed over the ridge the clouds parted and we looked on a glorious view of the Kanchenjunga range spread out in front of us. We stopped to say goodbye to the Goddess of the Mountains, and drove on with a sense of completion.
This post appears as scheduled while I am travelling. I’ll be connected, but may be slow to look at your comments and posts. I hope you will bear with my delays.
Continents are constantly formed and destroyed. The bedrock under our feet is melted and forged anew, over and over again, from the scum of silicates that floats on the earth’s iron heart. Normally it would take a creature living ten thousand times slower than us to notice this. But if you travel in the Himalayas with an open eye you can see these changes frozen in a snapshot of time: layers of rock which are normally horizontal under your feet pushed up into inclines, ancient river beds raised to the skies, hillsides melting away in the rain, soil created and transported downhill in devastating floods, abrupt discontinuities in rivers. The signs are everywhere. Rocks come first, then the soil, eventually grass and other plants, and then animal life follows.
Every scene that you see here in front of you is constantly changing, each at its own special pace. The weather changes fast in these mountains: fog blows across the hills, the sky turns from blue to lead in moments. The flora changes with the economy: the plants in the foreground of the farm here are black cardamom, already yielding less benefit than a decade ago. The farmland itself is the work of a couple of lifetimes: to build up the flat terraces for planting, the poor soil enriched by the planting by a generation of farmers, before it begins to lift a family out of poverty. Hamlets shift and become villages as farmlands increase. And then, sometimes, a shifting of the whole hillside, which forces a growing village to disperse. This is less disruptive than when a village grows into a large town before a major earthquake strikes. The Himalayas are still forming.
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There are things here which know how to use rock and mud and grass. Next to a cliff, at the side of a narrow road with a heavy load of trucks, we stood with our cameras, taking photos of nesting Nepal house martins (Delichon nipalense). Such are the dangers which face modern explorers! House martins, of which we can see three species without leaving India, nest communally at such sites. Their houses are made from pellets of mud shaped into cups with mouths covered to leave a small opening. It was late March, the beginning of the nesting season. There was much bustling about. Perhaps the birds were still lining the nests with grass. In these colonies I suspect there is some cheating: not just sexual dalliances outside nesting pairs, but also brood cheating (laying eggs in an unrelated couple’s nest), and theft of nesting material. When there are societies, there will be cheating. Speculation is easy, but to prove it takes painstaking science. Perhaps the fact that two broods are raised in the same year in the same nest increases the chances of cheating.
A tiny mountain stream flowed fast over stones. I could lose myself in the little eddies and whorls which formed quickly and disappeared as fast. Or I could capture the average flow. Since I had a tripod, I decided to use it and capture the flow of the stream with a long exposure shot. That gave me the silken sheet that you see in the featured photo. You see the large smooth flow of water over stone as a sheet of green-brown, and areas of turbulence in white. How kind of nature to provide a colour coding! The Falachan is a tiny stream of glacial melt-water which eventually falls into the Sutlej river, one of the five tributaries of the Indus which irrigate the plains of Punjab.
Move to the larger river now. In Ladakh I stood at the confluence of the Zanskar and Indus rivers and was fascinated by how slowly they mixed. The Zanskar here is closer to its headwaters and rapidly flowing, so there is less silt and mud in the stream. The Indus has come a long way already, so here it is turbid and full of mud. Where the two streams meet you can see vortices forming, but the water does not mix into an uniform colour for tens of meters. Flows are strange.
Why stop at the Indus? Move to the largest of scales. I stood at the mouth of the harbour in Mumbai and looked at the Arabian sea, south of where the Indus lands, north of where it becomes indistinguishable from the Indian Ocean. The water barely moves. There is the gentle agitation of the sun and moon which causes the water to rise and fall in a stately twelve hour rhythm. Then there is the waves which the wind sets slapping on the land, cause the gulls to bob up and down in the water, and can be captured by my camera. All this is slow and mild compared to the vortices in the Indus or the turbulence of the Falachan. Small to large, fast to slow. That’s how water moves on earth.
Dhaulagiri is the seventh highest mountain in the world, one of the 14 peaks rising more than eight kilometers above the world’s seas. It jutted above the weather, cruising silently past the window of our flight back from Kathmandu. It’s silent passage was a reminder of its name, which translates to the White Mountain. I’ve seen it from a distance from the north western end of Uttarakhand in India. This was a much more majestic view.
After the hazy sunrise the day cleared for a while. We’d located a nice place for breakfast and booked a table before coming. It was the right weather for a breakfast with the view of the Annapurna range spread out in front of us. Clouds scudded over us, driven by a strong wind. It was nippy even down on the lawn where we had our table. But the sun was warm as long as it was out. So we decided to sit in the open air and have our breakfast.
