Dear Friends and Family,
We are beginning this blog from Deurali guest house, 10,171 feet up in the Himalaya mountains.We are 4 days into a 12 day trek, only 2 days from our first goal of Annapurna Base Camp (ABC), at 13,550 feet. The base camp is situated in the Annapurna Sanctuary, a protected holy place in Nepal. As per Hindu beliefs, no meat may be consumed. No disposable plastic water bottles are allowed-yay! It’s 4 pm, Oct.26, 32 degrees outside, and will get a lot colder, below zero, at night. We are looking at massive, steep green mountains. Waterfalls are pouring down, and snow covered majesty awaits us. Tomorrow we will trek to Machhapuchhre Base Camp (MBC), and the next day, ABC, both snow covered for sure. We have seen Annapurna South, Hiun Chuli, and Machhapuchhre (aka Fishtail) along the way and are so looking forward to seeing them, and others, up close soon. Our trek has been incredibly difficult, but so beautiful up to this point. After 1 night in noisy, filthy, lively with Diwali festivities, Kathmandu, Nepal, we took the bus 8 hrs. over the worst roads imaginable to arrive in Pokhara, a 1hr taxi ride from Nayapul (3,346 ft.), where our trek began. At Pushpa Guesthouse, in Pokhara, Raj, the manager, introduced us to our porter/guide, Uttam. He has carried our 1 stuffed backpack topped by his own. It is all we can manage to carry light day packs with our own water. Uttam procures food and lodging each day and guides and follows us on the trail. He books our guest houses from his mobile, writes down our breakfast, lunch, and dinner choices and is our liaison in all matters with the guesthouses. It is high season right now, and we are especially grateful for his services. Many people are turned away from overbooked guesthouses, which means they have to just keep trekking! The trail is clearly defined and, mostly, incredibly steep. We climb up many steep rock steps. Some are just a big jumble that you must find your way up, up, up! Just when we think we can’t take another step up, we go straight down, down, down! We’ve followed along dried river beds, hopped rock to rock across rushing creeks, and tried not to look down crossing rivers on swaying, bouncing suspension bridges, or bridges made of bamboo, or tree limbs and flat stones, more branches and mud pack holding them together. We are exhausted and out of breath most of the way. We started a regimen of Diamox to ward off altitude sickness above 8,000 feet. We climb using trekking poles to steady and plant our feet, and knee brace wraps as well. Bruce tripped and fell on one knee without injury, but Linda fell flat on her face on a small wooden bridge and hurt her nose/teeth/leg. She’s O.K., but we hope we will not have any more of these accidents. One tourist, we were told, dropped dead on the trail. Another, fell into the river at a glacier crossing, hit her head, and came stumbling into our guest house, aided by two other trekkers. We thought she might be air lifted out, but later heard she was feeling better.
Our lodgings and meals are unusual. The guesthouses where we stay and eat lunch charge very little for a room, only $4-8 per night. They make their money on our meals. By American standards they are cheap too, about $5-8 per person per meal, incl. beverage. We also paid for potable drinking water. We refilled our water bottles from home with boiled water from refill stations. We ordered big pots of hot lemon ginger tea and coffee. Sometimes we paid for pots of hot water and added our own tea bags/instant coffee, or just snuggled up to the hot bottles for warmth! The prices are higher as we get higher in the mountains. The soups are thin but delicious. We have tired of Dahl baht, even though it is the best deal and most nutritional. Our guide, Uttam, eats it for lunch and dinner nearly every day of his life. We usually opt for a pasta dish. We eat at large communal tables with everyone else staying at the guesthouse. Eating at another nearby guesthouse is discouraged. You eat where you sleep. At higher altitudes, the food is monotonous, mostly white carbohydrates, rice, pasta, bisquick pizza, with egg dishes and porridge for breakfast. Dahl Baht is most popular. This is a thin lentil soup, accompanied by plain white rice and a veggie potato curry. It is always served as all you can eat. It is kind of amazing to have these food options, when someone had to haul every grain of food, drop of liquid (other than water), and super heavy propane tanks up the same trails on their backs! During our whole trip, but especially in Nepal, we did not drink or brush with tap water. Even so, we both got our usual bout of traveler’s diarrhea a few weeks ago in Laos. We had Cipro with us which knocked it flat within two days. We also both arrived in Nepal with colds. We sweated profusely through the first three days of trekking and kicked the colds much faster than we normally would. Our guest house rooms were sometimes shared, 3 or 4 in a room. Often we were lucky enough not to get a roommate. The rooms are of the concrete/wooden barracks variety, with 1 light bulb and no heat. (Think Alcatraz!) The usually shared 2 toilet facilities are often dirty, wet squattie potties with an occasional western toilet. 40 to 50 trekkers share 2-3 toilets. At the higher elevations, these are the only lodgings available on the treks. There are no upscale accommodations. We are so exhausted, we are really appreciative of what we get!
