Keeper Of The Mountains (14 page)

Roberts's passion was the mountains – climbing and exploration. His knowledge of climbing history in Nepal was prodigious and he was generous in sharing that knowledge with Elizabeth. He helped familiarize her with the mountaineering world. He was also shy and sensitive, and Elizabeth observed that his feelings were easily hurt. Many people misjudged this shyness, thinking he was a bit dazed or vague. In 1953 John Hunt invited him to join the famous Everest expedition, but only after the expedition had arrived in Nepal. In fact, it wasn't until Roberts arrived at base camp with some late-arriving
oxygen that he was invited to take part. He declined. Considering his already stellar climbing record in the Nepal Himalaya, he was insulted by the belated invitation, and many in Kathmandu thought he was justified.

Roberts was a confirmed bachelor and did not have lady friends. Another rumour made the rounds of Kathmandu that he and Elizabeth were romantically involved, but she sets that one straight too. She doesn't think he ever made passes at women and believes he didn't care for women at all. She saw him at parties, often drinking heavily, but never with a woman. One of his closest friends was Pertemba Sherpa, and they adored each other, according to Elizabeth. Pertemba worked with him in the trekking business but eventually left for another company. Roberts was hurt by this apparent betrayal. But he was a brilliant organizer and his idea was not only original but also right for the times, and so the business began to grow.

As it grew, Roberts needed someone in Kathmandu to handle cor­respondence, because he preferred to be with clients on the treks. He asked Elizabeth for help and she said yes. Her first assignment for the company was to help organize a trek into the region between Dhaulagiri and Annapurna for a physiologist from the University of California's oceanography lab. She met the client at the plane, took him shopping for a bath towel, soap and other personal things for the trip, answered endless questions and saw him off on the plane. “The helpless scientific type,” she concluded. Other clients began trickling in, attracted by the description of exotic locales, as well as the chance to meet famous explorers such as Eric Shipton (another rumoured lover of Elizabeth's – also firmly denied), who worked briefly as a Mountain Travel guide.

In the early days of climbing in Nepal, there was no legal requirement for an expedition to be represented by a trekking agent, but even then Mountain Travel coordinated a lot of expedition logistics. Now an employee of Mountain Travel, Elizabeth handled their mail while they were on the mountain. In return, she asked them to send her regular correspondence from the climb, letting her know how they were doing. They did this exchange via a simple cloth mailbag lined with plastic. Using planes, trucks and runners, she stayed on top of each expedition's progress.

At the same time that Mountain Travel was growing in Kathmandu,
a private American investment company named Tiger Tops was bringing travellers to the southern Terai region of Nepal. It was the creation of two Texas oil investors, Herb Klein and Toddy Wynne Jr. They hired John Coapman, the son of missionary schoolteachers in India, to go to the Terai and build a lodge in what was then a game preserve but which later became a park (after the royal family had systematically killed much of the wildlife). This lodge became the first jungle lodge in Nepal.

Tiger Tops quickly became famous as an adventure destination. Between Christmas of 1964 and New Year's, Elizabeth was a guest at the lodge, where she viewed big game, including tigers, from the back of an elephant. The lodge itself was attractive, with a sleeping building on stilts and a huge circular fireplace in the middle of the dining and lounge building.

By February 1966 business was picking up for Tiger Tops; it was then that John Coapman asked Elizabeth to help out with lodge bookings from her home office in Kathmandu. The lodge only had eight rooms at the time, so she used a school copybook in which she ruled out lines for eight spaces for each day of the week. Although she was already working as a stringer for
Time
,
Life
and Reuters, and in her new job at Mountain Travel, she was happy to have the extra income. She answered telegrams, handled Coapman's correspondence and answered questions from local hotels and travel agencies about Tiger Tops reservations. Within a year, this job began to take an inordinate amount of her time. But though the business was growing, the profits, strangely, were not.

