Kishan. At this point, my own happy ending wasn’t even a guarantee. The best I could come up with was finishing the four tasks, so the brothers didn’t have to be tigers anymore. I hoped that by the time we finished them, the happy endings would sort of take care of themselves.
Mr. Kadam returned and said, “We’ve received permission to take the Friendship Highway tour route to Tibet. It’s something of a miracle.”
“Wow. How did you manage it?”
“A high government official in China owes me a favor.”
“How high?”
“The highest. Still, we have to stick to the tour stops and check in at each place along the way so they can keep tabs on us. We leave immediately. Our first stop is Neyalam, which is about 150 kilometers from here. It should take us about five hours just to hit the Chinese/Nepal border.”
“Five hours? Wait a minute, 150 kilometers? That’s roughly ninety miles. That’s only eighteen miles per hour. Why does it take so long?”
Mr. Kadam chuckled. “You’ll see.”
He handed me the tour guide, map, and brochures so I could follow along and help him navigate. I thought the Rockies were huge, but comparing the Himalayas with the Rockies was like comparing the Rockies with the Appalachians, literally mountains to molehills. The peaks were thick with snow, even though it was early May.
Stark rocky glaciers rose up before us, and Mr. Kadam told me the landscape becomes tundra and then permanent ice and snow a little higher. Trees were small and scattered. The ground was mostly covered with grasses, dwarf shrubs, and moss. He said there were some conifer forests in other parts of the Himalayas, but we would be passing mostly through the grasslands.
When he said, “you’ll see,” he wasn’t kidding. We were climbing at about ten miles per hour into the mountains. The road wasn’t exactly up to standard, and we bumped and weaved around potholes and sometimes herds of yaks and sheep.
To pass the time, I asked Mr. Kadam about the first company he bought into.
“That would be the East India Trading Company. It was started before I was born in the early 1600s, but it became a very big business by the mid–eighteenth century.”
“What kinds of things did you trade?”
“Oh, lots of things. Cloth—silk mostly—tea, indigo, spices, saltpeter, and opium.”
I teased him, “Mr. Kadam! You were a drug dealer?”
He winced. “Not in the current definition of the word, no. Remember, opium was touted as medicinal then, but I did transport the drug in the beginning. I owned several ships and funded large caravans. When China banned the opium trade, triggering the Opium Wars, I stopped shipping it and focused most of my business in the spice trade.”
“Huh. Is that why you like grinding your own spices so much?”
He smiled. “Yes, I still like to look for the best quality products and enjoy using them in my cooking.”
“So you’ve always been in the cargo business then.”
“I guess I have. I never really thought about it that way.”
“Okay, I have two questions for you. Do you still have a ship? I know you kept a plane from that company, but do you still have a ship? Because that would be so cool. The second question is what’s saltpeter?”
“Saltpeter is also known as potassium nitrate. It was used to make gunpowder and is also, ironically, a food preservative. And, in answer to your other question, the boys do own a boat, but not one of my original shipping boats.”
“Oh. What kind of a boat?”
“A small yacht.”
“Ah. I should’ve guessed.”
We stopped near the China/Nepal border in a city called Zhangmu where we had to fill out paperwork again. Then, after a day of driving and traveling only a total of ninety-six miles, we drove into Neyalam and checked into a small overnight guesthouse.
The next day we climbed even higher. The brochure said that by the end of the day we’d be above thirteen thousand feet. On this section of the drive, we saw six of the major mountains in the Himalayas, including Mount Everest, and stopped to take in the magnificent view of Mount Xixapangma.
On day three, I started feeling a little sick, and Mr. Kadam said he thought I had altitude sickness. He explained that it was common when traveling higher than twelve thousand feet. “It should pass. Most people adjust within a few hours, but for some it can take several days for their body to acclimate to the elevation.”