Mary Jane Walker's Blog: Adventures at Snow Farm Part 1 – Skiing with a broken shoulder! , page 37

Mad Mountaineering Guides: Time for another me-too movement? (Part Four)

Monument to a female Sherpa guide under construction in Namche Bazaar

 

 

WHEN we made our way back to Namche Bazaar after leaving Dingboche the next day, my guide said we should buy land together. And I said: “No Way!” Why would I?

In Namche Bazaar, we stayed at Tashi’s friend’s place, the Lasha Hotel, which was small and not used to putting up guides. I could hear my guide talking to the family all night and I thought: ‘Oh dear, what an imposition on them’.

That morning on the downward rocky path, full of people, yaks and porters, I told my guide that I wanted to finish the trip and that it was over with.

He somehow managed to get thirty porters agitated with his response.

I also said I would not have any congratulatory dinner with his family, and that I would not be going to his house to eat, sleep or be his second wife.

I thought I could get some money back but, no, I would get nothing back.

An Australian family came over and asked whether I was OK. They said that I could trek with them for the day. Thanks Tim, Edith and Jasper! You came to my rescue at a time when I did feel very much under siege. And after the 30 porters were agitated, I did feel very unsafe on that track.

My guide had screamed at me and said that I should finish the trip and I would not get any refund of any kind. I thought my guide was going to hit me, or that a porter would bump me off the track.

Later that day the monsoon which normally comes in summer, arrived early. The daily snows of an unusually protracted winter promptly turned into daily rains. The fine spring weather known as the climbing season never eventuated. Hillary and Tenzing wouldn’t have made it up Everest in these conditions! Was this a consequence of global warming?

I had tea in the porter house, though my guide said the porter had been busy and had four kids. He personally had only one kid and was not busy. I was free, and would I sleep with him? I said nothing but decided that this trip was definitely off.

That night, I got to Phakding and found my hotel. My guide stayed elsewhere and peered through the windows, which seemed rather weird. Though, I was getting used to weird by this stage. Once again, the manager of the hotel contributed his assent to the general judgement that my guide was weird.

My guide and the porter ‘D’ spent the day drinking masala chai which was normally quite expensive but provided for free by the hotel under the custom whereby guides get things free. Eventually the hotel manager chucked them out.

The Manager had only one guest and that was me. Flights from Kathmandu had stopped for about three days, which was serious. Because of the ruinous climbing season, hotels had next to no guests.

Is this a portent of things to come? Will the climbing season change to October and November? Last year it was warm then, and there wasn’t much snow.

This isn’t just a concern for climbers. If less snow were to fall in the Himalayas, the rivers in India and Pakistan would become less reliable in the drier parts of the year, affecting the agriculture that feeds hundreds of millions.

Next day, I put the fact that my guide had wanted sex on my Facebook page. I knew his wife and brother would be watching my page and I made it public. I got to Lukla by myself. It rained all day.

At 3 pm I went to the Danphe Café, where my guide had previously taken me on the way through and introduced me to a so-called owner (probably a friend of his), who had met us there and taken the permits, thus boosting my confidence in the climbing enterprise.

This time, on the way down, I discovered that the people in the Danphe had never heard of my guide (and they were all Sherpas).

So, it seems my guide had arranged to meet a friend there on the way through who did not work at the hotel; pretending to own it when he did not. What a web of deception. I could simply not keep up with it.

I found another hotel. I fell down the steps near the airport. Two Irish ladies picked me up and we sat down and arranged a plan of action. I was to get my own hotel and go to the Tourist Police.

My guide had gone off with my luggage. I texted him and said he had fifteen minutes to come over, or I would go to the Tourist Police. After fifteen minutes I went to see the Tourist Police. They checked the date we came through in a book full of tourists’ and mountaineers’ names. (I was surprised at how many seemed to come from the Ukraine!)

The Tourist Police officer who was helping me check the register had a photo of his son and his wife on his mobile. He said he was from another town nearby. Most men in Nepal love their family: just not my guide! That’s one thing I love about Nepal, myself. In the middle of a crisis we talk about his family and his people: just love it.

The Tourist Police rang my guide. He came down and started yelling at me. A crowd gathered outside the post. I had had enough of listening to my guides lies and yelled back.

The friendly Tourist policeman then called his bosses. About 4 guys came down and listened to me. They said they did not want guides like this in Nepal. My guide was drunk and smelt of alcohol, something the Police picked up on (they noticed it before I did).

They said the fact he took off with my bag and that I had no hotel meant they would punish him. I took them back to my hotel. The senior police officers, a guide a porter and a manager from the Namaste Lodge, who were all there, all said that some woman were even being raped by their male guides, and this had to stop.

All women deserve to be treated with respect. This sort of thing also happens in other countries. Do not get me wrong — I’m not having a go at Nepal.

The guide this story is about was my third guide in the Himalayas so far. I have had problems over warm rooms with others, and my second guide refused to take me up Island and Lobuche Peak after I paid a whopping $6000 US; he also stated that I did not know how to use crampons. I complained to the New Zealand embassy in India. Nothing was done about this nor the guide censured in that case. The details are in my book A Maverick Himalayan Way.

This time I was asked to get married, sleep with the guide, and buy property. The only answer as far as I am concerned is to have a female guide next time. Several guiding companies in Nepal offer female guides: you can go online and find out.

The most professionally advanced is Dawa Yangzum Sherpa, the first Nepalese woman to obtain a prestigious qualification from the Swiss-based International Federation of Mountain Guides this January after about fifty men from Nepal had done so. Other female guides are up and coming.

In addition to going to the Tourist Police, I sent a letter of complaint to the head of the Nepal Mountaineering Association as well.

I needed to get back to Kathmandu.

I had a ticket booked on a later fixed-wing flight out of Lukla. I wasn’t able to change it, and paid extra to fly out by helicopter.

The manager from the Alpine Lodge in Lukla most helpfully came to the airport at 7am and booked me onto the flight.



Video shot from the helicopter out of Lukla. It gives a really fascinating view of hills terraced for farming!

Amazingly, to top it all off, I then learned that my guide had used my fixed-wing ticket to fly to Kathmandu.

Eventually, before I left Nepal, I learned from the Tourist Police in Kathmandu that my guide had suffered the penalty of having his guiding license suspended for two months (he did have one, after all). He had to report to the Tourist Police once a week to discuss respect for his craft, his wife, Nepal, Buddhism and the Dalai Lama.

There are lovely people in Nepal, that’s for sure. People who do their best to make up for the failings of others. Things would be even better if they didn’t have to.

 

This is the fourth and final post in my series about ‘Mad Mountaineering Guides’. I hope you found it thought-provoking!

The post Mad Mountaineering Guides: Time for another me-too movement? (Part Four) appeared first on A Maverick Traveller.

Mad Mountaineering Guides: Time for another me-too movement? (Part Three)

A male specimen of the Danphe or Himalayan Monal, national bird of Nepal, which we did not get to see. ‘The Beautiful Himalayan Monal — Male on Snow. In Tungnath, Uttarakhand’. CC-BY-SA 4.0, image by Ajit Hota, 2017.

 

I HAD hoped that relations with my guide would be more convivial on the way to Island Peak Base Camp, as we were now in what is technically known as Very High Altitude terrain.

At this elevation the risk of succumbing to altitude sickness (an illness caused by lack of oxygen in the blood) or to some other danger is so great as to leave little room for error. Proper acclimatisation is the most vital precaution, and on average it is necessary to acclimatise to any altitude over 2,500 metres. The danger goes up exponentially after that. Tengboche is at 3,500 metres, roughly speaking, and Chukhung is 900 metres higher. Island Peak Base Camp is at roughly 5,100 metres.

In the early 1970s, about one in five hundred trekkers in this area used to die, mostly from altitude sickness or some related problem. That’s trekkers: I’m not even talking about serious mountaineers going higher still. These days it’s very rare for anyone to die of altitude sickness on the trekking routes, but only because people are more aware of the issue and of how to tell mild cases from more serious ones.

The most usual symptoms are wheezy lung symptoms. They go from being like a cold, to being like the flu, to being like pneumonia, to being dead. The brain may also swell up as well, a particularly serious complication. It’s thought that about half of all Himalayan trekkers get the milder forms of altitude sickness. If things get serious a person may start coughing up blood. And if a person does start coughing up blood, this is (as always) a bad sign.

To avoid getting altitude sickness, or to limit its likely severity if you do get it, a person has to ascend in stages, like a diver coming up from a great depth. Proper acclimatisation to Himalayan altitudes takes many days of slowly pushing higher and not overdoing things. There is also a medicine called Diamox, though of course it’s better not to get sick in the first place.

So, while common enough in its milder forms, altitude sickness is no joke because it has plenty of potential to get worse, especially if people ignore the early mild symptoms and keep pushing on. This doesn’t have to be upward. Over-exertion on the level can also make a borderline case get worse.

For instance, on the way, we saw a female member of a Russian party slide down a hill. Her friends gave her water and urged her to continue. She was like a leaf in the wind even with her Nordic walking poles, and was at least 100 metres behind her group. Was she fully acclimatised? I don’t know.

