By Aviral Srivastava, India
2026 was my third Kailash Outer Kora pilgrimage. The first was in 2016, at 25, out of sheer curiosity. The second was in 2019, entirely unplanned — Mohanji looked at me at the Prayag Kumbh and asked whether Srivastava was coming to Kailash. The third was for the 2026 Dev Kumbh year, which I had hoped for since 2016. Each of the three has been a different kind of journey.
Preparation
Considering myself a veteran, I began preparing for worst-case scenarios well before the trip. I fed every instruction from the organising team into an LLM, added my notes from 2019, and packed accordingly:
- Protection against sunburn on the nose, which had got me on both previous trips
- Medicines for constipation, loose motion, vomiting, altitude sickness, dry eyes – you name it
- Offline playlists, massage balls, weather forecasts for each day and location
- Daily outfits planned in a spreadsheet, a schedule for reapplying sunscreen through the three-day parikrama, and the food I would take out and distribute in the buses
- Odomos for mosquitoes, which ended up helping many during a picnic lunch
- All my clothes, shoes and gear from 2019, which had sat in sealed airtight bags for seven years and went straight into the suitcase as they were
I want to clarify I wasn’t feverish about it, but I wanted to be thorough, unlike the previous year. Partly I did not want to be one more person Mohanji had to look after — there would be large crowds this time, with needs far greater than mine. And I remembered acutely that on both previous koras it was surrender that carried me through, not the packing list.
I was ably supported in all this by my wife, who did everything in her power to dissuade me from going. We have a one-year-old daughter at home, so her case was strong.
Syabrubesi
The first surprise came as soon as we landed by helicopter from Kathmandu: our bags did not arrive that night, so there was no change of clothes.
The place itself was beautiful. I walked around, watched the water tear past, and spent a long time staring at the waterfall. In the evenings, the staff in all nearby hotels settled down to play carrom. At Kailash Lodge, a young girl on the staff made me tea although it was not the official hour for the group. She said that when she first came to work in that area, she used to worry about landslides and floods, but the elders had assured her it was safe, and she was comfortable now. Little did I know what the next few days held. Four days after we passed through, the hotel was washed away. I hope she is fine. I don’t know. I can only pray.
The next morning we waited a long time outside the Chinese immigration building. I remember looking down at the water, very, very far below — as though we were on the seventh floor and the river was at the ground — and thinking that even in a flood, how could water possibly reach this height. A year earlier, the bridge at exactly that height had been washed away. An immigration officer had me unlock my phone and sifted through the gallery. And 4 days later, the avalanche washed away the entire building. I think about him often too – I hope he is fine.
The lost bag
My duffel bag still had not arrived by the time we reached Kyerung, and that is when things got interesting. Two people’s bags couldn’t be located, and I was one of them. Kyerung was also the last town where heavy shopping was possible.
I spent most of the day with the Sherpas hunting for it. Late at night, I took the call: I would have to shop. By then, I knew them well,, and they were good company, so I told them that if they found my old bag, every new item I bought was theirs. Added motivation. Spoiler alert: I got to keep my word.
The next day I went looking for trekking shoes through more than a dozen stores. Chinese feet, it turns out, are considerably smaller than mine. I had already decided I would walk the Parikrama in Crocs if it came to that, but I would walk. Eventually I found a pair of sports jogging shoes my feet barely fit into.
An hour before we were to depart, the old bag turned up. By then I had burned through all my Chinese yen. This is where my careful preparation backfired: the LLM had confidently told me to carry ¥1,000 for the trip, pony included. The actual requirement was a larger amount of $1,000 – the LLM had hallucinated the currency. Mamu had to bail me out, more than once.
So yes, there were inconveniences, and they were entirely fine. In Kathmandu, Mohanji had told us that if you can hold your attention on consciousness even while battling for survival on the Parikrama, it is as good as a lifetime of sadhana in three days. So each time something went wrong, my first question became: how do I do a lifetime of sadhana right here?
The floods
On a bus one morning we heard the news of the floods. The Sherpas told me about the alternate route we would likely have to take, and that it was itself landslide-prone and had had a landslide three weeks earlier. I didn’t think much about the conversation. I was under Mohanji’s care. This was his lookout.
At Saga my old trekking shoes came apart, and the sports shoes I had been forced to buy in Kyerung were what I ended up walking in. Losing the bag had, in effect, bought me the shoes I needed. It all worked out.
Having done this twice before, I knew headaches, constipation, diarrhoea and dizziness were par for the course and not to be panicked over. What did strike me was watching the volunteers handle everyone’s reactions so patiently while their own bodies were struggling.
Mansarovar
Mansarovar was a lot of fun. We were not allowed to take a dip, and the Sherpas were pushing people back because anyone who tried was getting in too deep. But by then, between the shopping and the lost-luggage saga, the Sherpas were my friends, and they did not push me back too hard. Others noticed. Soon I was dipping malas and filling bottles for a great many people, and got wet enough in the process that it looked like I had taken a dip anyway.
