This ebook first published in 2010 by Orion Books

Copyright (c) Michael Palin 2004

Contents

Cover

Title

Copyright

About the Author

Map

Introduction

Postscript

Introduction

I�ve always had a soft spot for my Penguin Encyclopaedia of Places. On a dull day when I should be talking to someone about tax returns I like to open it at random and set off a few quiet fantasies. Initial disappointment that you�ve opened it at Norwich and Nottingham can turn quickly to a frisson of excitement as, lower down the page, your eye alights on Noumea, Nova Lisboa and Novara, all places I�d leave for tomorrow if someone said I had to.

At the end of 2002, with Sahara still warm, as it were, Roger Mills came up with the idea of following it with a series on the Silk Route. When I looked at the map I saw an awful lot of desert along the way, and I was looking for something that would take me away from desert sands for a while. I was about to close the atlas regretfully when my eye drifted south and east to where the Silk Route becomes entangled with that long, white-tipped mass of mountains, hanging like a raised eyebrow above India, and connected by the single word: Himalaya.

Something began to tingle. I reached for the Encyclopaedia of Places and found the page I was looking for. �Hillingdon, Greater London Borough�, �Hinckley, Urban District in Leicestershire� and there, snugly between the two, �Himalaya. In Sanskrit, �Abode Of Snow�. Vast mountain system in central Asia lying along the S edge of the Plateau of Tibet, enclosed by the Indus and the Brahmaputra Rivers. It extends generally ESE in an immense curve about 1500 miles long.� There wasn�t a word in that brief description that didn�t thrill me, and by the time I shut the book I knew what the next two years were going to be about. (No, not Hillingdon in 12 one-hour episodes.)

What the Sahara is to desert, the Himalaya is to mountains. Both share the same contradictory attractions, appealing and appalling, tempting and terrifying in equal, and ultimately irresistible, measure.

By rights I should have followed up Sahara with something easier. Perhaps I should have taken more seriously our sound recordist John Pritchard�s suggestion of a series called �Death By Luxury�. But it�s the mind as well as the body you have to look after, and that�s where the Himalaya seemed to have the edge.

All the elements that appeal to me most about travel were on offer. The stimulus, mental and physical, of working at extremes, the breaking of new ground (I had never been to any of the places on our route), and the chance to go in by the back door, as it were, and see how lives are lived in a fascinatingly mixed bag of countries: superpowers of the future like India and China; countries like Pakistan, recently pushed to the centre of international politics; secretive, unconquered mountain kingdoms like Nepal and Bhutan; and remote lands on the margin of the world�s consciousness like Nagaland and Ladakh.

The idea seemed to appeal to my team as instantly as it did to me, and setting aside advancing ages and hopes for quieter lives, we committed to a Himalayan journey at the beginning of 2003.

From the outset problems loomed as large as the mountains themselves. Pakistan was, though I�m glad to say no longer is, the subject of a Foreign Office advisory against all but essential travel. The whole Kashmir region was highly volatile, and the Maoists in Nepal were engaged in an increasingly threatening guerrilla war with the government. The Chinese were highly sensitive about allowing television crews into Tibet, and the Indian government was wary of our safety in Assam.

To their enormous credit, our production team soothed troubled brows successfully and we were able to leave for the Khyber Pass in May 2003.

There were crisis points, including a brush with the Maoists in Nepal, a nasty bout of illness halfway up Annapurna, and the loss, and subsequent recovery, of one of our crew to altitude sickness as we pushed up to Everest Base Camp. There were problems that could have been much worse, like the SARS epidemic in China, snowstorms in Bhutan and strikes in Bangladesh, but we were more or less intact by the time our tired little band emerged triumphant from a circuitous progress through six countries and 3000 miles of Himalaya at the beginning of April 2004.

The schedule was very tight, and I�m aware that these diaries are stronger on spontaneity than sober reflection.

What I feel we have achieved, none the less, is to put the Himalaya in a human perspective. We found people living at altitudes higher than the highest mountains in Europe; ancient civilizations surviving on arid, wind-scoured plateaux; gorges two and a half miles deep, through which traders have found their way for thousands of years and, everywhere, religion, vibrant and colourful, and thriving in adversity. In short, we found a Himalaya not reticent and forbidding, but permeated by every sort of human activity.

A battleground of immense geological forces that is a centre of human tectonics as well, with sacred and secular, tribal identity and national aspiration, tradition and technology, all pushing up against each other.

The scope of our journey means that this is not a mountaineer�s account of the Himalaya, it�s a traveller�s account. This is Himalaya, not from top to bottom, but from one end to the other; from the Khyber Pass where in a tight knuckle of mountains the great ranges of the Hindu Kush, the Karakoram and the Himalaya are born, to Bangladesh, where the Himalaya, reduced to dust and sand, is swept out into the waters of the Bay of Bengal.

Great journeys tend to bring me out in a rash of over-used superlatives, so all I will say this time is that Himalaya was a wonderfully, magically, brilliant journey, with more gasps of astonishment per square mile than any other in my entire life. And for once, I think I might be right.

Michael Palin, London, June 2004

Postscript

Since I put these diaries together there have been significant changes in the region, mainly affecting India and Pakistan, and by and large hopeful. Even before the defeat of the BJP in the Indian elections in May 2004 cross-border relations with Pakistan had been improving, and both sides were pledged to a peaceful outcome in Kashmir, the most troubled area we went through. With the advent of India�s first non-Hindu Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, this process is expected to continue.

Indians are playing cricket in Pakistan again and the British Foreign Office has lifted its advice against non-essential travel to the country. On 22 May 2004 Pakistan was re-admitted to the Commonwealth after five years, a decision which India supported.

The day after that decision a bomb killed 33 people in Kashmir. Change clearly won�t happen overnight, but there is cause for cautious optimism. Less so in Nepal where the Maoists and the monarchy seem unable to sink their differences. There are sinister rumours that Tiger Leaping Gorge in Yunnan might disappear beneath the waters of a reservoir, but better news for Bangladesh�s cricket team who have won their first Test Match and a one-day series too.

MP, February 2005

Pakistan

Day One : Up the Khyber

Below the walls of the fort that guards the Khyber Pass there is a viewing platform on which rows of chairs are set out, facing Afghanistan, like circle seats at the theatre. They convey an air of expectation, of something about to happen, of a curtain about to rise on great events.

Casts of thousands have at one time or another filled the plains below, as greedy armies, seeking the great prize of India, gathered at this narrow western gateway. Darius I, King of Persia, led his soldiers through the pass nearly 500 years before the birth of Christ. He was followed, nearly two centuries later, by Alexander the Great. Six hundred years ago I would have seen Tamburlaine�s army, down from Samarkand, toiling up the hill towards me, and 400 years after that, the lone, exhausted figure of Army Surgeon Brydon bringing news of the annihilation of 17,000 of his colleagues who had set out to conquer Afghanistan for the British.

Despite the bloody nose of that terrible defeat in 1842, the British returned to Khyber almost 50 years later. Recognizing that the Afghans could not be subdued by war, they sought to keep them in their place by peaceful treaty. Having made a deal with Kabul, they instructed Mortimer Durand to invent a border between Afghanistan and Queen Victoria�s India.

To make things easier for everybody Durand marked the borderline with giant numerals engraved on the foothills, and they can still be seen on the Afghan side of the pass. �1�, �2�, �3�, �4�. The limits of the British Empire.

The Durand Line made no sense, then or now, to the Pathans who live on either side of it, nor does it appear to have made much sense to the generations of British squaddies sent to guard it, who accorded this bleak spot a memorable place in Cockney rhyming slang. Khyber Pass, Arse. (Khyber is locally pronounced with a soft �K�, so �Carry On Up the Khyber� would, with Pashto inflection, become �Harry On Up the Hyber�.)

But the Pakistan army of today takes the border very seriously, and they have provided an ambitious plaster model that mirrors the terrain ahead of me: the dark shadows of the mountains, the low brown hills, and the long and winding road that twists and turns between them.

�Such a river of life as nowhere else exists in the world�, is how Kipling described the road that crosses the Khyber Pass. It was first laid nearly 500 years ago by the Afghan Emperor Sher Shah Suri to connect the extremes of his territory, Kabul in Afghanistan and Dacca in Bengal. In those days it was said that an unaccompanied woman could travel its 1500-mile (2400 km) length without fear or hindrance.

The British later paved it and christened it the Grand Trunk Road. Abbreviated to the colloquial �GT Road�, it remains to this day one of the most important transport arteries on the subcontinent.

Railways, rather than roads, were the status symbols of Britain�s empire, and it was inevitable that there would eventually have to be a railway up to the Khyber. Construction began in the 1920s, amply fulfilling the criteria for a colonial railway, being both expensive and difficult to build.

At the cost of some PS100,000 a mile, a line was squeezed for 27 miles through the rocky foothills between Peshawar and the Afghan border, an impressive burrowing job requiring 34 tunnels and 92 bridges and cuttings.

Though the last mile or two is now a spectacular no-man�s land of abandoned viaducts and fallen arches, the line from Peshawar to Landi Khotal has been kept open for its tourist value.

Recent business has been badly hit by post 9/11 security scares and, for a while, the British Foreign Office was advising travellers not to come to Pakistan at all, so it�s not surprising that Landi Khotal station is quiet as the breeze this morning as I wait for the train, which, I�m reliably informed, is the first to have left Peshawar for three months.