The trek to Island Peak Base Camp was an up and down walk, mostly up (some 500 metres). High winds and sleet alternated with sunny intervals during which I took photos. We made it after three hours, eventually.

 

My tent did not close properly, and I was pleased to have two single mattresses to sleep on for extra warmth. Pheasant- or partridge-type birds were everywhere, males and females pairing up for mating.

My guide told me that they were danphe, a species of pheasant which is the national bird of Nepal. So, I took pictures of them as well.

Birds are common even at very high altitudes in the Himalayas, and this is particularly true in the breeding season. They go higher in order to be safe from predators who might otherwise be attracted by their courtship. Birds’ respiratory systems are more efficient than that of human beings and other mammals, which struggle to follow the birds to these altitudes.

Darwin and the Danphe

Depicted at the start of this essay, the danphe is perhaps the gaudiest of all pheasants. It is Nepal’s answer to India’s national bird, the peacock. It’s a toss-up which is the more spectacular. To my mind the danphe looks like a magical bird from the pages of a fairy tale. The danphe is the avian equivalent of Joseph with his coat of many colours.

Well, the male looks like that. As with all pheasants the danphe hen is a drab creature, much harder to spot. Nature intends it that way, of course. Among heavy, ground-living birds of the pheasant type, it’s vital that the females not attract the attention of predators. The less well-camouflaged males are presumably more expendable.

Though it makes evolutionary sense that the females of big birds that live close to the ground should be harder to spot than the males, the exceptional gaudiness of the male in many species of pheasants, peacocks, and chickens was a poser for Charles Darwin.

He could understand how it made sense to have a well-camouflaged female and a moderately showy male, as with ducks. But how did it make sense for the males to be even more flamboyant than a drake (i.e., male duck)?

Why should heavy birds that lived close to the ground do everything possible to draw a predator’s eye? And to encumber themselves with a great big heavy tail as well, in the case of the peacock?

In the end Darwin concluded that the females of these species must have an eye for beauty that trumped all other considerations; perhaps because gaudiness was also a signal that the male in question was healthy and vigorous.

And so the hen mated with the male who most caught her eye even if he also caught the eye of the tiger a bit later on: with every successive generation of males becoming a bit more conspicuous than the last.

Whether this kind of evolution could go on indefinitely was a good question. In fact, it didn’t seem that it could! Like the antlers of the stag, which served a similar function, the peacock’s tail obviously could not keep on getting bigger, forever, simply to please the pea-hen or, in the case of the stag, the doe.

So, maybe in some cases evolution didn’t always favour the survival of the fittest; at least, not in the long run. Maybe in some cases evolution more or less got side-tracked by mate preference The result was such improbable-looking creatures as the peacock, the danphe and the stag.

Today, we would say such creatures have a place in nature that is like that of a red sports car in a stream of traffic. Practicality and safety have been sacrificed in favour of showing off to the females. And nature has proven as willing to make this expensive choice as some men have.

But the courting pairs we saw were drab in both sexes, the products of a more mundane form of evolution: the family-car variety one might say.

In other words — they weren’t danphe.

A pattern of errors

Only later would I discover my guide’s misidentification and realise, in the same instant, that it fitted into a wider pattern of unreliability. He didn’t even get Nepal’s unmistakeable national bird right. So what else was he wrong about?

Anyhow, at Island Peak Base Camp the toilet was overflowing. It reminded me of similar sanitary problems at Gorek Shep, near Everest Base Camp, which people sometimes call Gorek Shit.

I was invited to have dinner at 6 pm, which was noodles. I refused as I am gluten intolerant. My Pringles chips came in handy and so did my Snickers bars, as I had purchased three of them. I had to sing out for boiled rice instead of noodles.

The Singaporean trekker Siri, who I introduced in a previous instalment, was at Island Peak Base Camp with his guide as well.

We would be leaving to climb Island Peak, more properly known as Imja Tse, at one am.

My sleeping bag was frozen at one in the morning when we prepared to leave. I had tried to do an equipment check earlier, at the Hotel Sherpaland back in Namche Bazaar, but my guide spoke to someone else on the phone, and never checked my equipment.

Even the night before the climb, my guide had refused to check all my gear. It now turned out that I was missing an additional drinking bottle or a bladder that could take hot water, necessary in the high Himalayas as cold water would freeze. I didn’t have enough for the two of us. What a disaster.

The root of this problem lay in the fact that the hiking gear I had assembled in New Zealand had gone missing on an Air Canada flight from Montreal to Toronto. After a 24 hour flight from Toronto to Nepal via the USA, I tried to buy all the most essential mountaineering gear I needed in Kathmandu in one day, before leaving with my guide. But clearly, one or two things were forgotten.

At 4 pm we made it to Crampon Point, where I discovered that to make things worse still, and in fact hopeless, one of the drink bladders that I did have had been unsuitable for filling with hot water, and had burst.

And so, we turned back to Base Camp at 4 am, arriving at 7 am. The Porter ‘D’ was collecting my bag at 10 am from Base Camp, so I repacked that. We then went on our way to Chukhung. I was not going back to the hotel. Instead, I made my way to Dingboche. I put my orthopaedic insoles into my hiking boots, and wore them.

I went into Mama’s Bakery and the Green Tara again to stay the night. This time around I got to meet Yahjing’s husband Tashi, the former Tibetan monk. I loved meeting Tashi: what a character. My guide did not have to pay to stay here. He had his own room, but had to pay to house and feed the porter.

That night, my guide told Tashi that the Dalai Lama was mad and should not follow the Americans. Tashi said that Buddhists do not get into fights, so he got up and left instead. I thought my guide should have been the one to leave the table.

The next day I had coughing fits and was actually coughing blood, and just needed to rest. This was a bad sign of altitude sickness, probably a consequence of our racing ascent to Island Peak Base Camp.

According to the itinerary my guide had drawn up, we were to have climbed Island Peak (6,189 m) on my ninth day in Nepal, after only seven days in the mountains. As it turns out, this was too soon by the recommended standards, whereby the final attempt on such a peak should be left until people have spent about two weeks trekking slowly higher and higher towards it. It’s easy to be wise in hindsight about such things. But of course that’s what guides are meant to be for.

Goodness knows what would have happened if we had not been so short of water to the point of needing every last drop and if one of my water bladders had not then burst. For we would have pressed on to the summit, roughly a thousand metres higher still. And then I might have been overcome by altitude sickness and not been able to make it down, which is another worst-case scenario and a factor in many deaths on Everest and other high mountains.

Mountaineers say that getting to the top is the easy part. It’s coming down when you’re stuffed and quite possibly suffering from altitude sickness that has come on during the climb that is the hard part. And of course you have to get down under your own steam or you will die. That is, barring a rescue which isn’t likely to succeed at Himalayan altitudes and puts other people at risk anyway.

Back in Dingboche (and really we should have been lower still in view of my conditinon), my guide was overheard outside the bakery saying he wanted to change hotels. He asked me if he could save money by having the porter share his free room. I said he should come to some financial arrangement with Tashi all the same. I told Tashi, but he never charged.

Tashi was a great story teller. We had monks visiting the bakery-cum-lodge, and at night Tashi talked about how at age twelve in 1985 he had escaped from Tibet, riding in a truck that crossed over the Indian border.

Tashi said that young Tibetans these days had forgotten their culture and smoked and drank and rode motorbikes.

However, the Dalai Lama ran Tibetan schools that enjoyed some degree of tolerance from the Chinese authorities. Tashi hoped for more autonomy for Tibet. The present Dalai Lama has predicted that he will live to be 113 years old and will witness such a development before his demise.

Interestingly enough, Tashi’s surname was Lama, which means Priest. And it turned out that my guide’s great-grandfather came from Tibet as well.

My guide liked Yahjing and Tashi’s momo dumplings, too. But his behaviour seemed erratic. Tashi offered free meditation and other help to guests, and made a point of extending this offer to my guide.

I warmed to Tashi, who took pity on my guide and treated him with compassion. The next day we were going all the way to Namche Bazaar, so I chose a small hotel run by a friend of Tashis. I wanted to keep the peace, but I knew I had to finish this expedition somehow. My guide was weird, and I had to leave.

To be continued . . .

 

The post Mad Mountaineering Guides: Time for another me-too movement? (Part Three) appeared first on A Maverick Traveller.

Mad Mountaineering Guides: time for another me-too movement? (Part Two)

Mama’s Bakery

 

AFTER Namche Bazaar, I thought things could not get worse. The next day we went on to Tengboche. I chose a hotel named Tashi Delek, where it turned out that none of the staff knew my guide.

He thought he had to sleep on the couch in the dining hall; but guides were given their own rooms! He said he had stayed there seven times. Yet the common story everywhere was that no one knew him.

Our porter stayed at the porter house, where the arrangements were just mattresses on a floor in a warm building. This was more communal than the private rooms for guides, though they got great food. Had my supposed guide only been to Tengboche previously as a porter?

