Which is the best time in the mountains? There’s no question in my mind that it is early in winter. I’m not keen to explore heights beyond 5000 meters, where the air is so thin that you have to constantly worry about AMS. For me an altitude between 2 and 4 kilometers is ideal, as long as I take it slow and acclimatize. All I want is a clear and unobstructed view of the high Himalayas. A town like Darjeeling is ideal: with its narrow twisting roads always looking out on Kanchanjunga. If you aren’t satisfied with those views, then you can take a taxi to Tiger Hill in the morning and see the sunrise paint the peak pink.
Or one can be more adventurous and venture up into the roof of the world via Arunachal Pradesh. These wonderful high mountains and lakes look so serene that it is easy to forget that in our times it is a possible flashpoint due to China’s claim over all the Tibetan plateau. That dispute is going to outlast us all, so one hopes that events will not overheat suddenly during your visit.
Or there is the politically safer option of looking at Annapurna from the neighbourhood of Nepal’s Pokhara. The only thing to remember is that nowhere in this young and dynamic range is truly safe. Earthquakes are common, and once in a couple of decades or so there’s going to be a bad one near any big town in Nepal.
If all you are interested in is a good fleeting view of the highest peak in the world, nothing beats flying past it. A bit of a cheat you say? But everything is fair when you want a good photo, isn’t it? And to have a bit of fun while you are at it.
In this age of mass tourism, everything that you photograph will have been photographed a million times before, and will be photographed again several million times. There is no way that a straightforward view of the Zhan Garden in Nanjing, one of the five classical gardens of China, will be different. But that’s the lovely thing about tourists’ photos: they don’t have to be different. They are only meant to remind you of how beautiful the world is, and how lucky you have been in your time in it.
2011: Tour Eiffel
During the two decades I spent travelling to Paris in springs and summers I took hundreds of photos of each of the famous tourist spots in the city. One summer , late in the evening, I decided to walk out into the little lanes around the Seine and approached the Eiffel tower from a different angle. I was very happy with this photograph: it is slightly different from the others, and reminds me of that relaxed summer when The Family and I hosted many friends who passed through the city.
Mandu, near Indore, is not known as well as it should be. The capital of a small medieval principality which fell to the Mughals, it had architectural ambitions well beyond what such a small state usually managed to achieve. Above you see a misty view of the tomb of Hoshang Shah. This was a structure which was an exemplar of what could be done in those days, and was copied several times. The most famous copy surpassed the original by a hair, and is called the Taj Mahal.
On a cold and windy evening The Family and I walked around Berlin’s Alexanderplatz: stopping to take in the sights and tastes of the place. It is very far removed from the atmosphere of the Weimer that Döblin captured. But with the Soviet-era TV tower looming over everything, you can get interesting photos.
One of the most memorable walks in our lives took the two of us to a place on the border of India and Nepal from which we could see four of the world’s five highest mountains. On one side was Everest, Lhotse, and Makalu, that’s the view you see here. On the other side was Kanchenjunga. The clear skies, the sun warming us as we stood on a ridge high above the valleys that winter, the exhilaration of the day’s walk: these are the memories that this photo brings back. There was also the little matter of our phone switching between Indian and Nepali carriers several times that day: a circumstance which led to a huge phone bill, and took us months to sort out.
The Nezu shrine in Japan is not as famous as it should be. It is not only the azalea blooms which fill its gardens the week after the cherries, but also the lovely walk through the orange torii. There are also the fox guardians which dot the place, and its connection to many Meiji era writers and artists which make it a place worth a visit.
The Little Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, more properly known as the Church of Saint Sergius and Saint Bacchus, and the Cathedral of Porto are two structures which are often given a miss by tourists. We had enough time in the two cities to explore them in detail, so we visited both. They were definitely worth the visit. But even more than the beautiful architecture (the windows cut into the dome in the Little Hagia Sophia, and the azulejos of the cathedral) what I remember now are the peaceful atmosphere: a complete lack of other tourists in cities filled with them. Paradoxically, that’s what you want to do as a tourist: break free of others like you.
A voice on the PA told us that Everest was visible on the port side of the plane. The lady at the window was gracious enough to lean back to let me snake my phone past her to the thick slab of smudged plastic which passes for a porthole at these heights. Far away, peeking over the horizon, its peak a couple of kilometers below us, the snow glittered on the highest mountain in the world. Today there were no streaks of cirrostratus clouds over its peak; climbers would have a lovely view. Its always a pleasure to see its symmetric bulk from a plane, even though the sky above it is infinitely higher.
The flight had been getting a bit boring till then. I’d spent my time trying to figure out all the reasons why it might be dangerous to fly barefoot. Migratory birds pecking at your feet? Frostbite? Loss of aerodynamic viability? None of the above was more likely.
I looked out of the window again. Four of the world’s fourteen peaks taller than 8 Kms were clustered close along the flight path we were on. East to west they are Makalu, Lhotse, Everest/Sagarmatha, Cho Oyu. We were past all of them by now. The layer of clouds below us seemed like altocumulus; from the ground it would probably be a mackerel sky. Our path would veer south soon heading to lowlands, missing a view of Kanchenjunga. It’s not an accident that the eight-thousanders are clustered together: irregularities in the motions of continental plates guarantees it.
Science da kamaal! Posts appear automatically while I travel off net.