The inconveniences are well worth it. The views are phenomenal, and we love encountering so many world travelers. We share the trek with hundreds from Europe, Asia, The America’s, NZ, and Australia. Many trek carrying their own belongings, and many, like us, employ a porter/guide. The porters are amazing, carrying 3-4 large backpacks incredible distances, over the steepest terrain, using head-straps to help support the load on their backs. Our single bag, packed for the two of us, probably weighed about 25-30 pounds. We also are frequently passed by cargo-carrying mule trains as well. Mule trains even cross suspension bridges. We give way on the trail when the mule trains approach us by plastering ourselves against the mountain side.
Day 6: We are now at Annapurna base camp at 13,550 ft. We trekked here for 2 hrs. from Machhapuchhre Base Camp (MBC) at 12,439 ft. The trek was agonizingly slow. We took 10 steps and had to catch our breath before continuing at a snails pace, but we did it! The afternoon view was obscured by clouds and it was snowing lightly when we arrived. Morning views are usually all you get. At these altitudes, the clouds move in rapidly around 11 am and stay until late that night. We are happily huddled, sharing a sleeping bag over our knees, with the lodge crowd in the communal dining hall, reading and blogging, and listening to the French folks chatting right next to us. It is 4 pm on Oct. 28 and 32 degrees outside.
Day 7: We slept poorly at high altitude, with Bruce waking often to urinate, a side effect of the Diamox, and no heat in the room. The walls between rooms are super-thin paneling. We heard every noise our neighbors made. We had to go outside and down a walkway to use the bathroom, a freezing prospect, especially in the middle of the night. Late at night, the skies were clear, and there was moonlight enough to find our way. Bruce woke Linda up to see the view. The mountains were silhouetted against the star-lit blue-black sky and towered over us. We had a 360 degree view. We couldn’t wait to wake up and see them in the daylight! ABC is in a basin. In the morning, we were surrounded by Annapurna South, Himchuli, Machhapuchhre, Annapurna 1, and Barahchuli, Tent Peak, and Annapurna 3. They were so immense and so close up, It was dizzying. At daybreak, scores of trekkers emerged from their rooms and made the short trek up to a nearby viewing area to take photos in the crystal clear air, the sun glistening off the mountain peaks. We stood near the edge of a snow covered ridge and looked down a the massive “South Annapurna Glacier.” Several helicopters landed and took off right beside our guesthouse. On a dare, a young trekker stripped down to his birthday suit before the crowd. 😜There were tents pitched in a neat row behind the 2 guesthouses for those with no reservation, or those who were brave enough to “rough it.” There were streams of prayer flags, and flags from different countries, all blowing in the wind together. It amazed us to think that hardier folks than us use this camp as a starting point from which to begin their climbs! For us, this trek was a Herculean effort and a major accomplishment. We felt so small completely surrounded by such massive peaks! We intended to descend to Dobhan that night, but we got caught in a snowstorm so decided to be safe and stay put. We slept in Deurali instead (10,171’). This made the next day especially long, but we made it to lower Sinuwa (6,749’) for our scheduled sleep stop on Day 8.
