Dinner was all but inedible. I don’t say that in jest or lightheartedly. Every day dinner was almost inedible. We carried up a big tent for dining in – or I should say the porters carried it up, and we ate in this tent most evenings once we set up base camp. This tent was quite helpful because it was usually raining by the afternoon and into the evening. On days when we were hiking higher into the mountains, we would come to hiker’s thatched huts, or occasional abandoned buildings used by the people trekking the trails, and we would eat in these structures. That was very undesirable because all of the porters smoked like firestorms, and the buildings or huts would be saturated with a rank tobacco haze. You could see the smoke literally pouring out of the windows. But once we got up to the lower base camp at 14,000 feet we set up the dinner tent, and then the porters would smoke outside and it made dinner a much less smoky affair.
Dinner usually included three different courses all served at once and pooling together on your plate. There would be some kind of a rice course with some vegetables and “curry” (when I say “curry” you can interpret this as ground-up hot chili pepper sauce). Then if we were lucky and the porters managed to find mountain people that day to buy vegetables from, there would be a vegetable dish cooked in “curry”. Finally there was always a lentil dish cooked with a few vegetables and – you guessed it – immense amounts of “curry”. There was no meat included with any of these dinners or with any of the meal on this trekking trip. Remember all of the locals are vegetarians as a result of their religion. Instead of having meat we consume copious amounts of “curry”. In actuality there is no spice called “curry” in India. They have hundreds of spices, and they combine them in various ways to make what we consider to be “curry”. In India there is no one kind of “curry”, but instead there are some 70 or more different common varieties that are used throughout the country. In all of these varieties, if it is authentic Indian “curry” it is made with copious amounts of hot chili pepper powder. This is why the dinner was virtually inedible.
Here is what I mean by “inedible”. With the first bite you begin to choke and everything in your mouth feels like it’s on fire. Your eyes begin to water and you swallow as fast as you can drinking down water afterwards. You have a plate full to go, and you know you have to eat it if you want to make it through the trip. With the second bite it becomes hard to see because of the water in your eyes, your nose begins to run, you begin to sweat profusely, and you swallow as fast as you can and drink more water. It would’ve been nice to have dampened this excruciatingly hot flavor with bread, or fried flour, or anything else to drink – but there was nothing except water. The porters who cooked the meal put a lot of effort into finding vegetables to go in it, but that no longer matters because your mouth is so flaming hot that you can no longer taste anything. You take the third bite and it hurts just as much except, of course, all flavor is now gone. Your stomach says to your bowels “look out! Hot load coming through!” and you realize that you’re going to have to concentrate pretty hard to not lose everything that you’re eating. You have two orifices that you can lose your calories from, and on any given night one or the other of them will be threatening to do just that. Bite after bite you shovel it in without tasting a single thing hoping that you can both keep it down and keep it in for the rest of the night. It will be the only significant amount of food you get for about 24 hours. On and on it goes night after night. By the time you’re done on any given night your shirt will be saturated with sweat, your eyes will be red and bloodshot, your nose will be dripping like a faucet, and you will be struggling hard to make sure you don’t lose your entire load of calories.
I actually did fairly well with the whole affair. I only dumped calories after eating on one or two occasions during the trip. There were others who did not fare so well. Once I actually wound up with some time on my hands, and I was at the dinner tent for some reason where they were cooking. I watched the porters preparing the meal – a fascinating experience. They had backpacked in a rather large two-burner gas stove, and astonishingly, a heavy metal old-fashioned pressure cooker; it was the kind with the locking top and the little weight that sits on the top venting steam. Along with this they had a huge propane tank (many times larger than a typical barbecue propane tank), and I saw at least one giant burlap bag of rice (50 pound bag?). I watched the cook put rice and water into the pressure cooker, and then one of his companions got out a cloth bag with the “curry” in it and began to pour it into the cook’s hand. The cook used his cupped hand as a measuring device, and when his hand had filled up piled high to almost overflowing he would dump it into the pressure cooker with the rice and water. He dumped one handful, and then another handful, and then another handful, and then another handful, and at that point I began to be astonished. And then another handful, and then another handful, and then another handful, and at that point I know my mouth was gaping open in astonishment. And then another handful, and then another handful, and then another handful, and then one final handful – all this in one pressure cooker filled with water and rice. No wonder the food was so hot – we were eating mostly chili pepper powder seasoned with rice!!
We established base camp on a large fluvial terrace (river terrace) about 50 feet above the Gori Ganga River. The larger contingent of our group stayed at base camp for four or five days while the smaller group including the trip coordinator continued climbing up to 16,000 feet to the base of the glacier of Nanda Devi. They were mapping the glacial moraines and collecting granite rock samples for dating glacial recession. My understanding is that one morning for about a half hour the clouds parted for them and they had a spectacular view of Nanda Devi from that location, but from our location at 14,000 feet our view was blocked by clouds and the lower Himalayan Mountains. (These mountains themselves, however, were a spectacular view.) On the morning following the arrival of the smaller contingent back to base camp, the trip leader broke into his supplies and pulled out a number of cans of beans. He said he figured that by that time we would be craving anything with protein, and I think he was right. On that morning we dined on fried flour and beans – it was a gourmet meal!
The trip back down from the high Himalayas proceeded the same way as it had when we came up. The food, the locations, the leeches – they were all the same. There were only a few mishaps; I remember on the last day luckless Debbie got lost. There was a bit of the search to track her down, and finally she turned up stumbling through the streets making her way up to the trekking hotel sometime by the end of the day. (Since the city was built on a steep hillside every place you went was either up or down through the city.) The rest of us got in somewhere around noon making our way back to our rooms and getting cleaned up in the “showers”, if you can call a pipe stubbed out of the wall waste-high with no nozzle of any kind a “shower”. But after weeks of backpacking, I think I would have gladly got cleaned up with a garden hose, and the shower was after all about one step above that – but only one.
The trip leader sent the main dissertation student down into the city to buy chickens. My understanding was that both he and the professor had been to India together before on at least one other occasion, so he was usually sent to do the more difficult tasks. The trip coordinator had seen a few chickens in the yard of a local while he was climbing up through the city to the trekking hotel, and the lady with the chickens seemed amenable to selling them, so the student was dispatched from the hotel when we got back with money to purchase them. Our coordinator was concerned that after weeks in the mountains with no protein at all except for one morning with some cans of beans, we might be feeling weak or we might be losing weight. I know I had lost weight but I don’t think it had to do with the fact that I wasn’t getting any protein. I was actually starting to wonder if my taste buds would ever grow back in my mouth again after being chemically dousing so often with torrents of chili pepper. The main dissertation student came back with the chickens (I think five of them) and they were given to the cook at the hotel to prepare. These were not the standard American fryers that you might get at say Popeye’s Famous Fried Chickens or Chick-fil-A. These were puny birds by any standard; I think even the roosters didn’t want them. The chickens were given to the cook and executed, thus sacrificing themselves to provide the gift of protein for a weak and protein-starved crew. The cook skin them and prepared them Col. Sanders style in a pressure cooker. I was not the last to arrive at the dinner table, but most of the sacrificial carcasses were gone by the time I arrived. I think I got a wing and a drumstick; the rest of the dinner consisted of chili pepper flavored with a little rice and vegetables. The meat actually satisfied me, and that night I didn’t down much of the incendiary chemicals. The taste of the meat was enough to let me know that soon I would be back in the land of tourists where, with any luck, I would begin to taste food once again. I’m happy to report, by the way, that my taste buds did not succumb to permanent damage from that extraordinary culinary trip, but when I did get back to the states I have to say it took me three to four years before I could brave another Indian restaurant again!