I had worked intensively all my adult life, and only a couple of years ago I realized that I had to give myself the opportunity to recover. Mountains for me are the best way to completely disconnect from reality, sometimes not very pleasant. I like mountain hunting, but there are almost no places left in the world where it has been preserved in its original form. Where you cannot meet a single person for days and weeks, where you have to overcome serious obstacles and danger lurks hourly and even every minute. Nepal evokes respect among such tramps: just imagine 70% of the country is impassable high mountain ranges, and 8 out of 14 eight-thousandths of the planet are located there.
There were four people in our company. The first one was the indefatigable Frenchman, who introduced himself as Anthony (in the Italian way), and didn't agree when we call him Antoine , even took offense. He became interested in mountain hunting from the age of sixteen, but since he was not rich, he soon retrained into a PH, a professional hunter who accompanied wealthy clients. He looked about 35 years old, he was lean and very active. Anthony's character was lively and active. He had been to Kazakhstan at least fifteen times and, and was completely delighted with the naturalness of the conditions, like other hunters. Anthony had been making films about hunting for the last couple of years, and he was doing it quite well. Telling the truth, he quite tired us during the expedition, with the demands to repeat the passage on camera and the organization of staged shots. I could only guess about his purpose in that expedition. Obviously, it was a reconnaissance expedition for him, since his client, whom he will lead to the blue sheep, was due to arrive in ten days. My Spanish friend Geordie, with whom Anthony developed some kind of hunting territory in the Alps invited him to the company as an operator.
As for Georgie, with whom we agreed to conduct this hunt together, he was born a Catalan, worked for a large energy company. I met him at a hunting exhibition about eight years ago, and we agreed on cross-hunts: he organizes a trip for me in Spain, and I do the same for him in Kazakhstan. So we became friends. We have visited each other five times over all those years. He has decisively quit his company a couple of years ago and became an outfitter, who organizes hunting trips around the world. So, he was also the PH.
So that to reduce the helicopter cost ($8000), the Spaniard called his sidekick Daniel, who, to our mutual satisfaction, agreed Danny turned out to be an ophthalmologist, who had been fond of mountain hunting for many years, and visited many places in his 45 years (Kazakhstan, Canada, Kamchatka, etc.) and got a lot of things. He was very intelligent and a little (in a good way) boring, well physically prepared.
The authority cut the limit on bharal in half while we were negotiating with the organizers in Nepal, and only 3 licenses for the whole country were issued for a tahr at all – just like we had.
There were no farms of their own here, there were several hunting reservations and licenses were sold to local outfitters at auction. At last, when there only two days to our departure left, the host party announced that for reasons beyond their control they had only two licenses. We had to cast lots, and Daniel and I had the opportunity to hunt, and Geordie decided to go as the second operator.
Moreover, it turned out that it was impossible to rent a weapon. I was going about to ask the Spaniard to take a carbine for me (the rules with their export in Spain were much more loyal ), but you couldn’t hunt with someone else's weapons in Nepal . I had to issue a permit to the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the export of my "Christensen". Thank you to people, who helped, everything was issued without delay. Next, I sent in advance a notarized translation of the weapons permit and export permit to all airlines on the route, and got approval from them. It was absolutely necessary to make notarized copies of these transfers in order to give them to our customs officers at the border, as well as to fill out a declaration, which indicated what you were exporting.
The question of how to fly had two answers: via Delhi or Dubai, but the Nepalese side prayed that only not through India! That’s why I had to take tickets with connections for 20 hours. Inch'Allah, everything went well, apart from the delay in Dubai, but in the end, I flew to Kathmandu with all my belongings!
The first day.
The flight delay in Dubai turned out to be in my favor, because waiting at their airport it was much more pleasant to wait at their airport than in Kathmandu. I had to wait for the Europeans, who arrived four hours later than me.
The airport in the capital of Nepal was not the best one. The mess was terrible, luggage was given out very slowly. However, visa processing was put on stream. Kazakhstanis can get a visa on arrival – you just need to fill out the data in a special machine, pay 25 bucks and you're done. The luggage was given out an hour later, I started to worry a little, but everything arrived safely.
Then the procedures began – first at the airport inspection and reconciliation. Then in the city, in two ministries. A hunting certificate was issued in the first one, and the issuance of a hunting license was confirmed in the second. Everything was serious, with fingerprinting! It took almost the whole working day. We got to the hotel and rested for a while only in the second part of the day. In the evening we were taken on a short tour of Kathmandu. The roads were broken, there was no street lighting, there was garbage and piles of dirt everywhere. There was such smog that Almaty just seemed like a paradise. How reminiscent it was of the suburbs of Delhi.
It turned out to be a little more interesting in the tourist area: a thousand shops of all sorts of stuff and a bunch of shops of different equipment – both branded and outright fakes. The local cuisine is a fusion of Indian and Chinese, which is explained by the border location of the country.
