IN FOCUS Himalayan trekking guide Almas Khan has made his base camp in Tasmania for the past seven years
Himalayan trekking guide Almas Khan has made his base camp in Tasmania
The wind an avalanche creates can knock you off a cliff before the snow ever reaches you. The Himalayan blue sheep isn’t a sheep and it isn’t blue. At 5000m above sea level, the air contains half the oxygen it does at sea level. And a 600kg yak is more sure-footed than your average human. These are not revelations from an episode of the TV quiz show QI but part of the acquired knowledge of Himalayan trekking guide Almas Khan.
Khan, from the Indian foothills town of Nainital, has made Hobart his home for the past seven years. The house he and wife Jayne designed and built themselves in Fern Tree is the highest dwelling in the Hobart municipality, at 560m above sea level. But compared with Khan’s work environment, even the highest point in Tasmania – the 1617m Mt Ossa – is a little on the low side.
Every year, in the northern hemisphere spring and summer, Khan clocks up 1600-2000km of walking at high altitude, taking small parties on treks in Bhutan, Nepal and the Indian Himalayan region of Ladakh. Life at 5000m above sea level can be very heady, but Khan is about as centred and down-to-earth as it’s possible to imagine. The 45-year-old emanates calm and contentment as he sits outside the Fern Tree home he and Jayne share with their two British Blue cats, Pearl and Golu.
“People have different reasons to climb mountains,” Khan says of his great love for the Himalayas. “Some do it because they’re there, some for the achievement. Just being there is good enough for me. I can feel the nature, the altitude, the harshness, the beauty; I like the air, I like the silence. Being there just humbles me, the size of the mountains, the dangers you face – I come back more humble every time.”
When home in Tasmania, Khan’s trusty Scarpa walking boots and vintage Kathmandu-brand sleeping bag mostly sit in a cupboard. “Walking is what I do for work – I’m here to rest,” he says.
For someone as active as Khan, though, “rest” is a relative concept. He is a volunteer for both the Fern Tree Fire Brigade and the State Emergency Service. In his nearly five years of SES service, he has been on search and rescue missions in the wilds and spent nights pulling tarps over people’s roofs during rainstorms. In 2011, he went on two deployments to Queensland to help in the wake of Cyclone Yasi and he spent nine days at Dunalley during the 2013 bushfire crisis.
“Almas is one of my most loyal and dedicated members,” SES regional manager south Mark Nelson says. “He’s always available and he’s very professional and very keen.”
Jayne Khan puts her husband’s enthusiasm down to his need to stay busy and keep his reflexes sharp.
“He can’t just sit down and do nothing: he likes to be active, he likes the people contact and he has this drive to help people,” Jayne says. “Also, he likes an element of disaster – the 2am call-out and the unpredictability. He has got this natural ability to stay calm in those circumstances”.
Khan first came to Tasmania to walk the South Coast Track, inspired by reading King of the Wilderness, Christobel Mattingley’s biography of legendary South West resident Deny King. “Everything it talked about, from the forest to the wildlife, to the remoteness – that really interested me how far away Melaleuca was and I really wanted to go and see how a person had built an air strip by himself and everything Deny King did there,” Khan says.
He has now walked the South Coast Track, from Melaleuca to Cockle Creek, five times and has great respect for it.
“If you can do that walk, it will prepare you for any trek in the Himalayas,” he says. “It has bogs, forests, river crossings, ridges. It’s good mental preparation.”
Khan leads four to five Himalayan treks a year. Among them is the Lunana Snowman (named after the Abominable Snowman, or Yeti, of Himalayan legend). The Snowman is a 29-day, 356km trek in Bhutan, near the border with Tibet. It starts at 2280m above sea level and trekkers walk as high as 5250m, passing peaks that top 7000m.
Khan is proud that he has never had a death or major injury on any of his treks. Altitude sickness is the most common problem for trekkers, along with the occasional sprain or stomach bug. If any of his party falls in a heap and feels they can’t go on, he advises them to think of the next half-hour only, not of the distance they still have to go.
“If you can walk for one day you can walk for 27,” he says. “Eighty per cent of it is in your head. You put one foot in front of the other and don’t think about the next 27 days.
“You don’t know how strong you are until you put yourself through the fire. People don’t push themselves. Everyone is capable of doing much more than we think we can do.”
Born into a Hindi-speaking family and educated in English at an Irish Brothers school, Khan also speaks Nepali, which helps immensely in his dealings with Himalayan locals. The logistical challenges involved in organising his treks include lining up sets of pack animals and their handlers to be available at different points along the way, with a fresh team required every five days. The biggest challenge of Khan’s work, though, is the weather.