With Mohanji
He came to see us off right before the Parikrama. I hugged him and said, “Mohanji, I need a blessing to walk the Parikrama.” He said, “Of course you will.” From that point on, I was done. No thoughts. I was his headache now.
Mohanji does not say “Of course you will” carelessly. In 2019, he said the same words to me and, in the same breath, told a lady who told him she knew she had his blessing to walk, “Take a pony.” I do not take any words of his lightly, and had come fully prepared for him to tell me I would not be walking.
The Parikrama
Day 1 was smooth, as expected. I had hired a pony and a porter but walked the entire way. At the end of the day, a few of us climbed up to see the iconic North Face up close, as far as the police permitted.
My feet had begun to hurt, though — shoe bite from the new shoes — and from past experience, I knew the big toes take the real hammering on the Day 2 descent. I met my porter at the start of Day 2, told him I would walk up, and asked him to meet me at Dolma La Pass, because I wanted to go to Gauri Kund. I carried almost nothing: a 100 ml water bottle and some dry fruit. He took the rest, including the empty bottles meant for Gauri Kund.
I reached Dolma La Pass slowly and steadily, pacing myself, not letting the breathlessness or the headache frighten me. But my porter was nowhere to be found, and my feet were in agony, the swollen big toes hitting the front of the shoe with every step. I had searched the previous night for what happens if your toes keep getting hammered on a trek. Best case, blackened nails. Worst case, the nails have to be extracted.
And yet, by some blessing, I wasn’t overthinking any of it. That morning a message had gone around the WhatsApp group saying accommodation would not be available at Zuthulpuk for Day 3. I could not understand what it meant, and — quite unlike me — did not think about it at all. I simply focused on finishing the day’s walk.
At the top of Dolma La Pass, time was running out. I had zero empty bottles to fill at Gauri Kund and no energy to get down and back up alone — and even with the stamina, you need someone to hold your hand, because the path is treacherous.
I thought long and hard, then made a deal with Mohanji in my head: let me descend Gauri Kund and complete Day 2 properly, and I will consider myself to have finished walking the Parikrama. Right then, a couple of people dropped a handful of clean empty bottles into a dustbin. I rinsed them with what drinking water I had, and having no bag, stuffed them inside my jacket and started down towards Gauri Kund.
With my feet in that state, there was no way to balance and race down as I had in 2016 and 2019. So I sat down and slid. Five minutes in, someone appeared out of nowhere, chatted me up and escorted me the rest of the way down. At Gauri Kund, one of the volunteers, Anja, suggested I fill the water myself rather than hand the bottles to someone else. So I filled them myself, rested, and set off again.
Descent from Dolma La Pass
The rest of the journey was very hard. Every single step hurt, and I descended six kilometres that way, with no backpack and therefore no water, because my pony man had disappeared. Someone from the volunteer team I met on the way suggested I sip the Gauri Kund water and even offered me hers. That was miraculous, and it kept me going.
I could not help comparing this with the previous two trips, where the descent had been the easiest part — I simply hop-skipped down, the whole thing done in twenty minutes. This time it took four hours, in rain and then hail. Kind strangers, ladies and old men, would see me struggling and give me their hand for a few steps at a time. I think I was the third-last person from the group to reach the tea stall at the bottom.
My porter finally found me there. It turned out that when I asked him to meet me at Dolma La Pass, he understood only that I wanted Gauri Kund water, and went to collect it himself. So I now had extra water, which I could give away to others.
Between the accommodation situation and the state of my feet, I took the car for the remainder of the Parikrama and went back to Darchen. It worked out better than intended: I didn’t have to spend another night without an attached bathroom, and instead spent it under a hot shower and a warm blanket. And I had still completed my Parikrama.
Afterwards
Truthfully though, the journey was fairly luxurious. In Saga, the common complaint was that the beds were too hot. Heat, on a Kailash trip! What a good problem to have. And we actually landed in Kathmandu a night earlier, so I had pizza in in-room dining, offering it to all the deities to enjoy alongside.
My biggest mental block coming in had been the nights without attached bathrooms — and then I saw how much fear there was on that topic in the WhatsApp group and realised how relaxed I was in comparison. In the end there was only one such night. At Mansarovar, I was put in the lodge with attached bathrooms, not the monastery, and at Dirapuk I had a comfy room on the premises with just two roommates, while others had five or slept in tents inside the hotel. Video calls worked every single day of the trip, including at the top of Dolma La Pass. Rajesh from the US was my roommate on most legs, and very good fun. The food was fantastic every single day.
Finally, in Kathmandu, Mohanji gave us all certificates and medals for completing the Parikrama. While receiving mine, I told him, “Thanks to your blessing, I was able to walk Day 1, Day 2 and Gauri Kund.” He looked at me and said, “Congratulations! This is a big deal. Srivastava is growing up.”
For me, this feels like the final trip. I have no yearning for Inner Kora. Though never say never — as my wife says.
|| JAI BRAHMARISHI MOHANJI ||
Edited & Published by – Testimonials Team, 1st October 2026
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