My name is Gyalbu Tamang, and I was born in Kyangjin Gompa of Langtang Valley. I am now 44. My father Pasang Norbu worked in the cheese factory here when the Swiss first established it in the 1950s. My mother Tshering and us children grew up helping him with chores.
My father was trained by the early Swiss experts who first came to explore the feasibility of having a cheese factory in Langtang. I think they found Langtang very similar to their own country so they liked it here. My father used to mention the names of Toni Hagen who first came here in 1952, and was probably one of the first white men to come to the village.
Most people in this remote village of Langtang had goitre then caused by iodine deficiency. The valley was at least a week’s walk away from Kathmandu in those days, and people did not have access to sea salt. Tibetan rock salt did not have enough iodine. Goitre was so common that it was even seen as a sign of beauty among some.
When children in Langtang saw western mountaineers and Swiss cheese makers, they used to run away and hide. They called them “go sherpu” (Yellow Head) or “ni karpu” (pale eyes) and kept away.
My father worked with Sepp Dubach and Werner Schulthess, both Swiss cheese makers who were convinced that cheese had a future in Nepal even though at that time Nepalis did not really eat cheese. We had chhurpi but that was hard, and took hours to melt in the mouth. We were not used to the taste of cheese.
After spending a year in Langtang, Schulthess concluded that the best way to preserve the surplus yak and nak milk production in the high mountains of Nepal was to convert it into cheese so it could be transported to market. He was convinced that yak cheese from Nepal would be as good as if not better than Emmentaler cheese from his home country. He brought the technique of Swiss making, and trained my father and others in Langtang. Most of them have passed away now, and Schulthess himself died in 2011.
My father remembers that the Swiss were very passionate about their work, and were impatient with the laid back attitude of the Langtangpa. At first, the yak herders were so suspicious, they refused to provide milk to the Swiss cheese factory, even if they were paid for it. The Swiss gave a milk quota for each herder depending on the number of their yaks which they were forced to sell to the factory.
On days when there was not enough milk the Swiss would hike up to the pastures, break into herders’ huts and confiscate the milk. Sometimes, they would be so angry they would even kick the milk bucket and spill it. After that, my father used to tell me, many of the herders started hiding their milk.
Then Schulthess and his team brought the village Lama on their side, got him to convince the yak herders that it was for their own good. We also came to realise that the Swiss had a different culture, they had come to Nepal to do a job, and they wanted to do it well. Especially Schulthess, he was convinced that cheese making would uplift the nutritional level of the people of the mountains, and provide them income to send children to school and benefit from their pastoral livelihood.
The Swiss ran Nepal’s cheese-making program with other dairies in Jiri and elsewhere, and handed the facilities over to the government’s Dairy Development Corporation in 1964. It was because of the Swiss devotion to quality that Langtang cheese soon became popular in Kathmandu, and Nepalis slowly developed a taste for it. The tourist industry started buying cheese in bulk, and even local sales picked up in Langtang’s guest houses.
My father used to wake up every day while it was still dark, and walked over to get the fire going before the yak herders arrived with their morning milk. When I got older, I used to help him stir the milk as it was heated, watch him add the culture, and go through the whole process. I accompanied him to Langsisha and down to Ghora Tabela to check up on the yak herders.
My childhood memories are of a holy valley steeped in culture and religion. We were deeply ingrained into our traditions, carrying on as the spirits of our ancestors looked down upon us. For us the mountains are not inanimate, they are spiritual beings as well. Every rock, tree, the breeze fluttering the prayer flags, the water gushing out of the glaciers, herds of tahr grazing above the treeline, the alpine choughs soaring on the updrafts, were all fellow-sentient beings connected to humans through a divine bond.
We learnt about the impermanence of life, how the cycle of birth and death and rebirth defines existence. Being a human being is but a small segment of this cycle. What we do in this life, the karma that we earn will determine our reincarnation in the next life. The body may come and go, but the soul lives on in the cosmic realm.
I went to primary school in Langtang, and then after Grade 5 my family sent me down to Dhunche to complete Grades 6-8. My father knew schooling was important and wanted to make me smart, but my heart was not in reciting sentences from the bland text books and I longed to be back up in Kyangjin with my family and amidst a familiar landscape.
My father retired from cheese factory, but he was not planning a sedentary lifestyle. Dairy farming was in his blood. So with his pension he bought ten yaks and carried on doing what he did before, and selling the surplus milk to the cheese factory. His, and our, life revolved around the yaks. In summer, when the snow-covered slopes were replaced with a carpet of green grass with brilliant coloured flowers, we took the yaks up to graze on the slopes below Naya Kanga. It was the herbs mixed into those grasses that gave the milk its unique flavour, which is passed down to the cheese.
We used to watch the sun rise from behind the fluted summit of Gang Chhenpo to the east, and the shadows travelled across the valley as the afternoon clouds moved up, bringing the misty monsoon rain. At night the clouds would part, and we looked up at the dome of stars with occasional meteorites cutting across the ghostly celestial river of the Milky Way. My father did not like sleeping indoors, and if the weather was all right he would take a nap in the grass as the yaks grazed nearby.
Looking at the children of Langtangpa today in schools in Kathmandu, I feel sorry that they cannot experience the kind of idyllic childhood we had. My own four children only get glimpses of this life when they came home for holidays, even though this year Langtang’s children have got to stay is longer up here because of the COVID-19 lockdown.
When I turned 18, I got a job at the Langtang Cheese Production Centre that my father worked in, starting from the bottom – weighing the milk as it came in, collecting firewood, turning the blower to get the fire going, doing all the back-up work that was needed to make cheese. I knew much of this from assisting my father when I was a boy, so it was all familiar territory.
Tourism really picked up in Langtang after 1990, there were people from all over the world: Americans, Israelis, Japanese, Australians, New Zealanders. The fact that people from so far away came all the way to Langtang to admire its wilderness made us proud of our land, and convinced us that we needed to protect it as much as we could.
By now, the valley was a part of the Langtang National Park, and there were strict rules about trail-building, cutting trees and killing wildlife. The new road to Dhunche was built, so we did not have to walk all the way down to Trisuli to catch a bus to Kathmandu anymore. Langtang was now only a two-day walk up from Syabru.
This meant that it was easier to transport the cheese to market in Kathmandu, and with more trekkers coming in, local demand for cheese also rose. This meant more income for the yak herders, and it started becoming really busy during the peak milk season during the monsoons.
In Langtang itself, locals started adding floors to their homes as trekking traffic increased and their earnings went up. The hotels became fancier, there was electricity, solar panels for hot showers, and better rooms and meals. Attracted by the scenery, and the fabulous day hikes in the surrounding mountains, many tourists started stayed longer, and local incomes rose. Porters got jobs ferrying chicken, eggs, meat and other provisions from Trisuli. People started flying in by helicopter for day trips.
