High by Erika Fatland (2020)

Posted on 2025-05-08 by thelittleman

A Journey Across the Himalayas Through Pakistan, India, Bhutan, Nepal and China (English translation, 2022)

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Rating: 4 out of 5.

I recently traveled to India for the first time, where I visited friends living along the border of Bhutan. This trip came just two months after my first visit to Nepal, and I’m already planning a trip into Bhutan for later this Fall, making this year one of genuine Himalayan adventures!

For these reasons, Erika Fatland’s travelogue High was a fitting and entertaining read for me as I sat in taxis and hotel rooms in Northeastern India. Fatland, a road-wise Norwegian, covers many places I’ve seen firsthand—Lhasa, Yunnan (Shangri-La, Tiger Leaping Gorge, Lijiang), Kathmandu, Jaigaon, etc.—and many others that I’m a bit more hesitant to visit, like Pakistan and Kashmir.

In this review, I’ll introduce the author and her book and then add a few favorite moments from my reading. Because it’s so full of great information, I break those favorites down geographically and thematically.

A Little about the Author, and This Book

Fatland’s travels in this book cover two major adventures that make up Parts 1 and 2: first from China to Pakistan to India to Bhutan; and then from Nepal to China. Her writing style is personal (though not really intimate), sharing tidbits about herself that might come up during conversations with others. These conversations are a key driving force for the book, and she’s certainly unafraid to question her single-serving friends about politics, cultures, and ethnic instabilities.

She opens the book with a bad omen—a Buddhist prayer tower that falls for the first time in forever—so I wondered if she might be setting us up for a miserable journey. Turns out, that’s not really the case, though at one point late in the book she does complain: “Why do we travel? Why do I travel? I suddenly felt so tired.” (503) This, perhaps, suggests that she might be momentarily burnt out from this career travel-writing and might just need a long break. She’s good at it, though, so I’m sure she’ll get back into it eventually.

From the early chapters, I had to wonder how I’d stick with it, and for two reasons. First, she covers so much ground—so many cultures and peoples and histories—that it felt like information overload. I couldn’t possibly retain the information I read. She herself wasn’t pulling these histories out of her own memory bank, but was able to write it all only following her own lengthy research. I felt like I’d much more prefer an in-depth look at one nation rather than a cursory look at several, but I guess it’s what I bargained for when I picked up a Himalayan travelogue!

Secondly, she alone seems to be the only filter for which conversations get published and which go forgotten. Agendas are easy to manipulate in such cases, and I worried she might have a bad one. In the end, though, I found her to be a balanced writer who shares many differing views and opines only occasionally about how she thinks the rest of the world should function. Her writing is slightly more technical than, say, Paul Theroux’s, but she kept my interest, and I was happy to read it through to the end.

Some Favorite Geographic Tidbits

IN CHINA: Because I’ve spent a lot of time in China, I’m always interested (if not always happy) to hear other travelers’ takes on a place I call home. Here are a few that stood out to me:

Bicycles, which only a few years ago were the very symbol of Chinese urban life, were now conspicuous by their absence, as were the Uighurs. (29)

China, like India, is not really one country, but many: the province of Yunnan alone is not one country, but many. Twenty-six different ethnic groups live here – no other Chinese province is home to such ethnic diversity – and that is only those that are registered; there are many more sub-groups. (505)

China is a strange and unpredictable nation,” he said, as we were about to leave. “Historically, we were ruled by an emperor. If the person at the top is good, the people benefit. Xi Jinping has no faith, but his wife is a Christian. She was my pupil many years ago. She came to Lijiang, and twenty thousand people came to see her kneel down in front of me and acknowledge me as her teacher. My hope is that she can influence her husband with her Christian values. I believe that only then will China move forwards. The alternative is to stagnate.” “What was Xi Jinping’s wife like?” I asked, bursting with curiosity. “It’s so long since I was her teacher that I can’t really say what she was like,” the honourable conductor said with great diplomacy. “She is another person now, she is in a completely different position.” (509)

