First higher mountain pass ahead. Due to the weather, the day starts with a 4:00 am wake-up call. Yes, it is really still dark, at 4 am. There is no time for breakfast, as this cuts the morning’s horse preparation from three hours to two hours, and so the morning is spent with only hot tea and snickers.
(Snickers and Coke, by the way. Those are the only two products you can buy really anywhere. You walk into a village, five adobe houses, one unofficial shop where a few kids, not even ten years old, are selling… and they have a bag of rice, a few cans of beef, chocolates, Coke and snickers. I don’t know how these two companies do it, but it’s unbelievable.)
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It’s really extremely cold this morning, it’s around zero and the wind is blowing terribly. So instead of a hat, it’s a balaclava. If I met someone like that in the woods in the Czech Republic, I’d probably shit myself in fear.. but luckily the locals are used to it, because of the weather, everyone here wears a hood. So we pack up the camp and horses and at six in the morning we cheerfully set off to meet roughly one kilometer uphill and then another kilometer downhill. I remember the words of the locals over the map: and here, where it looks like you have to go down, definitely not there, you would reach another village, here you have to turn right and go up here, where it looks like there is no road….
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After a few hours of riding straight up a beautiful green valley, you come to a nice gradual mountain saddle and a view of the path down into the village. Um, not here, so up that rocky cairn? Really? A level three climb on horseback? (Hi Mom, don’t read that) Fidel the horse turns his head reproachfully at me and stops with his inner eye fixed directly on me. And he waits. “Well, okay, Fidel, I’m dismounting, you’re right, I’ll walk here…”
Fortunately, Fidel, Chai and Tian are supposedly representatives of a local type of horse (I guess you can’t call it a breed) called the “Chui horse” according to the locals. They handle the terrible terrain with absolute ease. Unlike me, who scratches my arms, legs and belly like a cunt. I can’t imagine any czech warmblood climbing that, because even a less physically fit person can’t climb it.
But for Fidel and Tea, it’s a piece of cake. The local horses aren’t very smart. They’re also not very cooperative, they don’t like people, they often can’t even do basic things like lifting their legs, their memory for training is abysmal, so you probably can’t teach them much, I mean – let’s face it, you can’t teach them anything in a month and a half of daily work, they can just walk forward and that’s it – but the terrain they can handle is incredible.
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Up above the rocky mass, we have a beautiful plateau. At 3450 meters it offers views in all directions – it’s called the “roof of the world”. So, five minutes of enjoying the view of the mountains around you and hurry away, a storm is about to roll in and in the middle of the storm you want to be anywhere else, especially not on this two-kilometer-long plateau, the roof of the world. But there’d have to be a road. We’ve been navigating by vocals rather than by map for a while now, because the GPS signal is kind of lame. So the descent down is going along the lines of: here on the horizon it looks like there’s a river flowing down from the glacier, so unless there’s a waterfall downstream, logically it should be passable along the river all the way down into the valley (…if there’s that waterfall along the way, it’s sort of not passable, you don’t have to be studied for that, and it’s time to come up with a plan B, but there’s no point in coming up with one yet as long as you have a plan A). I start using this tactic of descents absolutely anytime, because there are no paths here rather than there are, and when a path starts, it ends after a while anyway. One nice rutted road was marked on a paper Soviet map as a mountain road for cars. Only somehow, in reality, it ended halfway up the slope a moment before the pass. They drew the map before they finished the road… and then the comrades changed the five-year plan and the lovely road never made it.
But nobody told us that when we planned the route, so now I’m stumbling from one side of the glacial river to the other, silently cursing the cartographers of the SSSR.
