Photo: Karma, schoolteacher in Upper Dolpo

September 2007   

If you have not already read it, please visit the Home Page and read all about my expedition in the summer of 2006 to the Upper Dolpo region of Nepal. This was one of those “once in a lifetime” type of adventures that changes your life forever. In a nutshell, I went to a region of the world so far off the map that few people even know it exists. Upper Dolpo exists as a land beyond time, beyond the reach of the modern world, the only region of the world where a form of pure Tibetan spiritual culture still exists. Getting into Upper Dolpo is one of the hardest treks on the planet.  

Since my return to North America from Nepal, I have checked around with various trekking companies in the US and Nepal to see if any of them are organizing treks to Dolpo this year. According to the latest news, the Maoists in Nepal may have stopped charging “fines” to trekkers in many areas of Nepal. Or they may not. Time will tell, but the good news is that tourism is slowly starting to commence again in the mountain kingdom.  

I have discovered that Mountain Travel Sobek, a prestigious global travel firm with headquarters in San Francisco, has organized a trek to Dolpo in October 2007. Did I mention that getting to Upper Dolpo is a lot like landing on the moon?  Certainly Upper Dolpo, on the far side of the Himalayan Mountains in northwestern Nepal at 17,000 feet, looks a lot like the surface of the moon. You have to cross over the Himalayas to get there, and time your trek to avoid the winter snows, spring snowmelt and the summer monsoon. And did I mention the Maoists “taxing” everybody?  

Mountain Travel Sobek reports their first trek to Upper Dolpo, at $11,000 per person, is sold out. There is a lot of excitement among serious trekkers about actually being able to get to Dolpo. It has been many years since many trekkers have made it there.  No future are treks are scheduled by MTS.  I inquired with MTS, and was told that two of these  trekkers are doctors. Aha! Doctors!I told Mountain Travel Sobek that I will raise the money to get an 80-pound load of medicine (antibiotics, first aid, etc) sent from Kathmandu to Lower Dolpo, if their trekking party would agree to deliver it to the "clinic" that Dawa, Tinle Londrup’s daughter, has built in Karang village, Upper Dolpo. Tinle is the star of the famous (nominated for an Academy Award) movie Himalaya, and a chieftain of Upper Dolpo, my mountain guide and the only reason my own expedition was able to ever make it to Upper Dolpo. And back alive.  

There is the small matter of getting this load on a plane and onto a mule and over the Himalayas, crossing several 18,000-foot passes, but if people in Houston can land a lunar module on the moon by remote control, I think I can get a horse to the Tibetan plateau.  Through friends, I have been able to contact Dr. Ajit, at the hospital in kathmandu, and he has happily agreed to buy and pack the medicine, and deliver it to MTS when the trek arrives in Kathmandu.  I am hoping to raise funds to hire Dr. Ajit in the future as a village doctor, traveling to Upper Dolpo once or twice every year. 

There are currrently no doctors who practice western medicne in Upper Dolpo.   I have written several magazine articles about my life-changing trek to Upper Dolpo, and am writing a book.  I am also finishing the final touches to a documentary film (Journey to Dolpo, Rescue Mission on the Roof of the World.)  Donations from showings of this film are being used to pay for the cost of buying medicine and renting a horse and paying for overweight luggage on a bush plane flying into the Himalayas. This is now all set to occur.  

I have good contacts in Upper Dolpo. Karma and Binod are two Tibetan schoolteachers who teach in Upper Dolpo but live in Kathmandu in the winter. I think Karma would rather go to jail than go back to Upper Dolpo again, because the phrase "hardship posting" doesn't begin to describe life in Upper Dolpo, but he agreed to go back to Upper Dolpo again and teach for six months, before meeting me in Kathmandu in November. Since Karma is now back in Upper Dolpo, I assigned him a special project of his own.  

Karma bought a digital camera and agreed to take photos on his “commute” in and out of the region, and of his life during the summer season in Dolpo. I gave him a few hundred questions to answer, and asked him to keep all the answers in a daily journal. I will buy the photos and his journal when we meet in Kathmandu, edit his journal and send the finished story to various magazines. "The Longest Commute in the World" comes to mind as a working title.  After all, he has to walk for two weeks, over several hundred miles of some of the most difficult terrain in the world, just to get to his job.  