 

From Tengboche, which is officially at 3,867 metres elevation, we were going to Chukhung (a bit of a hike, which would take seven hours and one that would gain about 900 metres in additional elevation.

We were going to go via a village called Dingboche, which sounds like Tengboche but is a different place, further up the hill, at 4,410 metres.

My guide said his leg was playing up. He said that he could not walk properly and that he would go slowly. He then blamed me for going too fast the previous two days, i.e., getting to the Namche bridge to avoid crowds and yaks.

 

 

My guide walking with a stick when he was lame, apparently

 

It was snowing when we left Tengboche, and I spoke to a Sherpa woman minding ten yaks. She was going to the village of Gorek Shep (5,164 metres), near Everest Base Camp. Gorak Shep is so high up that it is not occupied in winter. I asked why she was not a mountain guide, if she hiked all the way up there and back: her job did not have to be in the kitchen.

It snowed every day. The visibility on the way to Chukhung was going to be really bad.

In Dingboche, we stopped in at a café called Mama’s Bakery and had the best momos ever, even though Dingboche was pretty much in the middle of nowhere. Momos are a kind of local dumpling, which is a staple food. Mama’s Bakery adjoins a guesthouse called the Green Tara Lodge, which is owned by Yahjing, a lovely lady from Namche Bazaar, and her husband Tashi. Yahjing told me that Tashi was Tibetan, a former Buddhist monk, and that they had married thirteen years previously and had two children.

 

 

(The name of the lodge looks Irish to Western eyes: but in fact, the Green Tara is a spiritual figure in Tibetan Buddhism.)

I visited the toilet and it was so clean that I thought I would stay at the Green Tara Lodge on the way back down, if it wasn’t full. I was attracted to the unusual cakes in Mama’s Bakery: for instance, a garlic, lemon and ginger cake! And, to the Tibetan flag on the wall and the Buddhist altar.

My guide went through to Chukhung very fast. I met so many other trekkers throughout the whole way who were concerned for my welfare.  Several people had commented that 900 metres in one day was dangerous and that to do a peak within six days of my arrival in Nepal was even more dangerous. That is to say, that such rapid ascents risked altitude sickness.

My guide said this was fine and was no problem: but he just appeared as an imposter. He got to Chukhung by 1pm: what had happened to his bad knee, and why the erratic behaviour?

Anyhow I met this amazing English guy who was carrying his father’s ashes. His father was a mountaineer who had been at least part of the way up Everest and had died ten months previously. The Englishman and his wife were meant to be doing the Base Camp trek to Everest, to spread his father’s ashes at the Base Camp.

But his wife had become pregnant with their second child, due on his father’s birthday, and so she wasn’t able to go all the way. He freaked out about the date coincidence: I said it was normal and I had known other people who this sort of thing had happened to.

He was helpful, and I walked with him for about an hour.

He was recounting his fathers’ descriptions of the track, from memory. What an amazing goodbye.

Then I met a couple from Poland, who took a trip once a year for two weeks without their kids; then took a trip once a year with their kids.

They were breathless getting up the hill to Dingboche and we walked together for two hours. Later I would meet them at Mama’s Bakery and we shared a helicopter together on the way back to Kathmandu, all by chance.

The couple were staying the night in Dingboche: so, onward and upward to Chukhung by myself. I had paid $4000 US for a guide recommended to me by a friend in France, and this guide was nowhere to be seen, having gone on ahead of me.

I got lost out of Dingboche as the visibility was poor, with low cloud and sleet. I almost wandered off the track and up a hill instead and had to ask porters and ordinary Nepalis how to get to Chukhung.

The vegetation was sparse, and pregnant yaks grazed on the new Spring growth.

My guide sent the porter to find me at 4pm. I was staying at the Sunshine Eco Lodge in Chukhung. After I had arrived a Singaporean tourist asked, in what was now becoming a familiar mantra, what is wrong with your guide? The Singaporean’s name was Siri. His guide was amazing: he ran around, got the food, and asked if Siri was ok. Never once did my guide ask if I was ok: it was all about his knee, followed by a blister.

Siri’s guide had maps, and they discussed the trail, about the precise route they should take up the Island Peak Summit. My guide had no map, no drinking bottle (he borrowed mine) and no sufficient snow gear. He and his brother owned the agency I had hired him from: ironically enough, an agency that seemed to have lots of other bona fide guides.

I was really wanting to trust my guide to take me to the top of Island Peak. He said he was Nepali and did not need a drinking bottle- so he just drank mine! I noticed our porter, a man called ‘D’, was really tired. So, I fed him for the next two days.

The owner of the lodge told me not to talk to people, or to talk so loudly, which I thought was a bit much. Then he charged me US 80 for hiring boots and other equipment. Siri only paid for one day: I paid for two days hire to be on the safe side.

I decided to leave the Lodge abruptly when I was told I could only wear the mountaineering boots from Island Peak Base Camp: a three-hour walk up and another 500 metres in elevation. I had put my orthopaedic insoles into those boots and could not easily take them out and use my hiking boots as it taken an hour to put my insoles into these mountaineering boots.  After this insult, I left early for Island Peak.

(One guide was living in a tent outside the Lodge, and he told me it was so cold!)

The room my guide initially booked me into was dark and dingy and I asked for a better room. The only difference was that the covers on the bed were cleaner. There was mould in the walls and another guest complained that the water froze in her drinking-water bladder.

I had stayed at a better hotel in Chukhung on my last trip, and just did not like the mould: you get sick. And on top of that, the owner was a control freak telling me not to talk to anyone!

 

(To be continued. . . )

 

 

 

The post Mad Mountaineering Guides: time for another me-too movement? (Part Two) appeared first on A Maverick Traveller.

Mad mountaineering guides: time for another me-too movement? (Part Two)

 

Mama’s Bakery

 

AFTER Namche Bazaar, I thought things could not get worse. The next day we went on to Tengboche. I chose a hotel named Tashi Delek, where it turned out that none of the staff knew my guide.

He thought he had to sleep on the couch in the dining hall; but guides were given their own rooms! He said he had stayed there seven times. Yet the common story everywhere was that no one knew him.

Our porter stayed at the porter house, where the arrangements were just mattresses on a floor in a warm building. This was more communal than the private rooms for guides, though they got great food. Had my supposed guide only been to Tengboche previously as a porter?

 

From Tengboche, which is officially at 3,867 metres elevation, we were going to Chukhung (a bit of a hike, which would take seven hours and one that would gain about 900 metres in additional elevation.

We were going to go via a village called Dingboche, which sounds like Tengboche but is a different place, further up the hill, at 4,410 metres.

My guide said his leg was playing up. He said that he could not walk properly and that he would go slowly. He then blamed me for going too fast the previous two days, i.e., getting to the Namche bridge to avoid crowds and yaks.

 

 

My guide walking with a stick when he was lame, apparently.

 

It was snowing when we left Tengboche, and I spoke to a Sherpa woman minding ten yaks. She was going to the village of Gorek Shep (5,164 metres), near Everest Base Camp. Gorak Shep is so high up that it is not occupied in winter. I asked why she was not a mountain guide, if she hiked all the way up there and back: her job did not have to be in the kitchen.

It snowed every day. The visibility on the way to Chukhung was going to be really bad.

In Dingboche, we stopped in at a café called Mama’s Bakery and had the best momos ever, even though Dingboche was pretty much in the middle of nowhere. Momos are a kind of local dumpling, which is a staple food. Mama’s Bakery adjoins a guesthouse called the Green Tara Lodge, which is owned by Yahjing, a lovely lady from Namche Bazaar, and her husband Tashi. Yahjing told me that Tashi was Tibetan, a former Buddhist monk, and that they had married thirteen years previously and had two children.

 

 

(The name of the lodge looks Irish to Western eyes: but in fact, the Green Tara is a spiritual figure in Tibetan Buddhism.)

I visited the toilet and it was so clean that I thought I would stay at the Green Tara Lodge on the way back down, if it wasn’t full. I was attracted to the unusual cakes in Mama’s Bakery: for instance, a garlic, lemon and ginger cake! And, to the Tibetan flag on the wall and the Buddhist altar.

My guide went through to Chukhung very fast. I met so many other trekkers throughout the whole way who were concerned for my welfare.  Several people had commented that 900 metres in one day was dangerous and that to do a peak within six days of my arrival in Nepal was even more dangerous. That is to say, that such rapid ascents risked altitude sickness.

My guide said this was fine and was no problem: but he just appeared as an imposter. He got to Chukhung by 1pm: what had happened to his bad knee, and why the erratic behaviour?

Anyhow I met this amazing English guy who was carrying his father’s ashes. His father was a mountaineer who had been at least part of the way up Everest and had died ten months previously. The Englishman and his wife were meant to be doing the Base Camp trek to Everest, to spread his father’s ashes at the Base Camp.

But his wife had become pregnant with their second child, due on his father’s birthday, and so she wasn’t able to go all the way. He freaked out about the date coincidence: I said it was normal and I had known other people who this sort of thing had happened to.

He was helpful, and I walked with him for about an hour.