By 1971 the Texas backers of Tiger Tops were tiring of the logistical and administrative problems and questionable profits, although they remained convinced it was a good idea. They were used to making money, not losing it. Tiger Tops was not even able to pay its staff during this time, and Coapman had the unpleasant experience of a general strike. So he fled, not just from Tiger Tops but from Kathmandu altogether. This didn't affect Elizabeth as much as it could have, because Coapman had fired her shortly before the company went bust. He had a terrific temper and Elizabeth's strong and stubborn character had been too much for him.

In the meantime, another Kathmandu resident and keen hunter, Jim Edwards, joined up with Chuck McDougal to start a hunting
company in Nepal. Jim had had his eye on Tiger Tops, so when Coapman fled, Jim met with the Texans and was appointed manager of the company in 1972. He knew Elizabeth and wooed her back to the company, after which they set about trying to straighten out the mess John had left behind. There were unpaid salaries, dead elephants, staff on strike, no credit in Kathmandu and more. But within a short time they dramatically increased the business.

With their newfound success, they even managed to coax Royal Nepal Airlines into offering daily flights to their lodge – not an easy task. Jim had worked for Pan Am in New York before he came to Nepal, and he was a successful salesperson, not only selling the lodge to tourists but also bringing in more investors. He was generally a charming man, but not always, and Elizabeth didn't find him to be the easiest person to work for. She recalls that when he became angry with her he would rant and rave on the office intercom, but she knew how to turn the intercom off. He did not. So he would rant and she would go on with her work. It seemed to work for both of them.

At the same time, Jim wanted to open a trekking agency. Eliza­beth happened to know that Jimmy Roberts was getting bored with the management of Mountain Travel, so she introduced them to each other with a merger in mind. It worked. Jim continued to bring in new investors for the expanded company. Mountain Travel maintained its own name, as did Tiger Tops, and Jim then went on to open Himalayan River Exploration and two more jungle lodges. It was an exciting time for the travel industry: Mountain Travel was the first adventure travel company in Nepal and the world; Tiger Tops was the first jungle lodge in Nepal. Together they were not only successful, but they changed the way people thought of travel. The company eventually became known as Tiger Mountain.

In 1975 a young British woman, Lisa van Greisen, now Lisa Choegyal, joined Tiger Tops and began to invite a number of high-profile customers to the company, building its international reputation and having some interesting times in the process. It was a parade of stars: Robert Redford, Henry Kissinger, Goldie Hawn and Jimmy Carter. Lisa remembers that for the most part they tried to steer the guests clear of Elizabeth, since she had a brusque manner that the guests did not find endearing. But perhaps Elizabeth was just selective – somehow she managed to sufficiently charm Jimmy Carter
into lobbying on her behalf to the king when she had some problems with her journalist accreditation. It didn't work but she appreciated his efforts. Carter found himself in a curious situation when his round-the-clock bodyguards, who accompanied him to Everest base camp, almost dropped dead from the combined effects of altitude and sheer exhaustion. Kissinger had his own problems down at the Tiger Tops lodge when he attempted to get on an elephant. He couldn't bring himself to climb on – it turned out he suffered from vertigo. He ended up taking a Jeep tour instead, regaling Lisa Choegyal with stories of high-level intrigue and diplomacy.

Years later, in 1995, one of the Tiger Tops celebrities was Hill­ary Clinton. Lisa came up with the idea of introducing Hillary to the other Hillary – the knighted one – who happened to be in town. Elizabeth and Lisa choreographed the event, which ended up taking place on the hot tarmac of the airport. Hillary Clinton was particularly enthusiastic, gushing about how excited she was, announcing that her mother had named her after Sir Edmund. Former president Bill Clinton's bestselling biography of 2004,
My Life
, repeats the story of his wife being named after the man who first climbed Everest. There is only one problem with this anecdote: Sir Edmund Hillary did not reach the summit of Everest until May 29, 1953, when Hillary Clinton was already five years old. At the time of her birth, he was an obscure New Zealand beekeeper. Both Lisa and Elizabeth doubted her story at the time, but basked in the ink the event produced with headlines like “Hillary meets Hillary.”