The view was wonderful, with Machhapuchhre dead center. West of it were the multiple peaks of the Annapurna massif. Annapurna 1 is a bit to the north, so the peak looked smaller than those of Annapurna 2 and 4, which were closer, and Annapurna South, which was closest. Clouds piled up on the east so we didn’t have much of a view there. The waiter who got us piping hot tea said that sometimes on a clear day you could see Manaslu, the eighth-highest mountain in the world. Not today, though.
The sun was a fickle quantity today. When it was in the sky I had to take off the jacket and was glad that we’d decided to sit out in the lawns. But when a cloud came over it I had to put the jacket back on, and thought that it might have been more comfortable inside the restaurant with its wonderful picture windows with double glazing and flush doors. The service was excellent, and two waiters in tandem kept the toast and tea coming, along with the eggs, sausages, and whatever else you wanted from the buffet. One of them answered my question saying that the restaurant was a nice place to view the sunset from, and that we could have sundowners in the restaurant. “Another time”, we promised.
As we came to the lobby after breakfast, I heard a massed choir of grey treepies (Dendrocitta formosae) and rushed out. Harvest was done, and treepies had descended on the hay still in the field to forage for leftover grain. The Family had disappeared, but came back soon after. “I looked at the rooms,” she said. “We can stay here if we come back.”
Annapurna is the tenth highest of the world’s fourteen peaks which stand more than eight kilometers above sea level. That is the highest peak that you see in the photo above. In front of it, to the right, is Annapurna South, still a giant though it is eight hundred meters lower, and not one of the fourteen. Behind this isolated peak you can see two others: Gangapurna to its left, and Annapurna III to the extreme right. I was lucky that our flight past this impressive range took place on a brilliantly clear day.
Spiny babblers (Turdoides nipalensi) can be seen near the World Peace Pagoda in Pakhara. I didn’t know that when I told The Family that I would sit and have a chai at a restaurant instead of climbing up a hill to the pagoda. I missed my last chance of seeing this endemic bird of Nepal when the man at the tea stall told me about a peak called Pumdikot nearby where there is a large statue of Shiva and a grand view of Annapurna. So I took a taxi up. The road climbed extremely steeply, rising about 600 meters in a couple of kilometers. From the parking lot there to the statue of Shiva was a short walk, and I reached just in time to see the last light of the sun on the Annapurna range.
I knew that The Family would also be seeing the same sunset, so I had a little time to take a few photos before getting back. The taxi would get back from Pumdikot to the base of the pagoda before she could have walked down. That’s exactly what happened. She hadn’t seen the bird, but we’d seen the same sunset.
Kathmandu is vibrant and alive, but after a while it can be a little overwhelming. One morning we braved the claustrophobic chaos of Tribhuvan airport to emerge into the clear spaces of Nepal outside of the self-regard of its capital. Instantly we could see the wide open spaces that are dragged into your thoughts when the word Nepal comes to mind. Even the Kathmandu valley looks green and calm from the air.
Although one thinks of Nepal as a land of the high Himalayas, most people live at low altitudes. Kathmandu lies in the high Himalayas, but in a bowl whose base is 1400 meters above sea level, with the rim going up to about 2200 meters. Pokhara is even lower, in a river valley in the lower Himalayas at an altitude of just over 800 meters. These are about the altitudes which one can drive to for a weekend out of Mumbai: Matheran is at an altitude of 800 meters, and the Kaas plateau is a little higher than 1200 meters. Since we were not going to Sagarmatha (8849 m), Annapurna (8091 m), or Makalu (8481 m), I wasn’t worried about the altitude. What worried me was the weather. Would we have clear views?
My worries dissolved into the thin air as soon as we started climbing. The sky was the very definition of limpid. I could see forever, or at least all the way to the horizon. Even after we descended into the mild haze over Pokhara, the view of Mount Machhapucchre (6993 m) remained clear. Pokhara airport was built by the Chinese in the typical cavernous Chinese style, totally empty apart from a small planeload of people.
The price of taxis is a shock in Nepal. But in Pokhara this shock is easily mitigated by the view as you drive out of the airport. The road points straight to the acute triangular shape of Machhapuchhre with higher (but more distant) peaks in the Annapurna range flanking it. The double peak that gives the mountain the fishtail appearance referred to in the name Machhapuchhre is visible only if you go northeast or northwest of the city. The season for treks to the Annapurna circuit was on, and hotels had been nearly booked full by trekkers moving in or out. We seemed to be the only people who were here for day trips and bird watching rather than treks. Pokhara is a good place to hunt for the Spiny babbler (Turdoides nipalensis), a hard to spot lurker, which can only be seen in Nepal.