A group of teenage boys is fascinated by our presence. They form a circle around me, curious, unthreatening and very close.

�D�you live round here?� I ask their ringleader.

He replies in English with a toss of the head, confidently, if eccentrically.

�Why not?�

�D�you see many people from England here?�

�From England? Why not?�

I ask him if he�s working.

�I have finished school. I have no job. There are no jobs here.�

�Have you brothers and sisters?�

�Why not?�

�How many?�

�We are 30 in our family.�

We�re interrupted by a distant wheezing hiss and the whoop of a train whistle and as we turn, there, breasting the incline into the station, is a surreal snapshot of Empire.

Despite the silver-painted crescent moon and star of Islam on their noses, the breathless pair of geriatric locomotives that gasp to a halt beside me were built in Britain, in 1916. They draw two tankers of fuel and two coaches, from which descends a well-behaved group: workers from a bank in Islamabad, an imposing white-haired Welshman who is headmaster of an exclusive private school in Peshawar, prosperous-looking businessmen with cameras and binoculars and their unveiled wives. A band, immaculately turned out in plumed hats, tartan scarves and white gaiters, dismounts from the train. With a flourish of the bandmaster�s silver-topped baton, the sound of drum and bagpipe mingles with the sighing of steam engines and the polite chatter of disembarked passengers. Only the presence of black-clad Pathan policemen with rifles spoils the powerful impression of having been transported back to an Edwardian house party.

A short, harassed man, carefully turned out in polo shirt and slacks, seeks me out and introduces himself as Zahoor Durrani, the man whose travel company keeps the Khyber Railway alive. He has organized today�s outing. Included in the price of the ticket is a lunch and, there being no facilities of any kind at the station, Zahoor buses us to the Khyber Rifles Officers� Mess, where this normally arid landscape of rock and scree is cloaked with green lawns, rose-beds and ancient maple and walnut trees. A buffet lunch is served from a tent, after which we�re entertained by military dancers in local costume. The dance seems a little camp at first, with much tossing of heads and raising of knees, when, quite suddenly, from among scarves and voluminous tunics the dancers produce rifles, which they loose off in time to the music. This, I�m assured, is how they celebrate in the Tribal Areas, and I�m just relieved that there are no US warplanes within range.

Back aboard the train, we pull out of Landi Khotal as the track cuts through successive outcrops of bare rock, amplifying the shriek of the bogies into ear-splitting howls. Then the walls of a longer gorge begin to close in, and the heat of the day and the stench of the furnace become almost unbearable.

We grind to a halt in one of the tunnels, trapped like bread in a toaster, and are only saved from suffocation at the very last minute, when the cow that was blocking the tunnel is persuaded to move.

The last miles of the journey are less fraught, a slow glide into the wide Vale of Peshawar, with time to indulge the voyeuristic pleasures of railway travel: surreptitious views over high walls into courtyards and back gardens, glimpses of life backstage, where mothers and wives prepare food and hang out the washing, and children carry bundles of wood and bring the cows and goats home. As the train passes it gives a look-at-me whistle. The animals run away from it, the children run towards it, and the women stare with a frank curiosity they�d never allow themselves if their men folk were about.

On the outskirts of Peshawar we pass one of the newest cities in Pakistan, the Kachi Gahi refugee camp, thought to be the largest in the world. It grew up in 1982 to deal with the displacement of Afghans after the Soviet invasion. Because the Afghans are great entrepreneurs, trade has thrived here and almost anything from guns to drugs to washing machines is available in Smuggler�s Bazaar, the heart of this warren of sheds and shacks. Since the fall of the Taliban the trickle of overladen trucks returning to Afghanistan has become a flood, yet 1.5 million refugees remain in this camp alone. And this is a fraction of the 18 million displaced people for whom Pakistan is their temporary home.

Zahoor Duranni tells me all this without any emotion, other than some quiet pride that his country has dealt with this enormous burden without complaint.

He gestures down towards the sprawling camp.

�We�re all the same people.�

Day Twenty Eight : Lahore to Amritsar

On the front page of the newspaper there is a photograph of a man on a ladder painting black stripes over an advert that shows an unveiled woman holding an apple drink. He is described as a member of the Shabab-I-Milli Islamist Activist group. Lower down the page are pictures of two sisters, their faces disfigured by acid thrown by the husband of one of them. �Acid attacks,� notes the report, �are among the worst of the huge numbers of crimes against women committed in Pakistan.�

There could hardly be two more graphic reminders of the problems that loom ahead for the country as it tries to reconcile progress with deeply entrenched tradition.

As I pack for the last time before crossing the border to India, I have to say that Pakistan has been a revelation. Simplistic post 9/11 propaganda sought to equate it with terrorism, as if you could equate a population greater than that of France and Germany combined with any single thought or idea. I have found Pakistan to be infinitely more complex and diverse than I had been prepared for. Wilder and more beautiful too. Never once did I feel threatened. Give or take a few cold beers, I leave it with regret.

The Indian border is only 18 miles (30 km) from Lahore, an accident of politics that brought terrible suffering to the city when Pakistan was created in 1947. The exact details of where the frontier would run were not revealed by the British until a few hours before independence was declared. When it became clear that one of India�s oldest and most prestigious cities was to become part of Pakistan an hysterical panic broke out. As half a million Hindus and Sikhs fled east and even more Muslims fled west, reprisals on both sides were swift and bloody.

Cross-border trains arrived at Lahore station full of massacred corpses. Men, women and children on both sides were attacked and killed. Law and order were paralysed as the communal violence took its course. The British refused to bring their army out onto the streets to help. Across the subcontinent as a whole it is estimated that partition resulted in over a million deaths.

The legacy of hatred still smoulders. The border post at Wagah is the only official land crossing between Pakistan and India, and even then Pakistanis and Indians are only allowed to cross in specially secure trains between Lahore and Amritsar. Foreigners, if they have the time and patience, can walk through from Pakistan to India, and this is what we intend to do.

The thermometer has fallen to a mere 41degC (106degF), but the humidity has risen. There was quite a storm across these plains last night and a combination of dust and moisture makes the air thick and sticky. It�s what Roger calls a three-shirt day.

The canals that run along the side of the road to Wagah are thronged with people cooling off. Families picnicking on the banks watch children splashing in the mud, men wash rickshaws and bicycles in the water, women, veiled and sari-ed, take tentative dips. Hot-headed teenage boys fling their shirts off and leap from bridges. There seems to be a heightened devil-may-care mood along the roadside today. As the traffic grinds to a standstill boys who would not normally have dared approach us dance like scarecrows in front of our minibus and bang the sides as we move on. It�s nice to have one last image of Pakistan with its hair down.

At the border the road peters out in an open assembly area, full of trucks. Beyond this rises a modern red brick arch decorated with faux-Mughal columns and cupolas and flanked by terraced seating. Through the arch can be glimpsed two pairs of heavy metal gates, with a white line between them, which is the border itself. Beyond them rises another arched gateway inscribed with the single word �India�, the grandness of the gesture somewhat compromised by a row of threadbare potted plants arranged along its parapet.

This is the arena for a nightly display of nationalist feather ruffling, as both sides lower their flags in a ceremony deliberately designed to provoke unabashed jingoism in the assembled crowds.

Loudspeakers blare out. The terraces are filling up and a heavily perspiring man wearing a T-shirt in green and white national colours is warming up an already damp crowd.

�Pa-ki-stan!� he shouts.

�PA-KI-STAN!� they roar back.

Two very small children carrying flags are sent out by their mothers to join him. They�re greeted with tumultuous applause.

We can hear the same sort of thing happening on the Indian side, the only noticeable difference being that they have music playing from their loudspeakers, while the Pakistanis have prayers and readings from the Koran.

At 6.05 precisely (this is, after all, a military ceremony) a bugle sounds, and, to resounding cheers, two of the tallest people I�ve seen in Pakistan march out towards the border gates. These are Punjabi Rangers and to say they march is an understatement. Every movement is executed with barely suppressed fury. Arms are snapped out like freshly drawn swords, legs fly into the air, high enough to brush the nose with the knee, before thudding into the ground with the force of a steam-hammer. This study in bellicosity is emphasized by uniforms as black as their smouldering eyes. Fan-shaped head-dresses rise like hackles from their turbans.

They are followed by a squad of 12 more Rangers, who emerge with a splendid mixture of panache, aggression and bad acting that has the crowd roaring.

Speeding, slowing, high kicking, strutting, stamping, grimacing, leering and hissing with a finely honed ferocity, they create the impression of caged beasts ready at any moment to bite their opponents� heads off.

The Indian guard, in light khaki with red and gold turban plumes and white gaiters, march out to meet them. They try hard to be as theatrically aggressive as their Pakistani counterparts but somehow you don�t feel their hearts are really in it.

Nevertheless, the show must go on and both sides, now eyeball to eyeball, contrive to present a quite surreal display of precision nastiness, raising their forearms like weapons, pawing the ground, baring their teeth and snarling at one another like turkey-cocks.

Even the lowering of the flag is conducted with a tight-lipped, carefully choreographed, competitive swagger, the final flourish of which is the controlled slamming of the gates between the two countries.

