We all arrived in Kathmandu tired out from our trip through Tibet as none of us were really able to sleep well the whole time (altitude perhaps?). The first thing we did was head out for huge woodfired pizzas (terrible I know, but you would probably do the same after more than a week of yak meat noodles every day).
It was strange crossing the border from Tibet into Nepal. The border was a river and as soon as we crossed the bridge that constituted the no man's land between the two countries suddenly everyone and everything looked completely different. The trucks and buses were all colourful and instead of wearing Tibetan clothing the women were all wearing saris.
Kathmandu was polluted and crazy. We stayed in Thamel like everyone else and it was crazy there most of the time as the streets were so narrow there wasn't really room for traffic and pedestrians at the same time. Luckily our hostel was down a side street and ended up being quite peaceful.
We spent a few days in Kathmandu trying to sort out our Indian visa (a huge chore which we made even worse by trying originally to go on a Sunday when it was closed) and get our trekking permit. At first we didn't really know which trek we wanted to do - we just had an idea that we wanted to see some great scenery. Anais and Emmanuel decided to do the Helambu trek and Alex and Felicity were set on doing the Annapurna Circuit. Paul didn't really know much about Nepal and said he just wanted to see some big mountains. I remembered a girl I used to work with in my library job had done the Annapurna Circuit and said it was amazing - this, along with what I already knew about it and Alex talking it up so much decided me - we were going to try it too. (I only remembered much later that the gist of her story had been about how her boyfriend fell seriously ill on the trek and she had to hire a pony to get him down and out. Perhaps it was just as well we had started the trek by the time I remembered this...).
Paul initially wasn't too keen as it seemed like it would take us 18 days. He thought he might like to climb a 6000 metre mountain but we didn't have time to arrange it and our insurance didn't cover mountaineering so I convinced him that could wait until next time and we should start with something a little bit easier (especially as we had spent the last two weeks sitting in a jeep for most of the day). I convinced him by saying the scenery was going to be great and we would get to go over a really high pass - I knew he would come around after the first few days. So we got the permit, packed our bags and set off still not really knowing what to expect.
Quite a few people we met on the trek asked us why we didn't have a porter or a guide. The main reason we didn't take a porter or a guide was that we knew that it was possible to do the trek yourself and we didn't want to spend the money. If we were to hire a porter only we would have to be fully responsible for them. We would have to check that they had the right clothing, we would have to insure them and we would have to work out a price that suited everyone. As we weren't even sure we could get ourselves over the pass, we didn't want to be responsible for someone else as well. Plus it seemed a little bit like cheating - it wasn't like we had to carry food or a tent - just our clothing and a sleeping bag etc.
We arrived at Besisahar (which is technically the start of the circuit) on the afternoon of the 11th. Because it was a little late to start trekking that day we decided to cheat a little and take a local bus the first 9km to the village of Bulbule where most people stop the first night. We were hoping to catch up to Alex and Felicity who had started walking on the 10th (in the end we didn't catch up with them until Pokhara!). The next morning we met a nice tour group from Australia who were also starting their trek that morning. We said goodbye to them and set off thinking that we would probably see them along the way.
The first several days of walking took us up a river valley and we were never out of sight of the river for long. We had started from around 1000 metres altitude and got higher and higher every day. At lower altitudes the villages were lovely and green and there were a lot of water buffalo around. We crossed tonnes of suspension bridges (including one crossing where we crossed paths with some donkeys in the middle of the bridge - this taught us to always, ALWAYS give way to donkeys!) as well as some crazy bridges that were just a bunch of sticks across the river. At times the track was quite precarious and exposed, including some sections where there had been landslides and you had to navigate around them. Often these sections were high above the water and I wished I hadn't heard that some trekker had fallen off the track and died last year.
They were putting in a road up this valley and you could often see the workers blasting away at the cliff or chipping the stone by hand. There were donkeys all up and down the track carrying loads of goods and it was amazing to see them navigate the narrow path and the rickety bridges. We also saw so many people transporting huge loads of plastic pipes or lumber - bearing most of the weight on their heads. Sometimes you couldn't even see the people as their loads were so huge. I have no idea how they carried these loads uphill all day.
During this portion of the trek we walked between 8 - 12km per day. Although we were gaining quite a bit of altitude each day the track still went up and down all the time. This seemed to be the average distance most trekkers covered. In fact it seemed like most trekkers tended to stop at the same villages every night so we saw the same people over and over again. Still, if we had wanted to we could have gone much shorter distances as there were villages every hour or so an most of them had a least one lodge.
Throughout the trek (except the day we crossed the pass) we tended to wake up at about 6.30am, have breakfast at 7.00am and set off between 8.00 - 8.30am. We would stop for about an hour for lunch at around 12.00 or 1.00 and usually arrive at our destination around 3.00pm. This gave us a bit of time to do our washing and have a shower before the sun went down. I took two hiking shirts, two pairs of underwear and two pairs of socks, so one set could be washed while the other one was being worn. This worked really well and usually everything was dry by morning. The only times it didn't work was while we were above about 3500 metres. It just got too cold for things to dry overnight and often socks etc would be frozen in the morning. This just meant that I put them on the outside of my pack to dry during the day.
