Himalayan winter

I remember the first time I woke up in the middle of the night shivering from the cold – it was after a party I was at in Switzerland. The C₂H₅OH had reached threshold concentration and my brain had shut down on a sofa next to the fireplace. The confusion of where I was and why it was so cold when I woke up led to a singular objective – find the nearest heated room. Much later I found out that someone had turned off the mains to the cabin and everyone had had the same horrendously cold night.

I was thinking of this incident the first time I woke up shivering here in the Himalayas. In all the excitement of spending a year in the mountains, I’d forgotten how brutal the elements actually are. And the first stretch of my year was one of the most brutal environments my body had ever experienced. City-comforted, seaside, cushion baby suddenly at the Third Pole of the world, no fancy ambient heating either.

In the time from November, for 4 months, I have woken up shivering way too many times. Sometimes it’s because the blanket fell off, sometimes I slept with some part of my body touching the wall, sometimes I didn’t wear a sweater to bed. But every time, it was the same full-body shiver that woke me up. It is a very humbling and numbing (quite literally) feeling when your bodily movement is controlled by the geography. I can’t count the number of times I’ve thought to myself, “Why did humans even colonize this part of the planet?”

There are varying levels of feeling cold, some of which you may already have experienced, like the “hands need to go in my pockets” cold, or the “I can’t feel my face” cold. But have you ever heard of “I held a glass of hot chai, involuntarily shivered from the temperature difference and spilt hot chai on myself” cold, or the “I was walking uphill and trying to breathe only through my nose but now I can’t feel my nose”?

There were also really crazy nights when the cold started to hurt, like in Bagasarahan. It is a small village situated at the top of a mountain – I’d gone there in January. I was told the views were to kill, I wasn’t told I’d spend most of my time there with my blanket as a shawl, over 4 layers of clothing.

View from our homestay in Bagasarahan

It was there that I discovered a whole new level of cold – the embrace. It happens after the chill turns to cold and then pain. The entire body overcomes the pain and becomes one with the cold. Your fingers feel like that cold metal tray you pulled out of the -80ºC freezer in college. Your feet don’t feel like they’re attached to your body anymore and you can almost swear that your hair was made of ice. No shivering, no teeth chattering, no “brbrrbrbrbrrrr” either.

But the good thing about being a warm-blooded mammal is that you only have to cover yourself enough such that the thermodynamics of your body retain that heat generated. For instance, if you were stupid and went out to see the stars at 11pm on a winter night and stayed out staring at the constellation Cassiopeia for a little too long, all you have to do is to cover yourself with some blanket or jacket and allow your body to heat up the air between your skin and that layer. Simple as that. I definitely didn’t know before I came to the Himalayas that patience would tide me over the winter!

But of course, not everything about the winter is cold, numbness and despair. There is also the fun of seeing everyone run towards patches of sunshine, scurrying away from the icy shadows of trees and buildings. When the sun comes out, everyone comes out. Our reptilian ancestors were pleased that their descendants had managed to upgrade to self-regulatory body heat systems, until so many of them went to the Himalayas.

You will often find the average person toasting different parts of their body in the sunlight, turning this way then the other. Even your back will feel too cold compared to the front when you’re facing the sun. I think winter is when I really empathized with reptiles – sitting still in the sun, trying not to waste any energy and just taking in all that heat.

Winter came and went. And coincidentally, I left the mountains for a short gap just as winter was ending so that when I came back here, I could pack up my winter clothes. All the thermals, jackets, gloves, scarves, etc. I left a few things outside, out of respect for the mountains which could freeze me to death at any time (wise choice in hindsight).

I went out for a walk the next day with just a thin jacket and my beanie. As I walked past the tree I could see from my window, just as I had every day for the last weeks, I noticed a few white blossoms on its branches and had just one thought in my head, “I survived a full Himalayan winter to tell the tale.”