Flying during the night is tiring, and in the day it is boring. I finished a hefty daytime shot of whisky and depolarized a window to look out of the Dreamliner flying from Delhi to Shanghai. Some time earlier The Family had spotted the unmistakable profile of Everest poking out of the northern horizon. Now I looked down to see a network of rivers. A quick look at the flight map verified that we were flying over the floodplains of Bangladesh, a little north of Dhaka. Somewhere down there, if I knew where to look, would be the village where my grandmother was born.
A Dreamliner’s pace can seem slow, until you try to take a photo. Then you realize how quickly features in the landscape eleven kilometers below you slip away. After putting down my beer chaser, I found our path had curved past the Shan highlands of Myanmar towards Qunming. We were more than halfway to Shanghai, and sitting on top of a sea of white clouds. Time to click through the movie menu again.
I first heard about Paro airport from a friend’s son. When he was ten years old, he was addicted to flight-simulator games, and Paro was a legendary airport to him and his little group of enthusiasts. I first learnt from him of the extremely steep angles of approach and take off, needed because Paro is a deep valley, at an altitude of 2300 meters, surrounded by peaks which are over 5000 meters high. This was not all, he said, it had a short runway, and the approach had to wind through a safe path between mountains. Interestingly, since the beginning of civilian flights in 1983, Paro airport has not had a single accident.
A few years later, I was in a party of four who flew in for our second visit to Bhutan and saw all this first hand. On our previous visit we had taken the road up from Phuentsholing on the Indian border. The flight took off in the early morning from Kolkata. Later I realized why. The pilots make a visual approach, and have to return to Kolkata and be ready to try again the same day if the weather turns bad.
Our flight was uneventful. We had a clear view of the massive summit of Mount Everest. Auguries are part of the culture of Bhutan, and the calm and majestic view of Chomolungma augured well for our trip. The uneventful trip included a hair-raising descent to Paro airport. We could clearly see the mountain walls which seemed to hang just outside the windows of the cabin. The plane twisted and turned through the valley of the Paro river until it came down to a perfect soft landing at the airport. The small cabin broke into applause. It was well-deserved, the pilot was one of the handful who are qualified for Paro airport.
Bhutan, with its population of half a million, was a refreshingly informal place. We could stay on the apron and admire breathtaking views of the walls of mountains rising around us. Eventually we moved into the squeaky-new airport terminal, got our visa and moved on.
The great thing about Air India is that the Mumbai-Shanghai Dreamliner skirts the southern edge of the Himalayas at an altitude of 12 kilometers in the mid-morning. In October, when the skies over north India are crystal clear, you could have a great view of the high Himalayas from the flight. The names rolled off my tongue on the taxi to the airport: Dhaulagiri, Annapurna, Manaslu, Shishapangma, Cho Oyu, Sagarmatha (Everest), Lhotse, Makalu, Kanchenjunga. They might appear in that order as I fly. The taxi driver looked in his mirror quizzically. I told him about the 8000 meter peaks. He seemed to understand; he said he is from near the foothills of the Himalyas.
The bad thing about Air India is that you can never predict what they are going to do. I’d booked myself an aisle seat on the port side, forward of the wing, on my flight out to China. My boarding pass specified a completely different row, one which turned out to be smack over the wing. This was a pity, but not as much as the fact that the gentleman two seats behind me plonked a huge suitcase on top of my backpack before I could take out my camera.
So when we glided past the bulky silhouette of the Everest on the horizon all I had with me was a phone which specializes in taking fish-eye landscapes. I can’t make out whether I also got Cho Oyu in the photo. The sight of the mountains brought out the romantic in many of my fellow travellers. The aisles were suddenly crowded with people looking at the bulky shape of Everest. My neighbour was ecstatic. I must go to Nepal, said the young man to me in Hindi. We compared photos, and stared out of the small port at the mountains we drifted past. I told him about the 8000 meter peaks, the ones I know I will never reach, but which I dream of scaling. We talked about the continental collision which form these heights, and the movement which causes frequent earthquakes in the region.
The rest of the flight was, well, downhill. We flew into Burma, then over the rice fields of south eastern China to Shanghai. China is a thin spot in the global map of the internet. This time I was not surprised, merely inconvenienced. No blogging for a week, no maps, restricted mail. From the top of the highest mountains, back to reality. It hit hard a few days later, when the government of Nepal put new restrictions on who can climb the Everest. Most of the time I think the restrictions are good, but there are the Walter Mitty moments when I plant my feet on top of one of these peaks, and raise my rime-encrusted face to look at the dark blue sky.
Watching the movie Everest so soon after blogging the highest I’ve ever been was interesting. The Everest Base Camp is about the same height that we reached then. After the movie, The Family and I had a short discussion on how it would be to walk up to that point from Namche Bazar. We agreed that it would be more tiring to walk, but the slower pace of the climb would give you more time to acclimatize.
Writing the blog post had refreshed my memory of the pounding headache I nursed at a height where the Everest climbers begin the final trek. So this was on my mind throughout the movie. Remembering how difficult it was for me at that height made me appreciate the sheer physical stress of working at altitudes where the oxygen level is so low. The heart starts working harder, fluids begin to accumulate in places they should not. This kind of stress is shown in the movie, but I might have overlooked it if I’d not faced a milder form of the same problem.
Don't hold your breath 