Most of the lodges offered hot water but as it was usually solar powered hot water it wasn't hot at all if there was no sun that day or if too many trekkers had already arrived before you and used it all. Cool showers weren't such a problem at the lower altitudes but when we got higher we always looked for places that had as few trekking groups as possible. Still, we had our fair share of frigid showers - by the time we got to Letdar and High Camp (both over 4000 metres) we had just given up on the whole idea of showers.
We arrived in the village of Manang (just over 3500 metres high) on the 7th day of the trek. Like most other trekkers we had planned a rest day here to help us acclimatise. The position of Manang was beautiful - you could see Annapurna III, Gangapurna and the Gangapurna glacier on the other side of the valley.
The morning of our rest day we got up to go for an acclimatisation walk to a lookout perched over the top of the glacier. I had been suffering from a cold for the last few days and it was hard work getting to the top of the hill - I was so slow and gasping for air and felt quite feeble. Paul was waiting for me for ages at the top. There was such a lovely view of the glacier and the mountains at the top and there was some snow lying around on the ground. The weather was really warm as long as you kept out of the wind so we stayed up there for some time to eat some chocolate and enjoy the view.
Paul was excited about staying at Manang as it was a larger village and he wanted to try eating in a local restaurant instead of always eating in the lodge. When we got back from our acclimatisation walk he said that he was going to find a local restaurant to eat in. I told him I wasn't going to eat in a local restaurant as I was worried about being sick - we had already met quite a few people heading down to Besisahar with stomach trouble. He told me that if I felt like wasting money eating in the guesthouse restaurant that was my prerogative and off he went. He came back later that afternoon bragging about how cheap his meal had been. "The sign on the restaurant said it was the cheapest food in town!" he boasted. "Well, good for you" I said.
Well, it might have been the cheapest food in town but our stay in Manang didn't end up being cheap as Paul was stuck in bed for the next two days with food poisoning! We had to watch all the other trekkers leave the next day to continue up the valley while Paul lay groaning in bed and I brought him toast on a tray. Luckily we had brought our antibiotics with us and I put him on them straight away. There was also a volunteer doctor in town who told us this type of thing was common. I was quite worried for a while that he wouldn't get better and we wouldn't be able to keep going up, especially because from Manang it is only 3 days until you usually cross the pass.
Still, there were worse places that he might have been sick than Manang. I used the extra days to go on another acclimatisation walk to a monastery high up on the hill over the village. The view of the mountains from up there was stunning. Finally, two days later Paul was finally sufficiently recovered to keep going up. That day we arrived at Letdar (about 4200 metres high). It was quite cold and miserable there and I was really glad that I had hired a -20 down sleeping bag before the trek. It was the best sleeping bag and the whole time I never got cold in there (I even had to stick my arm out occasionally to cool down). It was getting hard to sterilise our water as our Steripen didn't seem to want to work when the temperature of the water was so cold. I had to warm my water bottle up inside my down jacket for up to an hour before the Steripen would work - I was too cheap to buy boiled water because by this point the price was so ridiculous I refused. It helped that there were safe water stations along the way where you could buy drinking water but these were usually closed by 5.00pm so there was no water available at night to clean your teeth.
The next morning we took off for Thorong Phedi (about 4400 metres) which was the next village. I was walking so slowly I felt as if I would never get there. I was finding it quite difficult going and breathing hard. Still, we seemed to make ok time and arrived in Thorong Phedi around lunchtime. We stopped for a drink and considered our options. We could either stay at Thorong Phedi for the night or continue going to High Camp (about 4800 metres) which was the next village (really just one guesthouse) about 1.5 hours away straight up the hill. The pass was around 5400 metres so if we walked from Thorong Phedi the next day it was going to be a huge altitude gain to cross the pass and at least an additional 1.5 hours of walking (more given my slow speed the past few days). We already knew that once we crossed the pass it would be another 4 hours downhill until we reached Muktinath, the first village on the other side where we would be able to find a lodge. I just didn't know if I could make it over the pass if we decided to walk from Phedi so we decided to push on and overnight at High Camp instead.
I was glad that we made that decision as soon as we started up the hill from Phedi to High Camp. I felt like I was walking very slowly and it just felt like really hard work. Throughout the trek I found that I was quite slow going uphill – Paul would always be waiting for me for ages up the top of any hill. To make up for it though I thought I had quite good stamina and I could walk for a long time every day if I had to. This later proved to be useful on the day we crossed the pass. Just before you reach High Camp there is a rock ledge that you walk over. Once you have crossed this ledge you can see High Camp. When I finally crossed the ledge I was so relieved as I could finally see High Camp a couple of hundred metres away and I knew that I was almost there. But that just seemed to make me slower! It seemed to take hours to walk the last couple of hundred metres to the lodge (probably because I kept stopping to rest about every 10 steps). Paul had already negotiated a price for a room, checked in and made himself at home by the time I arrived.