“You can’t control the weather but you can make allowance for it,” he says. “If you keep days in hand it always helps. We completed The Snowman last year despite a cyclone because I took away the rest days so we could get ahead of the weather and so we had spare time to sit out the blizzards between the passes.
“You don’t fight a mountain. Mountaineers have accidents because they think they’re bigger than the mountains. More people die coming down a mountain than going up it: it’s not because it’s more dangerous coming down but because they’re overconfident. You’re never bigger than a mountain.”
Discussing the world’s tallest peak, the 8848m Mt Everest, Khan has never been there and has no interest in it.
“Everyone heads there – that’s why I don’t go,” he says. “There are helicopters flying all over the Everest Base Camp trek, and there’s internet access and Swiss bakeries. Coca-Cola and internet cafes is not trekking mountains. Just because it’s the tallest doesn’t mean it’s the toughest. I would rather go to the second or third-highest mountain.”
PEOPLE HAVE DIFFERENT REASONS TO CLIMB MOUNTAINS … JUST BEING THERE IS GOOD ENOUGH FOR ME. I CAN FEEL THE NATURE, THE ALTITUDE, THE HARSHNESS, THE BEAUTY; I LIKE THE AIR, I LIKE THE SILENCE. BEING THERE JUST HUMBLES ME
Khan was an early starter as a mountain man. He was just three when two uncles took him rock climbing for the first time. He took to it straight away, encouraged by his school-teacher mother. He went on to become a rock-climbing instructor, as well as being introduced to trekking by friends when he was in his mid-teens.
He led his first commercial trek at 22 and worked for World Expeditions for the next 13 years. This included being an assistant trek leader to well-known Australian mountaineer Tim Macartney-Snape. In the past 10 years, Khan has been a freelancer, co-ordinating most of his treks through UK firm The Mountain Company.
Khan talks enthusiastically about the bird life of the high altitudes, including the Himalayan vulture, the crow-like chuff, and a beautiful iridescent pheasant called a monal. Other animals in the region include marmots, deer, ibex and bharal (the “blue sheep” that are actually goats and greyish-fawn in colour).
“I love watching the ibex and bharal climbing up rock faces,” Khan says. “Above the snow line there are also the snow leopards, which I have only seen twice in my life, both times around shepherds and their flocks. I’ve never had a bad moment in the mountains. I had a few close calls doing stupid things when I was young but I’ve never had a serious injury.”
Ten years ago, a woman from Tasmania who had been working around the world as a chef turned up to do The Snowman. Only 20 months earlier, Jayne Atkinson had lost her right arm in a near-fatal car accident in San Francisco, where she was in port as the chef on computer tycoon Larry Ellison’s yacht.
With the loss of her arm, her cooking career was over. Having done three treks in Nepal before her accident, she decided that her psychological recovery lay in the Himalayas.
“There were so many things I couldn’t do any more but trekking was something I could do,” Jayne says. “I knew from my treks in the past that it’s a really good way of rebooting your brain because it shuts you off from the outside world.”
She booked two back-to-back treks. The first was led by Khan, who was impressed by her determination. They met up again when Jayne next visited India and, in 2005, they married. They spent their first three years together based in Delhi but Khan was concerned that this bustling Indian city was too dangerous a place for Jayne to be alone when he was away at work.
When they came to Tasmania in 2007 to do the South Coast walk, they visited Jayne’s brother at Longley, in the kunanyi/Mt Wellington foothills and Khan felt he had found his new home.
“I love Fern Tree. It’s like my home town was 20 years ago, before the population doubled,” he says. “Nainital is forested and with a similar climate. And I used to walk along a track like the Pipeline Track to get to school.”
He became an Australian citizen two years ago, at the Australia Day ceremony on Sandy Bay Beach. Jayne describes herself as a global citizen. “My base and centre is Fern Tree, because we built it ourselves and our cats are here, but I love the whole earth,” she says.
“Almas’s heart is in the Himalaya but it’s more sane to live in Tasmania; things work here, there’s law and order, and road rules.” As to their far-flung marriage, she wouldn’t have it any other way. “I would be disappointed if Almas didn’t do what he does,” Jayne says. “The Himalaya is his passion and life’s work. And I don’t worry about him because he’s super-capable.”
Almas Khan says he would enjoy having some Tasmanians on his trips. If you are interested in joining Khan on a Himalayan trek, you can find more information at www.themountaincompany.co.uk