After dinner we went to bed, a helicopter would wait for us early in the morning.
The second day.
We got to the airport. Crowds of tourists with backpacks of various calibers were waiting in line at the helicopter terminal. Spring in Nepal is a high season for trekking enthusiasts. It did not work out to fly away quickly, because of overweighting, the weight exceeded the maximum permissible by forty kg. We tried to leave something, but it didn't solve the problem. So, we decided to fly twice.
All the middle mountains on our route were actively mastered by people - mountains with steps of terraces, small and large villages. I didn't notice asphalt roads, but there were a lot of trails. It was the main transport route between settlements in almost all directions. When the altitude increased to 4000 m, a magnificent panorama of the majestic peaks of the Himalayan eight-thousandth peaks opened.
In general, we were in the air for an hour and a half and soon landed in a small clearing right on one of the ridges.
We met a team of Sherpas and guides, it turned out that they were hiking for 10 days already! They traveled by bus for two days, and then walked with all the cargo: tents, dishes, kitchen, groceries and personal belongings! Sherpas (only with a capital letter as a sign of respect) are a caste of porters, highly respected in Nepal. These are not people, they are machines! They are the example of such a natural adaptation, when the entire physiology of the human body has completely rebuilt. A person who has lived a couple of months very high in the mountains can obtain only a small part of these adaptations. In total, together with the guides, I counted 26 of them!
In correspondence, the host party asked us not to collect a lot of things, that's why I concluded that we would carry our luggage ourselves, so I put everything in a Kifaru platform backpack, for hand luggage I used my favorite 35-liter Shlumbejack assault backpack. The Sherpas immediately took the bulk into their baskets – they carried all the cargo in large baskets that were fastened with a rope on their foreheads. The average weight was 25-35 kg with the own weight of Sherpas about of 50 kg. All of them were short - 150-160 cm, they looked very thin, in sneakers on bare feet. Like kids!
I managed to "take away" a backpack with a carbine and optics by 12 kilograms, so to speak, for training purposes. Europe followed my example on the second day and also took the load. We went down from the helipad and then went up through a wooded gorge, the trail was very picturesque and not difficult, it was easy.
We passed a narrow canyon on the way and by lunch we reached the first camp at an altitude of 3300. Here we were met with hot tea by the advance detachment, which prepared the camp. Separate tents were set up for hunters. They were very comfortable and reminded me of Polish tents from my childhood - with a high ceiling and duralumin construction. A larger tent was set up as a mess, the same for the kitchen and a couple more for guides and organizers. The Sherpas spent the night under the tent all together. There was a Guest camp not far from ours, as I understood, trekking is the basis of the tourist business in Nepal – there are quite a lot of them on all trekking routes. The tourists can spend an inexpensive night and eat.
In the evening they were fed pizza and garlic soup. As soon as there was a free minute, we were reset to zero. My group "flew" a little higher and to the left. Going up was the expected result for a height of 3300, and it was carried away to the left, apparently due to transportation. I made all the amendments, twisted the turrets. Then I went to bed.
The third day.
Uh... Finally we got to the base camp! 2000 Kcal, 700 vertical meters, height from 3300 to 3860. The trail went not only up, there were many descents. I didn't sleep well in the first camp and could hardly eat a couple of spoons of porridge for breakfast, I got the rest of the calories on the route with an isotonic and a bar. We left the camp early. The trail wound through deserted places, along slopes heavily overgrown with various (in every sense of the word) vegetation. You can find on one site there were pine, spruce, juniper, oak, birch, oleanders and ficuses. It was amazing how evergreens get along with leaf-dropping plants? Probably, if snow falls at such heights, it is obviously episodic. All that selva was richly covered with vines and all sorts of saprophytes, which were beginning to bloom. The early spring in Nepal looks very attractive, the mountains are green in summer but are still very magnificent.
There is a kind of high-altitude zoning in the Himalayas. The trees in my country end at an altitude of 2700 m, then the alpine zone began with 3700 m. Animals were not particularly visible, even there were few traces. However, some kind of bird of paradise was pushed a couple of times in the forest – a black rooster with red and blue, a tuft on its head, quite large and edible in appearance. The guides kindly told us its name in the local language, which was impossible to pronounce, much less remember. And there was no need – it was impossible to hunt that bird, it turned out that it is in the Red Book.
We saw a couple of tracks. Some were clearly canine, although the locals claimed that they were wolfish. The others might have been left by a leopard, there were quite a lot of them, but it was not possible to check whether it was the case. In general, we completed the entire route in a little over four hours. The trail went in the mid of the mountain, but took a little bit up all the time. It wasn't a path, but a tract by our standards. Everything was very thorough: steps were laid out on the ascents, there was a detour in all difficult places. Nepal is a Mecca for trekking lovers!
The whole country is solid mountains. It's too expensive to make roads there. So people get out of the situation as best they can.