High Camp was really, really cold. There was slushy ice all over the yard, snow on the roof and there was slick ice right in front of our bedroom door. The temperature in our room was -5 before the sun even went down. We abandoned our acclimatisation walk up a small hill behind the lodge as the ice up there was really slippery so we just got into our sleeping bags instead. At one stage I was in the room checking out the state of my blisters and I heard Paul talking to someone outside the door. When I went out I discovered that the trekking group that we met at Bulbule were there! It was so strange to see them again after all that time. We must have passed and re-passed each other over the days but we never saw them. There were 4 trekkers, Bob, Jon, Liz and Frank with their Australian guide Teresa and their porters. It was nice to catch up with them after all that time.
The food and accommodation at High Camp was really expensive and the dining room was really cold. Still, everyone had an early start in the morning so people were in bed really early. The trekking group were nice enough to say we could walk with them in the morning to cross the pass so we arranged to set off at 6.00am.
Waking up the next morning was really hard as our room was so cold. I always got so hot when I started walking because I was carrying the pack so I didn't wear any thermals, just my fleece and my waterproof jacket over my hiking shirt and just my hiking pants on the bottom. We set off at about 6.00am and straight away there was heaps of ice and snow on the track. Lots of the snow had melted and then refrozen which made it really hard to walk on – in spots it was sculpted into strange waves created by people's bootprints. The flat ice was the worst as you could just slip straight off and quite a bit of the way there was a long drop on the right hand side of the track – I tried not to think what would happen if I fell off the track. Sometimes the ice under the snow was almost black and if you weren't careful you could think it was a rock and step on it – I quickly learnt that this wasn't a good idea.
Having never walked on ice or snow before it took us a while to get the hang of it. A few German tour groups raced past us in the meantime – they didn't seem to have too many problems with the snow. It was supposed to be about 3 hours to the pass from High Camp. We ended up getting there about 10.30am. I was so relieved when I got there as I felt like I had been so slow going up I might never make it. I was amazed at 73 year old Bob who was ahead of me the whole day! I don't know why I was so slow – hopefully next time I go to high altitude I will improve. I kept telling myself to go faster but it seemed like my body just wasn't able to do it. It was quite hard to breathe at that altitude and I was taking one full breath in and out with every step. I don't know if I would be any faster without the pack but I don't think it would have made that much difference. Obviously I am just bad at going uphill, especially considering that I was slow going uphill even when we were at lower altitude. On top of the altitude, the wind was blowing so hard across the pass and it was right in our face which made walking really hard.
There was a teahouse on the top of the pass but the wind was howling through the cracks in the wall and sitting in there was worse than walking so we decided to keep going instead of having tea. We only spent about 10 minutes on the pass taking a few photos and having a short rest as we knew we still had a long way to go.
Going down the other side of the pass was really hard and almost as slow as going up as there was heaps of ice and snow. I wished that I had crampons as some sections of ice were quite dangerous. Paul ended up slipping twice (but not seriously) but luckily I kept my feet the whole time. And I was pleased that I started to come into my own. On the way down Paul got a really bad headache and felt really tired. On the other hand, once we were going down and not up, I felt great! Although I was obviously tired etc I still felt like I had enough energy to keep going. Paul seemed like he had completely drained his energy reserved as he kept saying he wanted to lay down and have a sleep! I didn't think this was the best idea when we were still so far away from the next village so I just made him have a rest, eat and drink and keep going. Luckily we had taken heaps of snacks to eat along the way.
We finally got down to another small teahouse about 2.30pm where we stopped for lunch with the trekking group. After lunch it was another hour or so to Muktinath. There was a temple just outside Muktinath which was supposed to be quite interesting and the trekking group went inside to check it out but Paul was so tired we decided to keep going straight to the village. We ended up getting there around 4.00pm which was pretty slow going compared to lots of other people (we later found out one Polish girl crossed the pass in 4.5 hours coming from Thorong Phedi!) but hey, at least we made it!
When we checked into the guesthouse in the village we were so excited as it had a really lovely hot shower and we hadn't had a shower for a couple of days as the water was too cold at the higher camps. Paul decided to have yak steak that night as I had promised him he could eat whatever he wanted once we crossed the pass (he was restricted to a "safe" vegetarian diet after his little incident in Manang) and I had lasagne (not very traditional, I know). After celebrating with the trekking group we fell into bed exhausted.
The next day we woke up late and started walking down the valley to the village of Kagbeni. We wished that we could have had a rest day at Kagbeni as it was such a lovely village. But since Paul had used up our spare days being sick we had to keep going. It was on a cliff at the confluence of two rivers and was really Tibetan in style. Actually, quite a few of the villages at the higher altitudes were Tibetan in nature and had a lot of people of Tibetan heritage living there. They wore Tibetan-style clothing and there were many Tibetan Buddhist monasteries and temples. All the houses in Kagbeni were made out of mud bricks which were whitewashed and the houses had red roofs. There was a really nice temple with a lovely view of Nilgiri (7061 metres high) in one direction and into the restricted Upper Mustang valley in the other direction.
