The Post Somewhat Smaller than the Himalaya But Still Really Big
by Nathan
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!
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!
Did you know that he speaks Nepali, Hindi, Japanese, and English? Neither did we for the first couple days
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:
You can measure the distance we went from civilization by the price of coke. Here: 70 rupees, about a dollar.
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.
All the tea houses look something like this...very simple stone and mortar construction. The flowers, while somewhat more transient than the stone buildings, were a nice touch. For reference, 1 coke = 90 rupees.
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 and rice often means a lot more than just Dal and Rice. This is great when you're really hungry and really cheap.
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:
+1 art reference points. Hopefully these points are worth something at some point in life. I remain optimistic.
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:
Packing light doesn't mean you can't still make a mess .05 seconds after walking into a room for the first time.
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.
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!
this was not the droid we were looking for.
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:
onward!
Some five hours and two Dal Bahts later, we arrived at Ghorepani:
asomewhat unremarkable town, significant for two reasons: 1. Internet
Reason 2:
HIMALAYA! this is a view of the Annapurna range. the view from our hotel was all kinds of spectacular (thanks DC).
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:
sunrise
matt is cold. so is my camera, so it decided to take a really long, lazy exposure in the early morning
i know, this picture needs some photoshopping. i also need a haircut. complaints can be left in the complaint box by the door.
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:
but it is symbolic of what's for dinner. bye!
How Are We Still Alive?
by Nathan
Seriously though. Five college students rent scooters for a day, survive downtown Chiang Mai, ride 60 miles to Doi Inathon national park, ride up Thailand's tallest mountain (8500 ft), and then ride back. Parents might want to look away for this post.*
View of Napapon Phoom-siri Chedi around 5km from the actual summit
*this is an active implementation of the "after-the-fact" method of keeping our parents in a constant state of medium level worry. They don't know that we're doing something dangerous, but always rest slightly uneasily, knowing that we might just be up to something.
Anyways, the idea of the day was to see something of Doi Inathon national park, one of Thailand's most spectacular national parks. This park is essentially a reserved area in a mountain range, crisscrossed by various streams and some of Thailand's best waterfalls. The name comes from Doi Inathon, one of the Thai kings. When we first arrived, we almost took advantage of this by taking our first showers in several weeks...but the water was cold...so we took pictures while we tried to comprehend the mysterious script that had been emblazoned on the sign:
I don't know....it could be fun...
the water is flowing
Next, we drove a kilometer of pavement and half on dirt in search of a cave.
check out our super awesome dirt biking skillz
Supposedly, the cave was unlit and offered the possibility of spelunking. My friends will know that I have an unnatural affinity for spelunking, mostly because spelunking is the best word in the English language (IMHO). Unfortunately, the cave had collapsed moments before our arrival, resulting in us wandering around for an hour looking for it (translation: we couldn't find the cave. sadness). Nevertheless, there will be more spelunking! Look forward to more posts on the subject.
By this time, our bikes, unlike us, had cooled down and were ready for the climb to the summit, also unlike us. We had already tasted something of the road, and I at least was apprehensive about convincing an urban scooter that it was a hill-climbing machine. Fortunately, this was somehow not a hard sell; the little scooters did well up the mountain.*
Yes, we were wearing helmets. It's the law (in Thailand)
*that is until DC's bike just stopped working. At this point, we had a decision:
1. leave DC. this would have been bad form, as you never leave a wounded man behind
2. turn around. (this isn't really an option, I'm just listing it to give the appearance that there was an alternative to number three.
3. 2 people, 1 bike. (Let's do a little math. Honda Scooter: 220 lbs Myself: 150. 530 DC: 160. Adding another person increases the total mass of the system by 44%, making the scooter only stable at speeds much greater than it could climb with two people on it. Ridiculous.
This was the worst idea we'd yet had
So on we went, having left DC's scooter at a waterfall about halfway up, reaching the summit around thirty minutes later. There were some spectacular sights on the way up in addition to the ongoing sight of one of the most insane roads I've yet been on:
At the summit, we had the most scenic view of a country full of pollution I have ever witnessed. We could see nothing. Being at the highest point in Thailand only meant that we were on a small island of green in a smoldering ocean of hydrocarbon-derived smog. It was a sobering sight.
