Aloha,
We (Madeleine and I) just returned from a month long trip to Nepal. We had a great time including a few days in the crazy confusion of the streets of Kathmandu with its mixture of ancient buildings and dress and the constant merging of traffic on the streets of pedestrians, cars, motorcycles, bicycles, rickshaws,and all manner of hand pushed carts. There seems to be no rules or lanes but it all works like magic.
After a 6 or 7 hour bus ride we arrived in Pokhara and went a hotel in "lakeside", the tourist area on the shore of a good size manmade lake with a dam. I stayed here when I visited 20 years ago and it was considerably different. Back then it was to my remembrance a sleepy mixture of small one story guest houses interspersed with residences and fields of corn and rice with a street of restaurants and shops catering to backpacker tourists and trekkers. Now it is much more developed with hundreds of hotels and shops with many of them 5 or 6 stories high and lots of traffic on the main streets. It's still a great place with astounding views of the surrounding mountains when the weather is clear but it is by no means sleepy.
One day we did a day hike to a view point on the other side of the lake through the woods. It was a day off from school so a boy volunteered to be our guide and practice his English. His goal was to be a trekking guide and I guess he was practicing on us. We discovered monkeys roaming the woods eating chestnuts on the ground and leeches sucking the blood from our ankles. The hike led to the "Peace Pagoda" a buddist monument built by a Japanese organization with plans to build more around the world.
We arranged for a porter from our hotel and went for an 11 day trek to the Annapurna Base Camp (ABC).We took a car with our porter/guide, "KP" to a town called Nayapul a few hours drive and started walking. We carried day packs with a jacket, water and snacks and KP carried a pack with the rest of our clothes and sleeping bags (about 25 lbs). Our routine was to walk about 4 to 6 hours on trails that are well traveled by both trekkers and local people carrying goods to their homes and villages and by porters carrying supplies to the lodges. The porters usually carry their cargo in baskets held by a strap to their forehead and weighing about 50 to 70 lbs. One time we saw a porter carrying a sick person down the trail in a basket with holes cut out for their legs.This part of the trail was the main highway for trade from Pokhara to Tibet and has been in use for many centuries. It is wide and well developed with many stone steps laid meticulously and most of it is very steep up and down.
The second day on one stretch there are supposedly 3300 steps with an ascent of 4500 ft that day. The steps are not like stairs in America which have an average rise of about 7 or 8 inches and about 30 degree slope. These steps are more like 12 to 16 inches each at an angle of up to 45 degrees so you can imagine that our legs were plenty tired after that day.
We slept and ate in lodges every night. The accomodations (standardized $3 rooms) varied with each town but were surprisingly similar in the neighborhood. Usually they were right on the trail, often with the path going right through the patio in front so you were watching everyone walk up the trail. Most lodges are made of stone or bricks with either slate or metal roofs in the shape of a motel with a long building with 5 or 10 rooms divided from each other by a very thin wall of plywood, 2 beds with foam mattresses and a sheet and an electric light that sometimes worked. There was a dining room and kitchen and a communal bathroom. The bathroom would usually be an asian squat toilet with a bucket of water for washing and flushing. A separate room usually had a solar heated shower sometimes with propane. The weather in the lower altitudes (starting at about 3000 ft elevation) was warm to even hot when walking and cool at night. We gradually gained elevation until we got to over 10,000 ft for the last days where it was cool and very pleasant walking in the day and definitely down jacket at night.
Food was served in a dining hall often with one big table. Some organization has standardized the menus and printed them so you usually had about the same choices of dishes creatively made from the available ingredients of rice, potatoes vegetables, cheese, eggs, chicken and various breads and pancakes fried or deep fried. Somehow they are even able to make a passable pizza which we enjoyed a few times. Keep in mind that most of what you consume there has to be hauled up the mountain on someone's back or sometimes on mule train. Food is more expensive than in Pokhara but still very reasonable. After a night stay out bill for 2 meals and a bed for 2 of us was usually $20 to $25.
On one of the first days we met some Australian folks, a father and his daughter, and while Madeleine was talking with them at the lodge next to the trail a string of mules passed by and one of them bumped the father who fell against the daughter who then fell against Madeleine knocking her down like dominoes. She fell on some rocks and got a nasty cut and bruise on her arm the same place she had been injured by a runaway surfboard a few weeks earlier. Lesson: give those mules plenty of room on the trail.