In the morning we dragged ourselves out of bed early and took a short walk upriver to visit the village of Tiri. We had to cross the river bed to get there – the bridges that the locals had put there were all icy as it was still cold and they were a little bit slippery. Tiri was just a small village but it was interesting to visit as it used to be part of Upper Mustang, meaning that it was off limits unless you bought a really, really expensive permit.
After Tiri we headed down the valley towards the village of Marpha. Marpha was another pretty village and was famous for its apples so that night we had apple cider, apple brandy and apple crumble. The only annoying thing about that day was the wind that was still blowing straight up the valley. As much of the track was in the river bed we copped the wind right in the face all afternoon. We were so relieved when we finally arrived.
The next few days we kept heading down the valley. Gradually we started to see trees again and the scenery became greener and greener. We had lovely views of Nilgiri, Dhaulagiri (8167 metres) and the Dhaulagiri Icefall on the way down. There was a road on this side of the pass and sometimes you had to walk along the road. It was just a dirt road and occasionally a bus, truck or motorbike would come along. It didn't really bother me that I was walking on a road (although it was dusty when a vehicle came past) but a lot of trekkers didn't like it. Still, there were quite a few places when you could walk on the other side of the river if you didn't like the road. We ended up walking on the road most of the time as it was faster.
We caught up with the tour group again at a village called Lete (we had parted with them in Muktinath) and we ended up walking part of the next day with them to Tatopani. This ended up being our longest day – we walked about 20km and got in quite late. We had run out of time to finish the whole circuit so we had decided to pull out at Tatopani and get the bus to Pokhara. (The circuit officially ends at Nayapul which was probably another 2 – 3 days of trekking but we decided that we could always do this as part of another trek next time). We were getting worried about our Indian visa and getting out of Nepal on time. There were some hot springs at Tatopani but we got in a little late so we didn't end up checking them out.
The next day we found a local bus which agreed to take us to Beni (it seemed like they were supposed to go somewhere else but changed their minds when we turned up as we were the only ones on the bus at the time) where we would change buses. From Beni we got another bus to Pokhara and arrived about 2.00pm.
Pokhara was nice but we didn't really do much there as we were pretty tired from trekking. Next time I go to Nepal I will definitely get a longer visa as 30 days is just not long enough. After that it was back to Kathmandu to sort out our visa and do other chores. We finally booked our tickets to South America and managed to get a stopover in New York over Christmas and New Year so we needed to try to book some accommodation for that.
Leaving Nepal turned out to be an adventure in itself. We left it until the day that our visa was going to expire to leave the country. Perhaps this was tempting fate as our bus trip turned out to be a disaster. We left on the bus from Kathmandu at 7.30am imagining that we would be at the border at around 3.00pm. About 1.00pm we suddenly stopped behind a huge long line of trucks and buses. We didn't know what was going on – Had we reached the border already? Was it a Maoist blockade? We finally worked out that a bridge had become unstable up ahead. It seemed like there was no other route around the river so we had to sit in the bus and wait for it to be fixed. We waited for hours, only moving ahead when one of the trucks ahead of us decided to give up and turn around. All the time, small cars and motorbikes were still crossing the bridge – this was totally frustrating. We didn't know what to do as our visa was expiring at midnight and we didn't even know if the border was open 24 hours. It got darker and darker as we sat there waiting for something to be done about the bridge. A haystack in the field next to the road became the designated ladies toilet – I wished that I was wearing a sari like everyone else as it at least gave you a little extra privacy while doing you business.
We finally started moving at about 10.00pm but there was still a couple of hours to the border. We didn't end up getting to the border until 2.00am. Everyone else just got off the bus and went into a hotel on the Nepali side of the border. But we had already overstayed our visa and we didn't know what would happen to us if we didn't try to cross straight away. Luckily by this time we had worked out that the border was open 24 hours so we started walking down the road towards the border. We walked down the road and saw that there was a boom gate across it. There were two guards there so we asked them if we could cross and they said yes. They told us that immigration was on the left so we walked down the road trying to spot it. It was in a grotty little building which you could easily have walked straight past (and nobody would have tried to stop you). Still, we went in and banged on the window yelling "Namaste!! Namaste!!".
It was strange crossing the border from Tibet into Nepal. The border was a river and as soon as we crossed the bridge that constituted the no man's land between the two countries suddenly everyone and everything looked completely different. The trucks and buses were all colourful and instead of wearing Tibetan clothing the women were all wearing saris.
Kathmandu was polluted and crazy. We stayed in Thamel like everyone else and it was crazy there most of the time as the streets were so narrow there wasn't really room for traffic and pedestrians at the same time. Luckily our hostel was down a side street and ended up being quite peaceful.
We spent a few days in Kathmandu trying to sort out our Indian visa (a huge chore which we made even worse by trying originally to go on a Sunday when it was closed) and get our trekking permit. At first we didn't really know which trek we wanted to do - we just had an idea that we wanted to see some great scenery. Anais and Emmanuel decided to do the Helambu trek and Alex and Felicity were set on doing the Annapurna Circuit. Paul didn't really know much about Nepal and said he just wanted to see some big mountains. I remembered a girl I used to work with in my library job had done the Annapurna Circuit and said it was amazing - this, along with what I already knew about it and Alex talking it up so much decided me - we were going to try it too. (I only remembered much later that the gist of her story had been about how her boyfriend fell seriously ill on the trek and she had to hire a pony to get him down and out. Perhaps it was just as well we had started the trek by the time I remembered this...).