He was recounting his fathers’ descriptions of the track, from memory. What an amazing goodbye.

Then I met a couple from Poland, who took a trip once a year for two weeks without their kids; then took a trip once a year with their kids.

They were breathless getting up the hill to Dingboche and we walked together for two hours. Later I would meet them at Mama’s Bakery and we shared a helicopter together on the way back to Kathmandu, all by chance.

The couple were staying the night in Dingboche: so, onward and upward to Chukhung by myself. I had paid $4000 US for a guide recommended to me by a friend in France, and this guide was nowhere to be seen, having gone on ahead of me.

I got lost out of Dingboche as the visibility was poor, with low cloud and sleet. I almost wandered off the track and up a hill instead and had to ask porters and ordinary Nepalis how to get to Chukhung.

The vegetation was sparse, and pregnant yaks grazed on the new Spring growth.

My guide sent the porter to find me at 4pm. I was staying at the Sunshine Eco Lodge in Chukhung. After I had arrived a Singaporean tourist asked, in what was now becoming a familiar mantra, what is wrong with your guide? The Singaporean’s name was Siri. His guide was amazing: he ran around, got the food, and asked if Siri was ok. Never once did my guide ask if I was ok: it was all about his knee, followed by a blister.

Siri’s guide had maps, and they discussed the trail, about the precise route they should take up the Island Peak Summit. My guide had no map, no drinking bottle (he borrowed mine) and no sufficient snow gear. He and his brother owned the agency I had hired him from: ironically enough, an agency that seemed to have lots of other bona fide guides.

I was really wanting to trust my guide to take me to the top of Island Peak. He said he was Nepali and did not need a drinking bottle- so he just drank mine! I noticed our porter, a man called ‘D’, was really tired. So, I fed him for the next two days.

The owner of the lodge told me not to talk to people, or to talk so loudly, which I thought was a bit much. Then he charged me US 80 for hiring boots and other equipment. Siri only paid for one day: I paid for two days hire to be on the safe side.

I decided to leave the Lodge abruptly when I was told I could only wear the mountaineering boots, from Base Camp; and Base Camp was a 3 hour walk up and down and another 500 metres in elevation. I had put my orthopaedic insoles into those boots and could not easily take them out and use my hiking boots as it taken an hour to put my insoles into these mountaineering boots.  After this insult, I left early for Island Peak.

(One guide was living in a tent outside the Lodge, and he told me it was so cold!)

The room my guide initially booked me into was dark and dingy and I asked for a better room. The only difference was that the covers on the bed were cleaner. There was mould in the walls and another guest complained that the water froze in her drinking-water bladder.

I had stayed at a better hotel in Chukhung on my last trip, and just did not like the mould: you get sick. And on top of that, the owner was a control freak telling me not to talk to anyone!

 

(To be continued. . . )

 

 

 

The post Mad mountaineering guides: time for another me-too movement? (Part Two) appeared first on A Maverick Traveller.

A Cold April in historic Qu��bec City

I RODE the train into Qu��bec City from Montr��al, set on exploring the capital of the former New France and the modern Province of Qu��bec; a city so different to most other cities in North America���������more like a transplanted plug of old Europe, complete with city walls. The journey took three hours. I whiled some of it away in a discussion with a Facebook friend who lives in Qu��bec City, a writer of Netflix episodes and aspiring actor who...

A Cold April in historic Québec City

La fresque des Québécois, a mural in the old city. This is all painted on a flat wall!

 

I RODE the train into Québec City from Montréal, set on exploring the capital of the former New France and the modern Province of Québec; a city so different to most other cities in North America – more like a transplanted plug of old Europe, complete with city walls.

The journey took three hours. I whiled some of it away in a discussion with a Facebook friend who lives in Québec City, a writer of Netflix episodes and aspiring actor who worked on the 2005 film Le Couperet (released as The Ax in America, and The Axe in Britain).

The St Lawrence River was partly frozen over, and so were the cliffs I saw when entering the city of Québec, which stands at the first narrows of the great St Lawrence estuary which leads to the Great Lakes, guarding access to the interior of the North American continent. Or, at least, it did in the days of sail.

I’ll describe my modern adventures in Québec in a moment. But first, a little background on this most historic city.

 

A Historic City

Québec City was founded in 1608, as the capital of a French colony called New France. The colony itself was founded in 1534 when the explorer Jacques Cartier landed on the Gaspé peninsula, well out toward the east in the St Lawrence seaway. In the maps above, the Gaspé peninsula is a large, curving, peninsula north of New Brunswick, with the town of Gaspé near its tip.

A Canadian national park close to Québec City, which can be seen as a patch of green overlapping the city’s name in the lower of the two maps above, is also named after Jacques Cartier.

Québec City was founded as a fort by Samuel de Champlain: a fort that became the Québec Citadel. All traffic to and from the Great Lakes had to pass through a narrow gut overseen by the Québec Citadel, located atop formidable cliffs that looked down on the St Lawrence River. Cliffs hem in the river in on the other side as well.

Possession of the only way in and out of the Great Lakes helped the French to gain control of what eventually became a vast area of the North American continent. By the mid-1700s, New France extended all the way south to New Orleans and west beyond modern-day Winnipeg, and also incorporated the whole of what is now the mid-western United States. That’s why so many places in the mid-West have French names even though they are a long way from more obvious centres of French culture like Québec or New Orleans.

The northern part of New France was called Canada, the southern part Louisiana. These names survive today, of course, though the boundaries of modern Canada and modern Louisiana are a lot different.

As large as it was, the New France of the mid-eighteenth century was under-populated and hard to defend. Most of the territory had no towns, only forts. If the British could dislodge the French from a few key strongholds such as Québec City, it would be a straightforward matter to take over the rest. The conquest of New France became a British objective once a general European conflict known as the Seven Years’ War broke out in the 1750s.

The British scaled Quebec City’s cliffs in 1759 to capture the city in a battle fought at a site known, in English, as the Plains of Abraham.

 

Thereafter, Québec became part of British North America and ultimately of modern Canada, in which Québec City is the capital of the Province of Québec.

Ironically, the British conquest of New France made the American Revolution possible. The American colonists didn’t need the British army to defend them from France anymore, and started to think of the redcoats as the enemy instead.

At the same time, despite the loss of the American colonies, the British gained so much territory that they began to talk about something called the British Empire: a rather new and agreeable idea as far as they were concerned.

As for France, it suffered a revolution of its own: a revolution which almost certainly would not have happened had New France not been lost. A dynasty of kings named Louis, after whom Louisiana was named, lost much of its prestige—and domestic instability followed.

 

History was made in Québec City once again in August 1943, when Canadian Prime Minister William Mackenzie King, F. D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and the Governor-General of Canada (the Earl of Athlone, in uniform) made plans for the conduct of the latter part of World War II at the Citadel, where the photograph below was taken, and at the Château Frontenac, an upmarket hotel that can be seen in the background.

So, we can say that all kinds of history have been made in Québec, really. It’s not exaggerating much to say that the British Empire, the United States, the French Revolution and D-Day were all made in Québec City.

 

 

Back to the Present

After I got to Québec City, I stayed in Rue Couillard, at the Auberge de La Paix or Hostel of Peace, which has a peace sign outside.

In the 1970s, locals formed an association to provide cheap accommodation, as the bourgeoisie had objected to people tenting in the green areas around Québec, and the Auberge de la Paix was one of the results.

The Auberge has a large section where people can camp in the summer (in winter it is under a blanket of snow).

The Auberge was a fifteen-minute walk, mostly uphill, from a railway station called the Gare du Palais. This is a beautiful building, one of many that I didn’t notice on the way up the hill due to my heavy backpack with boots in it.

(I intended to use these boots in Nepal, where I was headed next, to go climbing; and was lugging them around with me even in Canada!)

The Auberge was a beautiful building from the 1800s. Maybe, parts of it were older still. But there were a lot of fires in the old days. Buildings were rebuilt to the point that you couldn’t really tell how old they were to begin with.

At the Auberge, you could stay in a dorm or have your own room.

Next morning, I got to know the neighbourhood better. I walked more consciously past the Irish pub called St Pats, past the Hôtel de Ville, the Seminaire de Québec, the Place d’Armes and Parc Montmorency.

I walked along the Promenade des Gouverneurs, which is above the St Lawrence River and as such a bit like the Brühl Terrace in Dresden, and finished at the La Citadelle de Québec, the old fort.

Before I got to the Citadelle, or Citadel, I saw the Château Frontenac, which has long served as an upmarket hotel, and the battlefield known in English histories as the Plains of Abraham. I walked along the fortress walls before arriving at the Citadel.

Motorists who are local stop for you to let you cross the road. I was amazed at how happy they were to do that.

 



Promenade des Gouverneurs, overlooking the St Lawrence River – the local equivalent of Brühl’s Terrace in Dresden!

 

 

The city reminded me of Edinburgh, with very similar brick and stone houses. Indeed, there was an old alliance between France and Scotland in the days of Mary Queen of Scots, and there may have been some transfer of architectural ideas.

