The Great Himalaya Trailblazer: Robin Boustead

The holy grail of trails: That’s what the Great Himalaya Trail has been called. And with good reason. The Great Himalaya Trail (GHT) is the longest, highest and most challenging alpine trail in the world, running through the most spectacular mountains on earth in Bhutan, China, India, Nepal and Pakistan. A network of existing trails that spans 4500km to 7800km, depending on the route, the GHT offers everything from immersion in local culture to the exhilaration of extreme adventure, from easy low-elevation village-to-village hikes at 2,000m (6,500ft) to rugged trekking and intermediate mountaineering at 6,000m (20,000ft).

Sydney-based Briton Robin Boustead is researching, documenting and mapping the GHT. He started with the 1700 km Nepal section of the trail, trekking from one end of the country to the other over six months in 2008 and 2009. Earlier this year, he finalized the trail through Bhutan and he’s also completed much of India, with a full traverse planned for 2011. A trekker, guide, equipment designer, retailer and sustainable tourism authority, Boustead has written two books about the GHT: “The Great Himalaya Trail: A Pictorial Guide,” published by Himalaya Map House in 2009, and “Nepal: Trekking and the Great Himalaya Trail,” which will be published by Trailblazer in November 201

Boustead also recently became a representative for the International Porters Protection Group (IPPG) and is hoping to professionalize the trekking support industry by galvanizing IPPG’s network and expanding the training programs offered to porters, kitchen staff and sherpas. IPPG works all over the globe but Boustead believes that if the program is a success in the Himalaya, “then the rest of the world will follow along pretty quickly.”

TrekWorld caught up with Boustead in London, where he was giving two presentations on the GHT Nepal, sponsored by World Expeditions.

How did the idea for the GHT originate?
The very first idea of the trail was developed by a couple of New Zealand mountaineers back in the seventies—not necessarily the GHT project as it is now but the concept of moving east to west or west to east along the great Himalaya range.

Those initial expeditions, back in 1980, 1981, all the way through 2002, were hamstrung by significant bureaucratic problems. You just weren’t allowed to go to an awful lot of the mountain regions, not just in Nepal but also in India and Bhutan. It’s only really the last five years that’s seen significant areas of the Himalaya open up to tourists for the first time—in many cases, for the first time ever. In Nepal, you can now basically travel anywhere. All you need is the relevant trekking permit. In India, there are still restrictions but they’re easing and I think that as time goes by over the next couple of years we’ll see them ease significantly further. And Bhutan is in the middle of a big push to improve and increase tourism. So, really the only area of the Himalaya that is still largely restricted is Chinese Tibet.

The idea’s been around for a long while, I guess. For me, it was receiving a message from the Home Ministry in Nepal in 2002, a fax saying that Nepal and China had demilitarized their mutual border and had opened areas that had been closed for at least 50 years to tourism. I thought, wow, what a great way to learn about new places in Nepal, go off and explore them, and as I was doing so I began to realize I was linking together the main trekking routes, taking somewhat of a pipe dream—a fanciful notion of a trail along the Himalaya—and making it a reality. Up to then, it was something that me and a bunch of other trekking guides and people in the industry would fantasize about after a couple of beers, and it went from that to something that was really taking shape.

By 2006, after four years of research treks, I really began to feel confident that it could be something special. By 2007, it was: Okay, let’s give it a crack. Let’s see what we can do.

To be clear, the GHT is actually not a new trail but a network of existing trails. What you’ve essentially done is map the places in between the main trekking routes.
Yes. There are three things the GHT project is attempting to achieve. First, mapping and documenting trekking routes. There are no new trails being developed. They’re all in use by locals. They might not be used very often—there are some trails in far west Nepal that might only see one or two locals a year, so there’s a pretty broad definition of what a trail is—but mapping them, documenting them and making sure the information is accurate is the first big step I wanted to make. A lot of what purports to be accurate trekking information is nothing of the sort. In addition to my own research, I wanted to draw in other people who go into the mountains and start sharing the information, put it in the public domain rather than having big trekking companies and a few guides keeping trails secret, keeping that information to themselves. I’ve never thought that was in the best interest of trekking, so turning that on its head somewhat was goal number one.