Paul initially wasn't too keen as it seemed like it would take us 18 days. He thought he might like to climb a 6000 metre mountain but we didn't have time to arrange it and our insurance didn't cover mountaineering so I convinced him that could wait until next time and we should start with something a little bit easier (especially as we had spent the last two weeks sitting in a jeep for most of the day). I convinced him by saying the scenery was going to be great and we would get to go over a really high pass - I knew he would come around after the first few days. So we got the permit, packed our bags and set off still not really knowing what to expect.
Quite a few people we met on the trek asked us why we didn't have a porter or a guide. The main reason we didn't take a porter or a guide was that we knew that it was possible to do the trek yourself and we didn't want to spend the money. If we were to hire a porter only we would have to be fully responsible for them. We would have to check that they had the right clothing, we would have to insure them and we would have to work out a price that suited everyone. As we weren't even sure we could get ourselves over the pass, we didn't want to be responsible for someone else as well. Plus it seemed a little bit like cheating - it wasn't like we had to carry food or a tent - just our clothing and a sleeping bag etc.
We arrived at Besisahar (which is technically the start of the circuit) on the afternoon of the 11th. Because it was a little late to start trekking that day we decided to cheat a little and take a local bus the first 9km to the village of Bulbule where most people stop the first night. We were hoping to catch up to Alex and Felicity who had started walking on the 10th (in the end we didn't catch up with them until Pokhara!). The next morning we met a nice tour group from Australia who were also starting their trek that morning. We said goodbye to them and set off thinking that we would probably see them along the way.
The first several days of walking took us up a river valley and we were never out of sight of the river for long. We had started from around 1000 metres altitude and got higher and higher every day. At lower altitudes the villages were lovely and green and there were a lot of water buffalo around. We crossed tonnes of suspension bridges (including one crossing where we crossed paths with some donkeys in the middle of the bridge - this taught us to always, ALWAYS give way to donkeys!) as well as some crazy bridges that were just a bunch of sticks across the river. At times the track was quite precarious and exposed, including some sections where there had been landslides and you had to navigate around them. Often these sections were high above the water and I wished I hadn't heard that some trekker had fallen off the track and died last year.
They were putting in a road up this valley and you could often see the workers blasting away at the cliff or chipping the stone by hand. There were donkeys all up and down the track carrying loads of goods and it was amazing to see them navigate the narrow path and the rickety bridges. We also saw so many people transporting huge loads of plastic pipes or lumber - bearing most of the weight on their heads. Sometimes you couldn't even see the people as their loads were so huge. I have no idea how they carried these loads uphill all day.
During this portion of the trek we walked between 8 - 12km per day. Although we were gaining quite a bit of altitude each day the track still went up and down all the time. This seemed to be the average distance most trekkers covered. In fact it seemed like most trekkers tended to stop at the same villages every night so we saw the same people over and over again. Still, if we had wanted to we could have gone much shorter distances as there were villages every hour or so an most of them had a least one lodge.
Throughout the trek (except the day we crossed the pass) we tended to wake up at about 6.30am, have breakfast at 7.00am and set off between 8.00 - 8.30am. We would stop for about an hour for lunch at around 12.00 or 1.00 and usually arrive at our destination around 3.00pm. This gave us a bit of time to do our washing and have a shower before the sun went down. I took two hiking shirts, two pairs of underwear and two pairs of socks, so one set could be washed while the other one was being worn. This worked really well and usually everything was dry by morning. The only times it didn't work was while we were above about 3500 metres. It just got too cold for things to dry overnight and often socks etc would be frozen in the morning. This just meant that I put them on the outside of my pack to dry during the day.
Most of the lodges offered hot water but as it was usually solar powered hot water it wasn't hot at all if there was no sun that day or if too many trekkers had already arrived before you and used it all. Cool showers weren't such a problem at the lower altitudes but when we got higher we always looked for places that had as few trekking groups as possible. Still, we had our fair share of frigid showers - by the time we got to Letdar and High Camp (both over 4000 metres) we had just given up on the whole idea of showers.
We arrived in the village of Manang (just over 3500 metres high) on the 7th day of the trek. Like most other trekkers we had planned a rest day here to help us acclimatise. The position of Manang was beautiful - you could see Annapurna III, Gangapurna and the Gangapurna glacier on the other side of the valley.
The morning of our rest day we got up to go for an acclimatisation walk to a lookout perched over the top of the glacier. I had been suffering from a cold for the last few days and it was hard work getting to the top of the hill - I was so slow and gasping for air and felt quite feeble. Paul was waiting for me for ages at the top. There was such a lovely view of the glacier and the mountains at the top and there was some snow lying around on the ground. The weather was really warm as long as you kept out of the wind so we stayed up there for some time to eat some chocolate and enjoy the view.