 

I visited the Hôtel du Parlement, the Québec provincial parliament house, also referred to as the national assembly. You can actually meet local legislators informally—they are so laid back here.

The Citadel is a good example of a well-preserved old European stone fort in the Americas.

What is even more remarkable is that the oldest part of Québec City is also a walled city with the Citadel at one end of the walls. Old Québec is the only intact walled city on the North American continent north of Mexico.

 

 

 

 

 

Many Irish also migrated to Québec, to the point that it is estimated that 30 or 40 per cent of the population of the Province of Québec have some Irish ancestry, even if they have French names.

In 1867 the Dominion of Canada was formed from the Province of Canada, corresponding to modern-day Ontario and Québec into which the Province was split, along with New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Canada would later add western provinces and Newfoundland, which otherwise remained separate British colonies for a time, indeed until 1947 in the case of Newfoundland.

Section 133 of the Constitution Act, 1867, made the Canadian federal parliament and the Québec legislature both officially bilingual, though the parliaments of other provinces were conducted purely in English. This is interesting, as Māori has also been spoken in the New Zealand Parliament since 1868, for about as long as French in the assemblies of Ottawa and Québec.

The moderate-separatist Bloc Québecois party only hold 30 per cent of the seats in the Québec parliament now, which is dominated by the Liberals. Québec has decided it needs Canada, the guide said.

I went to the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Québec National Fine Arts Gallery. This featured art both local and international, including some sculptures by the renowned Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti, who worked with Salvador Dalí in Paris in the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s.

 

There were also some remarkable paintings, which I haven’t been able to do justice to in the dim light (you can’t use a flash, obviously), but at least these photos give you an idea.

 

Indigenous affairs: a blot on Canada’s reputation

Also, there was some indigenous artwork in the museum, by which hangs a tale:

 

 

If the position of the Māori in New Zealand is comparable to that of the French in Canada in some ways, the indigenous peoples of Canada, which the Canadians call First Nations, are in a much more marginal position.

Canadian First Nations have a degree of autonomy on reservations and in various northern fastnesses of a more extensive nature such as Nunavik, the northern third of the Province of Québec.

 

 

But Canadian First Nations speak many widely different languages. In New Zealand, all Māori iwi or tribes are united by a common language—indeed, the word Māori means ‘common’—which is also one of the two officially spoken and written languages in New Zealand, the other being English.

(The Māori name for New Zealand, Aotearoa, land of the long white cloud or bright shining land, also has official status though non-New Zealanders find it hard to pronounce.)

Also, the languages of other Polynesian peoples from tropical islands north of Aotearoa are similar to each other and to Māori, differing only about as much as Spanish might differ from French. Polynesians who come from the tropical islands either directly or by descent are also common in New Zealand today.

To make matters worse for Canadian First Nations, they are a comparatively small minority as well as a scattered one. The population of Nunavik, for example, is only twelve thousand. All the First Nations taken together add up to about 1.4 million out of Canada’s roughly more than 36 million inhabitants.

People of Māori/Polynesian descent add up to about one million in Aotearoa, a number which is smaller. On the other hand, because the total population of Aotearoa is only 4.8 million, the result is a First Nations bloc in Aotearoa that commands a degree of influence that Canadian First Nations can only dream of—a position that is, literally, more like that of the French-Canadians.

A large number of treaties were signed between the Crown or the Dominion of Canada and various Canadian indigenous groups (though not with all of them). In New Zealand there was only one, the Treaty of Waitangi, which is thus perhaps more difficult to overlook.

Though bad things have befallen Māori and their island relatives at the hands of the European, the indigenous populations of Canada have often suffered worse fates, more like those of the Australian Aborigines—and indeed, in one respect, worse still.

The most objectionable aspect of past Canadian indigenous policy is the extent to which indigenous communities were, for a long time, subjected to forced assimilation into white society.  A similar a policy was pursued to some degree in Australia with its ‘stolen generations’, but even that was half-hearted by Canadian standards.

Indigenous communities in Canada were even denied formal citizenship unless they abandoned their old ways—no such legal discrimination was practiced in New Zealand, nor even in Australia—and Canadian First Nations also bore the brunt of various other stratagems aimed at wiping out their supposedly primitive tendencies, such as residential schools that broke up families, and even a high rate of forced sterilisation of those judged (by Europeans) to be antisocial or incapable of looking after themselves or their children properly, in the western provinces where indigenous populations were largest.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been quite busy apologising for all those things lately.

 

 The Trans-Mountain Pipeline and its distant resonances in Québec

Speaking of Justin Trudeau, he is currently embroiled in a controversy over an oil pipeline that the firm Kinder Morgan wish to build, to transport diluted bitumen from oilfields in Alberta, over the Rockies, to a tanker port in the ecologically sensitive San Juan de Fuca strait north of Vancouver.

There is already one such pipeline, carrying oil, called the Trans-Mountain Pipeline, but Kinder Morgan are proposing a second one to run alongside the first.

The British Columbia government under Premier John Horgan is opposed to the second Trans-Mountain Pipeline, as are a number of First Nation and environmental groups. On the other hand, the project is supported by Alberta Premier Rachel Notley’s government, which is threatening to cut off oil and gas sales to BC if the pipeline doesn’t proceed.

Trudeau is proposing to assert the legal paramountcy of the federal government to ensure that the pipeline goes through and even to bail out Kinder Morgan financially.

I was a little surprised by this, given that New Zealand’s government under Jacinda Ardern has just banned further offshore oil and gas exploration in and around New Zealand (a policy that, admittedly, doesn’t affect current exploration).

But in case readers think I am wandering off topic, the interesting thing about the pipeline dispute is that it has also upset the Québecois, who might not otherwise have taken too much interest in goings-on at the other end of the country.

For the Québecois guard their autonomy and special character dearly, and don’t like to see the federal government getting too heavy-handed with a province whatever the issue might be.

 

 

Meanwhile, back in Québec City . . .

I had a massage at a place called L’attitude by a woman called France, who said if I meditated my back pain would go away and practiced the Trager massage technique. But I would not recommend it, as it isn’t hard enough for my back pain. This was in the fashionable Avenue Cartier District.

As to where people should stay, I recommend the Saint-Roch district, northwest of the old walled city. Saint-Roch has a Youth Hostel and is, most importantly, outside the city wall. The issue is that the old city is more picturesque, but parking inside the wall is hard to find. The district is unmissably dominated by a large, early-twentieth-century Roman Catholic church, the Église de Saint-Roch.

 

 

I wanted to do a further walking tour with a proper guide, but Trip Advisor had nothing under $300, so I downloaded a free self-walking app. The Bureau de Tourisme offered some local advice, but also told me to go online to find out about le Parc national de la Jacques-Cartier, the Jacques Cartier National Park.

The Jacques Cartier National Park is forty minutes from Québec City and is great for both Winter and Summer sports. You can hire snow shoes, and other items in Winter and do a tour. You can stay in cabins and yurts. It’s worth checking the website sepaq.com/jacquescartier (exclusively in French, but it’s easy enough to auto-translate).

 



Jacques Cartier National Park

 

 I hired a car in order to drive to the Jacques Cartier National Park. What with global warming and the paradoxical increase in cold snaps that it causes in mid-latitudes, the result has been an unusually cold April. So, I had snow tyres. Which was just as well because when I finally left Québec City for the airport, once more by car, it was in a blizzard!

 

 

Coda: beware of Canadian weather-related mixups

 I had a connecting flight to Montréal, and then to Toronto. But these didn’t happen thanks to the storm, and also thanks to what I though was the incompetence of Air Canada, who proceeded to lose my luggage.

I got to Montreal OK, but then it turned out my 5:45 flight was cancelled. They put me on an earlier flight, at 4:30, and my bag, with all my heavy and expensive gear for Nepal, somehow failed to turn up on the carousel at Toronto.

I was given a toothbrush and told that it would turn up the next day at Montreal, but it didn’t. Meanwhile I was booked onto a connecting flight to Los Angeles, so I could make my flight to Nepal.

In the end I had to press on to Nepal and get more gear once there. My bag was sent on to Auckland, where it did arrive, by the Canadians. I felt that I got no sympathy from customer service and gave them 3 out of 5 on Google.

 

 

 

The post A Cold April in historic Québec City appeared first on A Maverick Traveller.

A cold April in historic Québec City

La fresque des Québécois, a mural in the old city. This is all painted on a flat wall!

 

THE train from Montreal to Québec City took three hours. The journey was made a lot faster by discussion with my Facebook friend William, a writer of Netflix episodes and aspiring actor, who worked on the 2005 Franco-Belgian film Le Couperet (released as The Ax in America, and The Axe in Britain).

The St Lawrence River was partly frozen over, and so were the cliffs I saw when entering the city of Québec, which stands at the first narrows of the great St Lawrence estuary which leads to the Great Lakes, guarding access to the interior of the North American continent. Or, at least, it did in the days of sail.

I’ll describe my modern adventures in Quebec City in a moment. But first, a little background on this most historic city.