So, with Karma stationed in Upper Dolpo, I have someone set there to receive the medicine when it arrives. I have emailed his girlfriend Tsering in Kathmandu, who sent him a note by a Dolpo villager (a 200-mile walk), and when the American doctors on the Mountain Travel Sobek expedition show up in October Karma will be ready to translate. Tinle's daughter Dawa in Kathmandu built the “clinic” in Karang, which stands empty because there is no western medicine. (They have some Tibetan folk medicine, weeds and twigs, which is not the same as antibiotics.) Then there is the small problem of showing people how to use the antibiotics, or bandages, and/or anti-diarrheal formula, but I am working on that with Tinle's daughter. Nobody in Upper Dolpo has ever washed a day in his or her life, so we need to explain what water is, and how important cleanliness can be, but that's a small detail.  There is a rubber hose that leads from the school in Karang up to a stream that melts from a glacier at 20,000 feet, so we can get access to clean water.  

 In the meantime, Karma's girlfriend in Kathmandu, also a schoolteacher, explains that there may be a telephone line installed in Upper Dolpo this summer, which sounds like an engineering feat worthy of NASA. If and when a phone line is actually installed, then Karma will call her, and she will email me, and before then I will have emailed her in Kathmandu, indicating whether medicine is on its way, and how Karma can help. (He can read English, you see.)  

 All of this is a fantastic experiment to see if I can actually get equipment into Upper Dolpo, and what will transpire with the Maoists, who control every mountain pass and check all bags and charge “fees” (maybe) and if I can get actually pull off this project sitting at a desktop in North Vancouver, Canada. Tinle's daughter has promised to help with any and all planning, if necessary, including getting the assistance of her father, who is still a very influential figure in Dolpo. That helps with the Maoists, who may want to know what all this medicine is for, and where it is going, and why.  

I have sent Dawa a lot of photos I took of the Dolpo kids and their parents from my trek last year - the one's we met last year when I went to Dolpo with Lama Tenzin - and she says she has already sent these photos via porter to the parents in Upper Dolpo. She will also send instructions to the parents about the medicine,  as soon as I arrange it, telling them how to use it.   

Much work yet to do, but what fun!  Here I am in North Vancouver, working with the Mountain Sobek Travel people in Emeryville, California (whom I have never met) and who may get cooperation from all the doctors who are going on this October trek and who certainly have never heard of me, plus working with people in Kathmandu and Upper Dolpo!  Wow, the magic of email!  I will fly into Kathmandu this November, prior to the November 22 elections, and if there aren’t nay bombs exploding then I will tour the city and look into the orphanages and shelters where children from Dolpo live when forced from their homes by war and poverty.  It will take more than delivering a single load of medicine to help the people of this unique culture.    

 If you are interested in seeing whether this crazy project will actually work, please feel free to contact me asap.  The next challenge will be to raise funds to hire Dr. Ajit next year, and buy more medicine, and provide the most desolate region on the planet with medical care for the first time in its histroy.  There is also the possibility, with appropriate funding, of sending more than one load of medicine to Dolpo this October. Since very single item in Upper Dolpo has to be carried in by hand, over several 18,000-foot passes, I don’t want to get carried away by planning to send a ton of medicine, but certainly the villagers could use everything sent to them.  Are you interested in helping?  

There are no roads, no electricity, no doctors or nurses, no food and very little money in Dolpo. Nepal is one of the poorest countries in the world, and certainly Upper Dolpo is the poorest place in Nepal. It may very well be the poorest place in the entire world. The people living there possess virtually nothing. Medicine of any sort is completely unknown.  A simple sickness there can be a death sentence. Had I broken my leg while there, I knew there was no possibility of any rescue.  But , having made it back alive, I would like to do what I can to help the wonderful people who live there.  They were kind, gentle and generous to me, a complete stranger, and I think the outside world could learn a great deal from the ancient spiritual knowledge that these people possess, and practice. As the Dalai Lama has said: “Kindness is my religion.”  Project Kindness is my gift to the people of Upper Dolpo. Would you care to help?

Michael McCarthy

North Vancouver, Canada September 2007