I sit on a stone wall holding a cup of tea in my hands as the warm sun bathes my face and the wind whispers gently in my ears. I can hear, a thousand feet below me, the dull roar of a glacial river I crossed just one hour before. One hour of relentless stone steps woven into the cliffside. From below it had looked like nothing more than the remains of a landslide, and at the moment I am spent from my effort.
Crickets chirp in the nearby trees but what brings me more bliss than anything is the Nepali woman sitting next to me; the sound of the thread as she tugs her needle through the fabric, stitching an intricate pattern into the the otherwise plain white dress. She’s just served me the tea, and I envy the simplicity of her day’s work as I consider the upward trek that will make up the rest of my day.
She tells me the tea house is new and that her husband is two villages away working with cows. She has two girls, both in school at the nearest city, two hours and many decades away from this simple life on the mountain.
Earlier in the morning, before I’d descended into the glacial valley, I ran into three school children dressed in uniforms, who immediately said in perfect english. “Hello. How are you?” I may have caught them off guard with my response of “happy”, but they brushed it off, and we continued to converse. They told me that they were on their way to school, and because I hadn’t seen one since leaving the village earlier this morning, I asked how far they had to go. They caught me off guard with their answer of “two hours”.
I’d learned a great deal about Nepal in the three days since I started my trek. It began with a two hour bus ride from the lakeside village of Pokhara. Because of the fuel crisis caused by India’s oil embargo, most of the Nepali were now riding busses, which are packed so full that the younger kids have resorted to riding on the roof of the bus. They’re taking it in stride though and you hear roars of laughter as the buses careen along rutted dirt roads.
The trip from Pokhara took just over two hours, and I was dropped off in a dusty little village at the entrance of the canyon leading up to the great Annapurna mountain range. The road I headed up was flanked with stores providing last minute supplies to the thousands of trekkers that pass this way. Having heard that everything was more expensive the later you bought it, I had already stocked up on oreos, and other essentials, so I kept moving on. I was forced to stop, however, when I came across a pair of boys playing volleyball over a tattered fishing net. What caught my attention was the unusual ball they were using. It was a plastic grocery bag stuffed with plastic grocery bags, forming a mass that was effective enough to play the game. I found a great deal of joy in this ingenious bit of recycling. It wouldn’t be the last example I saw.
I hadn’t really planned what I was going to do since there are little villages every 30 minutes or so along the way, but I set my initial goal on a village about seven hours away. Almost immediately I began to struggle with my decision as I passed through one bucolic village after another. The first was situated next to a rushing mountain river, and since the temperature was already in the seventies, I began to imagine an afternoon of swimming below the lodge.
Unfortunately, I’d only been walking for two hours, and I couldn’t imagine how long my trek would take at two hours a day. The next town I felt compelled to stop in was nestled in a canyon surrounding a waterfall. It seemed yet another ideal place to drop my pack, but it was just one in the afternoon, and I couldn’t figure out what I would do for the nine hours before bedtime. I did get some inspiration from several boys who were flying a kite from a suspension bridge over the falls, Again, a plastic bag had been fashioned into a toy, and the boys were using an unraveled reel of cassette tape as the string to keep it aloft.
While I think I could have made an afternoon of watching this and the falls, I knew I had a 1700 foot climb in front of me and decided to spend the afternoon getting myself aloft. Stone steps were used to create this steep ascent and I zigzagged up them in an effort to reduce the elevation gain in each step. At one point, I was overtaken by an old woman hauling a conical shaped basket full of apples that was strapped to her head. In passing, she asked if I would like to by one, and I obliged if for no other reason than to lessen her load.
All the Nepali carry things in this fashion. Whatever the load, it is fastened with a band that goes across the forehead and connected to a container that rests against the person’s back. You see this technique used by porters to carry the supplies of trekkers, and by men and women, young and old to carry baskets filled with apples, oranges and firewood. They tell me that it is better, but I imagine in some statistical research that the Nepali have simply developed great neck muscles having carried goods this way their whole lives. Perhaps it at least explains their small stature.