IN PAKISTAN: Early in her trip, she visited the Karakoram Mountains, which can be considered a steppe-brother to the Himalayas. This is the Hunza that I once had a book about, essentially a true Shangri-La part of the world nestled inside Pakistan. It’s a place of mystic beauty that I’d love to see—though it’s not a part of the any Americans should be visiting these days! Here’s an interview snippet that stood out to me:

“These days, there’s only two narratives about what’s going on in Pakistan,” Muhammed said. “The Americans did everything right, or the Americans did everything wrong. But what will people think in a hundred years’ time? What is in fact right and what is wrong?” (38)

IN KASHMIR: Although big in the news these days following a terrorist attack and India’s military response, I still had to look it up online to see where exactly this place is. It makes sense, because even the people who live there don’t know where they are! This whole passage about a fake Jesus was news to me. It’s definitely not a major draw for me, but it’s certainly a fascinating historical tidbit:

Officially, it is Yuz Asaf, a Sufi Muslim sage from the Middle Ages, who lies buried in Roza Bal, but millions of people, and by no means only Ahmadiyya followers, believe that Yuz Asaf, or Youza Asaph, is another name for Jesus of Nazareth. Since Lonely Planet wrote about this theory in 2010, Roza Bal has become a popular attraction for any foreign tourists who dare to visit Kashmir, much to the delight of the local shop owners, who no doubt are behind the Koran quotations. (123)

IN INDIA: Again, I’ve only visited India once thus far in my life, and I found it to be a place of intrigue and unfamiliarity. It wasn’t uncomfortable, just different, and this quote helped clarify why:

India is not simply a country, it is a subcontinent, and it comprises not one reality, but myriad parallel worlds. (109)

IN NEPAL: She shared a snippet about kids making a road barricade in the Nepali hills (in the chapter on menstruation), which really made me smile. While we were driving in the backstreets of Dharan, the exact same thing happened to us. A band of kids aged 5-10 pulled a rope across the road and stood in front of the car. They would only let our driver pass when he paid them 10 Nepali Rupees ($0.07). The girls were laughing and having a good time of it, but I could tell that the scowling boy holding the rope was hoping to make it his career.

Some Favorite Thematic Quotes

ON HISTORY

It can often seem that history is nothing more than massacres and destruction. However, any traces of the bloodbath were long gone, and the temple and associated buildings have been restored and returned to their former glory. Such is the unending and exhausting cycle of history: destroy, rebuild, destroy, rebuild. (107)

ON TRAVEL

I was nineteen the first time I came to India. I had never been so far from home and was utterly overwhelmed. All the people, smells, colours, noise – it was as though my senses were unable to digest it all. I travelled around for two months, from one place to the next, first south, then north again, getting thinner and thinner, my stomach full of amoebas. In the end I tired of it – not my dodgy digestion, but the endless travel without purpose, eating pancakes in backpacker cafés, hanging out with other young Western travellers, haggling as if our lives depended on it; the backpacker existence boils down to logistics, money and a few limited topics of conversation. It was a strangely vacuous existence. I tried to remember who I had been back then, tried to imagine how I had thought and felt at the time, but all I could remember were vague snapshots: a cockroach, a spider, the funeral pyres in Varanasi, a coconut pancake in Kerala, a temple full of rats. These memories might as well have belonged to someone else. (108)

When you travel with someone else, even if it is only one other person, you are immediately in a bubble, a private micro-world. When you travel alone, you are at the mercy of what is around you, you are vulnerable, naked. (108)

ON CULTURE

In the same way that culture is not a museum, it is not a fragile flower. It does not wither and die simply because it is exposed to exhaust and electricity. (255)

Conclusion

This was a very full, historically focused travelogue that gave me a small sense of the vast world that’s out there waiting to be explored. Erika Fatland is a solid writer that I’d seek out again, were I to head back into and of the locations she’s already covered. Whether you’re an armchair traveler or heading this direction yourself, you might gain some healthy insights from this engaging book.

©2025 E.T.

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