The Post Somewhat Smaller than the Himalaya But Still Really Big

We've gone journal style now. Unfortunately we aren't trained journalists, so you'll have to make do with our amateur bumbling. So without further ado:

DAY 1:

Welcome to Nepal!

So we're in Nepal now. Our flight here can best be described as uneventful...our arrival, not so much. After we got through passport control and retrieved our bags, a man immediately seized our bags, hoisted them onto a cart and ran away with them through customs. This happened in the space of about 10 seconds. This is only the beginning.

Once outside, we were immediately swarmed by at least 10 guys, all of whom were yelling shades of "hello! Welcome to Nepal! Where are you going! Taxi!" and so on. The choice of "swarmed" here isn't accidental...they followed us in front and back. Again, madness.

Eventually we found our way into a small metered taxi with both a pilot and copilot. While maybe necessary for the rally-style driving required on Kathmandu streets, we soon discovered that the copilot was an agent from a trekking agency riding along to sell us a trek. To make a long story short, after he convinced us that a nationwide strike was planned for Wednesday (the day after we arrived), we ended up using his trekking agency to book the Jomsom trek out of Pokhara. DC will call us pushovers right now...and it didn't feel good, but in our defense all the trekking agencies are the same and we looked them up on the internet first. Since it was what we came for, using this agency worked out in the end (I can say this now, having finished the trek).

A short while later, one vital roll of toilet paper richer, we found ourselves pulling away in a beat-up 20 year old corolla without seatbelts (seatbelts are only necessary in countries with Ralph Nader). The ensuing seven hour ride through the mountains was hellish. Bumpy, winding, dark, loud, dusty, and cold, are the mildest adjectives I can think of. If I had to choose, I would only call it surreal.

Day 2:

THERE ARE NO MOSQUITOES IN THIS COUNTRY! VICTORY IS MINE!!!!!!!

Sorry I got carried away....we had just become tired of all creepy-crawly-bitey bugs in Thailand.

Yes, I've been waiting to make that pun. I would take a bow, but I have to keep dodging the tomatoes.

Also, we're in Pokhara now. The crazy car ride finished around 11:00pm and we crashed in our hotel room. We woke up, ate some breakfast with some creative substitutions (mango instead of orange juice, mint tea instead of coffee, and potato curry instead of hash browns), met our Nepali guide, Prakash, and piled into a taxi to drive to the trailhead!

We drove for an hour or so on the highway* before we got to the first village, Birethati:

*highway here is a bit of an overstatement...any highway with six-inch drop-offs and bovine roadblocks needs some tender loving care.

Anyways, Birethati:

From that point, we hiked several hours up into a canyon until we arrived at Hile, our stop for the night. Before I put up more pictures, it's worth describing how this whole trekking process works. Trekking is distinct from mountaineering in that there are no technical skills required to do it. We hike every day, generally from around 8:00 am to 2:00 pm, covering a distance anywhere from 10km to 25km, depending on the grade and condition of the trail. We stop at "tea houses," small dinner-and-bed-and-breakfasts run invariably by very nice middle-aged* ladies.

*middle-aged here needs a little context: the lifespan of the average Nepali is around sixty years. This knowledge made us all the more impressed to see wrinkled men and women carrying 50-100 lb loads of firewood up and down mountains.

As a guest at one of these tea houses, you are expected to eat from their restaurant. The menus are very strange: as they have been standardized and price-fixed by the tourism commission, you can get anything from pizza to macaroni to yak curry or dal baht (the standard Nepali dish).

Dal Baht is worth explaining, since we ate it for at least 50% of all our meals.

Dal is a watery lentil curry and Baht is rice. Curry and Rice. Simple, yet effective, as pretty much every single one of the 20 million inhabitants of Nepal eat it twice a day. Even though it's a standard meal, the flavors are by no means the same: differing amounts of ginger and other spices make each meal often surprisingly different and tastier than the last. Kind of like a certain artist:

Anyways, in the continuing interest of describing how the whole trekking thing works, here's a picture of a representative room from our trek. Note: no heating, no sheets, and only one light:

That about finishes up day two. Therefore, sticking with the decidedly boring linear recollection of events, we move begrudgingly on to:

Day 3:

Welcome to Nepal! Part 2. This picture is more representative of why we came to Nepal.

Today we have found the droids we were looking for! The Himalayas!

On day 3, we hiked from Hile to Ghorepani, a small village in a pass. The hike involved the greatest vertical change we did on the trip, 1400 m or 4600 ft, which is basically the vertical climb of Half Dome in Yosemite. Here we have Matt and Prakash taking a short break:

Some five hours and two Dal Bahts later, we arrived at Ghorepani:

Reason 2:

As we discovered around 5am, the real reason that trekkers converge on Ghorepani is to hike a nearby hill, called "Poon Hill," early in the morning to watch the sunrise. The view from the top is around a 270 degree view of the Annapurna range and is reputed to be one of the best views in Nepal. Since I couldn't take a picture of the whole thing and my camera batteries worked in the freezing wind about as well as I did, I have a couple pictures:

The photo from the beginning of the Day 3 post is also during the sunrise.

Later that day, after we had unfrozen, we hiked down the pass to Torepani, a small town with some hot springs. To tide you over until Matt finishes his post, I have a picture of a chicken, which may or may not be symbolic of the situation of Nepal: