Jugal Himal

Ed Douglas on the Jugal Himal
"Chomolungma Sings the Blues" (London, 1997 pp. 11-12)

The itinerant curmudgeon Bill Tilman had been the first European to tramp his way through this slim portion of the Himalaya in 1949, travelling south from Langtang to Panch Pokhari and then west to the Helmu, grumbling about skinflint shepherds and sleeping in damp hovels at night, maybe dreaming that he was seventeen again and back in a trench on the Somme. He wouldn't like those districts now with their tea houses and apple pie and I doubt he'd like this road either. None of it was there in the 1940s. In those far-off days the Ranas still ruled from their palaces in Kathmandu and the Dalai lama looked over his people from the Potala in Lhasa.

Bill Tilman was a childhood hero of mine. He still is. The remoter and more uncomfortable the better seemed to be his guiding principle. A better philosophy for escaping this over civilised modern world I cannot imagine.