Applause and cheers follow the two flag parties as they march rabidly back towards their respective arches.

After this the whole thing degenerates into a PR exercise as the men who have terrified us for the last 30 minutes reappear to mingle with the crowd and have their photograph taken with kiddies and members of Parliament.

This pantomime at the border sends out confusing signals. Beyond the arches and the terraces where this carefully calculated piece of theatre has taken place is the reality of the Indo-Pakistan border: a mile-wide strip of no-man�s land, guarded and patrolled as far as the eye can see by troops armed with more than high kicks and grimaces. Follow this line north into Kashmir and you will find several hundred thousand heavily armed men facing each other, not for entertainment, but because 56 years after independence, the line of partition remains a deep, unhealed wound.

India

Day Thirty : Amritsar

A sign greets the traveller who makes the long walk across no-man�s land and through the easternmost archway. �India, the Largest Democracy in the World, Welcomes You�. As if to emphasize what a difference a half-mile makes, cold beer salesmen assail you and you are liable to be overtaken on the road by women on motorbikes. But the difference between the severity and discipline of Islamic Pakistan and the liberalism of secular India seems nowhere better demonstrated than in the border city of Amritsar.

Muslim and Hindu live reasonably happily together here (indeed, it�s a fact that, despite Partition, there are more Muslims in India than in Pakistan), but the predominant religion in the first big city on the Indian side of the border is neither Muslim nor Hindu. Amritsar is a Sikh town.

Sikhism, professed by 65 per cent of the population here, is one of the world�s newer faiths. It was founded by one Guru Nanak, in the early years of the 16th century. After a lifetime of travel, he concluded from what he saw that �God is to be found neither in the Koran or the Puranas� (the sacred Hindu texts). Unable to accept the Hindu caste system, or what he saw as the intolerance of Islam, Guru Nanak came up with an admirably pragmatic solution. One God for all, rich or poor, with no human hierarchies or priesthoods, idols or icons coming in between.

In a nod towards another religion, the Sikh gurus chose a pool visited by Lord Buddha around which to build their first temple. It was called Amrit Sovar (The Nectar Pool) and though the name was elided to Amritsar, the pool, much extended, still exists and the temple built around it is now one of the most famous shrines in the world.

To get to the Golden Temple I take a motorcycle rickshaw into the centre of the city. The bracing, or exhausting, anarchy of Indian streets begins as soon as we leave the hotel. Cars veer out of side roads without stopping, lame dogs hop gamely across your bows, bicycles and buses appear from nowhere and blasts of the horn mingle with blasts from exhausts. At a roundabout we are forced into the middle of the road to avoid not just a cow, but a cow feeding its calf. As we pull out, a scooter with three small children concertinaed in between their mother and father hoots indignantly at us before disappearing in a cloud of fumes from the back of a passing truck.

Road safety signs with slogans like �Hell or Helmet!� and �Stay Married! Divorce Speed!� are partially obscured and universally ignored.

An additional discomfort for an Englishman driving into Amritsar is a series of very public reminders of how much we were once disliked.

On one roundabout is a statue of a dashing figure in a theatrical moustache, a puja garland around his neck, running forward pointing a gun. This celebrates the assassin Udham Singh, who shot and killed Sir Michael O�Dwyer, a hated governor of the Punjab, in London in 1940.

Around the next corner is a statue to S. C. Bose, who felt so strongly about getting the British out of India that he tried to ally his Indian National Army with the Germans and Japanese in the Second World War. A half-mile further on is the alleyway leading to the Jallianwala Bagh, where 400 peacefully but illegally protesting Indians were massacred on the orders of Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer in April 1919, an outrage considered by many to mark the beginning of the end of British rule. Today the site is a park where a sacred flame burns, sponsored by Indian Oil.

The complex of buildings that contains the Golden Temple is called a Gurudwara (Gateway to the Gurus), the name given to all places of worship of the 20 million or so Sikhs in India. This, the holiest and grandest of them all, dominates the centre of Amritsar, its balconied, white stucco facade and flamboyantly domed roof rising exotically above a clutter of stalls, billboards, shops and crowded pavements where groups of Dalits (�the oppressed�) squat inches from the traffic.

There is a strict dress code for the Golden Temple. First of all the head must be covered at all times. Scarves of various colours are readily available for non-Sikhs, either from any one of the 17 young lads who converge on you as soon as you pull up outside, or more cheaply from one of the stalls inside the forecourt. Shoes and socks must be removed. By the time we have deposited them at special lockers (a lady takes mine, something that would never have happened in Pakistan), we look like a line of pantomime pirates. Hands must then be washed at marble-lined public basins and bare feet passed through a trough of water at the bottom of the steps.

The combination of the heat of the day, the constant crowd moving in and out and the carrying of film gear makes all these preliminaries rather a trial, but the sight that greets us when we finally reach the gateway arch banishes thoughts of discomfort, at least for a minute or two.

The Golden Temple itself, called by Sikhs the Hari Mandir (God�s Temple) sits, like a great glittering barge, in the centre of a huge tank of water, with one narrow causeway (jammed with people throughout the day) connecting it with the promenade and the dazzling white ancillary buildings that enclose it on all four sides.

Four gates, one on each side, symbolize the inclusivity of Sikhism, the temple�s openness to all, irrespective of religion, caste, creed or sex. The four equal entrances are not all that distinguish it from other religious buildings. Instead of climbing to an altar, the stairs to the Golden Temple lead downwards to the holy place, an encouragement to approach with humility.

Once down the steps to the waterside, there isn�t much encouragement to sit around. Most of the pilgrims are moving, in a remorseless clockwise flow, around the marble-flagged promenade, some strolling, some bustling purposefully, some dodging the mops and buckets of the cleaners, most squeezed onto coconut matting to avoid burning their feet, while hymns from the Holy Book are sung over booming loudspeakers. Some men are stripped down, bathing in the holy water, which seems to be largely full of fat carp with gulping, Jagger-like mouths. Very few visitors, apart from a one-legged man lying asleep, head resting on his crutches, are doing nothing.

I notice how much more openly curious people are here than in Pakistan.

�What is the country in which you are residing?� they ask. �For what purpose have you come?�

Occasionally, a passing family group will quite unapologetically insert themselves alongside us and get a friend to take a photo, as if we too are part of the tourist attractions. Helpful explanations of what�s going on are given, whether solicited or not.

An elderly gentleman with a long beard points in the direction of the Hari Mandir.

�Whatever you require from God he is giving you. That is what they are singing about.�

There is a brisk, businesslike pragmatism about the Sikhs. They don�t seem over-concerned with the mysteries of belief.

Philanthropy, along with business enterprise and physical bravery, is a vital part of Sikhism and all their temples have a langar, a kitchen preparing free meals around the clock, financed through the one-tenth of their income that all Sikhs are expected to give to good works. It�s a huge operation, with an estimated 50,000 meals prepared each weekday and twice that at weekends. The work is all done by volunteers, and any Sikh, whether surgeon or street cleaner, is expected to come and help chop onions or wash dishes. In the words of one of the ten holy Gurus on whose teachings Sikhism is based: �If you want to understand me, come into my kitchen.� This we do.

The kitchen is spread through several buildings. One is entirely devoted to a chapatti production line. A rat skips nimbly out of the way as fresh sacks of flour are cut open and fed into the bowels of a slowly turning machine, which regurgitates the flour as dough. One group of helpers rolls the dough into balls, another flattens each ball out into a pancake, and another lays them out on hotplates the size of double beds, made from cast-iron sheets laid on bricks with gas fires underneath, and capable of taking a couple of hundred chapattis at a time. When one side is done the chapattis are flipped over in quick, dexterous movements of a long thin implement with a half-moon end. When the flipper is satisfied both sides are right he gives an extra strong flick, which sends the chapatti flying off the hotplate to land neatly on a pile on the floor. The piles are then removed and carried out to the refectory.

The chapatti production line shares a tall barn-like space with dal cauldrons, the largest cooking vessels I�ve ever seen. Vats like giant tympana are set above gas jets and stirred with mighty ladles.

I pick my way through the kitchens, across a terrace where 30 or 40 people sit slicing onions and garlic, green peppers and ginger, and up the stairs to take a meal in one of the spartan communal dining rooms. Each floor is the size of a warehouse and can accommodate 3000 covers at any one time. I join a line of people who file in and sit cross-legged at a long coir mat, soggy from periodic washing. Volunteers pass through, giving out segmented stainless steel trays, which others then fill up with chapatti, dollops of pickle and dal ladled out of steel buckets. Water is poured into our mugs from another bucket.

As a helpful man next to me says, this whole process embodies the Sikh teaching that we are all equal and we must learn to serve each other.

This high-volume soup kitchen is not the only service; there are also free dormitories here providing accommodation for 25,000 people a night.

It looks and sounds like a fine and good thing but there have been abuses of the system. I notice a sign advising �Pilgrims must not accept eatables from strangers�, which refers to a recent spate of cases of people being drugged and their belongings stolen.

Twenty years ago this altruistic environment saw dreadful violence when a group of Sikhs demanding their own state barricaded themselves in the Akhal Takht, the second most sacred building on the site.

The siege was lifted in the infamous Operation Bluestar, when the Indian army brought tanks into the temple and pulverized the building. It�s estimated that several thousand died in the fighting. Such was the strength of feeling that a few months later Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who authorized the attack, was assassinated by Sikh members of her own bodyguards.