Our group went with the light backpacks (about 10-12 kg each) very confidently at first. But it became more difficult to go after 3600 masl. Not like we had at this altitude at home, but it was noticeable. I felt tired, although I managed to recover well while we were setting up camp.
In the evening, the guides returned from reconnaissance. They said they saw a group of kuku Yamans (the local name of the blue sheep). Dani offered to draw lots, but I insisted that he went first.
Day #4.
We got up at 4 am. I hardly slept at such an altitude (3900 m). The sleep was very fragile, unstable. We had a little snack and went out in two groups. Daniel and Anthony were in one group, Geordie and I were in another. We began to gain altitude lightning the way by the lanterns. The gradient was 60 degrees, the heart jumped out of the chest, I specially put on a heart monitor to control the pulse (it was impossible to allow rapid acidification of the muscles), I tried not to raise above 150.
We passed 400 vertical meters; it was dawn. We began to look around, but didn't find anything alive except a couple of Himalayan snow cocks.
In the morning, about seven o'clock we heard the sound of a shot. One shot says that the job is done. And so it turned out – Dani took bharal an hour after dawn on the first day of the hunt. He was lucky! We went up another 400 meters, but saw nothing apart from the fascinating views.
At the pass, our guide Monrad (a very professional guide) saw a group of Bharals on a neighboring ridge. Obviously, these were animals from the group that Dani was hunting. We saw a good trophy male through the pipe and decided to try to approach, due to the lack of other options.
But we should descend into a wide valley and then climb an icy, seemingly impregnable wall. By this time we had already "tumbled", crossing the frozen couloir (the ice axe came in handy), and I dressed the crampons for full confidence. The vertical kilometer already made me feel tired.
We found the first group of blue sheep at an altitude of 4760 m but there were not males. They grazed at an altitude of 5000 m, the second group with four males was at our level, the animals slept on a stone moraine. Monrad gave the command to lie low and wait, although I thought it would be right to hide behind the edge and to make an approach while the sheep were sleeping. The snack took a couple of hours, the weather began to change rapidly, everything was delayed from below, and everything was about to end. The guide realized the situation and ordered to run! He just said: “I run and you run”. We all had laughed at his words at such height, but, nevertheless, we ran. The snow began to fall like a wall just in five minutes later and a snow storm began, as it should, with thunder, lightning and hurricane wind! We reached the right rock in 10 minutes later, but the animals were no longer there. Probably, they were afraid of a thunderstorm, since the wind was strictly from them. Probably, it was for the best, because the rangefinder didn't work in clouds and snowfall. As a result, it became cold and sad – from fatigue. We descended to the base camp in such condition.
The result of the day was 18 km of travel, 1,480 meters vertically dialed, the maximum height was 4924 m, 4890 Kcal were used.
But there was also a pleasant side to the return – fresh meat and a liquid forty-degree energy drink in the company of friends who had won an excellent trophy. The snow did not stop, and we decided to take a day to recuperate. Moreover, there was no particular hurry – it was almost impossible to change tickets for an earlier date and go through the procedure of renegotiating the transportation of weapons.
Day #5.
Although we were scared by the organizers that alcohol was poison at such a height, we felt great. I slept ten hours! The group, which had finished the hunt, planned to go down for a munjak (a small deer), but also changed their mind.
It was unusual somehow: it was already getting light, and there was such silence in the camp! It was snowing all night. I saw from the inside that there was plenty of snow on the tent. I looked out… The view was divine! I took the camera and ran to make pictures until the magic of the early morning disappeared.
The rest day was an opportunity to put everything in order. I'd laundered all underwear used for three days. Then charged all devices on electricity connected them to power banks and a solar battery. I got a lot of them: two smartphones (Samsung – field for filming and a ballistic calculator, iPhone - for everything else), two cameras (a small Sony dsc-hx90v chassis and a second Sony Alpha7IIR with a large matrix and two lenses – a new acquisition - for filming on a simple route and in the camp, it was hard to take such a hunting). In addition, I had an iPad, Garmin Phoenix 3, Princeton tec flashlight. As power banks I used Goal zero sherpa 50 with a solar battery and another small pocket for 10A.
By lunchtime, the weather had cleared up and the wind had completely died down. Geordie and I splashed in the river. By the lunch time, the guides came down from the reconnaissance – three groups of blue sheep were found!
The chef was pleased with a wonderful lunch: bharala meat with fried eggplant and boiled potatoes in garlic with homemade tortilla! Awesome! We had lunch seating on the open area and heating under the sun! Everybody was in high spirit! We even thought to go out hunting after lunch, but the weather began to spoil with Dalangiri, as yesterday, clouds began to pull, and thunder and lightning again.
There was nothing to do, but to devote that time to siesta.
By evening, black clouds were pulled from the valley, thunder and lightning intensified around. Some strange snow fell from the sky – small snow balls of 5-7 mm in diameter. But not icy, but soft.
To be continued..
