Climbing to Cloud Town
Thursday, July 27th, 2006
Most of my photo-updates end up being long tirades about how the photos don’t really do the experience justice. For this trip, that is truer than ever. The 2 day mountain trek to Bhimashankar that I took two weeks ago is one of THE experiences I’ll always remember, right up there with the typhoons, the coup and the tsunami camp.
The trip up redefined for me what mountain climbing is. When I was in Korea, I went what I then called mountain climbing most weekends. But I now know that if you’re taking the same path that the senior citizens jog up to do their morning excercise, it’s not a climb. No matter how much you’re sweating and gasping for breath.
We didn’t exactly break out the ropes and clips, but it was still a pretty vertical climb, and a good 3 point hold could still be the difference between making it to the top or very quickly making it to the bottom.
And the night we spent on top, inside a tiny village that itself lied entirely inside a cloud was more other worldly and surreal than anything else I have ever seen, be it in real life or in a science fiction movie.
It was the kind of trip that the second I got home, even though I was caked in sweat and dirt, shoes full of rainwater, feet swollen, muscles aching, and ready to collapse in bed, the first thing I did when I got home was not shower or sleep, but sit down and write a list of things to do before I die. It was inspiring.
But sadly, you won’t see all of that in these photos. The moisture of walking through clouds and climbing through sudden on and off monsoons killed off our cameras one by one, so most of the upward climb is left undocumented. Shimmying under waterfalls, wading through rivers, crabwalking along slippery cliffs and reaching for footholds all unphotographed
And cloud town, as I have dubbed it, was simply unphotographable. Without the flash, I’d get solid black. And with, the camera captured surreal swirling canvases of fog. I’ll try to explain how amazing the actual experience of walking through a cloud is when I get to that part.
But I have collected all of the photos from the people involved, pieced them together, and I’ll try to tell you the story.
Getting to the mountain was quite the hike in and of itself. I left my apartment at 5:30am (after a late night shift at the call center) and the group went off on a journey that included rickshaws, taxis, trains (packed again the very weekend after the blasts), buses, and stops at run down little tea stands until we finally reached the area in the early afternoon.
Our last rickshaw dropped us off at the entrance to a small village, and we marched through to the other side, until we saw the mountain off in the distance.
It was then a brief shimmy through a few farms…
…over a couple bridges, past some tiny houses, and a couple shortcuts through fields and backyards..
..when we finally reached the path itself.
Sadly, this is where the cameras had all quit on us. So photos of us hugging rock walls and dangling from finger-sized crevices will have to wait for the next trek. I was enjoying the hell out of this leg of the trip. Normally when climbing, I’m hacking and wheezing after a few hours, but climbing vertically was more engineering than it was physically enduring. It was all about determining where to take your next step, and where gravity would hold.
It wasn’t a horribly dangerous or difficult trek (one member of our party was a 9 year old girl, after all) but just challenging enough to get me excited to get into shape and try even more challenging trips. (Kilamanjaro is on that aforementioned list of things to do before I die)
The sun had just set when we reached Bhimashankar. For the last little bit of uphill hiking, I could only see in shades of grey. But when the land suddenly fell flat, I could see only one shade of grey. I took off my now completely fogged up glasses and looked around. No trees, to far off peaks, even the path we had just walked up had disappeared. The few rocks next to my feet were as close as I got to detail. The last bit of light crept through the fog just enough to illuminate it, like street lights shining behind a closed curtain. It was as though the entire world had disappeared. The rest of the group were surrounding me, I could see their fuzzy sillhouettes in varing shades of grey. Somehow, someone up ahead knew where to go, and all of the fuzzy shapes, myself included, followed.
The first image I saw of the town we had walked to was the towering sillhouette of a hindu temple, just a shade of grey darker than the solid color of everything else. When we turned around to the other side, the light inside shot out of the intricately patterned window carved out of the wall. It looked like that classic mocked up photo of the light beaming out of a church, except with this window projecting a perfectly clear floral pattern onto the fuzzy greyness of everything else, carrying the bright yellows and oranges inside the temple with it, it was all the more striking.
When we walked up a small set of stairs and reached the town itself, I felt like I was in a particularly surreal Hayao Miyazaki movie. The world was still solid grey, but the windows to every open restaurant and street stall were perfectly clear, seemingly floating midair, attached to nothing. The view inside the windows was like watching a full color movie projected into a black and white world, but with the steam from all the cooking pots and freshly cooked food bellowing out of the frame, and intermingling with the fog outside. You could follow the steam as it travelled toward you, intermingled with the steam from your breath, whished past your nose just long enough to entice you inside, and then continue down the street.
Of course, none of this showed up on film, and I’m not entirely that my description even makes sense to anyone who hasn’t seen this with their own eyes. All the photos I took could capture are odd looking images like this, which are certainly very far from what I saw.
The food. Oh, man, the food. These people have special mountain recipes. Food doesn’t taste that good anywhere else. I assume it’s because they have special ingredients you can only get from living in the sky, like sunshine and rainbows.
My roommates and I slept in a tiny room that consisted solely of a mat on the wet floor, a couple of nails to hang our sopping wet clothes on, and a ceiling made out of a clear tarp which hung a couple of feet lower than it was supposed to, suspending a children’s swimming pool’s worth of water over our heads.
We started out with a fair bit of room for all five of us, but as the water dripping down the walls started to flood the sides of the room more, we had to squeeze into the middle a bit more. The next morning, the few of us who had gotten up early hiked the last little bit up to the very peak. it was a twistly little piece of earth and rock that jutted out over the cloud, from which we felt like we were standing in heaven. Once again, no working cameras.
Then, we began the trip down.
We split up. Some took the same path vertical down, the sissies took a bus to the bottom, and my group elected to take a different path, known as ‘the easy route’. This route may have been a pleasant walk on mostly level ground, but for an out-of-shape cartoonist such as myself, a long pleasant hike is the hard part. I huffed and puffed my way down, often stopping to play in waterfalls along the way.
We reached the bottom, safe and sound, and now there are many more treks just like this one in the works. And next time, I’ll be ready with backup cameras.
I don’t know if that town is like that every night, truth is, I don’t want to know. It was perfect just the way I experienced it.
Oh, and I apologize in advance to those who are already sick of hearing me talk about sleeping on a bench in a typhoon, because now you’ll have to hear ‘I slept in a cloud”.