Such trauma seems almost inconceivable tonight as a setting sun burnishes the 500 kilograms of gold that sheathe the marble walls of the Hari Mandir, hymns echo around the arcades and turbanned and bearded Sikh men and their families move slowly in through its doors to pay homage to the Holy Book, the most precious object in a religion that rejects idolatry.

Nepal

Day Forty Four : Kathmandu

We arrived here last night from Delhi on the penultimate night of Dasain, a big Nepali festival, and though badly in need of some rest and recuperation after our Indian adventure, the final day�s celebrations cannot be missed.

To start the day we�ve been asked by Pratima Pande, a formidable, energetic, Gordonstoun-educated Nepali, to watch a puja, a ritual act of worship, at the home of one of her in-laws. This being the first time I�ve ever been to Nepal, I�m craning my head out of the car window as we drive there. I have a sense of streets that are less hectic and a city much easier on the eye than those we�ve seen these past few weeks. Buildings look like buildings rather than structures for supporting billboards.

The house is comfortable but not opulent. As we arrive a group of musicians are parading around the garden before taking up a position on the far side of a small swimming pool. It�s a bit of a squeeze, as two of them are wielding large, curved horns.

I�m told that this is Bijaya Dasami, the �victorious tenth day� of the Dasain festival and Pratima and her husband, mother-in-law, brothers-in-law, nephews, nieces and cousins are here to celebrate King Rama�s victory over the demon Ravana, helped by Shiva�s consort, Durga.

I�m desperately trying to get all this down in my notebook when the music starts and the family priest, an unassuming, modestly dressed figure, who looks as if he might have come to fix the plumbing, steps forward. The exact timing of the puja is very auspicious and it cannot be delayed for foreign film crews. He sets the ball rolling by applying a dab of yellow to the forehead of the oldest member of the family, Pratima�s 82-year-old mother-in-law. Today, Pratima tells me, everyone in Nepal, from the King downwards, will wear this mark, the tika.

After some light family argument over the exact order of things, the ceremony continues, in strictly hierarchical fashion, with the five brothers, and then the children, kissing the feet of their elders and giving each other the male tika, made from a preparation of curd, rice and vermilion powder. Jamara, shoots of barley, are placed on the head or in a garland around the neck as a symbol of fertility and longevity.

As an outsider I�m struck by how seriously all this is taken. Pratima�s brothers-in-law are hard-nosed, professional people, one a doctor, one a banker, two others in the army. They�re dressed in the labada salwar, a knee-length tunic, with tight leggings and black leather shoes, but over it they wear a Western-style sports jacket.

Many of them have been educated in Britain or America, their children speak fluent English and go to private schools. Yet here they are taking part in an ancient and rural ritual with a thoroughness that one can�t imagine among their counterparts in the West.

The first thing to remember, says Pratima, is that not only is Hinduism the religion of 90 per cent of Nepal, the Nepalis take pride in being more scrupulous in their observance of festivals. The Indians, she says, have shortened their ceremonies.

�We take three days to get married. They do it in a day!�

She herself is off to a private audience at which she will be given tika and blessed by the King, who is some sort of relative (they�re both from the Rana family). This afternoon, he will be doing the same for the public in the grounds of the palace. Would I like to come along?

The prospect of meeting the king of a country I�ve only been in for 12 hours appeals in a surreal sort of way, and I scurry back to the Yak and Yeti Hotel to find a tie and get my only jacket pressed.

There is a certain amount of morbid curiosity here, for the Nepali monarchy was very nearly wiped out in June 2001, when the King and Queen and seven other members of the family were murdered by the Crown Prince, who then turned a gun on himself. Rumours abound as to what really happened but it seems he was a heavy drinker, loved guns and flew into an hysterical rage when his father refused him permission to marry the girl he wanted.

At three o�clock I�m with Pratima in the grounds of the Royal Palace, blinking a little wearily in the bright sunshine as King Gyanendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev, the late Crown Prince�s uncle and incarnation of Vishnu the preserver, descends his front steps between statues of guardian animals - dragons, horses, peacocks, dolphins and elephants - to the strains, and in this case strains is the right word, of a Scottish-sounding dirge weirdly played by a pipe band in red and white plaid scarves and white gaiters.

The palace, with its Potala-like central tower, Hindu temple shapes, Tibetan loggias, red-brick skin and clusters of concrete columns that hang down without touching the ground, seems to have been built in a style that might best be described as Himalayan Fantasy. Which might also apply to the rest of the day.

The King takes his place behind a red, padded leather desk, which makes him look a bit like a hotel receptionist. At a given signal his subjects begin to move forward and he sets to work applying tika to the nation�s foreheads. Having so recently seen the Dalai Lama work a line, I know that it�s possible to combine gravitas and jollity, but King Gyanendra maintains one expression throughout, and that is a sort of jowly glumness, as if being ruler of Nepal is absolutely the worst job in the world.

The line is slowed down ahead of me by a succession of middle-brass army officers whose huge, peaked caps have to be pushed back before the tika can be applied, then repositioned to enable them to salute. It all takes time and the King looks even more bored by the time my turn comes. Pratima moves forward to introduce me. I don�t know what�s said, but a flicker of animation crosses the royal features and after applying the royal tika to my deeply incised brow, the King extends a hand (his own) for me to shake and, leaning forward, wishes me a happy stay in Nepal.

�It could be the highlight of his afternoon,� says a Brit, working in the country. �He needs all the friends he can get.�

Whatever his personal popularity, the institution of monarchy seems strong enough to attract a queue of people that extends all the way back to the heavy iron gates and for a few hundred yards out along the road, and those at the end of the line must be among the poorest in the kingdom.

No sooner are we back in the Yak and Yeti looking at laundry lists for the first time in a week than word comes through that a special ceremony, happening only once every 12 years, will be taking place in the heart of the old city later tonight. It�s being kept very secret because it involves the King, who, because of the fear of attacks from the Maoist guerrillas, rarely goes out in public within the city.

It sounds a long-shot but we follow it up and make our way to Hanuman Dhoka, the Old Royal Palace. Although it is dimly lit and hard to distinguish individual buildings, the complex of streets and squares has an extraordinary atmosphere. I�m reminded of walking at night in St Petersburg or Rome. There is a theatrical unreality to the place. Astonishing buildings, unlike anything I�ve seen before, are silhouetted against the night sky. Towering pagodas with long wide-eaved roofs, stacked one above the other, are topped with Hapsburg-like spires. Deep balconies cantilever out on long poles, the lintels and sills of the windows are thick timber beams. A fairy-tale kind of architecture, the more magical for being first encountered at night.

The general public seems conspicuously absent. We walk through empty squares until we come upon a small crowd that seems to consist mainly of flak-jacketed military, armed police and press photographers in dark suits.

The authorities look nervous, their eyes constantly scanning us and each other. Nigel grabs a camera position a few feet off the ground beneath a lamppost, and defends it against all comers as we wait for the production to begin.

After some time a procession can be heard approaching. Led by women with lamps and incense sticks and musicians playing cymbals and drums, a group of masked figures enters the square. The masks are big, elaborate and brightly coloured and their arrival provokes a mad rush as the press photographers, closely ringed by police, scoot across towards them like a squad of black beetles, thrusting people aside with their cameras as they try to get close. The masked dancers, some of them with towering headdresses and wearing animal skins like African witch doctors, seem to have been at it some time, and they twist and turn to the music as if in a trance.

There is still no sign of the King. The photographers have taken their pictures, the dancers have made their spectacular entrance and by the time the royal motorcade looms out of the darkness, the energy and spontaneity have all but evaporated. Army, police and plain-clothes security men with fingers at their ears move in around the King and escort him forwards. The most impressive of the masked figures, a representation of the goddess Bhadrakali, with a blue face, staring eyes and scarlet lips, moves up close to the King. She blesses him with divine powers, hands over a sword, flashbulbs erupt and moments later it�s all over.

The press pack close in; the King, tiny and insignificant beside the great blue head of the goddess, gives a brief and nervous smile, before being rushed back to his Mercedes and away.

This combined display of paranoia and celebration puzzles me greatly. Why was it so important to take such a risk with the King�s safety? If it was so important why weren�t the public invited? What is it that frightens King Gyanendra so much?

Perhaps I shall learn more as we go along. If this is the overture, my stay in Nepal promises to be a very rich piece indeed.

Tibet

Day Fifty Nine : Xangmu to Tingri

Xangmu high street, quiet as the grave when we arrived, erupts into life at night. Sounds of shouting, drilling, thumping and banging drift, unhampered, through tightly closed windows and into my head. I pull all the blankets off the unoccupied bed next to me, curl up in a foetal ball and hope it will all just go away. It doesn�t. It gets worse. The hissing, clunking, industrial sounds seem to be augmented by flashes and crackles. Can someone really be spot-welding out there at 12.15? The prospect of how exhausted I�ll feel in the morning keeps me awake for at least another hour.

Wake at eight, but it�s still pitch dark. In fact, it doesn�t begin to get light for another half-hour. The government of China, in their wisdom, decreed that the whole country, wider than the United States, should have only one time zone. The further west you are the later daybreak comes.

