Everybody knows the expression "ugly American," but we discovered other "ugly" travelers as we readied ourselves to leave Kathmandu for Pokara, a city approximately 7 hours away where tourists head before the start of their trek into the mountains. As there's only one departure time for Pokara, all the tourists gather at the bus depot at approximately 5am. As we sat quietly sipping our tea, a loud group of English speakers sat down at a table near us. One particularly annoying woman kept repeating in a loud voice (inbetween bites into her danish and chain smoking her cigarettes) how great a packaged danish was. Luckily, she and her group of friends ended up on a different bus from us.
Upon arriving in Pokara, we were greeted by the usual cast of characters trying to get us to come to their guesthouse, promising us a wonderful room for a great price. They were even willing to drive us there at no charge. Sure enough, after seeing the room, the price given to us ahead of time was suddenly inflated, but was then magically reversed as soon as we were out the door. It's all part of the game they like to play with tourists.
Our next order of business was to secure the services of a porter to carry our gear on our 6-day trek into the mountains. We walked from agency to agency until we found someone with whom we felt comfortable. It was especially important for us to secure someone who could understand that Marc would need special attention along the trek. We agreed to meet Ponkaz, our porter, the next morning at the office and begin our adventure.
We then wandered down the main street and sat at a sidewalk cafe for a snack. We ordered two OJs from our pint sized waiter, a 9-year-old local with a pretty good command of English. He was in charge of taking orders while his 5-year-old brother was in charge of squeezing fruit. Twenty minutes later two buckets of juice arrived at our table. That night we dined fire-side at Lemon Tree restaurant. As with Kathmandu, Pokara only has sporadic electricity.
After a 90 minute drive the next morning to Nayapul, we hopped out of the taxi along with Ponkaz and prepared for our trek in the Annapurna region. We weaved through the hoards of Korean tourists with their massive SLR cameras and giant duffel bags. That day, we came across some local children who danced for us:
In addition to seeing dancing children, along the trail we saw donkey trains and shephards with their flocks of goats and sheep.
Seven hours after leaving the taxi, we climbed the stone stairs and arrived at our first tea house in the small town of Ghandruk. We weren't sure what to expect and were pleasantly surprised. As soon as we got to our room, Ponkaz came to get our food order for dinner. We told him we weren't hungry yet and that we'd order when we got to the dining room. What he failed to explain was that the kitchen takes quite a long time to prepare the food. Therefore, it is customary to order your meal ahead of schedule. As we were uninformed, we ended up waiting a long time for our order that evening. After dinner we made sure to give the kitchen our breakfast order so we wouldn't have to wait in the morning.
Note: The Nepali government has made a strong effort to encourage trekkers to refill their water bottles at their tea houses where water is purified as a way to avoid the waste of plastic bottles. This allowed us to drink as much water as we wanted without worrying about having to carry a lot of weight.
After a quick stop at a local museum, we hit the trail onto our next destination. It was a nice sunny day and we got to sunbathe during our lunch stop at Hillside Paradise, a restaurant on the trail. The owners had a dog around whose neck they hung a cow bell. Just when we thought we were having lunch with a cow, the dog turned up.
During our second day of the trek, we came across a group of local teenagers who were trekking with their teacher. The girls in the group took turns interviewing Marc. They wanted to know where we were from, among other things, and took notes of the answers. We managed to take a photo with them.
We continued our trek until we reached a village named Baan That. At this point, the days were fairly warm out, but the nights were very cold. Additionally, at this altitude it is easy to become dehydrated, so we were both drinking a lot of water and hot tea. Unfortunately, at this particular tea house, the toilet was located down a flight of stairs several feet away from the rooms. Since we went to sleep at roughly 9pm, Marc was up a couple of times in the middle of the night to take care of nature's business. In an attempt to save himself from falling down the stairs, he merely walked outside the room and "watered the flowers."
On our third day, we had to climb up and down hundred of stairs. We breaked at a place named "Lonely Planet" of all names. The local women there were sitting around a picnic table talking. We asked permission to take a photo with them, but apparently they didn't realize that would actually involve them having to look at the camera. Here's the result:
The rest of the day we walked through a forest to the summit. We were feeling a bit silly by this point:
We then descended to Gorepani where we spent the night. That evening we sat by the fire to stay warm.