Another physical feature of the Nepali is their rapid aging. I was checked into my first guest house by a stout older woman who walked me to the top floor of the lodge and showed me a room looking directly at the Annapurna range. I said, “I’ll take it”. We chatted a little, and knowing how important family is within the Nepali culture, I asked about her children. Surprised that a woman this old could have children so young, I asked her her age. She was two years younger than me and looked like my grandmother. It appears the challenging life of living in the mountains takes its toll on the body.
It doesn’t come as a big surprise. The Nepali are always working. I have never seen better multi taskers. When they are not cooking, they are cleaning; when they are not cleaning, they are doing laundry; when they are not doing laundry, they are prepping food for the evening meal. They are always busy at a variety of tasks. Before I left one of the lodges, I asked the cook what he would be doing that day. He said he was going to a nearby farm to cut hay for the next six hours in order to provide food for the horses.
It’s amazing to see the traditional methods used for preparing food from the harvesting honeycombs out of logs fashioned into bee hives to the drying of foods for winter use. Everywhere I went I saw sliced carrots, potatoes, beans, flowers all drying under the warm Himalayan sun. Drying is done on many different surfaces: wicker baskets, screens, bed sheets laid across the ground, the roofs of houses. It became one of my favorite things to see and photograph along the trek.
Naturally, the first thing I did upon settling into my first lodge was to shower in an attempt to both cool off and rinse the sweat from 2 hours of practically vertical hiking. As would be the case for the whole trip, what was advertised as hot water simply meant not freezing. I took advantage of my time in the shower to also wash my clothes, and found myself impressed with the color of brown that the water turned during the process.
Heeding the advice of a couple of women who’d finished their trek before me, I decided to bring only two pairs of clothes; the one in my pack and the one on my back, which meant I had to wash daily. I didn’t think this would be a problem as I planned to arrive at most of the lodges in the early afternoon. What I hadn’t counted on is the sun setting so early in the mountains so I woke up to still damp clothes and decided to wear them during breakfast in an effort to provide some heat for evaporation. This actually worked since everything I brought was made of lightweight material.
At checkout, I was provided with an itemized bill for my stay, something that was to happen throughout the trek. What changed, however, was the price of everything as you got further up the mountain. Naturally there were charges for lodging and food. And while the room rate might only be one or two dollars per night, they make up for it by billing you for charging your phone, using hot water, napkins, even honey. Every little luxury is added to the tally. In the end, it only ended up costing me $20 per day so I just enjoyed the surprise of the daily punctilious tally.
Since the sun sets around three in the afternoon, it gets cold early. There’s no insulation in the rooms and often no electricity, so you often end up going to bed pretty early just to get warm beneath the covers. This means you wake up at first light or earlier. On the positive side, you get to see the sun rise, and it provides good light for morning photography. For this reason, I usually started my days early and was on the trail between seven and eight.
The second day of my trek was spent walking beneath the trees with very few views except the river that flowed downhill beside me. At the end of the day, I crested the saddle of the mountain and saw the Annapurna range in its entirety. Having been cast in the shadow so early the previous day, I was determined to find a lodge that would get the last of the sunshine in the village. As it turns out, it also had a great view.
I basked in the sun until later afternoon when I decided to join every other trekker in the village on the pilgrimage to the top of Poon Hill to watch the sunset. I was told the 1000 foot climb would take about 45 minutes and was about to congratulate myself in making it in only 30 minutes when I was corrected by a sign on top of the false summit which read “15 more minutes”. When I did make it to the top, it was like standing on an island in a sea of fog which had managed to creep up from the valleys below and blanket the hillsides below me. What was left above was a range of majestic snow capped mountains, one of the many crowns of the Himalayas.
Despite a similar view from the comfort of my bed, I was compelled to make this trek again the next morning at 5am to watch the sunrise, something everyone talks about when you mention Poon Hill. I believe that sunset provides the better views, but sunrise provides the better experience as you join a select few brave souls trudging up the mountain in the cold pre dawn hours. There is a hushed anticipation as you see the meandering line of flashlights held by trekkers switchbacking their way up the mountain.