The street outside, apart from the frequent clearing of throats and whistling of spittle, is quiet again this morning. I can find no satisfactory explanation for the nocturnal activity other than that Xangmu is a frontier town and frontier towns have a life of their own. We walk down the hill to resume the customs procedures.

A truck marked �Four Friends Transport. Live Long Friendship Nepal, India, China, Bhutan� is at the head of a long queue of vehicles heading towards Nepal. There isn�t much room at the customs, and trucks, individuals, a bewildered-looking tour group and a flock of sheep are all trying to get through at the same time. Young, officious border guards in slack uniforms either push people around or ignore them completely. High up on the wall, and conveniently inaccessible, is a small box marked �Complaints about Immigration�.

By the time all the formalities have been completed - and to be fair, a British film crew is a very rare sight in Tibet - it�s early afternoon. Our final departure is marked by a small ceremony at which the manager of the Bai Ma Hotel gives us each a white scarf to bring us good luck on our journey. He seems a decent man, doing his best, though I notice he doesn�t have a complaints box.

As we drive out of Xangmu (with few regrets, in my case) the squash of white-tiled buildings eases and we can see the wooded gorge we climbed yesterday, plunging picturesquely down to Nepal. The road to Lhasa (now, inevitably, re-christened the Friendship Highway) continues to climb steeply, through forested slopes and past tumbling waterfalls, until it brings us at last to the edge of the Tibetan plateau. The Roof of the World was once a seabed. What lay beneath the ancient Sea of Tethys was heaved up onto the top of the world by the same collision of the Indian and Eurasian plates that built the Himalaya. It now rests at an average height of 13,100 feet (4000 m) and from its steep sides stream some of the world�s greatest rivers: the Indus, Salween, Yangtze, Irrawaddy, Yellow River and Brahmaputra.

In the relatively short distance from Xangmu, we�ve made dramatic progress, vertically, if not horizontally. We�re only 20 miles from the Bai Ma Hotel, but 5000 feet (1520 m) above it. Apart from a few poplar groves, the tree cover has gone and on the mountainsides bare rock shows through tight, tussocky cover. At a cold, exposed little town called Nyalam we stop to have papers checked before entering a new administrative zone. Women in masks sweep the street, outside a modern building a prosperous-looking man makes two of his employees unroll a length of carpet, which he proceeds to examine with great care. Recently completed terraced housing runs along the side of the road, an early indication of Beijing�s plans to make Tibet a new frontier. This is a cheerless place, though J-P, never daunted, manages to find a shop selling wine and we roll across the River Matsang two bottles of Dynasty Red to the better.

The road continues upwards, over long, undulating, brown hills, until we reach the prayer flag-bedecked pass of Tong La, over 17,000 feet (5180 m) above sea level and the highest place I�ve ever been on earth (coming in well ahead of my previous record, the hot springs in San Pedro de Atacama in Chile at 14,700 feet (4480 m)).

Everything is bewildering, strange and wonderful. Running the length of the southern horizon is a chain of towering, white peaks and on the grassland below us a herd of yak, short-legged creatures, bodies close to the ground, their thick, black hair standing out against greeny-brown hills behind them.

We stop and walk a little way from the car, every step feeling like 20 at this altitude.

But that doesn�t dampen the exhilaration.

It�s dark when we reach the town of Tingri and, after some initial confusion, find our way off the highway and into a capacious courtyard, which looks like that of a monastery, but in fact belongs to the Snow Leopard Hotel. Life centres around a big, low, woody room with painted beams and a brick parqueted floor, largely lit by the glow from a stove of burning yak dung in the centre of the room. This is what was lacking in those inhospitable Annapurna cabins: a fire, so simple and so intensely welcoming. We cluster round it and a lady with braided hair and rubicund, muddied face offers us yak butter tea. Nigel describes the taste as �liquid gorgonzola�, which is absolutely spot on. The rancid smell of the tea and the sharp aroma of yak dung smoke is not as horrible as it sounds. I find it odd, yes, but interestingly strange and unfamiliar, quintessentially Tibetan and proof that north of the Himalaya everything is very different.

In the dim recesses of the room we�re served a very good meal of noodles with mushroom, pork, green peppers and lumps of soft, white, doughy Tibetan bread.

We�re advised to break out the sleeping bags tonight. It will be below zero in our un-heated rooms.

Leaving the fire is the hardest thing, but once across the yard, beneath a bracingly clear night sky, I�m into a pretty little room, so different from last night. Proper curtains, a colourful wall with a frieze of painted flowers. Beside the bed I have a wooden cabinet, also very charmingly painted. By the light of a very dim bulb I can make out leering gods, dragons, clouds, waves and what look very much like flying teeth.

The only setback tonight is that the bottles of wine from Nyalam proved undrinkable.

Day Sixty One : Rongbuk

Last night was desperately uncomfortable. A fierce wind blew, occasionally gusting with such ferocity that I feared it might tear the windows out. I lay awake, mouth dry despite regular swigs of water, listening to the village dogs fighting and detritus in the yard being flung about by the wind. As soon as I drifted off to sleep my breathing slowed and within moments I was wide awake, gasping for breath. I need the sleep so much, but I find myself fighting it, forcing myself to stay awake and breathe slow and deep.

The latrine is almost subhuman. It�s hard enough to aim through a hole reduced to a slit by the calcified accretions of many previous visitors, without at the same time having to flash a torch to warn other guests and extract thin sheets of Boots travel tissue in a freezing, force 8 gale. Many years ago, encountering similarly appalling conditions in a boat on Lake Tanganyika, I took Imodium to prevent me having to go to the toilet ever again. As I squat in this howling tempest three miles up in the sky, I think cyanide might be the better option.

One advantage of this fierce wind is that when daylight comes it is clear and pristine. The summit of Everest trails a plume of spin-drift, blown off the mountain by winds which, at that height, must be in excess of 100 miles an hour. The rest of the mountain, including the long, flanking shoulders below the arrow-head peak, is crystal clear.

The remainder of the guests who were here last night - Spaniards, Norwegians and a group of Australians - all leave today. They can�t believe we�re here for three nights, and whoop with joy as they�re driven away.

Our cooks are making yak butter tea, which the Tibetans call Bo Cha, in the traditional, long, thin, cylindrical churn. It�s a mixture of yak butter and tea leaves, with salt and milk added, and is a taste I�ve yet to acquire, and I�m sure I shall have plenty of opportunity to do so.

We had hoped to move up to Base Camp today, but with the wind still strengthening the decision is taken to stay down here and acclimatize. With atmospheric pressure about half that at sea level, everyone is suffering to some degree and Mr Yang, our minder, and John Pritchard, our sound recordist, are particularly uncomfortable.

Apart from the guesthouse and a new, red-brick hotel nearby, ready but tantalizingly un-opened, Rongbuk consists of a line of low cottages and the monastery, which looks old but was built less than 20 years ago to replace the one destroyed, along with thousands of others in Tibet, by fanatical Red Guards in the 1960s. Outside it stands a sizeable chorten topped with a small, black pyramid and hung with prayer flags like ribbons on a maypole. I walk into a courtyard of two-storey buildings with a painted balcony running round for access, and I follow the sound of chanting up a flight of steps on the far side of the square and into the temple. There are 30 monks and 30 nuns here at the world�s highest monastery. With their shaven heads and loose robes, it�s difficult to tell them apart.

After prayers they gather outside and I present them with a thangka (from Kathmandu). It�s accepted by the abbot, a big, amiable man with a very dirty, cherry-red duvet jacket over his robes. The monks gather round and study it with great interest.

By evening the wind has dropped as forecast. I sit in the room I share with Basil and make my notes as Everest, now completely clear of the cloud, turns pink in the dying sunlight. Apart from the very top, Everest is not one single, symmetrical shape like a Kilimanjaro or a Machhapuchhre, its outline being composed of a series of huge blocks.

Suddenly my view is obscured by two women banging on the window, staring in at me and holding their hands out. They�re some of the saddest people I�ve seen and for a moment I feel a sense of frustration that the monastery can do so little for them.

Getting in and out of my sleeping bag are the most uncomfortable moments of the day. The cold snaps at my heels and yet dressing and undressing cannot be hurried at this altitude.

Yunnan, China

Day Seventy Six : Shigu to the Tiger Leaping Gorge

In eastern Tibet and western Yunnan something quite dramatic happens to the Himalaya. They change direction. Crushed up against two unyielding plateaux, the world�s mightiest mountain range meets its match and is turned inexorably southwards. The meltwaters of the Tibetan plateau, gratefully unleashed, pour south through a series of plunging, often impenetrable gorges, to spill into the Bay of Bengal or the South China Sea.

All except one.

At a small town called Shigu, some 100 miles into Yunnan, the Yangtze, like the Himalaya, changes direction, a quirk of geography that Simon Winchester, in his book The River at the Centre of the World, regards as being responsible for the very existence of what we know as China.

Having carved its way off the plateau and running hard alongside the Mekong, the Salween and the Irrawaddy, the Yangtze-Kiang, now called the Jinsha Jiang, River of Golden Sand, meets an obstruction. A thousand miles of tumbling water heading for Vietnam and the Gulf of Tonkin is, within a few hundred yards, spun round to the north and, though it twists and turns and tries to find its way south again, it is now effectively a Chinese river, heading east to create the enormous bowl of fertility and prosperity that is the heart and soul of the Middle Kingdom.

