Flying Off Everest (16 page)

Making exploratory cross-country flights with inexperienced cohorts was not an entirely new challenge to Babu. Just the year before, he had flown a tandem paraglider across Nepal from west to east with Shri Hari, who, like Lakpa, didn’t know how to fly. They had started in the town of Baitadi on Nepal’s western border with India, along with seventeen other pilots—mostly foreign—all looking to become the first to make the crossing. No one had ever done it before. After thirty days, two canopy collapses, and one backward landing, they were the only team to successfully arrive on the eastern border of the country. They had spent eighteen days actually flying. The rest had been spent walking, often not on roads. Up and down remote mountain
valleys, looking for the next suitable ridgeline to launch from. Every other team had abandoned their crossing along the way. One got stuck dangling in a tree for twenty-four hours. Babu had used a secondhand tandem wing, which had been given to him by Mukti. With both Babu and Shri Hari and his camera gear attached, they nearly maxed out the 396-pound weight limit, so they couldn’t carry any additional supplies, like a tent, or more than a day’s worth of food.

“It answered the question, ‘What’s my country like?’” Babu later told a reporter for
Action Asia
magazine, referring to his trans-Nepal flight. “There are so many things that have to be done, roads, education, political system and so on. It’s the only way to see Nepal and it’s many different cultures and castes.” The experience also made a bit of a politico out of him. After seeing his country Babu wanted to change it. And he recognized that the only reason he got his name in a magazine, and had the opportunity to share his opinions and insights with the rest of the world, was that he had done something construed as crazy by the majority of the population.

Lakpa, now done with his end of the bargain—getting them to the top of Everest—was happy, singing as he helped Babu unfold their new wing for its second flight into the unknown. Or third, since they had first unwrapped it at Kala Patthar. Babu inflated the 51-foot-wide sheet of red and white nylon into the light breeze that was blowing and launched them over the valley. To anyone below they appeared to be an upside-down bright red crescent drifting slowly through the mountains, a single speck hanging beneath it from string. The flight itself was uneventful, and unremarkable other than the fact that it didn’t last long. In less than twenty minutes, they were on the ground, on the other side of the mountains that ran to the east, in a different river drainage, the Inkhu Kosi. They were nowhere near the only footpath leading anywhere, which was on the other side of the mountains running along the Dudh Kosi.

Like he had done so many times on his cross-Nepal expedition the year before, Babu packed up the paraglider, put it on his back, and
started walking south. Bushwhacking his way through the jungle, he looked for a place to relaunch. Lakpa followed. After six hours they reached the hillside village of Waku, near where the Inkhu Kosi and Dudh Kosi converge in a slight widening of the Dudh Kosi River gorge. They hadn’t eaten all day. Lakpa gave a few rupees to a local farm family in exchange for a place to sleep that night in their home, as well as a meal of dal bhat. Exhausted and grateful for shelter, the two men slept in the company of the family’s chickens.

The next morning, it was determined that there were no suitable places to launch a paraglider nearby, the surrounding hillsides too steep and forested to provide a proper, or even remotely safe, takeoff. So Babu and Lakpa thanked their host family and continued walking along the only footpath south, four hours to the similarly picturesque mountaintop village of Deurali—a small collection of gray stone buildings hugging the steep, rolling, perpetually terraced hillsides. White clouds floated above and below.

It was here that their SPOT locator stopped working. Back in Pokhara and in San Francisco, the little yellow dot on both the Arrufats’ and Phinney’s computer screens wasn’t moving again. And it didn’t move for four days. Neither Lakpa nor Babu had thought to change the GPS batteries.

A few days earlier, Phinney had posted on the blog again:

Now there was no way to track them or their progress, or lack thereof. Phinney had absolutely no idea what was going on with the expedition anymore and was afraid for her friends’ lives. David Arrufat, meanwhile, had posted a blog of his own on APPIfly.org,
his paragliding organization’s website, which a few days later would feature screen grabs and photos from the two memory cards Babu had given him, with the APPI logo and website URL embedded as a watermark.

The day after they had flown off the mountain,
Cross Country
also posted a short story on its website, titled “Babu Sunuwar Flies Off Everest,” based on information Arrufat supplied them. The news of Lakpa and Babu’s Everest flight was getting out. And Lakpa, unknowingly, was turning into a footnote.

With no way to communicate with Arrufat, Phinney, or anyone else in the outside world, Babu and Lakpa continued their journey south
toward the Sun Kosi River. They launched from a rice paddy in Deurali and flew over the ridgeline village of Aiselukharka, down into the next valley, where they unceremoniously landed in the trees. After untangling their wing, Babu and Lakpa hiked thirty minutes to the nearest village, Rawa Khola, where the two friends jumped in the nearby river to bathe. To celebrate, they drank prodigious amounts of
chhaang
(“nectar of the gods”), a locally made grain alcohol similar to unfiltered rice wine. They stumbled up the ridge to the south of town, aiming to launch off the top of it that night, but didn’t make it. Instead, they opted to lie down on the ground on the hillside in the forest and sleep off the chhaang.

