High: A Journey Across The Himalaya: Book Review

Book title: High: A Journey Across the Himalaya, Through Pakistan, India, Bhutan, Nepal, and China Book author: Erika Fatland Translator: Kari Dickland

 

Identity is created by boundaries and encounters with “another”.

In this six hundred pages long travel book, anthropologist Erika Fatland transports the readers to the Himalayas spreading over five nations and countless cultures. The Himalayas are an attractive destination for many, including me. The gigantic mountain range homes many different cultures, with rich heritage and history. Travelling in modern days, sometimes the local populations' lives and histories get past our tourist sunglasses. Erika wanted to bring these to daylight. She shared how she travelled around the Himalayas, how she met and interacted with the locals, shared a brief history of the local population and gave us a picture of the culture to this date.

The book starts with Erika trying to get a visa to enter India and Pakistan. She stressed the point that as the world is getting global, it becomes more difficult to travel. This realistic view of travelling gave me the idea that the book is going to be authentic.

What do adventurous globetrotters talk about when they meet? They talk about bureaucracy, about consulates, about visa extensions and application procedures.

I was also touring the Himalayas with Erika through her book. And I could relate the parts of Kashmir, Himachal and Nepal. It always feels great to relate to Kashmir in a heavenly manner… 

He had a quotation carved into the uppermost pavilion, lines that are generally ascribed to the poet Hazrat Amir Khusrau: “If there is a paradise on earth, it is this, it is this, it is this.” It is said that when he was on his deathbed, Jahangir was asked what he desired most in the world. “Kashmir, the rest is worthless,” was his reply.

The Himalayas seemed like a melting hotpot of cultures. The silk route, the ancient traditions are getting swapped with asphalt roads, plastic goods and statehood. The impacts came again and again in the book.

The inhabitants of these small kingdoms no longer have kings, but they do now have roads and hydroelectricity and a centralised school system. And in the process, something invaluable has been lost. Not only the local kings but small, isolated worlds, complete with sacred rivers and holy mountains, have been slowly erased from the map.

but no culture is a museum. Who would want to swap an ambulance helicopter, education, working lights and well-stocked shops for heavy physical work, potentially life-threatening births in the forest, miles from the nearest hospital, and dark, smoky living quarters? But in the same way that culture is not a museum, it is not a fragile flower. It does not wither and die simply because it is exposed to exhaust and electricity.

I very much loved the trekking part. Erika did the EBC (Everest Base Camp) trek, reading it made me think of my ABC (Annapurna Base Camp trek) trek. Totally felt her AMS struggles.

Reading the book felt like journeying across the Himalaya, where Erika is my travelmate. At some places, I did not like her as my travelmate, some questions she asked the locals seemed a bit interfering to me. Apart from that it was an epic ride!

My highlights and notes from the book