In Nepali and Hindi it is clear that the place name Pokhara comes from the word for lakes (in Nepali) or ponds (in Hindi). We took a boat ride on the Phewa lake after dropping our bags in the hotel. The sun was strong, but the breeze, the rocking of the boat in the gentle waves, and the view of the Annapurna range told us that the Pokhara experience was going to be completely different from the hothouse atmosphere of Kathmandu. Here were the clear skies, the mountains, and the open spaces, which The Family had always thought of as the Nepal experience. But there was more to come. Nepal is too varied to be captured in one photo, or five.
We visited Kaas plateau to see the once-in-7-years mass flowering of Topli Karvi (Strobilanthes sessilis), but our first sight of the plateau was a carpet of yellow formed by the gregarious flowering of the Hairy Smithia (Smithia sensitiva). One doesn’t have to travel to Kaas to see these flowers; you can see them in many places in the nearby tourist friendly Mahabaleshwar. The three-petalled flower is easy to identify, with two of the nearly round petals standing out over the third complex one like the ears on Mickey Mouse.
Smithia sensitivaSmithia hirsuta
The trouble is that there are two commonly seen species in the Kaas-Mahabaleshwar region which look similar, namely the Hairy Smithia and the Sensitive Smithia (Smithia sensitiva). The flowers (the one above, and the featured image) look similar and like a generic member of the pea family (Fabaceae). To tell them apart you need to look at the leaves. The leaves of S. sensitiva look like stubby ovals, and are mildly sensitive to touch. The S. hirsuta has compound leaves with multiple lobes, and each hairy lobe has serrated edges. In one place I saw them growing together, so one has to be careful with identification.
The third Smithia that I saw on the Kaas plateau were tiny yellow flowers, easy to miss unless they are pointed out. These are the Double-paired Smithia (Smithia bigemina, aka, Smithia agharkarii). If you look closely at the flower you’ll see not only the two lobes of the Mickey Mouse ears, but also that the “third” petal is a pair of petals. In the above photo you can see the gap between these two petals. Unfortunately the ground was too wet for me to squat to get a head-on view of the flower to show this feature clearly.
The Smithias are a small genus of 20 species, and you may be surprised to find three species in a small area of the plateau. The reason is that the center of diversity of the genus is India, with more than half of the species, 11 to be precise, not being found outside the country. Only 2 Smithias are not found in India, being species from Madagascar. This dates the origin of the genus from after the separation of the Indian plate from Gondwanaland, and before the rifting of the Madagascar plate from the Indian. By current understanding, the latter event too place between 90 and 66 million years ago, and the earlier rift was about 120 million years ago.
Our first view of Pangong Tso was stunning. Among the red and yellow ochre hills there was a streak of deep Lapis Lazuli blue. It was an arresting sight; we had to take to a halt for the first photo, the featured image. But this sight was even more special because of the amazing land forms we had driven through that day.
We had followed the main road from Agham along the Shyok river to Durbuk, taken the branch towards Tangtse, where we veered off into the smaller road which led to Pangong Tso through the pastures and swamps around Muglib.
Our road took us from the main road running through the Shyok-Chushul-Dungti tectonic zone into the Pangong Tso-Spanggur Tso zone. The first part of our day led through a geology shaped out of the same Ladakh granitoid which we’d seen on our previous drive. But this road, up to Durbuk, had cliffs hanging right over us, so that we saw these red rocks close up. The small road we followed afterwards wended its way through ravines cut by rivers into rocks which are called Ladakh granitoid gneiss. These brighter stones were initially laid down in the Permian era (299 to 252 million years ago) and then metamorphosed during subsequent geological upheavals, including the thrusting up of the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau. The rocks had been carved into deep ravines by flowing water. As we passed deposits of brightly coloured rocks- red, black, yellow- I began to understand the mineral origins of the colour schemes that you see in Buddhist monasteries in this region. And the region around Pangong Tso contained limestone with yellow and darker minerals.
So the landscape changde completely when we emerged into the swamps and pastures before Pangong Tso, where the only village I could see was Muglib. This area looked perfect for birds, but I only had time to spot a white wagtail (Motacilla alba), when we stopped to watch a clan of Himalayan marmots. Later I found that the Changthang Cold Desert Wildlife Sanctuary is not too far off. On these pastures I saw for the first time flocks of sheep and goat with their herders. This place is at an altitude of around 4000 meters, so the grass is not likely to last through winter. A sedentary pastoral life is not possible here; so these must be Ladakhi transhumanists. I’d not known of them before.
One of the most exciting things about travelling through these hard landscapes is how life and human culture adapts to the strains of living where these is little of water and air. These could be great lessons for us, if we bother to observe them closely.
This post is scheduled to appear while I travel. I’ll reply to your comments and look at your posts when I have network coverage.
Don't hold your breath 