From Sinuwa, we made our way to Chuile, (Day 9) back up in altitude to around 9,000’, an hour and a half short of our goal, which was Tadapani. We didn’t feel confident that we’d make it to Tadapani before dark as tired as we were, and the trail is dangerous enough without using headlamps! It was interesting to pass a home where blanket makers were beating cotton filling into just the perfect “fluffiness.” When you buy a blanket here, they make it at your home!
Down now, from ABC, we head for our second Himalayan trekking goal- the Ghorepani-Ghandruk trek, so that we can see Ghorepani and Poonhill before ending our trek at Tatopani hot springs. Uttam explained to us that in Nepali “Tatopani” means hot water, “Tadapani” means far water, and “Ghorepani” means horse water. We can hardly wait to soak in hot water! From Tatopani, we’ll taxi 7 hrs. to Pokhara, bus to Kathmandu, and board our Singapore airlines flight home to San Francisco.
On Nov. 1, Day 10, we had to make up some time, so we started our arduous uphill trek to Ghorepani at 7 am. We finally arrived at 4 pm. Ghorepani is a village of several guest houses, shops and souvenir stands. Surrounded by mountains, it is still gorgeously serene. Our next goal was to view the sunrise from Poonhill, 1,500’ above Ghorepani. At 5 am, we rose from frozen slumber to trek with headlamps to the Poonhill mountain viewing area. We joined about two-hundred trekkers to watch the sun rise over multiple enormous peaks. According to Uttam we saw: Dhaulagiri 1, 2, 3, and 4, Nilghiri, Dhampus Peak, Tukche Peak, Gurja Peak, and Annapurna 1 and South, Himchuli, Machhapuchhre and Zangapurna. Beautiful! We sipped steaming hot mugs of coffee purchased from a small beverage stand at the top of Poonhill. Our guide told us that “Poon” is one of the Nepali castes. Uttam is Poon. The caste system is still strongly followed here. As a guide/porter, Uttam’s caste falls in the middle of the hierarchy.
For two days, days 11 and 12, we descended steeply from 9,000 ft. Ghorepani to Tatopani hot springs and our nearby lodging at 3,900’ elevation. We felt so sorry for those ascending in the opposite direction. We knew they were in for a rough trek. Soaking in the hot spring pool was an absolute delight. Bruce showered there as well, for the first time in 12 days.
Our return trip to Pokhara was a harrowing bus/jeep/taxi ride. We often felt the bus between Tatopani and Beni would slip over the edge of the crumbling, rocky, pot hole-filled road and plunge into the raging river below. Our fear was not unfounded. We saw an unrecovered car that had wrecked and fallen into the river. After 2 hrs on the bus, ten of us were crammed into a Jeep that banged its way 3 hrs to the Pokhara outskirts. On the way, the Jeep bottomed out in a deep pothole and our radiator began to leak. We were so thankful to arrive back safely at Pushpa guesthouse in Lakeside, Pokhara! We slept well that night, rewarded our porter/guide, Uttam, with a generous tip, and thanked Raj and Uttam for an unforgettable experience.
We are recovering for a couple of days here in Pokhara. It feels great to be clean again, yet a little strange to be walking on flat land, unaided by trekking poles and unencumbered by back packs! We tried the water buffalo mo-mo, a dumpling similar to gyoza, and it is yummy! We’ve had numerous encounters with water buffalo on the trail, and they seem sweet natured. We had our clothes laundered and are ready to pack for home. Dhandebad (thank you) for sharing this latest adventure with us! We look forward to getting back home and seeing you again soon.
Hugs n Love, BnL
P.S. We’ll try to post photos with this, but will probably end up creating a separate blog for the photos.
bnlmos 