Such is the fame of the Great Bend at Shigu that I expect to see a battleground of the elements, some evidence of a cataclysmic confrontation between rock and water; but the Yangtze goes meekly, and Cloud Mountain, which blocks its way, is little more than a large hill. Sandbanks rise from the river and Shigu itself is a warm, sleepy little backwater.

Maybe it�s worn out by its history. Shigu means �Stone Drum�, which refers to a marble tablet commemorating the epic defeat of Tibetan invaders that took place here in 1548. It describes �heads heaped like grave mounds�, �blood like rain� and �dykes choked with armour�. Another memorial reminds us that Mao�s famous Long Marchers, pursued by the Nationalist army, crossed the Yangtze at Shigu in 1936. It took four days and nights to get all 18,000 of them across.

Popular legend believes that the limestone buttress of Cloud Mountain that turned the Yangtze north was put there by the Emperor Da Yu, with precisely that intention, some 4000 years ago.

There�s a huge tourist car park by the river with restaurant attached. Early on this Monday morning it�s quiet and there�s only one bus parked up, but I�m told that the rest of the time Shigu makes a very good living from Da Yu and China�s most famous U-turn.

No sooner has Da Yu�s carefully placed mountain done its work than the river is flung into the thrashing, frothing, unbelievably turbulent passage of a 13,000-foot (3960 m) ravine known as Tiger Leaping Gorge. Despite the fact that the escaping tiger that gave it its name would have had to leap a half-mile or more to cross it, legend is as important as fact in China and this is the name by which it is known, loved and increasingly visited.

At Quiaotou, a few miles downstream from Shigu, they�re pushing an ambitious new road through the gorge. This will be the easy option: the Low Road, but we�re going to walk the High Road, a trekker�s trail that clings to the sheer side of the mountain. Our guide, Li Yuan, is a tall, stooped figure with close-cropped, greying hair and a livid scar running down one side of his face. He has six horses to carry our equipment. They�re waiting patiently on the edge of town, tiny specks beside an army of bulldozers and earth movers. Adding a touch of surreality, women of the local Yi minority step daintily through the rubble on their way to market, dressed in sweepingly long, bright dresses, huge silver earrings and square, black hats, perched, like mortarboards, on the back of their heads.

We purchase tickets for the two-day walk from a small tourist centre beside which is a map of where we�re going and a warning in English that �Tiger Leaping Gorge is one of the most dangerous gorges in the world which is not convenient to sail�, before concluding poetically, �However there is a kind of beauty making of magnificence tugging of people�s heartstrings�.

Before we can have our heartstrings tugged, we have to survive a mile-long walk along the road out of town, as coaches swish by, stirring up clouds of dust. As we cough our way along in their wake, we can at least feel morally superior to the bus-bound tourist and soon we can feel physically superior as well, as our track winds up the hillside and the road slips out of sight below. We climb steadily upwards through scrubby woodland with big views of the southern end of the gorge unrolling below. Following a stone-built irrigation channel, we arrive at a farmhouse, in whose courtyard we loosen our boots and sit down at a table set with bowls of walnuts, sunflower seeds and crisp, delicious pears as round as apples.

The farm also has rooms and is run by Li Yuan�s wife. Like him she is quietly efficient, attentive and smiles a lot. She�s also a fine cook, providing us with a sumptuous lunch of rice, fresh mushrooms, liver and green chillies, kidney, pork, tomato and egg and a bowl full of quivering grey tubes that no-one touches.

They�re both from the Naxi (pronounced Na-hee) people, one of the rich mix of ethnic minorities in Yunnan.

Lunch is easily walked off on a thigh-stretchingly steep climb known as the 28 Bends. Trudging upwards in a tight zigzag, I count off each one carefully and still find another 20 left at the end. The reward is a long, level pathway following an old trade route along which horses from Tibet were exchanged for tea from Yunnan. It leads through warm slopes of camphor, bamboo and pine, across a stream, then downhill through a grove of walnut trees. By now the valley has become a gorge, and I have to concentrate carefully on the increasingly narrow and precipitous trail. It�s narrow and the drop precipitous. Far below are the angry, white-whipped waters of the Yangtze, dropping 700 feet (213 m) in a dozen miles. A lethal series of 21 rapids took many lives before two Chinese made the first passage of the river in 1986, entirely encased in a sealed rubber capsule. Sometimes the water is so far away and so hemmed in by mountainside that we can only guess at its ferocity from the distant roar.

As the evening light slants across the gorge a terrific panorama unfolds. On the other side of the gorge the Jade Dragon Snow Mountains, easternmost bastions of the Himalaya, rise in a series of smooth columns, sinuous ravines and needle-sharp pinnacles, their dark grey sides streaked with waterfalls. What makes this place different from Annapurna, Everest, even the Karakoram, is that the tremendous height is so close. When I stop on a narrow ledge to look around me, I find myself having to plant my feet very securely, for it feels as if the soaring vertical walls across the gorge are exerting some magnetic force, determined to tear me from my flimsy ledge.

No-one speaks now, and as we plod onwards round the mountainside, silenced by the sheer scale of the place, there is only the reassuring sound of the horse bells, and the distant hiss of the river unthinkably far below.

It�s dark by the time we reach Bendi Wan village and an overnight stop at a place called The Halfway House, run by the redoubtable Mr Feng De Fang. I�ve felt rather Hobbit-like for the past hour, as the scenery increasingly grew to resemble a Lord of the Rings backdrop, and the feeling that I might have morphed into Frodo Baggins is only increased as we pull the doorbell in the dim, lantern-lit entrance and are shown into a stone-flagged courtyard hung with gourds, pumpkins and stacks of drying corncobs.

Mr Feng is a slim to cadaverous young man, quietly busying round and making sure we have a warm fire to sit beside, and from his dark barn of a kitchen he and his wife produce an excellent meal of pork and fresh-picked wild mushrooms.

There�s a small, very hot shower down below and the rooms are like those in an old alpine chalet - cosy, cool and with very thin walls.

Kept awake by a noisy game of Chinese chequers on the balcony below, I bundle myself up in the duvet and tot up the day�s work. A 12-mile walk, a 2500-foot climb and, apart from the quivering grey things, two of the best meals since we started out all those months ago.

Nagaland and Assam

Day Ninety : Longwa

In the remote hill village of Longwa I can stand with one leg in India and the other in Myanmar, or Burma, as it used to be known. (I like the word Burma and take heart from the fact that Myanmar�s national anthem remains �Gba mjay Bma� - �We Shall Love Burma for Ever�.) Longwa, a collection of palm-thatched huts, a tin-roofed church and a huge satellite dish, isn�t marked on any maps I have. It�s at the end of the line, on the very edge of Indian administration.

It�s also the home of the largest building made entirely from vegetation that I think I�ve ever seen. The chief�s hut, or in this case, mega-hut, is some 200 feet long and covered with a striking roof of palm leaves that sweeps down from an apex of 50 feet or more to within 3 feet of the ground.

The hut occupies the highest point of a 4700-foot (1430 m) ridge, on either side of which the land falls away in a series of crinkly valleys. Along the top runs the India-Myanmar border. In fact, it slices right down the middle of the chief�s hut, so he can walk between the two countries without ever leaving home.

Throughout the Himalaya, in Kashmir, on the North-West Frontier, in Tibet and Nepal, we�ve encountered a tension between the hill people, determined to preserve their customs and traditions, and the plains people wanting to build nations and impose control and conformity. It�s no different here. There are a dozen different Naga tribes in these hills, who until very recently fought each other and themselves, took heads as trophies and were generally left alone. From the middle of the 19th century, the British took an interest, but of an avuncular sort, never trying to subdue them but keeping them as a loose but friendly tribal area, which they called Nagaland. They were followed by American missionaries, who tried to persuade them to love God, grow crops and stop fighting.

When India was granted independence, the Nagas were not happy. Assimilation and domination by their Assamese lowland neighbours was seen as infinitely worse than staying with the British, and they made things difficult for India, boycotting general elections and fighting a fierce independence war against central government right up until the 1990s.

In January 2003, after 40 years of bloodshed, the NSCN, National Socialist Council of Nagaland, met in Delhi and announced that the war was over. Others are not so sure. They claim that the dream of an independent Nagaland will never go away.

The problem is that the Naga tribes remain essentially a trans-border people who don�t fit neatly into any of the boxes that the politicians have created for them. This may vex central government but it also means I can stand astride this particular frontier without fear of being mined, electrocuted or shot.

The people of Longwa are Konyak Nagas, the most numerous of 16 sub-tribes. They used to be known as the Naked Nagas, the title of a book by an Austrian anthropologist who worked here in the 1930s, some of whose observations, such as �Virginity wins no halo in the Naga heaven�, suggest reasons for his fascination with them.

Today, things are very different. Such has been the success of the American Baptist Church that 99 per cent of the Naga have been converted to Christianity. Nakedness is a thing of the past, as is the once common custom of head-hunting. (Though a recent National Geographic article reported evidence of active head-hunters as recently as 1991.)

We have come here with Shingwong, whose official title is Extra Assistant to the Deputy District Commissioner. He�s a soft-spoken Konyak, with square, grave features, more Tibetan than Indian. He wears a Western jacket and trousers. Tomorrow there will be a big spring festival here and the guest of honour will be the local MP.