From the ridgeline the next morning, it was a ten-minute flight down to the small hilltop Sherpa city of Lamidanda. With a population of over 2,000, it has an airport but no roads, just heavily worn dirt footpaths. The roofs of the nicer stone buildings are covered in corrugated aluminum, either hiked in from the nearest road, which is nearly 15 miles away, or flown in from Kathmandu. Babu called his friend Nim Magar at Paddle Nepal to see where the kayak, the support crew, and Shri Hari were. They were a day behind, Magar told him. He and Lakpa could expect to meet their kayak and support crew at the rendezvous point just to the south of the confluence of the Dudh Kosi and Sun Kosi in three days.

Lakpa bought batteries for their SPOT locator but didn’t turn it on. He then called his sister, Ang Maya in Kathmandu, from a payphone and asked her to wire him some money. “I brought 50,000 rupees [about $500] from Lukla,” Lakpa says. “And that was not enough.” Without Babu being able to pay for any of their expenses, Lakpa had already managed to burn through his trip cash, paying for their room and board, as well as all the chhaang at the villages they had stopped at along the way. Ang Maya agreed to wire him 5,000 rupees for the rest of the trip, about $50.

After getting the cash from the local bank, they continued walking on the footpath south to Halesi Mahadev, a sacred cave and Buddhist
temple tucked into the hills five hours away. The cave itself is a quiet, dimly lit sanctuary with trees growing up straight out of the sides of the rock-wall entrance and steps carved right into the bedrock, leading down into the cave. They spent two nights talking and praying with the red-robed monks, flying off a nearby ridge for fun during the day. They flew off the same ridge again the third morning, covering only a few miles before crash landing in a cluster of rhododendron trees. When they finally managed to untangle themselves from the branches, Lakpa felt a sharp pain in his right knee. It hurt to walk. Their $4,000 wing also looked worse for wear. A series of holes was now clearly visible in the fabric—some of them quite large. They decided between them that, in spite of the damage, it would probably be “fine” to fly it one more day.

Babu and Lakpa hiked up the final ridge before the river and rested, camping out under the stars and a waning moon on a hilltop without having any dal bhat. The next morning came without breakfast, and they launched their damaged wing at 10:00 a.m. in the hopes of spotting their support crew floating down the river to meet them with a kayak, and hopefully more food.

After an hour of riding thermals—upward-flowing columns of air that help keep paragliders aloft in the sky—there was no support raft to be seen. Just green mountains beneath a blue sky and a massive, brown surging river.

Hamilton Pevec sat alone on a futon in a small room just north of Pokhara in the small village of Sidi, surrounded by four short walls made of stacked whitewashed fieldstone. The cement floor felt cold against his feet. Light filtered through a single paneless window and an open, doorless doorway, illuminating the white smoke rising from the lit joint in his hand. Outside, Arrufat’s chickens clucked and a lone rooster named Coco crowed. David and Mukti’s three-year-old daughter, Yada, ran after him, laughing. The bird was as tall as she was, the guest observed, looking out the empty window.

Pevec, a twenty-eight-year-old documentary filmmaker from Carbondale, Colorado, stood up from the old personal computer the Arrufats had bought and subsequently brought into their home for him to work on, walked over to the doorway, and chased a curious hen that had wandered into the room back into the yard. He was busy and stressed, preoccupied with reviewing the hours of video footage the Arrufats had just given him from Babu and Lakpa’s recent flight off Everest, but he wasn’t about to let chickens start crapping on the floor of his new editing suite. He had a movie to make, and not much time to make it.

A slow talker with a short, well-kept beard and a neck-length black ponytail, Pevec had been coming to Nepal since 2007, when he had fallen in love with a thirty-year-old Nepali yoga instructor named Devika Gurumg. He had moved from his home in Colorado to Dharamsala, India, where he spent several months instructing the Dalai Lama’s monks on modern video production techniques, working as a volunteer for the Namgyal Monastery Audio Visual Archive Center.
*

“I was living at the monastery,” Pevec says. “Devika and I had a mutual friend, and she invited me to Devika’s yoga studio in Pokhara. I fell in love with her. We had this on-again, off-again relationship over a couple of years. Then I promised I would be back in 2011. So I went back to see if our relationship was still alive and well, and sure enough, it was. And I fell in love with her all over again.”

