On The Road To Muktinath
(Photos Available)

The first, and last(ing) impression of the Himalayas will always be flying over the pale-yellow and barren fields of Bangladesh, laced with broad, tired and silty rivers struggling against the interminable flatness towards the relief of the open sea.

About an hour before touchdown in Kathmandu, Nepal's otherworldly capital, you start to make out the first shimmering, glacier-capped peaks, like giant molars, as the Himalayas sweep in to your right from far away, mystical lands like Bhutan and Sikkim.

As you start to descend, these white giants mass to form a stark wall, as if to hide or protect something cherished. The incoming vertical landscape fakes a broadside, and suddenly you find yourself in the Kathmandu Valley, the smoky and cluttered capital to the second-poorest country in all of Asia.

There are few, but good, reasons to come to the Himalayas. Most European outdoors enthusiasts (some 60,000 last year) flock here every Sept.-Dec. (post-monsoon, pre-winter) for arguably the best mountain trekking in the world.

I came on a spiritual journey. No, no religious inspiration to validate it, just a simple personal trek into the Self, something we all need to do every few years to "get our act together"; or, in the touchy-feely lingo of our generation, to do some 'spiritual house-cleaning'.

I had been into these high mountains a few times before, always alone. This time would be different.

My sister Eva and I pored over maps and guidebooks for two days while our mandatory trekking permits were being sorted out. We talked to recently returned trekkers, trying to find a challenging trekking route, our destinations becoming ever more ambitious. And the name Muktinath kept coming up.

A quick look at the map and we found Muktinath to be an unbelievably remote spiritual centre for both Hindus and Buddhists located high in the mountains (at more than 12,000 ft.) on the edge of the arid Tibetan Plateau.

Although this narrow corridor of snow-swept peaks and shallow wind-torn valleys are geopolitically Nepali, this region is 100% culturally Tibetan, an awkward legacy of political poker played over the last century or so.

With every word of wonderment for Muktinath came the warning that it was nearly Winter and the first snows of the season were imminent...

From Kathmandu it's on to Pokhara, Nepal's only other city, and the starting point for our trek. There are only two ways to get there, and both take courage: you either take a half hour flight in a dodgy WWII reject paratrooper plane or take the life-threatening 8-hour bus
journey along the precipitous and muddy (read slippery) mountain roads - the only ""highway"" in the country.

Fly.

Pokhara is a strange place. It's a sub-tropical oasis in the shadow of the immense Annapurna Range, a cluster of spectacularly sheared mountains that are the jewel in the Himalayan crown. You'll see people walking amongst the banana and fig trees, moving from one rental shop to another, looking for arctic expedition-quality sleeping bags and Goretex jackets.

When you're this close to the highest mountains in the world, and you've gone through so much just to get here, the draw of 'the interior' is so strong it makes you jumpy.