Day four: We woke up exceedingly early to watch the sunrise. Once again, there were many stairs involved. Considering it was early in the morning, still dark, and all the stairs were going up, it was difficult to get to the top of Poon Hill. Marc was not feeling well and ended up waiting alongside the middle of the trail while Sharon continued up to the top. Although this exercise involved a lot of early morning sweat, it was worthwhile:
On my way back down the trail, I found Marc shivering from the cold. His lack of movement combined with the outside temperature left him feeling miserable.
Side Note: Did we forget to mention Marc's condition? Back in Kathmandu, Marc had experienced some "gastro-intestinal" distress. After loading up on Immodium, he was "stuffed up" for several days. Consequently, on the trek we stopped at a Red Cross firstaid station where we purchased a laxative. Within a couple of hours, Marc was contributing back to nature. Later that night at the tea house, Marc would spend the majority of the time perched on his thrown. For the next several days, at any and all hours of the day/night, Marc would carry a roll of toilet paper for self-evident purposes. Picture this: a blind guy stumbling around in the pitch darkness of the night with nothing more than his TP roll looking for a toilet. Marc would like to thank the makers of Purell (antibacterial hand gel) for providing him with a sense of cleanliness despite the lack of soap at the tea houses.
As if we hadn't been faced with enough stairs already, that day we had to walk down an endless number of stairs for a total of 5 hours. Believe it or not, it's actually a lot harder going down than going up. We finally reached Sikha where we spent the night.
More stairs awaited us the following day. After four hours of that, we were thrilled to finally reach Tatopani. We put our belongings down in the Trekkers' Lodge where we had a quick lunch, and headed to the nearby hot springs. We got to soak for several hours to soothe our aching bones.
We had one more day left on our trek, a day which involved travel via several vehicles that would bring us back to Pokara. To start off, we woke up early to get to an area where we would catch a jeep that would connect to our bus. We waited 90 minutes for the jeep driver to gather up enough passengers to fill up the vehicle. We drove for about 15 minutes and suddenly the jeep broke down. We were told not to wait for the jeep to get fixed as it could be a long while. So we did what we had been doing for the past 5 days - walked to town. Ponkaz assured us we could catch another jeep there. Sure enough, though, there was a road block as the locals were fighting over some issue. No one knew how long it would be before this issue would get resolved. After waiting for a while we decided to start walking yet again.
After walking for 30 minutes, the locals were able to reach some agreement and consequently removed the barriers from the road so that vehicles could pass. That meant that jeeps were now running again. We jumped on board one which finally brought us to Beni - the bus station. We began our bus journey, but after 2.5 hours, we reached a jam in the road. It turned out that several hours earlier a bus had overturned and fell down the embankment. The locals were attempting to bring the bus back onto the road from the river below. This would hold us up an additional three hours. We were just thankful that it wasn't our bus that got overturned, especially after hearing that six of the passengers had died.
We were finally on our way again. After this never-ending day, we made it to Pokara, said goodbye to Ponkaz, and checked into the Pushpa guesthouse.
Our biggest disappointment for this trek turned out to be our porter. We initially liked Ponkaz because we felt he had a good command of the English language and assured us he would help Marc along the way. However, he would constantly walk ahead of us, leaving us to walk by ourselves. We asked him several times to stay nearby, but he seemed uninterested in what we wanted. This earned him the nickname "Punk Ass" (similar to his given name), which we would use to talk about him whenever he would abandon us. This was one more reason we were glad to be back to civilization.
Although this 6-day trek was more difficult than we would have liked, it was rewarding. We saw incredible views, hiked up and down more stairs than we care to recall, and best of all - we can say it's behind us. Maybe next time we'll research an easier trail, but there is a good chance that we will have a "next time."
The sign at the Nice View restaurant summed it up best:
(NEPAL: Never Ending Peace And Love)
To see more photos, visit: grossmintblog.shutterfly.com
1 comment:
You two are such troopers!
Post a Comment