Goal number two was to then bring in local government and nongovernment organizations as well as some charities so that they can start coordinating programs along the length of trail. That might be in education, or healthcare, or all sorts of different areas. And, finally, goal number three is to market the idea of the trail as being a network so that people can design their own adventures, to get away from the few large trekking companies dictating what happens and where people go and put back that decision-making power fairly and squarely into the laps of trekkers.

I think that’s the best way to try to strengthen the benefits of tourism. If we leave it up to the trekking companies they’re only going to worry about economies of scale so they’re not going to branch out. If we leave it up to the NGOs, well, they just don’t know enough about the trekking industry and what goes on logistically to run treks so they’re always going to be afraid to branch out. And without information people aren’t going to be confident in exploring new areas. So that’s the big trifecta for the GHT.

The GHT winds through several countries. Why did you choose to start in Nepal?
Simply because it’s a place I’m extremely familiar with but it also offers the greatest potential right now for being able to explore new trekking areas and to do so in a relatively easy way. Access and bureaucracy are at their most convenient in Nepal and I wanted to establish a trail network that was going to make a bit of a splash and get people’s attention. Bhutan is just too small to start with and in India there were too many restrictions. In Nepal, In Nepal, we’re able to say to other Himalaya countries and say, “Hey, look at the good things this can do. Why don’t you get involved as well?” It worked on lots of different levels to start in Nepal, but, to be perfectly honest, it was a country where I’ve spent most of my time in the Himalaya and I was very familiar with it. I’ve got a great team of people I work with there, so it was easy to start there.

World Expeditions is offering the first full traverse of the GHT in Nepal in February 2011—a guided five-month trek for $31,000. But the average trekker is more likely to trek a section of two of the GHT than the entire length of Nepal.
Yes, there’s 157-day itinerary, but it’s actually broken up into sections so that people can just do convenient bits of it. There are seven treks that go in conjunction with that long trek. They range from 18 to 34 days. So people can really break up the entire trail and do it over a period of time. That’s really where I saw the benefit of the GHT network. You can start off with relatively simple short-duration walks and build yourself into it over a period of time. And if you’re already familiar with the country you might want to do it in thirds, or something like that. There’s a lot of flexibility to allow people to take it on in the way that they’re comfortable with.

The GHT includes many established trekking routes. How does the GHT version of a trek—Langtang, for example—differ from the Langtang trek outlined in a book like the Lonely Planet guide?
The traditional teahouse tourist trekking route in the Langtang Valley goes up to a place called Kyanjin Gompa and it starts at a place called Syabru. That section—Kyangin Gompa to Syabru—takes two days of the 18-day GHT route through Langtang.

So, yes, it is incorporated but by no means is it the be all and end all. And I think this is perhaps the most important message from a trekking perspective: If people have been to Nepal before and they’ve been on the main trails in Annapurna, Langtang or Everest, even having gone to those areas, there is quite probably an enormous amount you didn’t get to see if you just stayed on the main trekking route.

A good example, in Langtang: Further up the valley from Kyangin Gompa, just a day or two beyond, you’re in the middle of some really stunning Himalayan peak valleys and snow leopard territory and glaciers and very, very few people ever go there. If we’re talking about encouraging sustainable tourism then just to get the Langtang communities to help set up basic facilities so that maybe a hundred people or a couple of hundred people a year would get to experience those remote areas, that’s a giant leap forward in terms of the amount of income these remote communities can generate for themselves. Langtang, just a stone’s throw from Kathmandu, has an enormous variety of trekking for people to enjoy, and yet it’s just normally a 10-day return route up to Kyanjin Gompa that gets all the action. What we’re trying to do is to get people to think beyond that.

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