Gurumg, a beautiful, brown-eyed woman with long, dark hair, was one of six children. She had spent her childhood picking fruit in orchards, making carpets, and housekeeping, until two Australian women took it upon themselves to teach her Hatha Yoga twice a day, every day, for three months. She was eighteen. By the time Pevec met her, she was running her own yoga studio in Pokhara. By 2011, when her and Pevec’s love was rekindled, she had become good friends with the Arrufats. She introduced Hamilton to David and Mukti, who had just started their new for-profit paragliding organization, the Association of Paragliding Pilots and Instructors, the year before, in 2010.

“They offered me a proposition,” Pevec says. “They said, ‘We’ll teach Devika to fly if you make us some promo stuff for APPI, because we want to launch APPI.’” Pevec thought it was a fair trade, so he agreed. “I started shooting this promotional video for APPI,” he says, “and Devika started learning how to fly, and about a week into shooting
these interviews with pilots and stuff, Babu and Lakpa launched their paraglider off the summit.” He had no idea who Babu and Lakpa even were at the time. “That changed everything,” he says. “Immediately, David and Mukti went up there to meet them. A few days later they came back with the footage, handed it to me, and said, ‘Stop what you are doing and turn this into a movie.’” Awestruck by the opportunity to make a movie about someone flying off the top of Everest, rather than a low-budget promo video, Pevec agreed, in spite of the fact that it would require significantly more work on his part.

“Using it as a promotional device to launch APPI was part of the plan,” Pevec says. He didn’t know about Lakpa, Babu, and Shri Hari’s plan to make their own movie of the expedition.

David and Mukti bought a computer that was several years old, carried it up the narrow, rocky creek drainage that served as their driveway, and placed it in the back room of the single-story stone house they were renting in Sidi, just a few miles north of Lakeside. Pevec downloaded pirated editing software onto the computer’s hard drive and started reviewing Babu and Lakpa’s footage from the mountain, whenever the electricity was working. “We only had electricity for a few hours a day,” Pevec says. “We never knew when it was coming on or going off.” They purchased a large battery that had enough juice to keep the computer running just long enough after the power went out for Pevec to save his edits before the computer would shut off completely. “It was a technical nightmare,” he says. David loaned Pevec his bicycle, which he used to ride to and from Devika’s place in Pokhara to the Arrufats’ each day. “He handed me this big jar of weed,” Pevec recalls. “Said, ‘This will help you get through it.’ And sure enough, that was the fuel for the film.” He started working twelve-hour days, every day, in order to make the July 15 deadline for the Coupe Icare festival, less than two months away.

The footage itself was rough at best. “Mukti shot the interviews when they were both really drunk,” Pevec says. “Babu and Lakpa were pretty wasted.” The rest was shaky, handheld GoPro footage. “I didn’t
get anything that the other filmmaker got,” Pevec says, referring to Shri Hari, not realizing the reason why he didn’t have any of the footage.

He didn’t have permission to use it.

Krishna Sunuwar looked up between the green hills rising from the Sun Kosi River at a clear blue sky, scanning the elevated horizon line for his older brother. The sandy beach where Babu and Lakpa were supposed to be waiting to meet them was empty. He knew they must still be in flight, or still walking to the river, which was now swollen and orange-brown with the recent heavy monsoon rains. Paddling a red 8-foot Riot brand whitewater kayak built in the early 2000s, which was loaned to him by his boss, Charley Gaillard, owner of the Ganesh Kayak Shop, Krishna kept his neck craned upward, squinting into the sun. He also kept a paddle blade poised over the fast-moving water beside him, wrist cocked forward, ready to brace himself in the case of an unexpected surge of the current.

Next to him, in a large blue raft emblazoned with a Paddle Nepal logo, sat Babu and Lakpa’s bespectacled cameraman, Shri Hari, as well as his and Babu’s mutual friends and fellow raft guides, Madhukar Pahari and Resham Bahadur Thapa. Both had been sent by Nim and Kelly Magar, along with the raft Madhukar was rowing, from Paddle Nepal back in Pokhara. They had been on the river for three days. The raft itself was equipped with two large oars attached to an aluminum frame and enough food to feed six people for another three days. Just enough time to reach their takeout at Chatra, near the Indian border: the end of the Sun Kosi’s steep whitewater, and the start of the gridiron-flat Gangetic Plain, where Babu, Lakpa, and Krishna would continue their journey south through India to the Bay of Bengal. A shiny new tandem kayak was strapped on the back of the raft, its rounded orange hull facing up to the sky. It was still wrapped in plastic.

Krishna, who had taken over Babu’s old job at the Ganesh Kayak Shop in Pokhara when his older brother had switched over to working
for David Arrufat at Blue Sky Paragliding, had volunteered to paddle with Babu and Lakpa all the way to the ocean, without pay. He knew that Lakpa, whom he had met only a handful of times over the past few months, couldn’t swim and had never paddled before in his life. Krishna’s job, Babu had told him before they had left for Everest, was to save Lakpa if they capsized. That was it.

