Taming the Shroom

When you go through customs in Bhutan, they ask you whether you’re carrying any cigarettes. The in-flight magazine had forewarned me about this; slapping me with a potential 300% tax on tobacco related products. Since China is apparently blowing across a Global Warming Smiley over the mountains and into the little kingdom, I guess they could do with a little less smoke. Anyhow, as soon as the customs officer beckoned me with a raised eyebrow, I defensively stammered, “I have no cigarettes!”
All he wanted were my baggage tags. Eventually the tax I had to shug out on the carton in my bag was enough to make me quit.

I had spent over a month in Bhutan twelve years ago. It was a fantastic experience that entailed fishing, trekking, and some random bar brawls. This time around, the intention was rather different. I was planning to read, write, indulge in yoga and avoid bars. Some very close friends who live on a spectacular trout farm were hosting me. One of their main businesses is supplying organic vegetables, so between the fish jumping out of the river and the veggies in their backyard, you can imagine how good the food was. After a few days of sitting by the riverside and writing until my computer battery would exhaust itself, an invitation to go ‘mushroom hunting’ sounded exciting. Somehow visions of me wearing my Sound-Of-Music outfit and skipping through fields picking shrooms seemed entertaining. I was in the middle of nowhere and being spotted in a floral skirt didn’t seem daunting. The real picture was drastically different. I followed… no… I crawled, panting in pain behind a seventy year-old Bhutanese man who deftly bounded up a forested mountain that never seemed to end. To add to my agony, there were no paths. My old guide parted a wall of thorny branches to make way and left them exactly when my face was at a perfect distance to stop them. After the fourth smack in my face, I suspected a pattern. After the eighth, it was nothing short of a conspiracy.

Yet there were two other concerns that plagued my experience. The first one had something to do with my elderly companion emitting guttural screams every few minutes. At first it scared the hell out of me. Once I learned to anticipate the time of each scream, my annoyance grew as his yelling pierced through the peace of the jungle. When I had had enough, I sat him down and begged him to stop. Soon I discovered that the screaming was to alert the several bears in the area. They needed to be notified of our presence, as it wasn’t very wise to suddenly startle a foraging bear. At once I started yelling so hysterically with every step that I risked tripping over my tonsils.

The other issue at hand was how the hell would I know which mushrooms to pick? There were three options - edible, toxic and deadly. Now toxic, I was willing to indulge in if they promised some magical effects. Though with my luck it would probably result in my face swelling up like a hot-air balloon. And what about the old saying – “One man’s drink is another man’s poison.” Either way, I decided not to be too discerning and picked every mushroom in my path. I have never seen so many different mushrooms - The colours, shapes and sizes amazed me. But then I have never gone ‘mushroom hunting’ in my life before.

As we sat over dinner having over ten dishes of various wild mushrooms that had been cautiously compared to pictures in the “Big Mushroom Catalogue” and then cooked, I kept thinking of what would happen if one of the “deadly” shrooms slipped into the pot. What if the photograph of a type was just that lighter shade of pale yet with very deadly properties? I was a good guest at the table, wolfing down all that I had been served, but finally I had to quell my curiosity.

“Oh whenever there’s a doubt we try it on the old man first” my host laughed, adding, “last season we had to pump his stomach twice!”

I found the whole thing hilariously bizarre and couldn’t help but wonder whether he had been madly screaming to alert the bears or had he been guinea pigged one too many times on his mushroom hunting expeditions?

Walter Mitty and My Mother…

Walter Mitty \wawl-ter-MITT-ee\noun: a commonplace unadventurous person who seeks escape from reality through daydreaming.

‘Adventure tripping’ is something I’ve coined to cover anything concerning adventure travel and adventure sports. It’s just a term that makes writing this article a little easier. So, why do we indulge in adventure tripping?

The first time I ventured into high altitude was nearly my last. Before heading to one of the many base camps, a crumpled Sherpa had haunted my mind with words like “potentially fatal” and “Acute Altitude Sickness.” But then, I was nineteen and indestructible. I prided myself on voluntarily controlling my pulse rate, never getting sunburned, and for me, the cold was a state of mind. Once I reached fourteen thousand feet my pulse was already at the peak of the mountain, the sun had peeled layers of skin off my forehead, and my state of mind was too numb to process any kind of temperature. All I could think of was that I needed my mother.

On the second day of my month-long Rescue Diver course in Mauritius, I was a hundred and thirty feet under in very cold, dark water and my fin broke off. To cut a long story that seemed like an eternity, I ran out of air. I was in the middle of a rescue simulation bringing up a fainted victim. Fortunately my diving buddy who was also playing the “victim” had to nip his acting career in the bud and share his air with me. Unfortunately, he had just enough air for the both of us to reach ninety feet below the surface. That’s when he calmly removed his mouthpiece and signaled to me that we were F&*KED! Thankfully we were saved by a third diver who had returned in search of us, else I wouldn’t be writing this article.

Bobbing along the Mekong Delta, in a six-man canoe with twelve people in it, we disembarked on a snake farm for lunch. While walking around as our meal was being prepared, my Vietnamese host opened a wooden crate revealing a massive python inside. My curiousity got the better of me and I deftly plucked it up from behind the head. Suddenly I seemed to be the only person in a one-mile radius. My sudden change of expression from boastful to confusion to pure terror prompted my host to yell something shrill from behind a bush. After deciphering the tones and deciphering the odd consonant confusion, I figured that the python was “very hungry”. That was it. Now picking up a snake of this size is relatively easy if you grab it from the back. Letting it go is the unpredictable part. The “very hungry” python was also very pissed off. Before this ten-foot long muscle crushed my neck and spine, I flung it off me towards the local hiding-party. Mid-air, it spun around and snapped the hair off my arms. I’m not lying; it was straight out of a sci-fi film with a Rambo backdrop. I was thrilled to be back in that six-man canoe. Needless to say, I had lost my appetite. Had I been slightly stupider than I had, my right arm would have been lunch and I wouldn’t be writing this article.

Last year we ran the Zanskar River in Ladhak. Most adventure operators had cancelled the run as the region had been inundated by freak rain; villages were washed away and the river was in full spate. On our third day, both our rafts wrongly read a large though relatively regular grade 3 rapid. My mind’s eye clicked as the raft in front of us flipped vertically ejecting eight people into the freezing water. It was just one photograph and then, just in case God had missed it, our raft did exactly the same thing. Now sixteen of us where tumbling around in numbingly cold, rowdy water. Just as I managed to extricate myself from under the upside-down raft, I belched out half the river and extended my frozen hand to Carol who was yanking people into the two-man kitchen raft. Just as she stretched to get me out of the river that now seemed intent on consuming me, she withdrew her hand, whipped around and screamed, “F&*K we are hitting another rapid!” After that experience, I think twice before putting my clothes into the washing machine.

So coming back to the beginning. Why do we indulge in adventure tripping? To help the Walter Mittys of the world live vicariously through our experiences? I really don’t think so. It’s tough to really care about them when we’re doing all the hard work.

I think the reason is because there is no other way. Ultimately adventure tripping takes you to places so amazing in magnitude, it makes you realize that it’s the only way to travel. The experiences that it puts us through remind us that we are alive, temporary and thoroughly destructible. Added to this, it’s also good to realize how infinitely small we really are. Yet most importantly, being in the great outdoors can be so overwhelming that it honestly embraces your soul (and once in a while makes you remember your mother!).