We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go Always a little further; it may be Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow Across that angry or that glimmering sea
We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go Always a little further; it may be Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow Across that angry or that glimmering sea —British poet/writer James Elroy Flecker
The Himalayas may be an object of veneration for many religious communities in the Indian Subcontinent or a challenge to be conquered, but for most of us the western part of the great range has just reduced to one erroneous certainty - that it is home only to terrorists and terrorism. The image has further been sullied by the Taliban and their refuge for the top Al Qaeda leadership.
British explorer and writer Levison Wood has highlighted the multi-ethnic and different interpretations of religion prevalent in northern parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan in his latest book on his 1,700-mile walk from the snowy peaks of Afghanistan to Bhutan via Pakistan, India and Nepal.
An elected fellow of both the Royal Geographical Society and the Explorers Club, Wood filmed his long walk, with just a hand-held camera, accompanied by a local guide along the way, from the Wakhan Corridor, the Silk Road route of Afghanistan, through five countries along the entire length of the Himalayas. According to the adventurer, his aim was to figure out the “appeal of the Himalayas to the visitors and what they meant to those who lived there.”
Two years ago, the 33-year-old had walked the whole length of the River Nile, covering some 4,000 miles in nine months.
His four-part documentary on his Himalayan walk was broadcast recently by Channel 4 in the UK. His first book Walking the Nile, a bestseller, too was also accompanied by a Channel 4 TV series in January last year.
Wood’s Himalayan journey started in Kabul, where he met his first guide Malang Darya, the first Afghan to climb Mount Noshaq, Afghanistan’s highest peak, who accompanied him for the walk through Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Northern Afghanistan has been a strong inspiration for writers and their books – from Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would be King, to The Lost Horizon by James Hilton that introduced the utopian monastery of Shangri-La and British writer Eric Newby’s A Short Walk in Hindu Kush about his bid to climb Mir Samir, a 19,000 feet Himalayan peak, in the Hindu Kush.
The bookends of the Wood’s walk, from Wakhan Corridor in Afghanistan via Gilgit in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, Srinagar in Jammu and Kashmir, Dharamsala and Simla in Himachal Pradesh, Rishikesh and Haridwar in Northern India, Pokhara and Kathmandu in Nepal, and Thimpu and ending Gangkhar Puensom in Bhutan, are the most fascinating parts of the book.
The desolate Wakhan Corridor, a narrow valley in northeast Afghanistan that acts as a buffer between Tajikistan, China and Pakistan, is the “very start of the Greater Himalaya range.” About 350 km long and 13–65 km in width, the corridor that juts out from the mainland Afghanistan, is wedged between the Pamir and Karakoram Ranges to the north and the south respectively. With a population of about 12,000, Wakhan, interestingly, is also home to about a 1,000 Kyrgyz nomads. People living in the desolate landscape with no trees, vegetation and almost no agriculture seem like phantoms of the past with no connection to the modern world.
The British adventurers have since the start of the Great Game, the 19th century subterfuge and rivalry between the Russian and British Empires to gain supremacy over Central Asia, been interested in Wakhan. Captain T.E. Gordon of the British Army explored the area in 1874, followed by Francis Younghusband 1891 and in 1894 by Lord Curzon. Renowned Sanskrit scholar and linguist Sir Aurel Stein explored the area in May 1906.
An officer in the British Parachute Regiment, Wood served in Afghanistan fighting against the Taliban in Helmand, Kandahar and Zabul provinces in 2008. Interestingly, Wood repeats and considers true the old adage that the Afghans simply loved to fight each other. “Most of them weren’t, and still aren’t, particularly inspired by religious fanaticism, but rather an innate sense of war, one that is in the blood after centuries of violence,” he writes.
The most terrifying moment in the book is the car mishap in Nepal, in which Wood’s taxi plunged 150 metres down a jungle ravine, flipping five times. Wood and his companions survived, but he suffered a broken arm and shoulder, only to resume the journey after a gap of five weeks.
The former paratrooper in the British Army has travelled and worked in over 80 countries worldwide. His explorations have taken Wood from Baghdad to the mountains, deserts and jungles of Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan, North and South Sudan, most of Sub-Saharan Africa, India, Nepal and Burma.
Wood encapsulates his walk, which had to end in Bhutan at Gangkhar Puensom instead of Lhasa in Tibet, by realising that it was the journey that mattered and not the end. In the age of hyperconnectivity and instant information, Wood shows how modern exploration is a viable experience, not just an anomaly.