There would be a picture of the smog here, but it's such an off-putting sight that we're going to spare our readers the trouble. (We're working on the picture)
However, the Thai air force, realizing that the summit needed some help in the PR department, built two spectacular chedis on the other side of the summit. This is one of them:
They take their temples very seriously here.
These two temples are so far our favorite in Thailand. Built in 1989, they are tastefully decorated in shimmering copper tiles and dark stone reliefs. The inside has a single Buddah figure in the center surrounded by marble carvings depicting the life of Siddhartha Guatama, the founder of Buddhism. We took some photos at the top. Bonus points for anyone who identifies the culture we're imitating.
Now, the moment that we had been dreading had come...downhill. The only bike that didn't have puny prone-to-overheating-and-failing-shortly-before-catching-fire drum brakes was DC's bike, which had a frozen engine halfway down the mountain. However, having survived this far against all odds, we spun the roulette once more and biked down the mountain. (It was Ben's turn to carry DC. The manual bikes were much better on the downhill due to their engine-braking abilities.)
It's a good thing that cameraman Daniel Posch has both hands on the bike while we careened down the mountain.
And......we made it!*
*Dc's bike was able to make it all of the way down since it was mostly downhill. However, about 20km or so into the journey back, his bike just cut out again. We went back to find him only discovering that he had mysteriously disappeared. He later described how a local had stopped to help him, ushered him into a bike repair shop, and tried to fix his bike. He learned that no-one had oiled the bike in the last decade (decade?!?!) and the cylinder had frozen, necessitating an overnight repair job. Enterprising DC, having been abandoned by his comrades already (we thought he had gotten his bike repaired and raced past us trying to catch us) wandered into a 7-11, somehow convinced the attendants to find him a ride back to Chiang Mai, hitched a ride with a group of GPS surveyors for a power company, and turned up several hours later at our hostel. The day after, DC gave detailed instructions to the mechanic from the motorbike rental agency, who hopefully retrieved the bike and got it working again.
You just can't make this stuff up.
The Cast of Tonight’s Show
by Nathan
Welcome to the Awesome Australian Adventure Blog! This hourly* updated blog will most likely feature pictures, details, and rescue requests from our most likely adventurous travels! Failing that, we'll post funny stuff that happens. First, I should introduce our intrepid team of highly-trained bloggers and partially trained Stanford Solar Car junkies. They are, in order of relative hunger:
- Marvin! (Marvin will always be listed in this way, with an exclamation mark. Note: he just ate dinner.) Marvin! hails not from any specific team, but from the Marvin! team, which has the primary responsibility of being Marvin!. all the time.
- Ben (Ben's humor is more subtle and British, obviating the need for such punctuation.) Like Marvin!, he also just ate some dinner. Unlike Marvin!, he is no longer hungry. Ben hails from the Electrical Team, which prides itself in finding Mechanical solutions to electrical problems. They also make the solar car run. on occasion. Ben likes to spend as little time on the ground as possible. He does a good job of this.
- DC (Whose first name is not Daniel.) DC is part of every team, but mostly after everyone else has gone to sleep. It's an important role. DC is very meta, as you can tell from this meta photograph.
- Matt ("MARVIN!?!?!?") Matt is part of the mechanical team, and so enjoys long walks on the beach immediately after disassembling/reassembling the suspension for the third time tonight. Also, for the record, Matt: 0 Carbon Fiber: 4
- Nathan (still dumbfounded that wordpress is not a mill, but remains undeterred.) I'm part of the mechanical team. My role is somewhat limited to finding mechanical solutions to every damn problem everyone else comes up with. This is a picture of me pretending to be Marvin!. However, I'm not particularly good at being Marvin!, especially when it comes to eating**
*by hourly, we mean whenever we send carrier pigeons to the internet with the appropriate data. This is known to be necessary in South Africa (http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUSTRE5885PM20090909) as sending large amounts of data by carrier pigeon will be faster than the internet in some countries we will visit.
**Marvin! and Ben may have consumed twice the amount of burger than I did in one sitting. In the interest of fairness, Marvin had already had dinner.
That being said, we will try to update and post pictures of what happens when these five people encounter these five countries: Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Nepal, and Japan (just me :p). Until then, a shoutout to our esteemed team leader.
SASHA!!!!!!!