The MP has asked to meet us and after our meal tonight Shing-wong takes us to see him, in a small, dark barn, with a hard earth floor. By the looks of things the MP�s had a few. His eyes are unfocussed and his mouth seems to have collapsed at one side, making him look not only unattractive, but dangerous.

Squatting on stools around him and lit only by flickering firelight is gathered a cross-section of mountain people, who seem to be from a completely different world. Most have red shawls thrown over bare shoulders and round their waists are aprons, held in place by belts made of bamboo cane. Some have bones in their hair and through their ears and small bronze skulls hanging from a necklace. These represent the heads that man has taken.

They grin vaguely at us as our purpose is explained.

�BBC. Journey round the Himalaya.�

But none of it�s going in. They�re all completely rat-arsed.

Day Ninety Four : Digboi to Dibrugah

A pack of pye-dogs circles the entrance to Digboi station, backing away with wary reluctance at the approach of my cycle-rickshaw. I buy a ticket for Dibrugah, 52 miles (80 km) down the line, for 18 rupees, about 25 pence. I notice that a ticket on the sleeper service to Delhi, over 1000 miles (1600 km) away, would set me back PS8.

That the railway extends here at all has everything to do with oil, tea and coal and very little to do with passengers. The wooden bench seats are functional rather than comfortable and progress is slow and punctuated every few hundred yards by a blast of the engine�s horn to clear the railway line of all those who use it as a highway, meeting place, or just for grazing.

Fortunately, I have some good companions. Sitting opposite me are two women, one tall and slim with classic English features, the other a short, stout, bespectacled Indian lady whose face wears an expression of such serene good nature that it�s impossible not to want to talk to her. The reason why they�re travelling together is a remarkable story that unfolds as the train shrieks its way westwards.

Anne, the older of the two, is the daughter of an illicit relationship between an English tea-planter and one of the women from �the lines� (i.e. a tea picker). Such liaisons were strictly forbidden and Anne�s father could never publicly acknowledge his child. He went off to the Second World War and died in Singapore in 1942. Anne�s mother, poor, uneducated and illiterate, had no idea how to find information about him. She didn�t even know how he spelt his name.

Anne, neither English nor Indian, never really fitted in with the tea-planters, who, embarrassed at such situations, were unapproachable and unhelpful. Enquiries about her father were stonewalled.

Anne was sent to a convent school and later met and fell in love with an Indian fighter pilot, who wrote to her every day, and even once dropped a letter to her from his plane. They had a daughter together, but he was a married man and, in a mirror image of her mother�s situation, they kept their relationship secret. He eventually returned to his wife. Anne got a job as a secretary in a tea company, where she saw a copy of the London Daily Telegraph in her office. She noted down the name of their defence correspondent and, on a whim, wrote and asked him how she might find out about a tea-planter called Stuart who went missing in 1942.

Thanks to his help, she eventually learnt her father�s name, one of many on the wall of a mass grave in Singapore. Armed with this lead, and with some help from one of the tea company�s directors, she finally made contact with her father�s family in England, 47 years after his death. His sister Mary was still alive and asked to meet Anne. Mary�s granddaughter Sarah is the girl travelling with Anne today.

The two women derive so much pleasure from each other�s company, that one can only wonder what things might have been like if they�d known of each other�s existence years earlier.

It seems years have passed since leaving Digboi when the train finally pulls into Tinsoukia, less than 30 miles down the track. As we approach Tinsoukia station the view on both sides is of decommissioned steam locomotives, row upon row of them in overgrown sidings. Some lie on their sides, some are hung around with vines and creeper and, as there seems to have been no attempt to strip them down, they remain intact, as if a spell had been put on them.

We move out of Tinsoukia at a pace that would make a snail seem nippy. Seeing our impatience, a jolly, bespectacled lady in a gold-trimmed sari smiles broadly across at us.

�This is a train for people who have no work.�

We talk about local things. She�s a professor at Dibrugah University and has strong views on the need for India to look east. She is a firm believer in an economic development initiative, ungracefully mnemonicized as BIMSTEC, to encourage co-operation between Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand and China. A recent meeting, however, was hobbled by the Indian government refusing visas to the Chinese delegation until the night before the conference. Understandably, they cancelled.

�The Indians don�t really empathize with the Chinese then?� I ask.

�I don�t think our mind-set is still yet fully open to Chinese cooperation,� she replies.

I take that as a no.

She agrees with Mr Das the coal-mine manager�s point about the cosmopolitan make-up of Assam, but has a different explanation for it. In 1823 a Scotsman called Robert Bruce first noted the commercial potential of the wild tea plant and within 20 years it had become a major and highly labour-intensive crop. The Assamese, being partial to opium at the time, were not good at hard labour, so it became necessary to look further afield for the work force, hence the widening of the gene pool in Northeast India.

We stay tonight at a tea plantation house called a changa, which is in effect a bungalow on stilts. Beneath the extensive boughs and trailing tentacles of an old rain tree, we sit round a fire and watch a delicately energetic dance performed by girls who look more Thai or Burmese than Indian. Assamese specialities are brought round. Long, rolled rice-cakes called bithas, made with molasses and sesame seeds, a grilled root with tomato and aubergine dip, feather-light pooris, chicken and fish from the Brahmaputra.

As night falls the handsome house behind us looks like an ocean liner, with its deep well-polished decks and white balustrade. It belongs to a local tea-planter called Manoj Jalan and his wife Vinita. His plantations employ 8000 people, and tomorrow he�s going to show me round. On an elephant.

Bhutan

Day One Hundred and Three : Gantey

Having been lulled into lowland warmth and balminess in the Brahmaputra valley, I find myself tonight dressed in several layers of winter clothes, in a candle-lit room, hugging close to a wood-burning stove and gratefully accepting the offer of a hot-water bottle to relieve the icy chill of my bed. I�m a mere 140 miles (225 km) from steamy Guwahati but have forsaken the lazy horizontals of the Brahmaputra for a return to the rugged verticals of the Himalaya, and the bustle of the streets and markets for the silence of one of the most tranquil countries in the world.

Bhutan is the only independent Buddhist kingdom and one of only two remaining Himalayan kingdoms (Sikkim having gone to India and Tibet to China). It�s a little larger than Switzerland, with a population less than the city of Birmingham, so there is room to swing cats. Add to this a deliberate government-imposed surcharge of $65 a day and you can begin to understand why we flew in to an airport that looked like a mediaeval palace on one of the only two planes that comprise the national fleet.

Bhutan (the name means the end of �Bhot�, the old name for Tibet) is a country of very strong character. The cultural confusion of East and West, of temples and shopping malls, robes and baseball hats, which marks so much of Southeast Asia, doesn�t seem to have done much damage to a country where the official language is Dzongkha, the official currency is the ngultrum and the official policy is Gross National Happiness before Gross National Product.

Of course, there are telephones and cars and satellite dishes and laptop computers, but they are inside traditional buildings and used by people wearing traditional dress. Bhutan sees no contradiction between its past and its present. Its history is not to be found on display in tourist-friendly heritage parks, but on the street and in the countryside, as a part of everyday life. National costume is worn throughout the country, quite unselfconsciously, and very elegant it is too. The men wear the kho, pronounced �go�, an ankle-length robe with prominent white cuffs, pulled up to knee height and tucked into a belt. Women wear the kira, a length of silk or cotton wound around the body, and a short jacket called a togo. The fabrics are locally made and distinctive, varying from plain, utilitarian designs to complex weaves and intricate patterns.

Concrete has not yet rolled over Bhutan. Thanks to careful husbandry, over two-thirds of the country remains forested and the majority of the houses I�ve seen from the single-track main road that runs east from the airport at Paro are combinations of colourfully decorated wood frames and rammed earth walls, reminding me of alpine chalets and Tudor manor houses.

The village of Gantey, at which we arrived late in the day, is set in restful landscape in the central part of the country, on a hill overlooking the broad glacial valley of Phobjika. Surrounding and enclosing this peaceful place are the Black Mountains, which rise above 16,000 feet (5000 m).

As if to confirm this bewilderingly thorough and barely believable change in our circumstances, light snow is falling outside as I take one last look at the ghostly outlines of wide roofs around us and begin the delicate process of inserting myself, and hot-water bottle, which all of us have been thoughtfully provided with by the management, into the narrow neck of my sleeping bag.

Bangladesh

Day One Hundred and Seventeen : Near Sylhet, Bangladesh

At their closest point Bhutan and Bangladesh are some 25 miles (40 km) apart, yet they could scarcely be more different. One is entirely composed of mountains, the other flat as a pancake. One is among the least crowded countries in the world, the other the most densely packed. One is an absolute monarchy with a stable government, the other a people�s republic that has just topped the list of the world�s most corrupt countries. But there is something that unites them: the Himalaya.

Bhutan�s seclusion and stability is due largely to the physical inaccessibility of the Himalayan mountains. Bangladesh�s survival is due to the water that pours off them.

Bangladesh, three times as big as Bhutan, with 75 times the number of people, has a population of around 135 million, and the only reason it can support so many is because two of the greatest mountain rivers, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, funnel down through the country on their way to the sea, depositing billions of tonnes of rich, recycled Himalaya.