 

A Historic City

Québec City was founded in 1608, as the capital of a French colony called New France. The colony itself was founded in 1534 when the explorer Jacques Cartier landed on the Gaspé peninsula, well out toward the east in the St Lawrence seaway. In the maps above, the Gaspé peninsula is a large, curving, peninsula north of New Brunswick, with the town of Gaspé near its tip.

A Canadian national park close to Québec City, which can be seen as a patch of green overlapping the city’s name in the lower of the two maps above, is also named after Jacques Cartier.

Québec City was founded as a fort by Samuel de Champlain: a fort that became the Québec Citadel. All traffic to and from the Great Lakes had to pass through a narrow gut overseen by the Québec Citadel, located atop formidable cliffs that looked down on the St Lawrence River. Cliffs hem in the river in on the other side as well.

Possession of the only way in and out of the Great Lakes helped the French to gain control of what eventually became a vast area of the North American continent. By the mid-1700s, New France extended all the way south to New Orleans and west beyond modern-day Winnipeg, and also incorporated the whole of what is now the mid-western United States. That’s why so many places in the mid-West have French names even though they are a long way from more obvious centres of French culture like Québec or New Orleans.

The northern part of New France was called Canada, the southern part Louisiana. These names survive today, of course, though the boundaries of modern Canada and modern Louisiana are a lot different.

As large as it was, the New France of the mid-eighteenth century was under-populated and hard to defend. Most of the territory had no towns, only forts. If the British could dislodge the French from a few key strongholds such as Québec City, it would be a straightforward matter to take over the rest. The conquest of New France became a British objective once a general European conflict known as the Seven Years’ War broke out in the 1750s.

The British scaled Quebec City’s cliffs in 1759 to capture the city in a battle fought at a site known, in English, as the Plains of Abraham.

 

Thereafter, Québec became part of British North America and ultimately of modern Canada, in which Québec City is the capital of the Province of Québec.

Ironically, the British conquest of New France made the American Revolution possible. The American colonists didn’t need the British army to defend them from France anymore, and started to think of the redcoats as the enemy instead.

At the same time, despite the loss of the American colonies, the British gained so much territory that they began to talk about something called the British Empire: a rather new and agreeable idea as far as they were concerned.

As for France, it suffered a revolution of its own: a revolution which almost certainly would not have happened had New France not been lost. A dynasty of kings named Louis, after whom Louisiana was named, lost much of its prestige—and domestic instability followed.

 

History was made in Québec City once again in August 1943, when Canadian Prime Minister William Mackenzie King, F. D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and the Governor-General of Canada (the Earl of Athlone, in uniform) made plans for the conduct of the latter part of World War II at the Citadel, where the photograph below was taken, and at the Château Frontenac, an upmarket hotel that can be seen in the background.

So, we can say that all kinds of history have been made in Québec, really. It’s not exaggerating much to say that the British Empire, the United States, the French Revolution and D-Day were all made in Québec City.

 

 

Back to the Present

After I got to Québec City, I stayed in Rue Couillard, at the Auberge de La Paix or Hostel of Peace, which has a peace sign outside.

In the 1970s, locals formed an association to provide cheap accommodation, as the bourgeoisie had objected to people tenting in the green areas around Québec, and the Auberge de la Paix was one of the results.

The Auberge has a large section where people can camp in the summer (in winter it is under a blanket of snow).

The Auberge was a fifteen-minute walk, mostly uphill, from a railway station called the Gare du Palais. This is a beautiful building, one of many that I didn’t notice on the way up the hill due to my heavy backpack with boots in it.

(I intended to use these boots in Nepal, where I was headed next, to go climbing; and was lugging them around with me even in Canada!)

The Auberge was a beautiful building from the 1800s. Maybe, parts of it were older still. But there were a lot of fires in the old days. Buildings were rebuilt to the point that you couldn’t really tell how old they were to begin with.

At the Auberge, you could stay in a dorm or have your own room.

Next morning, I got to know the neighbourhood better. I walked more consciously past the Irish pub called St Pats, past the Hôtel de Ville, the Seminaire de Québec, the Place d’Armes and Parc Montmorency.

I walked along the Promenade des Gouverneurs, which is above the St Lawrence River and as such a bit like the Brühl Terrace in Dresden, and finished at the La Citadelle de Québec, the old fort.

Before I got to the Citadelle, or Citadel, I saw the Château Frontenac, which has long served as an upmarket hotel, and the battlefield known in English histories as the Plains of Abraham. I walked along the fortress walls before arriving at the Citadel.

Motorists who are local stop for you to let you cross the road. I was amazed at how happy they were to do that.

 



Promenade des Gouverneurs, overlooking the St Lawrence River – the local equivalent of Brühl’s Terrace in Dresden!

 

 

The city reminded me of Edinburgh, with very similar brick and stone houses. Indeed, there was an old alliance between France and Scotland in the days of Mary Queen of Scots, and there may have been some transfer of architectural ideas.

 

I visited the Hôtel du Parlement, the Québec provincial parliament house, also referred to as the national assembly. You can actually meet local legislators informally—they are so laid back here.

The Citadel is a good example of a well-preserved old European stone fort in the Americas.

What is even more remarkable is that the oldest part of Québec City is also a walled city with the Citadel at one end of the walls. Old Québec is the only intact walled city on the North American continent north of Mexico.

 

 

 

 

 

Many Irish also migrated to Québec, to the point that it is estimated that 30 or 40 per cent of the population of the Province of Québec have some Irish ancestry, even if they have French names.

In 1867 the Dominion of Canada was formed from the Province of Canada, corresponding to modern-day Ontario and Québec into which the Province was split, along with New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Canada would later add western provinces and Newfoundland, which otherwise remained separate British colonies for a time, indeed until 1947 in the case of Newfoundland.

Section 133 of the Constitution Act, 1867, made the Canadian federal parliament and the Québec legislature both officially bilingual, though the parliaments of other provinces were conducted purely in English. This is interesting, as Māori has also been spoken in the New Zealand Parliament since 1868, for about as long as French in the assemblies of Ottawa and Québec.

The moderate-separatist Bloc Québecois party only hold 30 per cent of the seats in the Québec parliament now, which is dominated by the Liberals. Québec has decided it needs Canada, the guide said.

I went to the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Québec National Fine Arts Gallery. This featured art both local and international, including some sculptures by the renowned Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti, who worked with Salvador Dalí in Paris in the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s.

 

There were also some remarkable paintings, which I haven’t been able to do justice to in the dim light (you can’t use a flash, obviously), but at least these photos give you an idea.

 

Indigenous affairs: a blot on Canada’s reputation

Also, there was some indigenous artwork in the museum, by which hangs a tale:

 

 

If the position of the Māori in New Zealand is comparable to that of the French in Canada in some ways, the indigenous peoples of Canada, which the Canadians call First Nations, are in a much more marginal position.

Canadian First Nations have a degree of autonomy on reservations and in various northern fastnesses of a more extensive nature such as Nunavik, the northern third of the Province of Québec.

 

 

But Canadian First Nations speak many widely different languages. In New Zealand, all Māori iwi or tribes are united by a common language—indeed, the word Māori means ‘common’—which is also one of the two officially spoken and written languages in New Zealand, the other being English.

(The Māori name for New Zealand, Aotearoa, land of the long white cloud or bright shining land, also has official status though non-New Zealanders find it hard to pronounce.)

Also, the languages of other Polynesian peoples from tropical islands north of Aotearoa are similar to each other and to Māori, differing only about as much as Spanish might differ from French. Polynesians who come from the tropical islands either directly or by descent are also common in New Zealand today.

To make matters worse for Canadian First Nations, they are a comparatively small minority as well as a scattered one. The population of Nunavik, for example, is only twelve thousand. All the First Nations taken together add up to about 1.4 million out of Canada’s roughly more than 36 million inhabitants.

People of Māori/Polynesian descent add up to about one million in Aotearoa, a number which is smaller. On the other hand, because the total population of Aotearoa is only 4.8 million, the result is a First Nations bloc in Aotearoa that commands a degree of influence that Canadian First Nations can only dream of—a position that is, literally, more like that of the French-Canadians.

A large number of treaties were signed between the Crown or the Dominion of Canada and various Canadian indigenous groups (though not with all of them). In New Zealand there was only one, the Treaty of Waitangi, which is thus perhaps more difficult to overlook.

Though bad things have befallen Māori and their island relatives at the hands of the European, the indigenous populations of Canada have often suffered worse fates, more like those of the Australian Aborigines—and indeed, in one respect, worse still.

The most objectionable aspect of past Canadian indigenous policy is the extent to which indigenous communities were, for a long time, subjected to forced assimilation into white society.  A similar a policy was pursued to some degree in Australia with its ‘stolen generations’, but even that was half-hearted by Canadian standards.

Indigenous communities in Canada were even denied formal citizenship unless they abandoned their old ways—no such legal discrimination was practiced in New Zealand, nor even in Australia—and Canadian First Nations also bore the brunt of various other stratagems aimed at wiping out their supposedly primitive tendencies, such as residential schools that broke up families, and even a high rate of forced sterilisation of those judged (by Europeans) to be antisocial or incapable of looking after themselves or their children properly, in the western provinces where indigenous populations were largest.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been quite busy apologising for all those things lately.

