Trekking On The Trachycarpus Trail. Part 3

The expedition to search for Trachycarpus takil - final part by Martin Gibbons.
Martin Gibbons
Chamaerops No. 3, published online 23-11-2002

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On the roof of the world: Trachycarpus & the Himalayas .

The story so far...

Last October, Martin Gibbons & Wilco Karmelk went on an expedition in search of Trachycarpus takil. In the last issue we read of their arrival in India, the train then taxi journey to remote Pithoragarh, 600kms north-east of Delhi, and their frustrated efforts to find the palms, which, although reported in huge numbers in century-old horticultural journals, now seemed unknown to the locals. Finally, incredibly, they located one beautiful mature tree, and following that, the valley where small plants grew by the hundred. But no more adults. They planned a final, comprehensive search of the valley where they were sure the mature trees were to be found

Now read on...

We had a lazy morning in Pithoragarh, doing some shopping for food, and generally relaxing. We had arranged for a jeep to take us to Burapi and he duly arrived at 2pm. This time the drive up the mountainside was even more dangerous than the first time. The jeep had no first gear, so it was necessary for him to take the hairpin bends 'at a run' for fear of stalling the engine. Not only that but he insisted on driving on the 'drop side' of the road. I was sitting in the back with the mountain on my right and a sheer drop of 1000ft on my left. As we raced round the bends, I could look down out of the window, into the void. Several times we shouted at the driver to slow down, but he seemed to take little notice. Sometimes I literally closed my eyes.

At one time we met a herd of cows on the road, but instead of slowing down to let them pass, he drove hard and fast straight at them, forcing them off the road and onto a tiny narrow verge. It was a miracle that none of them fell off the edge.

It was therefore something of a relief when we arrived at Burapi at about 4 pm. Wilko and I stayed the night here, ready for an early start the following morning.

We set off as the sun was just peeping over the distant horizon, at 6.2Oam. There were four of us: Hareesh, another porter, Wilko and I. We were taken along a different track this time, and the going was somewhat easier than before. Or perhaps we were simply getting used to the altitude and the exercise. After an hour or so we came across a small house, and we stopped for a rest and some welcome chai. We were, as always, made very welcome and treated like honoured guests. Also, as usual, we were surrounded by curious onlookers. We began asking them about palm trees and showing them the now well-thumbed photos of Trachycarpus and some of the leaf bases we had collected from the big tree. One of the men explained in halfmime, half-Hindi that ropes were made from them. To our surprise Hareesh took some fibres from the bases of the leaves, and, rolling them between the palms of his hands, soon produced a foot or two of good strong rope, somewhat thicker than a pencil. The significance of this demonstration would only become apparent later on.

One of the men then said he knew of some mature palm trees and agreed to take us to them. In fact three or four of them accompanied us and we set off up the same track. After a stiff climb of half an hour or so, we came upon 5 big trees of Trachycarpus, which had been left standing when the surrounding land had been cleared for cultivation. They were on an exposed hilltop and looked quite stunning with the snow covered Himalayas as a backdrop. The light here was quite intense, causing the leaves to have very short petioles.

The man who farmed here chatted to us as we took photos. His house was on one of the three summits of the Thalkedar mountain, the temple was on another and the third was the highest at 8200ft above sea level.

Since it was our intention to sleep at the temple that night, he said he would shine a torch from his summit to ours at precisely 7.30pm as a greeting. We spent some time at his house, the garden of which looked almost English, with marigolds, African marigolds, dahlias, a peach and an apple tree, and a patio of rough-hewn stone slabs, where we sat drinking tea.

At length we took our departure and headed off down the hill in the direction of the valley we wanted to explore. We had some adventures descending its steep, sometimes precipitous sides in search of the larger palm trees, which we felt must be here somewhere. Small plants up to 4 or 5ft tall we saw by the hundred, but no large ones. Hareesh kept on saying 'No big, no big'. With sketches and mimes we tried to explain that these small plants came from larger trees, mummies and daddies in fact, and we asked him, 'Where Mummy? Where Daddy?' but he insisted, 'No mummy, no Daddy'.

During a rest stop he got around to explaining why there were no mature plants or big trees, and it was with sinking hearts that we realized the awful truth: the young plants are cut off at the base when they have 18" of trunk, to provide fibres for ropes. 'All cut?', we asked, incredulous. 'All cut', confirmed Hareesh. The stupidity of it is that no seeds are produced by the palms before they are cut, the natives believing that new plants spring up from the stump of the old one, which of course they do not. One of the 100-year-old accounts we had read in the library at Kew spoke of 'hundreds of palm trees' in this very valley. Presumably they have been cutting them smaller and smaller ever since, and now there are none. Rather like smaller and smaller elephants being shot for their ivory, even before they have had a chance to breed.