Combined with the heavy monsoons that are the blessing and the bane of Bangladesh, this gives the country some of the most productive land in Asia. The price they pay is frequent and frighteningly destructive. The most recent serious flood, in 1998, inundated two-thirds of the country and left 22 million people homeless.

The River Pijain, in the northeast of the country, falls, not strictly from the Himalaya, but from that older rock on which Nagaland and much of western Myanmar rests. As soon as it enters Bangladesh it is harvested. Not so much for fish or crop cultivation but for stones. The country is strong on mud but very short on stone and the river bed at Jaflang, just across the border from India, is like an open-cast quarry, combed by several hundred freelance quarriers. Men, women and children, in narrow flat-bottomed skiffs, put out onto the lazy, meandering waters and dredge for stones and gravel, which they take ashore to be carried by trucks to the crushing plants that line the road for many miles.

In the West all this would be done by machines and conveyor belts: in Bangladesh, human labour is abundant and cheap. For a day�s work collecting stones, unskilled workers earn the equivalent of 70 pence.

To survive in such unregulated conditions you need an eye for the main chance and while the boatmen are arguing over who gets the BBC�s custom, a bright-eyed, obliging young man seizes his opportunity and offers me a ride out onto the river. It�s only after the smoke-belching little outboard has kicked in and we�re heading towards a very low, makeshift bridge with ten-tonne trucks rolling across it that I first take a good look at my crew. The captain is probably no more than 14 and his first officer 8 at the most.

None of the boats on the river look like the sort you�d find at Henley Regatta, but ours is easily the scruffiest tub on the Pijain. The metal hull is leaking quite spectacularly. A series of small fountains erupt from the bottom of the boat as if it had been raked by tracer fire. The eight-year-old picks up a plastic bottle and bails out enthusiastically, stopping every now and then to flash me a big, reassuring smile.

By the time we reach the furthest of a succession of gravel bars I�ve developed considerable respect for my under-age crew.

All around us there are people sieving, sorting and sifting alluvia. Pencil-thin wooden punts are packed with boulders and gravel until they are so low in the water that it seems one extra pebble might be enough to sink them. This low-tech quarrying looks to be a family activity largely undertaken by the very poor. Out in mid-stream young boys dive for stones. From the bank a line of elderly men toss roped buckets into the water and slowly draw them in. Wives and sisters are sizing the stones and putting them in piles.

Wandering in the middle of all this are relatively affluent daytrippers, who obviously see this stretch of the Pijain as something of a beauty spot. They sit in chairs, buy soft drinks off the heads of itinerant salesmen and have their photos taken. A group of boys and girls walk arm in arm, suddenly breaking apart to splash water at each other. Bearing in mind that Bangladesh is 90 per cent Muslim, it�s interesting to see girls, unveiled, hand in hand with boys in public. It�s a reminder that, unlike Pakistan, Bangladesh is not an Islamic republic, it�s a secular democracy.

As I scramble off the cheerfully leaky boat back onto the shore, thinking what an odd and unfamiliar world this is, where holiday-makers mingle with crushers, trucks and small hills of gravel, I hear my name called in a Bangladeshi-Cockney accent.

�Michael!�

A man detaches himself from a family group and bounds up to me.

�I�m from Milton Keynes.�

He�s a chef in a restaurant there, coming back to visit his home country, a rich man by Bangladeshi standards. He says there are many like him from this part of the country.

On our way to Sylhet, we see the other side of the coin. The roadside is lined with piles of stones, carefully sifted and laid out to be crushed, either in machines or by roadside gangs, very often female. Many of these stoneworkers have come across the border from Myanmar and are not welcome. The Burmese immigrants in Bangladesh are as much of a sore point here as the Bangladeshi immigrants are in India.

Near Sylhet, the stone industry is replaced by undulating tea gardens, and we spend the night at a plantation home turned into a guesthouse called The White House and run by a slow-moving, chain-smoking, very bright, very laid-back man called Kais Chowdhury.

This was his family house. It was burnt down in the vicious war of 1971, when this country was called East Pakistan and the Pakistan army came in very hard to quash any hopes of secession. They lost and, helped by the Indian army, Bangladesh came into being at the end of that year. But it left behind scars and a lot of people who claim to have been �freedom fighters� at that time. This substantial, spacious and attractive house, with its deep verandahs, is, sadly, in slow decline. Water squeezes arthritically from the taps and disappears even more slowly down the plugholes; the wiring is eccentric and some switches require considerable effort just to find them. The White House has some grace and charm but it also has a fatal inertia, as if it�s being slowly strangled by the rich profusion of tropical flowers and shrubs that spill over onto it, mounting the walls and climbing over the balustrades.

All evening and long into the night, trucks from the stoneworks thunder along the road close by. Kais says that the opposition party has called a hartal, a protest strike against the government, for tomorrow, and the truck-drivers are hurrying to get their work done before the morning.

It�s apparently the second hartal this week. After the steely discipline of Bhutan, my first day in Bangladesh has been, well, different.

Acknowledgements

At four o�clock on the morning of 25 September 2003, in a cheerless hotel foyer in Delhi, Roger, cameraman Nigel Meakin and I celebrated, as best we could, an anniversary of sorts. It was 15 years ago to the day that, at the Reform Club in London, Roger had called �Action!� and set Around the World in Eighty Days in motion. One thing we all agreed on that morning in Delhi is that not for one minute had any of us imagined we�d still be travelling together five series and a decade and a half later.

I owe Roger a great debt of thanks for being patient and tolerant, careful, critical and above all wonderful company. As series producer, he took the lion�s share of responsibility for Himalaya and, as co-director, led Saga Platoon through Pakistan, India and Bangladesh.

John-Paul Davidson, who directed us in Nepal, Tibet and Yunnan in China, Nagaland, Assam and Bhutan, is a veteran of the Himalaya and his unflagging mix of energy, enthusiasm and invention was only matched by his empathy with the people, his love of the countries and his ability to produce fresh-brewed ground coffee at any altitude. Nigel Meakin made a mockery of the passing years by producing superb work in often awful and uncomfortable circumstances. Peter Meakin, his son and heir, is not only a credit to the family filming business, but also a dab hand with the sound recorder who got us out of a hole or two when altitude sickness struck. For a few weeks we were sadly deprived of John Pritchard�s affable company, as it was he who the altitude struck. His replacement, Chris Joyce, came out from England at very short notice, and ably picked up the baton (or whatever it is that sound recordists hold).

Vanessa Courtney, iron fist in velvet glove, negotiated us brilliantly through the choppy waters of security-ridden Pakistan and India, and the manic delights of Bangladesh. Claire Houdret soothed frayed nerves in Nepal, Nina Huang Fan was a tower of strength in China and Havana Marking and Natalia Fernandez kept morale up in the rarely trodden pathways of Nagaland and Assam. No-one could have looked after us better in the high Himalaya than Wongchu Sherpa, Mingmar Dorji Sherpa (who reached the top of Everest on 17 May 2004) and Nawang Dorjee Sherpa. Mingmar was both on-screen and off-screen star in Tibet.

Life on the road would not be complete without Basil Pao, gastronomic adviser, menu translator, peerless photographer and, I suspect, closet trekker.

In the front office, the experienced hands and cool heads of Anne James and Mirabel Brook once again set our journey up with speed and great efficiency. Anne watched us through to the end, whilst Sue Grant stepped into Mirabel�s shoes with aplomb. Natalia Fernandez worked tirelessly throughout the series, counting us out and counting us back. Lyn Dougherty and Steve Abbott took on the care of finances, and kept us both above the law and in the black. Paul Bird has done just about everything for us, short of coming on the journey, and Alison Davies has been wonderfully encouraging, as ever, as well as uncomplainingly taking on perhaps the worst job in the world - deciphering my sound tapes.

Special thanks to the sage of Harlesden, Alex Richardson, who should by now have been made the first saint of the editing world. Thanks too to Saska Simpson for taking on Alex�s role on one of the shows. And to Lorraine Heggessey, Nicola Moody and Tom Archer at the BBC for their continuous and constructive support.

Apart from those mentioned in my text I would like to thank others without whom Himalaya would have remained just another mountain range: Jonny Bealby, Abdul Kadur Jaffer, General Rashid Quereshi, Anuraag Jacob, Onkar Singh, Holly Williams, Mr Yang Le, Sun Shuyun, Mr Ding Duzhang, Yatish Bahuguna, Fazal Kamal, Doug Scott. We would have got nowhere without Maqsood Ul-Mulk and Hindukush Trails in Pakistan, Royal Expeditions in New Delhi, Peak Promotions in Nepal, Chhundu Travel in Bhutan and Purvi Discovery in Assam. Special thanks to all at Whitehouse Cox who made me two shoulder bags that went with me everywhere, and to Mike Griffin for all those farewells and welcomes.

Enormous thanks, too, to all those at Weidenfeld & Nicolson who have worked wonders to produce a complex book in such a short time, Michael Dover, my editor, whose unflappable and generous support was never more necessary, David Rowley, my art director and designer, who has done a fine job at a furious pace, ably assisted by Austin Taylor and Justin Hunt.

To Claire Marsden for making sure I spelt her name right, as well as about 4000 others. Thank you also to Tara Redmond and Angela Martin for making sure the world knows we exist and, finally, special thanks to Richard Hussey, who rejected a life of ease to stay on and see this book through production.