Yes … a touch melodramatic, because the Tsum Valley in Nepal is only unknown to those who have yet to explore it. But the idea of the ‘unknown region’ is a symbol for adventurous travel, and maybe for deeper exploration, since Toward the Unknown Region is the title of a poem by Walt Whitman, and…
Author: ianraitt
Autumn Leaves at the Birks o’ Aberfeldy
Scotland: a while since I’d been here, some sixteen years. Aberfeldy was familiar territory from the first eighteen years of life spent in Perth, and thus a remembered spot, associated with youthful ascents of Ben Lawyers and Schiehallion. How damp it felt after the much drier air of Andalucia. ‘You must go up the Birks,’…
Autumn Walks in Andalucia
Once a year, the local hill-walking club in Archidona climbs the mountain known as La Maroma, the highest in the province of Málaga at 2069m; I am keeping up this tradition as well, as it’s a way to test stamina with each year over the age of 70. It is a majestic creature, and can…
Autumn Winds
October: time of change in the northern regions, pivot towards winter. Clocks fall back; a sudden, darker onset of evening. And wind. Great movements of air boiling in the Atlantic, scattering the heavy lingering heat of summer from the Iberian peninsula, temperatures dropping from 28 to 16 in the space of a couple of days….
Winter in Ullapool
Ullapool is a small settlement on Loch Broom in the north western highlands of Scotland. A fishing port and the largest town in the district, it has a current population of around 1500, which has slowly increased over the last thirty years. Helen Gosch, the ceramics artist who has made her home on Ibiza, lived…
A short September walk above Lanjarón
It was the first outing of the Senderistas after a break in August. Thirty people turned out to go on a walk along the water channels above Lanjarón, a village of some 3200 souls, which is now famous for its brand of mineral water. Lanjarón is a town of hotels and it looked as if…
Joys of Cleaning
Contemplating the emotions and sensations around our normal reluctance to get going on cleaning the house, brought up some memories of my time as a professional cleaner. Short as it was, there were lasting lessons. The years of travail in mid-1970s Edinburgh partly revolved around the lack of a career plan, but as with current…
The Joys of Cleaning the House
There must be some irony in this title, surely? It is an activity perfectly designed for procrastination. I’ll do it tomorrow, or sometime later this week. An activity also started when things are truly desperate; it is, as in chess, a forced move, when the King has no alternative but to move to a certain…
Snow over Scotland
Every childhood winter was spent in a frenzy of longing for snow to fall. Granny said that it would snow if the clouds were tea-coloured. I would pester her: “Granny, is it going to snow?” But sometimes she would say with finality: “No, it is too cold for snow.” What law of nature, what observation,…
Langtang in Winter. Conversations we had on the trek: the pot cannot call the kettle black.
A trek is not just a geographical displacement; it is always a change in consciousness. Here is where it started, in Dhulikhel, just outside the main urban area of Kathmandu, in the early morning haze. The discussion of this haze, as part of a massive bank of pollution from the North Indian plain and how…
Langtang in Winter
Day 0: Wednesday 12 February 2020There was a window of opportunity in February, before work obligations in the spring. Covid was just starting its march across the world. Could there be a quick trip to Nepal, as the recorded cases of coronavirus were so far tiny? A convenient short winter trek would be Langtang. Memory…
Gokyo to Everest Base Camp: returning to Salleri
Sunday January 13th, 2019. Amazingly this is Day 18. Coming down is all part of the experience, and allows a retrospective contemplation, but while most trekkers stop at Lukla, and then take a plane ride back to Kathmandu, with more time on our hands we have elected to walk out to Salleri, the way we…
Gokyo to Everest Base Camp (part 2)
Lower altitude permitted some sleep last night. It is snowing, and all views have disappeared, only the sense of the gulf down to the river. Quiet, with that sense of mystery and stillness. After a steep rise, the path is contouring round. A yak follows us. There are footprints in the snow, but surely not…
Gokyo to Everest Base Camp (Part 1)
5th January 2019A gentle sense of achievement flushes the veins, as in the bright air we start to descend: there will be scalding soup at Gokyo, and in gradually waning afternoon light, views will open up besides frozen brooks. Colder air, wisps of mist condensing, calm silence; only busy ducks will forage in the waters…
Toward the Unknown Region
This eloquent title belongs to a poem in Walt Whitman´s Leaves of Grass. It begins: Darest thou now, O Soul,Walk out with me toward the unknown region,Where neither ground is for the feet, nor any path to follow? The epithet ´unknown region´resonates, challenges. This is how we may feel at the end of the trail…
Altibajos …. or the ups and downs of the trek – and its exigencies
We have to accept ups and downs, so nicely captured in the Spanish word altibajos. But it is difficult not to resent losing the height one has gained. A particular example occurs up from Namche. After patiently climbing to the pass at Mong, the path descends all the way down to the river, yes the…
Take things as they come
Should we embrace a teleological view of the trek, that it only has meaning based on its purpose to complete its objective and arrive at the final point, or should we follow that impressive advice of Robert Louis Stevenson, ¨to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive¨? Dear reader, you will probably feel…
Zen and the art of trekking
Sometimes the contrast between the real and painful effort made during the trek and the imaginative mental projection of finally crossing the highest pass, and the way we compensate in planning how to present this ´triumph´to others, makes one think that one purpose of trekking is to bleach out all pretence and vainglory, vanity and…
Everest Region: to the Gokyo Lakes
Beginnings Exactly ten years ago, during the January school break in Nepal, when I was working in Kathmandu University High School, we planned to do the Everest Base Camp trek. I was intrigued to discover that the trails would be snow free, for the most part, and provided you could stand the cold, they would…
Khopra Ridge
Day 16 – Day 21: Tatopani to Nayapul We reached Tatopani by bus from Jomsom. This might have been the riskiest road I have travelled on, being beset by landslides and also being so narrow that the buses have to blast out warnings to oncoming traffic to permit a mutual passing place through consensual pauses….