Paul was excited about staying at Manang as it was a larger village and he wanted to try eating in a local restaurant instead of always eating in the lodge. When we got back from our acclimatisation walk he said that he was going to find a local restaurant to eat in. I told him I wasn't going to eat in a local restaurant as I was worried about being sick - we had already met quite a few people heading down to Besisahar with stomach trouble. He told me that if I felt like wasting money eating in the guesthouse restaurant that was my prerogative and off he went. He came back later that afternoon bragging about how cheap his meal had been. "The sign on the restaurant said it was the cheapest food in town!" he boasted. "Well, good for you" I said.
Well, it might have been the cheapest food in town but our stay in Manang didn't end up being cheap as Paul was stuck in bed for the next two days with food poisoning! We had to watch all the other trekkers leave the next day to continue up the valley while Paul lay groaning in bed and I brought him toast on a tray. Luckily we had brought our antibiotics with us and I put him on them straight away. There was also a volunteer doctor in town who told us this type of thing was common. I was quite worried for a while that he wouldn't get better and we wouldn't be able to keep going up, especially because from Manang it is only 3 days until you usually cross the pass.
Still, there were worse places that he might have been sick than Manang. I used the extra days to go on another acclimatisation walk to a monastery high up on the hill over the village. The view of the mountains from up there was stunning. Finally, two days later Paul was finally sufficiently recovered to keep going up. That day we arrived at Letdar (about 4200 metres high). It was quite cold and miserable there and I was really glad that I had hired a -20 down sleeping bag before the trek. It was the best sleeping bag and the whole time I never got cold in there (I even had to stick my arm out occasionally to cool down). It was getting hard to sterilise our water as our Steripen didn't seem to want to work when the temperature of the water was so cold. I had to warm my water bottle up inside my down jacket for up to an hour before the Steripen would work - I was too cheap to buy boiled water because by this point the price was so ridiculous I refused. It helped that there were safe water stations along the way where you could buy drinking water but these were usually closed by 5.00pm so there was no water available at night to clean your teeth.
The next morning we took off for Thorong Phedi (about 4400 metres) which was the next village. I was walking so slowly I felt as if I would never get there. I was finding it quite difficult going and breathing hard. Still, we seemed to make ok time and arrived in Thorong Phedi around lunchtime. We stopped for a drink and considered our options. We could either stay at Thorong Phedi for the night or continue going to High Camp (about 4800 metres) which was the next village (really just one guesthouse) about 1.5 hours away straight up the hill. The pass was around 5400 metres so if we walked from Thorong Phedi the next day it was going to be a huge altitude gain to cross the pass and at least an additional 1.5 hours of walking (more given my slow speed the past few days). We already knew that once we crossed the pass it would be another 4 hours downhill until we reached Muktinath, the first village on the other side where we would be able to find a lodge. I just didn't know if I could make it over the pass if we decided to walk from Phedi so we decided to push on and overnight at High Camp instead.
I was glad that we made that decision as soon as we started up the hill from Phedi to High Camp. I felt like I was walking very slowly and it just felt like really hard work. Throughout the trek I found that I was quite slow going uphill – Paul would always be waiting for me for ages up the top of any hill. To make up for it though I thought I had quite good stamina and I could walk for a long time every day if I had to. This later proved to be useful on the day we crossed the pass. Just before you reach High Camp there is a rock ledge that you walk over. Once you have crossed this ledge you can see High Camp. When I finally crossed the ledge I was so relieved as I could finally see High Camp a couple of hundred metres away and I knew that I was almost there. But that just seemed to make me slower! It seemed to take hours to walk the last couple of hundred metres to the lodge (probably because I kept stopping to rest about every 10 steps). Paul had already negotiated a price for a room, checked in and made himself at home by the time I arrived.
High Camp was really, really cold. There was slushy ice all over the yard, snow on the roof and there was slick ice right in front of our bedroom door. The temperature in our room was -5 before the sun even went down. We abandoned our acclimatisation walk up a small hill behind the lodge as the ice up there was really slippery so we just got into our sleeping bags instead. At one stage I was in the room checking out the state of my blisters and I heard Paul talking to someone outside the door. When I went out I discovered that the trekking group that we met at Bulbule were there! It was so strange to see them again after all that time. We must have passed and re-passed each other over the days but we never saw them. There were 4 trekkers, Bob, Jon, Liz and Frank with their Australian guide Teresa and their porters. It was nice to catch up with them after all that time.
The food and accommodation at High Camp was really expensive and the dining room was really cold. Still, everyone had an early start in the morning so people were in bed really early. The trekking group were nice enough to say we could walk with them in the morning to cross the pass so we arranged to set off at 6.00am.
Waking up the next morning was really hard as our room was so cold. I always got so hot when I started walking because I was carrying the pack so I didn't wear any thermals, just my fleece and my waterproof jacket over my hiking shirt and just my hiking pants on the bottom. We set off at about 6.00am and straight away there was heaps of ice and snow on the track. Lots of the snow had melted and then refrozen which made it really hard to walk on – in spots it was sculpted into strange waves created by people's bootprints. The flat ice was the worst as you could just slip straight off and quite a bit of the way there was a long drop on the right hand side of the track – I tried not to think what would happen if I fell off the track. Sometimes the ice under the snow was almost black and if you weren't careful you could think it was a rock and step on it – I quickly learnt that this wasn't a good idea.