A slightly younger and even shorter, stockier version of Babu, Krishna had also taken to the water like a fish after leaving their village. In the same amount of time it had taken his brother to become an expert paragliding pilot (about two years), Krishna had become an expert kayaker, regularly paddling Class V rapids all over Nepal with his brother. And he was equally prone to taking significant risks. The year before, he had paddled the Sun Kosi for the first time. Solo. In a boat he had borrowed from Gaillard. The reason, he explains, was so that he could visit his family back in Rampur-6, paddling 170 miles of Class III-IV high-volume whitewater, completely alone, so that he could say hello to his mother, whom he hadn’t seen in a year.

As Krishna was about to land on the beach where he, Madhukar, and Resham were supposed to meet Babu and Lakpa, Krishna saw the red crescent of a paraglider rise over the ridgeline to his left. He watched it circle over the swirling river above their heads and land, his brother and Lakpa dangling beneath it. They touched down on the beach just in front of the raft. Both of them were smiling broadly and laughing, celebrating the fact that the flying portion of their journey was now over.

After a short, happy greeting, Krishna went to work setting up camp, preparing a meal of dal bhat and erecting the two tents they had among the six of them on the sand. Babu and Lakpa, meanwhile, unloaded the bright orange tandem kayak that was strapped to the back of the support raft and removed it from its plastic packaging. Inside, they found two new Peak UK PFDs, two new paddles, two new drytops, and two new neoprene spray skirts, which they would have to wear around their waists and attach to the combing around
the kayak’s two cockpits in order to keep water out of the boat while they were paddling it. Madhukar and Resham had brought them each a blue cotton T-shirt sporting the Paddle Nepal logo. The plan was for them to wear the same helmets on the river that they had been wearing on Everest and on their recent cross-country flight. Pete Astles had shipped them everything else they needed from the United Kingdom, free of charge.

They laid the gear out on the ground. Lakpa stared at it, then looked at the frothing brown river beside him, then back at the gear laid out on the sand, and then at the narrow, long, log-looking kayak at his feet. He imagined himself sitting inside of it, along with Babu, floating on the swollen brown river, bobbing out of control beyond the next bend wrapping around the green-covered mountains in front of him. He imagined what was beyond that bend. He then looked at Babu and said, “I can’t do this.”

After some discussion the group convinced Lakpa, who had never been on a river before, to get in the raft with Madhukar. They pushed off from the beach into a large, flat eddy and paddled the blue inflatable in circles for a few minutes. Lakpa, looking anxiously over the sides of the raft, waited to see what, if anything, would happen to him. Nothing did. The sun dropped behind the mountains to the west.

“He was scared of the water,” Shri Hari says. “Only after Lakpa gained some confidence in the raft did he agree to get in the kayak with Babu.”

That same evening, Lakpa clambered into the front seat of the kayak, Babu sitting behind him. He didn’t like the idea of being trapped inside the small boat, upside down in the water, so he and Babu pushed off into the calm eddy in front of their camp not wearing their spray skirts. Babu showed him how to hold the paddle, the slight concave shape in the blade facing toward him, and proceeded to go around in small circles, alternating between turning to the right and to the left until dark. It was the first time Lakpa had ever touched a paddle or sat in a kayak, and it was the only preparation he would
have before setting off on their journey to the ocean, starting with the Class IV big-water rapids that Babu and Krishna knew were only a few miles downstream.

Babu had never paddled a tandem kayak before, let alone with someone who didn’t know how to paddle to begin with, and he wondered—if they did flip—whether he could even roll it back upright.

Rising in Tibet from a series of small, snow-fed streams at the base of the 26,289-foot Gosainthan Massif, the headwater of the Sun Kosi River is referred to locally as the Matsang Tsangpo. The river, which starts as a simple meandering white-gray creek tumbling between snowcapped mountains, picks up speed and volume as it cuts south through the Himalaya at the bottom of a deep, cavernous gorge. Intersected by numerous feeder creeks, its water level slowly rises, boring its way through the heart of the Himalaya. Unannounced, the river’s name changes suddenly upon crossing an imaginary line delineating the border between Tibet and Nepal. Once in Nepal, the river is no longer referred to as the Matsang Tsangpo, but rather as the Sun Kosi—“the River of Gold,” the word
sun
in Nepali meaning “gold.”
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The newly renamed river continues to flow south, joined by the nearby Bhote Kosi just downstream of Barabise, gaining even more water until reaching its confluence with the Indrawati Nadi, which dumps into it from the northwest at Dolalghat, nearly doubling its volume. This is where most commercial raft trips on the river choose to begin, and it is where Krishna, Shri Hari, and the Paddle Nepal support crew started paddling downstream to meet Babu and Lakpa.