Captain Morgan's Log

The sun pelts down on our small group of students, teachers and Sherpas, ambling through rural Nepal to a school in Ghachok. The pace is calmer than the rest of our journey. There are no more Western tourists kitted out in the same uniform North Face coats and other professional walking gear. We only pass a few locals, in unpretentious clothing. We are dirty, limbs worn, not yet worn out from walking. I am relaxed, but the most prevalent feeling is thirst.
I look around, and see the growth the sun has encouraged; the hills rippled like the contours of an unmade bed, coated sporadically with crops and more frequently a beard of rough grass. The warmth feels as though it is pulsing through my head, and reaching my brain. Everything needs water in order to grow properly. I can see beads of perspiration on a bottle of water as clearly as a mirage.
The sun, though blistering, is a welcome change from drizzly Herefordshire in Mid-November, to which we shall soon be returning. The whole trip has been one of changes – activity in favour of lethargy, and spicy dhal bhats replacing fatty burgers. We walk towards a hillside cafe, eyeing it longingly from afar; buildings here are sparse. As we approach I assess choices I previously wasn’t aware I’d made, that I didn’t realise were mine.
An elderly Nepalese woman greets us, and her face lines with smiles. ‘Namaste!’ she cries. We bow our heads and echo her call. I will never discuss my greatest fears and dreams with this lady, never even see her again, but this one word, that greets another person’s soul, feels enough. A Sherpa translates our request for water, and she shakes her head still smiling kindly. As we perspire, it transpires she does not have any water to sell to us, but there is a familiar alternative.
We each purchase a glass bottle of thick, dark, sweet, fizzy liquid. It is the antithesis of everything I’d been hoping for, bar the blessedly chilly temperature. The familiar red label winks out at me, still fully in-tact, bottle-top glittering like a gem. I marvel at this odd familiarity, in such a vast setting, isolated from tourist traps, that a poor Sherpa has had to haul these bottles here, for some chance tourists when it is too dear a forfeit to part with water. This viscous liquid that is vomited out of taps in every MacDonald’s across the world and more besides. Before I would have deemed this a treat, but in this moment, I wonder whether water wouldn’t be the real treasure.