First things first, the planning stage. This little sojourn of mine into the wilderness had been progressively planned from about January. Planning not being my forte, though, I thought I’d outdone myself by convincing someone else to do it for me. All I did was hand out the instructions of “I want hard core views with soft core effort, please,” by which I meant I wanted to stroll through the hills with nary but a small day pack, spending each night in a basic-yet-hot-shower-affair guesthouse. And someone else agreed to follow these instructions, plan the destination, and even went so far as to book me on a return flight. Well, well, well, I thought, this is the way to travel. I’ve not even picked up a guidebook and I’ve got myself a trek in Nepal. But (and we all knew there would be a but) what I had not taken into proper consideration when picking my trekking partner was that Chris, another AYAD, works with the United Nations Development Project as part of the Disaster Management team, and Chris spent a certain period of his youth living out Lord of the Flies scenarios as a boy scout, and therefore Chris, unsurprisingly (to me now) and I have very different ideas on what it means to ‘stroll through’ the wilderness.
Hence my insistent declaration that I would not carry my big pack as we trekked up up up and down down down flew out the window as soon as I admitted there was no conceivable way I could fit 4 days worth of clothing and supplies including a sleeping bag into my day pack.
Ah, this looks very much like a pack on my back
Hence that despite my insistence the trek we do be gentle, taking into consideration my plummeting fitness levels, we ended up doing a trek that fit people do in 4 days, and sensible people do in 5 days, in just 3 days. (No I am not bragging, but you will have to read on to believe me on that one).
And hence that despite the fact we were trekking in a country which has the sherpa/local guide thing completely and utterly sorted so there is never any need to carry even so much as a water bottle yourself as long as you’re prepared to pay someone else to do it for you, we fell into the (what felt like) 1% of foreigners who decided not to avail ourselves of any of these services and went it completely alone.
For each of these points there came a dawning sense of realisation on my part. As for Chris, he met each of my maybe not overtly negative but definitely somewhat less than exuberant comments with the kind of enthusiasm I previously associated with the Fitness First instructors I thought I’d well and truly left in Sydney. But with one very significant difference – he understood that look on my face which said “if you even think about uttering anything so much as a word within my earshot that could be considered as encouragement to me, then I will… [insert preferred dramatic, scary, yet completely unfeasible threat in here]”.
And I appear to be going uphill with this damn pack on my back
Ok, so enough about the planning already. Let’s just sum it all up by assuming I didn’t really know what I was in for and go to the bit where I outline our (Ok, Chris’) initial plans:
Day 1 – Nayupul to Tikehedgungga
Day 2 – Tikehedgungga to Ghorepani
Day 3 – Ghorepani – Poon Hill for sunrise, then to Ghandruk
Day 4 – Ghandruk back down to Nayupul
Now begins the ‘blow by blow’ account - assume edge-of-seat position, please. I’ve adopted a ‘day by day’ approach to my prose because, for the most part, most of what is to follow comes directly from my journal entries. I did say this was self-indulgent.
Day one – Nayapul to Ghandruk
The end of day one and unsurprisingly given the amount of planning I put into this, things have not quite gone to plan.
Firstly - despite our well marked map, well trekked path, and well informed local villagers who willingly help out lost looking trekkers, we’ve managed to somehow reverse the direction of our trek by taking a wrong turn somewhere or other, and are now doing the trek the other way round. Luckily it’s no big deal, we’ll end up in all the same places, just at different times. But it does mean a change in which bits will be the hardest.
That little black spot in the middle of the pack horses there is me - going up
Secondly - despite the fact that Chris was supposedly a boy scout, and supposedly works in disaster management, and I’m supposedly of an age where I have developed an appreciation for my own mortality, we somehow decided we wouldn’t take any food with us other than an (albeit tasty) block of dark chocolate even though we hiked for over six hours. Fools.
Still going up, but wow, it's getting to be so...picturesque up here!
Thirdly – despite the fact that everything to do with the Himalayas implies a drop in temperature that could be considered significant for someone coming from a climate where sweating is as normal as blinking, I somehow made the ridiculous decision to leave my jacket behind because I thought I probably wouldn’t wear it, and I didn’t want to carry anything I didn’t have to in the pack I never wanted to carry in the first place.
Hmmm, but I'm starting to get a teensy bit over going up
So – what you would have seen had you been at the lovely guesthouse in Ghandruk we arrived at this afternoon were two very very hungry and two very very cold trekkers who spent the first hour desperately trying to go from our sweaty, wet and now cold clothes to … every single item of dry clothing we had with us because damn it is cold up here! And do this as quickly as possible because I need to eat like I haven’t needed anything in a long time. Cue moment where I briefly considered what life must be like for self confessed starvation fan Victoria Beckham, then tossed it aside so I could enjoy my garlic bread and fried vegetable noodles with relish.
And just in time Ghandruk throws a view like this at me
And now that the … somewhat negative bits are dealt with lets move right along to the fact that everywhere I have looked today, in every direction, whether up/down/back/around you name it – I have had significant difficulties wiping the smile off my face because this has been one of the best days I have had in a long time. The views have been truly stunning, and with the promise of more to come, I could be considered one of the happiest people around today.
Thoroughly enjoying one of life's pleasures... or two actually, eating and sitting down
Day two - Ghandruk to Ghorepani
Having had one of the most gorgeous experiences life offers today. I feel like a complete and utter thankless fool for the whinging I’m about to do but … hiking for nine hours, with eight of those hours involving climbing up, is hard. Really, really, really body achingly, shoulder numbingly, thigh shakingly hard. The first five to six hours of up up up up up today was the kind of hard, however, that I was prepared for. Having been fed and watered well, and waking up to mountain views, I was pretty damn eager to get back on the trail again as soon as we could. I wasn’t even daunted by the comments of our guesthouse owners who kept going on about today being a ‘long day’, and a ‘tough day’, and other such comments I was deciding to tune out since I was hell bent on embracing my new found enthusiasm for being ‘at one’ with nature.
And, sure enough, I did spend the first three hours of up happily chatting away about really important things like whether the next guest house would have garlic bread and vegetable noodles, and whether we could avoid eating the sloppy lentil soup/rice combo I’ve come to loath so much. At about the point where I was drenched in sweat and in desperate need of a loo and starting to dream about relieving my shoulders from the pack that I was never going to carry, and because Nepal is the kind of place which understands how much I need to love it, there appeared right in front of us a perfectly placed guest house with an “oohhh aaahhhh look at the valley” view
which served us splendidly warm hot fresh mint tea and, much to my relief, sold me mittens.
With our lovely, wholesome, friendly, restorative rest stop over, however, it was time once again to put on the pack and head in a northerly direction. The burst of energy from food and tea and the general sense of awe at our surroundings kept me pretty well entertained for the next few hours. Aside from the occasional grunt and moan at the incessant nature of going uphill, I was in a state of general well being which lasted for quite a while.
general state of well beingness
It lasted as we dropped down into a valley and climbed up the other side, and lasted as we crossed rocky river beds, and made our way through sleepy little villages of one or two buildings and lasted as we crossed bridges and small waterfalls and passed through green rainforesty smelling areas and lasted as we stopped for a chocolate snack on some rocks overlooking the distance we’d come and lasted and lasted and lasted until… We came to a stone staircase another three hours in and I all of a sudden could find not even a hint of well beingness in any part of me at all. I tried looking in my fingertips, under my feet, in my pockets, in my pack, in my camera bag, and finally even inside the very depths of myself and…I came up empty. Suddenly I was so full of despair, so exhausted, so certain that my legs were completely incapable of getting me any higher up than I was today, that I did the only thing one can do in these situations.
I started singing songs in my head. Cue Placebo’s cover of Kate Bush’s “Running up that hill”, cue Depeche Mode’s “My Own Personal Jesus”, cue Ben Fold’s “Such Great Heights” and on and on it went. Along with the inspiring songs (Here Comes The Sun, Beatles’ version), there were some unhelpful tracks that made their way in (Never Enough, The Cure; She’s Lost Control, Joy Division) but on the whole, I was incredibly relieved to have a mental soundtrack from which I could draw inspiration from because… there was none coming from anywhere else.
Snow! (and no, I will not stop for a photo - general state of well beingness has passed)
And the up just kept coming, and coming, and coming. And the head cold which was a mild annoyance a day before was now becoming a major issue as the air temperature dropped, altitude increased, and my tissue supply depleted. And the up just kept coming! At this point - about the point where I thought this was never, ever going to end and we were going to get stuck out here in the mountains in the cold in the snow because putting one foot in front of the other was becoming a monumental task I was not cut out for – Chris took over. Whereas our normal walking style was for him to let me go first and set the pace, the time had come for him to take the lead and hope like hell that I would follow. This was slightly hard to communicate to me, I admit, since I was beyond talking and the deafening silence from me was a strong indication that I was not in a happy place.
But, press on I did, through the combination of Chris’ patience and my sheer terror at the thought of being stuck out here in the cold (no, Gotye did not come into my head, by now my soundtrack had well and truly ended). As we crested the mountainside and headed over the ridge, I was left utterly breathless by the sensation that we were literally on top of the world, or very close to it. With valleys either side, I managed to start talking again, and use positive adjectives, superlatives even, as we took in the stunning views we were surrounded by. I was even starting to think that maybe, just maybe, this pain would all be worth it if we made it into town.
I am trying really hard here, but smiles are not my strong point right now
Since getting into town still involved about an hour of downhill (thank god!), I wasn’t crowing just yet. Which was a good thing, since this is the point where Chris hit his own set of problems with severe stomach cramps. As you can imagine, it’s rather difficult to hike with a pack on while doubled over in pain. Somehow he managed it though, and I managed to keep my tired thighs in motion, and the pair of us managed to stumble into Ghorepani after a long day of hiking for over nine hours and stumble straight into the first guest house we found and stumble straight into the beds that were so gloriously before us and from which we didn’t move for a long time.
When we did finally move, however, it was so, so worth it because 1. there was food, 2. there was a fire, and 3. there was hot water. Oh, the luxuries life offers sometimes!
Now for a good night's sleep. With a 4:30am wake up call ahead of us so we can trek up hill for an hour in the dark to catch the sun rising over the Himalayas from Poon Hill, after a day like today, we're gonna' need it.
To be continued...
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