 

 The Trans-Mountain Pipeline and its distant resonances in Québec

Speaking of Justin Trudeau, he is currently embroiled in a controversy over an oil pipeline that the firm Kinder Morgan wish to build, to transport diluted bitumen from oilfields in Alberta, over the Rockies, to a tanker port in the ecologically sensitive San Juan de Fuca strait north of Vancouver.

There is already one such pipeline, carrying oil, called the Trans-Mountain Pipeline, but Kinder Morgan are proposing a second one to run alongside the first.

The British Columbia government under Premier John Horgan is opposed to the second Trans-Mountain Pipeline, as are a number of First Nation and environmental groups. On the other hand, the project is supported by Alberta Premier Rachel Notley’s government, which is threatening to cut off oil and gas sales to BC if the pipeline doesn’t proceed.

Trudeau is proposing to assert the legal paramountcy of the federal government to ensure that the pipeline goes through and even to bail out Kinder Morgan financially.

I was a little surprised by this, given that New Zealand’s government under Jacinda Ardern has just banned further offshore oil and gas exploration in and around New Zealand (a policy that, admittedly, doesn’t affect current exploration).

But in case readers think I am wandering off topic, the interesting thing about the pipeline dispute is that it has also upset the Québecois, who might not otherwise have taken too much interest in goings-on at the other end of the country.

For the Québecois guard their autonomy and special character dearly, and don’t like to see the federal government getting too heavy-handed with a province whatever the issue might be.

 

 

Meanwhile, back in Québec City . . .

I had a massage at a place called L’attitude by a woman called France, who said if I meditated my back pain would go away and practiced the Trager massage technique. But I would not recommend it, as it isn’t hard enough for my back pain. This was in the fashionable Avenue Cartier District.

As to where people should stay, I recommend the Saint-Roch district, northwest of the old walled city. Saint-Roch has a Youth Hostel and is, most importantly, outside the city wall. The issue is that the old city is more picturesque, but parking inside the wall is hard to find. The district is unmissably dominated by a large, early-twentieth-century Roman Catholic church, the Église de Saint-Roch.

 

 

I wanted to do a further walking tour with a proper guide, but Trip Advisor had nothing under $300, so I downloaded a free self-walking app. The Bureau de Tourisme offered some local advice, but also told me to go online to find out about le Parc national de la Jacques-Cartier, the Jacques Cartier National Park.

The Jacques Cartier National Park is forty minutes from Québec City and is great for both Winter and Summer sports. You can hire snow shoes, and other items in Winter and do a tour. You can stay in cabins and yurts. It’s worth checking the website sepaq.com/jacquescartier (exclusively in French, but it’s easy enough to auto-translate).

 



Jacques Cartier National Park

 

 I hired a car in order to drive to the Jacques Cartier National Park. What with global warming and the paradoxical increase in cold snaps that it causes in mid-latitudes, the result has been an unusually cold April. So, I had snow tyres. Which was just as well because when I finally left Québec City for the airport, once more by car, it was in a blizzard!

 

 

Coda: beware of Canadian weather-related mixups

 I had a connecting flight to Montréal, and then to Toronto. But these didn’t happen thanks to the storm, and also thanks to what I though was the incompetence of Air Canada, who proceeded to lose my luggage.

I got to Montreal OK, but then it turned out my 5:45 flight was cancelled. They put me on an earlier flight, at 4:30, and my bag, with all my heavy and expensive gear for Nepal, somehow failed to turn up on the carousel at Toronto.

I was given a toothbrush and told that it would turn up the next day at Montreal, but it didn’t. Meanwhile I was booked onto a connecting flight to Los Angeles, so I could make my flight to Nepal.

In the end I had to press on to Nepal and get more gear once there. My bag was sent on to Auckland, where it did arrive, by the Canadians. I felt that I got no sympathy from customer service and gave them 3 out of 5 on Google.

 

 

 

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Mad mountaineering guides: room for another me-too movement? (Part One)

Featured image: a map of Nepal and neighbouring countries. The area I hiked in April 2018 is close to Mount Everest. 

 

HOW does it feel when your guide says he wants you for a second wife? On the day you depart for a 23-day hike that includes summiting two mountains—Island Peak and Mera Peak—which are both over 6000 metres high? Well, this is what happened to me in April 2018.

 

 

On day one, he smells of alcohol and you think, maybe he just drank too much the night before. You just keep making excuses like that at first. After all, he was my Facebook friend for one year and came recommended by a French mountaineer (what on earth was that mountaineer thinking?)

 

My guide told me that he had summitted each of Imja Tse (Island Peak) and Mera Peak about eight times. He was holding his accounting book showing how much he made. But I soon noticed that no one seemed to know him anywhere, and hotel managers told me there was a problem with my guide, pointing their fingers to their heads.

 

 

Then, he never offered to take a photo of me. It was me doing selfies the whole day long.

 

On the first day, I walked ahead of him from Lukla: ‘I’m fitter than he is!’

 

On the second day, he said he could catch up.

 

I have a rat phobia.  I had paid $4000 US to summit two mountains; and stated a condition of my expedition was rooms with no rats.

 

We arrived in Phakding at the end of the first day and there was a rat in the roof: no sleep that night! He panicked and searched out other hotels while I just slowly made my way to Namche Bazaar.

 

We arrived for the second night in Namche Bazaar, and he wanted me to stay in a dark dingy hotel behind the renovations taking place on the Buddhist stupa. I said no, I was not staying there, and made my way to the Sherpaland Hotel, where I stayed last time I was in the town.

 

He argued with the hotel management, and with me, for two days. I went to the hotel he’d picked and got a refund. The manager told me the cost was $25 per night. The Sherpaland was $35 per night, but I got the last room.

 

The other guides came up and told me that there was something wrong with my guide: that guides are meant to stay with their clients and order their food. My guide did not even stick with me on the trails.

 

As it turned out my guide did not like the dorm-like sleeping arrangements at Sherpaland, I stay in dorm-like conditions from time to time when backpacking around Europe. At least the rooms are warm.

 

I said to the owner of another firm, please train your grand-daughter to be a sherpa guide. He said he did not have a grand-daughter, and that woman belong in the kitchen!

 

Well, as I later found out, the company my guide came from had female guides for female clients.  But unfortunately, I hadn’t got one!

 

There are lots of wire suspension bridges on the trail, including an very high and scary one officially known as the Sir Edmund Hillary Bridge. If you are coming from Phakding, this bridge is the last bridge to cross before you get to Namche Bazaar: with about another two hours’ walk ahead before you actually get to the town.

 

The high bridge was erected a few years ago, above a now-decaying bridge built, I believe, in the 1960s with the help of Sir Edmund Hillary, and also known as the Sir Edmund Hillary Bridge in its day.

 

The old bridge is still there. But I don’t think anyone is supposed to use it now.

 

The new, high bridge was already in use in 2014, which is when I first hiked this section of trail.

 

The trail and its bridges are used both by trekkers and porters, and also by local people moving goods on yaks, dzos and mules. The resulting traffic jams can get dangerous given that the trail and its bridges aren’t very wide. Here’s a video I shot that makes the point:

 



 

In Phakding, I got to know an Australian woman. When she was crossing the new bridge before Namche Bazaar, a yak attacked her with its horns and almost pushed her off. Her friend in the group saved her.

 

This time around, I made a point of trying to get to the new bridge by midday, since four-footed animal traffic tends to build up in the afternoons.

 

I made sure there weren’t any potentially unruly beasts in sight when I crossed.

 

 

Anyhow, my guide said that the new bridge was seven months old. Which really made me wonder whether my guide had ever crossed this bridge, I knew the place better than him! Was this some kind of scam, or something?

 

To be continued . . .

 

 

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A Māori Yellowstone and a Jurassic Forest

 

I’VE always been attracted to the Rotorua geothermal region, in the North Island of my native New Zealand. It’s a complex of volcanoes, hot pools, geysers and lakes. If that sounds familiar, it should be. For, the area is New Zealand’s equivalent of Yellowstone National Park in the United States. In some ways it’s better because, unlike Yellowstone, which was created at the expense of the indigenous people who lived there, Rotorua is also a site of Māori cultural tourism.

On the other hand, the volcanoes are more active. There’s a theoretical risk that Yellowstone might blow up and engulf North America in ash; but the risk from the volcanoes around Rotorua is a lot less theoretical.. In fact Mount Tarawera, one of the four main points of interest in the region, erupted in a devastating cataclysm in 1886, during which the earth quite simply burst open for seventeen kilometres! I’ll have more to say about that below.

 

The four main areas of interest, shown in the map above, are the city of Rotorua, the two geothermal regions of Whakarewarewa and Waimangu, and Mount Tarawera.

If you look closely you can see how Mount Tarawera has the crack I just mentioned running along it. The crack runs under a lake formed by the eruption, Lake Rotomahana, to Waimangu, so only some of it can be seen on the surface today.