As the company matured, Jim created an executive committee, employing Elizabeth in that capacity. Then she became an executive advisor and finally more of a consultant, providing a monthly report that outlined the political, economic and major tourism news in the country.

Elizabeth finally had an opportunity to see a part of Nepal she had frequently written about – the Khumbu, land of the Sherpas and jumping-off point for many important expeditions. It was a place she was eager to experience first-hand. In 1965 she and her friend Barbara Adams joined a small group of Americans living in Kathmandu to fly to Lukla and trek for a couple of weeks. In a letter informing her mother of her plans, Elizabeth reassured her in a postscript: “I won't be doing any attempts at climbing, you understand – only trekking
or hiking.” Back in Kathmandu, having trekked to Namche Bazaar, Thyangboche and Khumjung, she was tired, describing the experience to her mother: “This slogging up steep mountainsides and back down again for hours on end when one is not in training is bound to be tiring.” But she thought it was worth the struggle – for the scenery and to see where and how the Sherpas lived.

March 9, 1967, was an exciting day for those living in Kathmandu, and the beginning of even greater exposure and business for Tiger Tops. A Boeing 707 landed at the Kathmandu airport, the first time an intercontinental jet had ever landed there. Experts had said it was impossible to land a jet on the short, 2103-metre runway in a small valley surrounded by tall mountains, but the Lufthansa jet did it in just 1067 metres. Only a test flight, it was expected to pave the way for more in the future, which is exactly what happened a few months later when the Nepal government opened the airport to Thai International flights direct from Bangkok twice a week. As the Thai flights became established, they became an important supplier of clients for Tiger Tops. But Royal Nepal Airlines wasn't pleased with the competition and demanded that Thai International pay a substantial fee to keep operating in Nepal. Elizabeth became involved and arranged a meeting between the crown prince's secretary and some of the senior Thai officials, resulting in a smoothing of relations and a free ticket for Elizabeth on Thai to an Asian city of her choice. By the beginning of June, yet another important transportation link had opened up – a paved road from Kathmandu to the Tibetan border. And in March, a casino opened in Kathmandu's newest hotel. The owners were a mixed group: Bhutanese, Albanian and Anglo-Indian, and the manager was a former acting prime minister of Bhutan – a real “man about town,” according to Elizabeth. The secret of Nepal was leaking out.

But even as the city became more accessible and cosmopolitan with each passing month, the political situation took a major setback in March 1968 when King Mahendra had a heart attack while hunt­ing tigers in western Nepal. He took two months off to convalesce and made his first public speech in May, sounding perfectly normal. Perhaps it was his brush with mortality that prompted the next mo­mentous political event.

To give the event some context, it is necessary to reflect back to 1960 when the prime minister of Nepal, B.P. Koirala, was arrested
and his authority replaced by that of the king. Koirala had been in custody without a trial or in exile ever since. One morning near the end of January, Elizabeth received a call from Koirala's former home minister, who had lived quietly in Kathmandu since his own release from prison seven years earlier. He invited her to come and have tea with Mrs. Koirala that evening at her home. Elizabeth knew something was up when she arrived to find several other journalists there as well. At about 8:00 p.m., a Russian Jeep belonging to the Nepalese army pulled up with two familiar faces: Koirala and his transport and communications minister, both of whom had been in jail or in exile all these years.

Koirala looked thinner but healthy, despite his prison ordeal. Now some interesting times would unfold, she thought, as these two men, the king and the former prime minister, would once again have to figure out how they were going to join forces – or not – in running the country. She was disappointed when, instead of Koirala, a deputy prime minister who had been suddenly dropped from the cabinet the preceding year was appointed prime minister. Although Kirtinidhi Bista was a pleasant man, she doubted he had the experience and vision of Koirala.

The political intrigue continued when a close political friend of Elizabeth's, Rishikesh Shaha, who had been arrested three months before under a vague Security Act, was suddenly released on technical grounds. On his way home from court, he was re-arrested, this time with all the technicalities worked out. She concluded that the present government considered him to be a very real political threat and wanted him well and truly out of the way. Personally, it was a discouraging development, as he had always been a reliable source of inside information for her.