Why Ringmo people will not let you swim the turquoise

Shey Phoksundo · Ringmo (Tsho-wa) shore path, Shey Phoksundo, Dolpa, Nepal

“The colour is not a swimming pool. The lake has lu. If you wash your body in it, you are not a guest.”

Tsering winters with yaks off the lake and summers in Ringmo — Tsho-wa, 'lakeside' — a village of about two hundred on the landslide dam that holds Phoksundo. The dam is tens of thousands of years old; the village sits near 3,660 metres, the water near 3,611. Nepal's deepest lake, about 145 metres, is a Ramsar wetland. There are no fish and almost no algae. Guides sell the turquoise. Tsering sells the rule: do not swim, do not bathe, do not wash clothes, do not put a boat on it. Ringmo is Bonpo, Yungdrung Bon, older in local telling than the Buddhism most trekkers know. Above the shore, Thasung Tsholing — Tshowa Gompa — keeps the lake. Villagers say a lama from Pungmo founded it some eight or nine centuries ago to stop hunters driving animals off the cliffs. Thasung means protected cliff; tso is lake. The name is a conservation order. Bon pilgrims still circle shrines counterclockwise, the reverse of Buddhist kora. If you walk a chorten the Buddhist way here, someone will quietly turn you around. The lake is spoken of as a being with lu, water spirits. Disturbing it invites weather and sickness, not a fine from a ranger. Half a kilometre south, the outlet falls about 167 metres — the waterfall on every trek photograph — but the sacred surface is the still water, not the drop. Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard and the film Himalaya (Caravan) used this shore; Tsering has watched crews ask for the same shot and then step toward the water as if it were a hotel pool. His instruction for guests: walk the shore path, visit the gompa if you are invited, photograph the colour from the dam, and keep your body out of it. Clarity is what you get when a community refuses to treat a deity as recreation.