Having never walked on ice or snow before it took us a while to get the hang of it. A few German tour groups raced past us in the meantime – they didn't seem to have too many problems with the snow. It was supposed to be about 3 hours to the pass from High Camp. We ended up getting there about 10.30am. I was so relieved when I got there as I felt like I had been so slow going up I might never make it. I was amazed at 73 year old Bob who was ahead of me the whole day! I don't know why I was so slow – hopefully next time I go to high altitude I will improve. I kept telling myself to go faster but it seemed like my body just wasn't able to do it. It was quite hard to breathe at that altitude and I was taking one full breath in and out with every step. I don't know if I would be any faster without the pack but I don't think it would have made that much difference. Obviously I am just bad at going uphill, especially considering that I was slow going uphill even when we were at lower altitude. On top of the altitude, the wind was blowing so hard across the pass and it was right in our face which made walking really hard.
There was a teahouse on the top of the pass but the wind was howling through the cracks in the wall and sitting in there was worse than walking so we decided to keep going instead of having tea. We only spent about 10 minutes on the pass taking a few photos and having a short rest as we knew we still had a long way to go.
Going down the other side of the pass was really hard and almost as slow as going up as there was heaps of ice and snow. I wished that I had crampons as some sections of ice were quite dangerous. Paul ended up slipping twice (but not seriously) but luckily I kept my feet the whole time. And I was pleased that I started to come into my own. On the way down Paul got a really bad headache and felt really tired. On the other hand, once we were going down and not up, I felt great! Although I was obviously tired etc I still felt like I had enough energy to keep going. Paul seemed like he had completely drained his energy reserved as he kept saying he wanted to lay down and have a sleep! I didn't think this was the best idea when we were still so far away from the next village so I just made him have a rest, eat and drink and keep going. Luckily we had taken heaps of snacks to eat along the way.
We finally got down to another small teahouse about 2.30pm where we stopped for lunch with the trekking group. After lunch it was another hour or so to Muktinath. There was a temple just outside Muktinath which was supposed to be quite interesting and the trekking group went inside to check it out but Paul was so tired we decided to keep going straight to the village. We ended up getting there around 4.00pm which was pretty slow going compared to lots of other people (we later found out one Polish girl crossed the pass in 4.5 hours coming from Thorong Phedi!) but hey, at least we made it!
When we checked into the guesthouse in the village we were so excited as it had a really lovely hot shower and we hadn't had a shower for a couple of days as the water was too cold at the higher camps. Paul decided to have yak steak that night as I had promised him he could eat whatever he wanted once we crossed the pass (he was restricted to a "safe" vegetarian diet after his little incident in Manang) and I had lasagne (not very traditional, I know). After celebrating with the trekking group we fell into bed exhausted.
The next day we woke up late and started walking down the valley to the village of Kagbeni. We wished that we could have had a rest day at Kagbeni as it was such a lovely village. But since Paul had used up our spare days being sick we had to keep going. It was on a cliff at the confluence of two rivers and was really Tibetan in style. Actually, quite a few of the villages at the higher altitudes were Tibetan in nature and had a lot of people of Tibetan heritage living there. They wore Tibetan-style clothing and there were many Tibetan Buddhist monasteries and temples. All the houses in Kagbeni were made out of mud bricks which were whitewashed and the houses had red roofs. There was a really nice temple with a lovely view of Nilgiri (7061 metres high) in one direction and into the restricted Upper Mustang valley in the other direction.
In the morning we dragged ourselves out of bed early and took a short walk upriver to visit the village of Tiri. We had to cross the river bed to get there – the bridges that the locals had put there were all icy as it was still cold and they were a little bit slippery. Tiri was just a small village but it was interesting to visit as it used to be part of Upper Mustang, meaning that it was off limits unless you bought a really, really expensive permit.
After Tiri we headed down the valley towards the village of Marpha. Marpha was another pretty village and was famous for its apples so that night we had apple cider, apple brandy and apple crumble. The only annoying thing about that day was the wind that was still blowing straight up the valley. As much of the track was in the river bed we copped the wind right in the face all afternoon. We were so relieved when we finally arrived.
The next few days we kept heading down the valley. Gradually we started to see trees again and the scenery became greener and greener. We had lovely views of Nilgiri, Dhaulagiri (8167 metres) and the Dhaulagiri Icefall on the way down. There was a road on this side of the pass and sometimes you had to walk along the road. It was just a dirt road and occasionally a bus, truck or motorbike would come along. It didn't really bother me that I was walking on a road (although it was dusty when a vehicle came past) but a lot of trekkers didn't like it. Still, there were quite a few places when you could walk on the other side of the river if you didn't like the road. We ended up walking on the road most of the time as it was faster.
