THE northern road out of Kathmandu climbs quickly out of the city smog. Our Jeep swings around switchbacks, overtakes colourful trucks on blind corners, brushes past dust-covered foliage. The seatbelts don’t work and neither does the air-con. I drop the window to get some cool air and inhale a lungful of cool road dust instead. There’s too much motion to read. I idly wonder if this is what it’s like to sit inside a washing machine.
I’m heading to the Langtang Valley, which rises eastwards from one of the main north-south routes through the Himalaya. It is a remote place. Huge walls of metamorphic rock and granite, hundreds of metres high, are overhung with masses of snow and ice. There is no road access – only one trail leads in and out.
The inhabitants of the Langtang Valley follow Tibetan Buddhism, a minority religion in Nepal. Until the 1970s they mostly raised yaks and made cheese, and while they still do, tourism has since became the dominant income;