Of course, these four sites don’t exhaust the region’s interest, and there is more to see than geothermal wonders. Māori culture is omnipresent, in ways I will come back to below. Also, there are hiking and biking trails and, curiously enough, at Whakarewarewa, a forest of Californian coastal redwoods—sequoia sempervirens—planted as part of an experimental logging scheme in 1901 and never harvested.

The Real Jurassic Park

As in California, the redwoods are becoming sacred now and nobody would dream of chopping them down any more. The tall trees have become part of the local scenery and populate of the landscape of many Kiwis’ childhood holiday memories too.

From a genus (sequoia) which was widespread in the age of the dinosaurs, but with their natural range now confined to California, the redwoods now growing at Whakarewarewa provide shade for an understory of equally ancient tree ferns: a type of plant which was also common in the dinosaur age, but which later died out in North America. Tree ferns did, however, survive in New Zealand.

At Whakarewarewa, the redwoods and the tree ferns dwell together to re-create a cool forest ecosystem not seen since the age of the dinosaurs. You can see this unique ecosystem from the trails, or you can see it from above on the 23 suspension bridges of the Redwoods Treewalk.

 

The Thin Crust of Rotorua

Let’s get back to the geothermal properties of the region, which are probably its main claim to fame. An aerial photograph of the nowadays quite sizeable city of Rotorua shows how thin the Earth’s crust is in these parts.

 

As I say, the dangers of living atop an even more active version of Yellowstone are not theoretical. People have been suffocated by noxious fumes even in Rotorua city itself, a city where the air normally smells faintly of sulfur: though admittedly such suffocation doesn’t happen very often and usually involves some problem with plumbing or ventilation (the codes are stricter now).

And on top of that, on the 10th of June 1886, the earth actually blew asunder over a distance of several miles in the famous eruption of Mount Tarawera, which altered the shoreline of local lakes and destroyed the Pink and White Terraces: natural wonders that were just starting to become known to the wealthy-tourist trade.

The pink and white terraces were made from a stalactite-like mineral called travertine, deposited by warm springs as they trickled down the hillside. Luckily, just as many caves have stalactites, so there are several travertine terraces around the world. Three of the best-known are the ones at Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone National Park, Pamukkale in Turkey, and Huanglong in China.

 

 

About a hundred people were killed when Mt Tarawera erupted in 1886, including a tohunga (Māori shaman), who was said to be a hundred years old and who was also said to have predicted the eruption. He was dug out alive from under the ash but succumbed a little later. It is surprising that, given the scale of the cataclysm, things weren’t worse.

Tarawera and the nearby lakes overly what is known as the Okataina branch of the Taupo Volcanic Zone, a massive ‘supervolcano’ akin to Yellowstone, but more active in the present era. The most recent full-scale eruption at Yellowstone ejected a thousand cubic kilometres of magma, mostly as ash. On the other hand, it also took place 640,000 years ago. In New Zealand, an eruption only 26,500 years ago at Lake Taupo—a date that might as well be today, geologically speaking—erupted 530 cubic kilometres of magma.

Though large by most standards, rupturing the earth’s crust for seventeen kilometres and ejecting an estimated one cubic kilometre of magma, the 1886 Tarawera eruption was quite puny by the standards of what the Taupo Volcanic Zone, like Yellowstone, was capable of.

It was, perhaps, a sign of this relative puniness, a mere throat-clearing of the underlying supervolcano, that the eruption occurred with only one hour’s warning in terms of premonitory tremors!

It’s thought that larger eruptions would be preceded by more warning than that. Which is probably just as well because, while Yellowstone’s volcanic dangers are now thought to lie mainly in the distant past, the Taupo Volcanic Zone is fully active in volcanic terms and, indeed, overdue for an eruption thirty times larger than the 1886 one. Such cataclysms happen every thousand years on average in the Taupo Volcanic Zone, but the last one was 1,800 years ago.

 

Clobbered by Cyclones, too

When I was there, the area got hammered by ex-tropical Cyclone Hola, a Fijian name. The day before the cyclone, I got some good photos of the freaky clouds that came before it. This part of New Zealand often gets the tail end of tropical cyclones, something that adds to its generally precarious nature and the feeling that nature is in command.

The Guardians of the Volcano

 

Tours to the top of Mount Tarawera are operated, these days, by a Māori agency called Kaitiaki Adventures.

Kaitiaki means ‘guardian’ or ‘guardians’, and the name refers to the fact that earlier, unregulated tourism had left the mountain covered in rubbish. At one time, a truck was hired, and filled, with junk picked up from the mountain. So, these days, the tourist has to go on a tour organised by Kaitiaki Adventures.

(After all, offending the Māori god of volcanoes and earthquakes, Ruaumoko, by dropping litter all over his face is surely not such a good idea in these parts.)

The mountain’s not very high—I suspect it’s blown its top to atoms more than once—and it’s pretty easy to get to the top.  And then you get to run downhill into the scoria-filled crater, or rather, the great crack in the earth which is the nearest thing Tarawera has to a crater.

 

 



Scree-running inside the crater-rift of Mt Tarawera. Scree is loose rock, and you run down it . Simple!

 

Curiously enough, my mother was born at a locality called Tarawera, which by the way means ‘burning spear’, though that Tarawera wasn’t the same as the volcano. The coincidence was one of the things that piqued my interest in Rotorua and Mount Tarawera, though, even at an

early age.

Another important example of Maori tourism operation in the vicinity of Rotorua and Tarawera is the village at Whakarewarewa, the ‘living Māori village’ which has been occupied since before the coming of Europeans to the area, and where tourists can sample the delights of food cooked the old-fashioned way in naturally boiling pools.

 

Return to Rotorua

I was able to stay on a campsite at the Rotorua Thermal Park for only $20 a night (they also have cabins), taking advantage of the hot pools, which have a range of temperatures. I had Māori massage which was offered in two forms, the relaxing Mirimiri and the deeper and harder Romiromi technique. The Hawaiʻians have a form of traditional massage called Lomilomi, so I imagine these techniques have been around for a long time. The woman giving me the massage said that she had to concentrate and breathe white light into my soul and the areas of the body that are sore. Her grandmother was a fully-fledged Māori healer, she told me.

Like much of New Zealand, Rotorua feels a bit more sophisticated than it used to be. Its downtown has been greatly beautified, and I went to a Tunisian restaurant, something that is obviously par for the course these days.

 

Well, that’s all till next time!

 

 

 

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A Fickle Easter in Brooklyn: Photos and writeup by NZ author Mary Jane Walker

 

This year, I decided I was going to revisit Red Hook, a waterfront district of Brooklyn. I discovered the charms of Brooklyn and its waterfront enclave of Red Hook just after Donald Trump was elected president. I had no time for the hysteria and street protests and wanted to go somewhere old-fashioned.

Brooklyn is just across the East River from Manhattan, via the Brooklyn Bridge — of course. There are also a few other bridges and a tunnel to Brooklyn these days, but they aren’t as famous as the Brooklyn Bridge, which was completed in 1883 and was significantly ahead of its time in engineering terms: the place where twentieth-century New York began.

 

Brooklyn is probably New York’s oldest suburb, founded by the Dutch in the 1640s not long after New York itself. It has a lot of charm.

Back at the time of the election, I had taken a boat-sightseeing tour of the harbour for the day and stopped at Fair Way Cafe, Red Hook. The food, the done-up wharf area, the brick buildings and the renewed warehouse area fascinated me, along with being so close to Manhattan and having a view of Lady Liberty.

Red Hook was the busiest freight port during the 40s and 50s and was inhabited by seafarers from all over the world, even Norway.

 

 

I had scored a room in Airbnb at a reasonable rate in Coffey St, next to the murals depicting  life in the area. My editor  Chris Harris had begun corresponding with a writer from Red Hook called Russell Bittner and his partner Elinor Spielberg. By chance or cosmic concern they lived at  a house across the way in Coffey Street as well.

 

Bike lanes are everywhere. They are so extensive you could bike to Manhattan, and many do.

 

 

When I first arrived the bus driver took a detour and said it was a shooting and went around Coffey St. It was a film shooting, an episode of Law and Order, and the set was guarded by the NYPD.

I received a random invite to a music evening called Woman of Color, featuring Ki and Sonic at a club called Nublu 151.

 



It was rap and great intimate music.

I got familiar with baseball — the Brooklyn Dodgers.

 



 

A weekly bus and underground pass is 32 dollars and the ferries from Ikea Red Hook are free during the weekends.

 

I walked to the Brooklyn Historical Society and saw the sandstone (‘brownstone’) houses and churches. This area, which has now been urbanised for four hundred years, was one of the first to take up arms in the American War of Independence.

 

 

The ferry being free, off I went wondering and wandering with my photography on the only fine and sunny day. I went to Central Park in Manhattan and photographed all kinds of remarkable scenes.

 

The next day it went from a comparatively warm 57 deg F to snow — wow!

 

And such was Easter 2018!

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