Namgyal has lived his entire life in a stone house above 14,000 feet, within sight of the pass that now carries a steady summer stream of motorcycles and 4x4s. He remembers when the road was a mule track.
'People ask me if it is sad, watching so many strangers pass through now,' he said, pouring butter tea. 'It is not sad. It is different. The mountain has always had visitors — traders, monks, soldiers. Now it is travelers. The mountain does not mind who walks on it, as long as they walk carefully.'
"'The road came, then the tourists came, then the shops came,' Namgyal said. 'The mountain did not change. Only what we do at its feet did.'"
He has watched the glaciers above his home retreat noticeably in the last two decades — a fact he states plainly, without theatrics, the way someone describes a neighbor's slow illness.
We asked what he wished visitors understood before they arrived. 'That they are guests,' he said. 'Not customers. A guest asks before it takes a photograph of my door. A customer does not.' It is the closest thing to a mission statement we have heard from anyone on this route, and we did not write it — he did.