A further irony is that it is perfectly possible to remove all the fibres from a mature tree without harming it at all. We have done it a few times at the nursery: Start from the bottom of the trunk and with a sharp knife cut through the old petiole and then right round the trunk just cutting through the fibre. A sheet of fibre about 40cm square will come away, with the old petiole in the middle. Continue onto the next one up and repeat the process. It's time consuming but not difficult. On a tree with a couple of metres of trunk you can get up to 30 or 40 such squares. And of course the tree will continue to thrive and produce more fibres for you.

We tried to explain all this to Hareesh but it was an impossible task. Our guess is that once every year or two a gang of villagers make an assault on the valley and cut down every palm that has half a metre of trunk. They would all then be gathered together and stripped back at the village. What a waste!

As time was getting on we asked Hareesh to take us to the temple. It wasn't too bad a climb and we reached it at about 4pm. when, after a rest and some tea, Hareesh and his colleague left us, to return to Burapi.

The solitude was wonderful then, on the roof of the world, no one around for miles, the snow-capped Himalayan peaks on the horizon, and only a few ravens for company. We lit a fire and cooked a surprisingly good meal: potatoes, lentils and some packets of soup, all mixed into a kind of stew. We watched the sun sink lower and lower and finally dip below the horizon at precisely 5.40pm. The Himalayan peaks were the last things to see the sun and it shone on fewer and fewer, Nanda Devi being the last to remain illuminated by its now pink rays.

The temperature drops quickly when the sunsets and soon we donned jumpers and watched the new moon rise and the stars begin to shine, until there were countless millions of pinpoints of light in the sky. At 7.30 we saw the promised torch light from the distant neighbouring summit and flashed ours back in return. We could just hear his shouted greeting, and rang the bells and whistled in reply. We finished our stew by torch light, then cleared up and settled down in our sleeping bags for a good night's sleep.

I woke to the sound of the ravens. The sun was over the horizon already, and it was time to be up. We made a cup of tea and sorted ourselves out. On our max/min thermometer we saw that the temperature had dropped to 8¾C during the night. This was October; it must get considerably colder in mid-winter. We left the summit and the temple at 8.30am. We said goodbye to Shiva and the ravens and decided the best way down to the valley. Then, taking our last look at the fabulous view, descended into the forest.

We went down some way, and, as before, saw hundreds of small Trachycarpus palms, but of course no large ones. It then became too steep for us to continue without great danger, so we went, crab-fashion, across to where the slope was more gentle. Even so, it was quite steep and much of the descent I accomplished in a sitting position, sliding down on my behind!

We soon came across the largest specimen we were to see in the forest, hard under a huge and vertical cliff face, and looking as though it, single-handedly, was supporting the whole thing. Small wonder they had not cut this one down! It had about one and a half metres (4'6") of trunk, thick at the bottom, but tapering towards the top, and very long petioles, indicating a need for more light.

However, these plants do not grow on the sunny side of the valley, presumably because it is too dry. As the old description had said, we found them only in damp, narrow valleys, and almost always in full shade.

We continued the descent, in all some 1000 metres (3000ft), by sliding, scrambling, slithering, climbing, and by lowering ourselves using the plants for support. One way or another down we came. We stopped for lunch, cooking some very welcome soup. The vegetation was spectacular: huge incana oaks, massive rhododendron trees, ferns, bamboos, and of course, palms by the dozen. Fortunately the temperature was quite cool, at around 11.5¾C; otherwise it would have been unbearable. The rucksacks were heavy, and often became entangled in the roses and briars, which grew in profusion. Thorns tore at our arms and faces. Sometimes it was so dense that we just had to force our way through. It was incredible to look back up and see where we had come down from, and at the sheer rock faces we had circled round.

As we came down, the palms became smaller and less frequent, their place seemingly taken by ferns. Horse chestnut trees beginning to show their autumn colours made it look like an English woodland. Soon we saw our last palm, as we reached the valley bottom. We picked up a track, and followed it down a gentle slope for perhaps a mile when we began to see signs of human habitation. Eventually the path widened, and led us through a veritable forest of Pinus longifolia. Soon we came to a small village where we had the inevitable glass of chai, and from here made our way to the road, where we waved down a truck to give us lift back to Pithoragarh.

* * *

So that, more or less, was that. We returned to New Delhi, spending a day or two as tourists, but we had been spoiled by the beauty and grandeur of the mountains, and nothing, not even the beautiful Taj Mahal itself, could compare.

And what of Trachycarpus takil? Well, if it exists, then we had certainly re-discovered it. But whether it is in fact a distinct species, to my mind, is dubious. More likely, it is a population of Trachycarpus fortunei, separated and isolated aeons ago, perhaps by the Himalayan upheaval itself. The photographs and specimens we brought back will be looked at and examined by experts in due course, but I feel confident they will reach a similar conclusion.

For our part, we had had a wonderful expedition, going to the very edge of civilization, and testing our abilities and resolve at the same time. Whether 'Trachycarpus takil' turns out to be just another variant of T. fortunei seems to matter less now, somehow, than it did before we set off.

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