We caught up with the tour group again at a village called Lete (we had parted with them in Muktinath) and we ended up walking part of the next day with them to Tatopani. This ended up being our longest day – we walked about 20km and got in quite late. We had run out of time to finish the whole circuit so we had decided to pull out at Tatopani and get the bus to Pokhara. (The circuit officially ends at Nayapul which was probably another 2 – 3 days of trekking but we decided that we could always do this as part of another trek next time). We were getting worried about our Indian visa and getting out of Nepal on time. There were some hot springs at Tatopani but we got in a little late so we didn't end up checking them out.
The next day we found a local bus which agreed to take us to Beni (it seemed like they were supposed to go somewhere else but changed their minds when we turned up as we were the only ones on the bus at the time) where we would change buses. From Beni we got another bus to Pokhara and arrived about 2.00pm.
Pokhara was nice but we didn't really do much there as we were pretty tired from trekking. Next time I go to Nepal I will definitely get a longer visa as 30 days is just not long enough. After that it was back to Kathmandu to sort out our visa and do other chores. We finally booked our tickets to South America and managed to get a stopover in New York over Christmas and New Year so we needed to try to book some accommodation for that.
Leaving Nepal turned out to be an adventure in itself. We left it until the day that our visa was going to expire to leave the country. Perhaps this was tempting fate as our bus trip turned out to be a disaster. We left on the bus from Kathmandu at 7.30am imagining that we would be at the border at around 3.00pm. About 1.00pm we suddenly stopped behind a huge long line of trucks and buses. We didn't know what was going on – Had we reached the border already? Was it a Maoist blockade? We finally worked out that a bridge had become unstable up ahead. It seemed like there was no other route around the river so we had to sit in the bus and wait for it to be fixed. We waited for hours, only moving ahead when one of the trucks ahead of us decided to give up and turn around. All the time, small cars and motorbikes were still crossing the bridge – this was totally frustrating. We didn't know what to do as our visa was expiring at midnight and we didn't even know if the border was open 24 hours. It got darker and darker as we sat there waiting for something to be done about the bridge. A haystack in the field next to the road became the designated ladies toilet – I wished that I was wearing a sari like everyone else as it at least gave you a little extra privacy while doing you business.
We finally started moving at about 10.00pm but there was still a couple of hours to the border. We didn't end up getting to the border until 2.00am. Everyone else just got off the bus and went into a hotel on the Nepali side of the border. But we had already overstayed our visa and we didn't know what would happen to us if we didn't try to cross straight away. Luckily by this time we had worked out that the border was open 24 hours so we started walking down the road towards the border. We walked down the road and saw that there was a boom gate across it. There were two guards there so we asked them if we could cross and they said yes. They told us that immigration was on the left so we walked down the road trying to spot it. It was in a grotty little building which you could easily have walked straight past (and nobody would have tried to stop you). Still, we went in and banged on the window yelling "Namaste!! Namaste!!".
A sleepy border guard dressed in a towel poked his head out the window to see what we wanted. "We need an exit stamp" we said. He gave us an exit form and took our passports. We sneakily wrote on the exit form that we exited the day before (the day our visas expired) and hoped he wouldn't notice – hey, we were only a few hours late! He did notice but he just stamped our passports with the correct day and gave them back to us without saying anything. We had seen on the board outside the office that the fine for overstaying was US$30 plus US$2 for every extra day so we felt like we had just dodged a bullet.
Having successfully exited Nepal, we now felt we had no choice but to try to enter India (although we could have quite literally walked back up the road and stayed in the hotel on the Nepali side of the border – we later wished we did do this as the Indian guesthouse was so foul). We kept walking in the dark down the dusty road and eventually reached another boom gate and another pair of guards. This lot directed us to another dingy building which constituted Indian immigration. We couldn't wake anyone up there so we decided to just wait until morning (well, later in the morning). We checked into the dodgiest hostel we ever saw and spent a few hours getting some much needed sleep. We hadn't even had any dinner.
The next morning we got a bus to Gorakhpur and then a train to Varanasi. We didn't arrive in Varanasi until about 6.30pm and we still had to find a hotel. We headed straight for the hostel that Alex and Felicity were staying in (they were a couple of days ahead of us) and thankfully managed to find it down the crazy maze of alleys along the river. We all went out to dinner that night to catch up. Unfortunately I woke up later with a really sore stomach and spent the whole of the next day laying in bed with some weird kind of food poisoning. My whole body was aching like when you get a really bad flu. I couldn't believe I had lasted less than 24 hours in India without getting sick! As well as this I was still trying to recover from a cold I caught from Paul in Kathmandu. Plus while I was in Kathmandu I had already had a bought of food poisoning – when was it going to end? I felt so sorry for myself laying sick in this dingy guesthouse with dirty walls. At least the view out the window was nice, when I had the strength to sit up and look at it. I could see everyone out on their rooftops washing their clothes, flying kites, kids playing... Sometimes heaps of monkeys would run across the roofs and everyone would come out with big sticks and try to chase them away.
We don't have long in India so we'll probably just check out a few places before we fly to America on the 19th. We're worried we won't enjoy ourselves if we try to cram too much in and it's such a big country we could never see it all anyway.
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