The second night we spent in Ghorepani at 9400 ft then through a pass over 10,000 ft. That day saw us up and down crossing several wooded valleys descending to cross suspension bridges over the streams and spent the night in Tadapani on a ridge at 8600 ft. The name of the village means "far water" since before a pipe was placed the porters had to walk for hours carrying water for the town.
The next day we descended down a long steep set of steps to cross a river at 6000 ft and then up again to spend the night at Chomrong at 7000 ft walking through many cultivated terraces of rice and millet with small patches of corn and climbing beans on the old corn stalks. Our room here was the best ever with stone walls between us and the next room and a great view out the windows of our corner room. We left a few items in a bag here to lighten our load and to pick up on the return.
Day 5 started with a steep descent to cross a river and then another steep ascent and then walking high above the main river the Modi Khola up the valley through hardwood forests interspersed with a type of clumping bamboo. Our porter, KP, gathered some bamboo shoots and let us sample them, yummy. We stopped at a huge overhanging rock called Mahendra cave where there used to be a house sheltered by the rock and saw a group of about 20 monkeys eating berries or seeds in the brush and watching us as we watched them. They were quite striking in appearance with bright white hair on their heads looking like a hat. No one else we talked to on the trek saw them so i guess we were quite fortunate. We spent the night in a village called Bamboo appropriately at 7500 ft. After Chomrong there were no more villages or agriculture to speak of and most of the houses were related to the lodges built for trekkers so the walking was through rhododendron forests mixed with bamboo.
Day 6 was a pretty steady climb with a few ups and downs as we crossed tributaries of the main river and were often near the banks of this rushing mountain river in a narrow canyon with steep walls ending with a night at Deurali at 10,600 ft. The trek was more crowded than usual because bad weather kept people from flying into the area for the Everest trek and many of those people changed plans and went on the ABC trek. There were no more rooms in Deurali so we slept in the dining room with the porters. It was actually pretty comfortable. All of the lodges have the benches around the dining table wide enough and covered with foam to be used as beds when people are finished eating. So we rolled out our sleeping bags at around 9:00 to sleep. I felt something run over the top of my head and saw a small rat investigating our packs and the bags of rice stored in the corner a few feet from Madeleine's head. I waited to tell her about it until the morning since I didn't think it would help her get a good nights sleep to know that.
Day 7 after Deurali was a steady and grueling climb with thin air almost like slow motion to keep from loosing our breath as I felt some altitude sickness symptoms of headache, no appetite and fatigue. It was a big challenge for me to keep putting one foot in front of another as we climbed to 13,500 ft in the clouds and drizzle through a barren landscape of glacial moraine with no vegetation and recent snow a few hundred feet higher on the surrounding mountains. The last couple of hours were walking on a wide ridge with a large rocky gulch eroded on one side and a gravelly slope up the other. Visibility was limited because of the clouds so we couldn't see any of the high peaks surrounding us only a few miles away.
Day 8 we spent mostly inside resting and feeling altitude sickness diminishing a little and we spent a second night at Annapurna Base Camp waiting for the rain to stop. We met a British father and son with plans to scale one of the nearby minor peaks a projected 3 day climb involving 2 camp sites. We woke up at dawn on day 9 to a beautiful clear day with incredible views of all the surrounding snow capped mountains including Annapurna 1 at over 26,000 ft high one of the highest mountains in the world which has only been climbed 100 times at great cost in lives, more dangerous than Everest. This view only lasted less than one hour when the clouds came back and the drizzle started again but it was worth all that effort!
Day 9 after breakfast we headed down retracing our steps past Deurali to Dobhan at 8500 ft , a descent of 5000 ft, a good day to wear a knee brace.
Day 10 I woke feeling good with the effect of the altitude sickness gone and had an easy day retracing our steps to Chomrong where we stayed in the same guest house where we left our excess baggage before. Madeleine made a connection with the Tibetan woman there and bought a couple of t-shirts that said Annapurna Base Camp.
Day 11 after some steep ups and downs we walked along the bank of the river until we got to a jeep road at Kimche at about 5000 ft elevation. KP had been in touch with the hotel in Pokhara and knew he had another porter job starting the next day so we opted to take a jeep ride down the last part so that he could spend one night with his family before heading out again on the same ABC trek. The road was very intense with some parts the jeep had to go even slower than you could walk. About halfway down the 2 hour ride we were flagged down and took a sick woman down with us so she could go to the hospital in Pokhara.
A few days R&R in Pokhara and then a flight to Kathmandu for a little sightseeing to Durbar Square, a collection of 16th century buildings and then to one of the largest stupas in the world at Buddhanath.