The other reward comes as you return to the lodge below and the breakfast you’d ordered the night before is waiting for you. Because everything is cooked on a wood stove, and there is no refrigeration, everything is prepared from scratch. You are expected to order each of your meals in advance, and there’s a certain excitement that comes in knowing that the food you will eat was growing in a tree or below the ground just an hour before it entered your mouth. There’s no denying that food tastes different up here, not just because you’re hungry, but because cooking is a craft which has been passed down over generations and practiced for years before one can work in the kitchen.
I joined two German guys at breakfast, and after commenting how much we enjoyed this village, we all decided to stay another day here. It made for an unusual experience as the rest of the trekkers left the village over the next two hours, and it felt as if we’d been left behind a chapter as everyone else continued on with the story. We each spent the day in a different way. One of the Germans pulled together two benches and napped in the sunlight, exhausted by both the previous day’s trek and the early morning sunrise jaunt. The other disappeared into the woods to enjoy a high of another sort, and I went about exploring the narrow paths that branched off to smaller nearby villages not included on the trekking maps you buy in town.
By the next day I was ready to move on and left at 7am to get an early start on the steep climb out of the village. I was now above the tree line and the only way to avoid getting baked by the high altitude sun was to leave before it appeared above the mountains to the south. I was clear of the summit before 9am and enjoyed a long descent to the next village. I arrived around noon and wasn’t ready to stop for the day so I continued on to the next village.
What followed was 2300 foot descent that took much longer than I had anticipated. Though the trail maps display the primary trails throughout the wilderness area, they are not necessarily accurate in scale, and the village that appeared next to the one I’d reached at noon was in fact several miles away. To make matters worse, I didn’t see a single other trekker during this time.
I began to question whether I had made a wrong turn and even got a little panicky when my GPS said I was on the ridge west of the one I wanted to be on. Knowing that darkness sets into these canyons shortly after three and that retracing my steps meant it would take me twice as long to get up the steep slope I had just spent two hours descending meant I was in trouble. After another hour of walking, I came upon a lodge and asked a group of drunken gentlemen where I was.
To my delight, they said the village I was looking for was just 15 minutes further on. In my euphoria, I practically skipped to the village. This was the biggest village I stayed in, and my happiness was soon extinguished when I realized how spread out it was. There was no real center, like all the other villages, where other trekkers hung out. I had also come down so far that the landscape was now verging on tropical and the mountains no longer took up all of your field of vision and even disappeared altogether as the valley fog moved in.
The lodge I chose would not have a good view until morning when the clouds lifted. This depressing atmosphere was reiterated in the windowless smoke filled dining room where I sat alone waiting for my meal. The incessant crying of two young children and miserable surroundings made me consider retracing my steps to the previous village even if I had to do it by flashlight.
In the morning I was left with two options. I was now within a day of exiting the wilderness and catching the bus back to town and a warm comfortable bed with unregulated hot water, but I wasn’t ready to leave this giant park, and I was craving the feeling of being back in a wilderness on top of the world. like the Gods of greek mythology.
Happiness flooded into me as I began to ascend back into the mountains just after daybreak. I felt like a bird climbing into the sky, and for the first time my body didn’t feel any pain. I think it was getting used to hiking for hours every day. I crested the saddle of a mountain that separated me from my destination and was headed down the other side before I changed my mind and returned to have breakfast at a restaurant that offered views of both valleys from its straddled position on the mountain.
A Nepali man at the next table was admiring my Danner boots and finally couldn’t resist asking if I would sell them to him. In this land where everything was hand crafted, I was proud to tell him that my boots had been handmade in my “village” and that I planned to take them with me around the world. He said that in Nepal, such boots would cost $250. I didn’t tell him I had paid even more than that.
Before I left the restaurant, I asked the man if that landslide on the other side of the next canyon was the trail I should take to reach my destination. With a look of compassion he said yes, so I bid farewell and descended to the glacially sourced river below before climbing back up to the cafe where I now sit.
I would spend another two days in this magical kingdom above the clouds before heading down, making a wrong turn which would take me up again another 1000 feet before descending to the last mountain village just as the bus was leaving for Pokhara. Two hours later my trek would be behind me and I would spend the next several days considering hopping back on a bus to do it all over again.