Nepal

Waking up in the early morning, it was extra difficult to climb out of our sleeping bag as it’s gotten ridiculously cold as we trek further into the mountains. Checking the temperature, it was only 6C in the room! Brushing and washing is now a freezing cold chore as the water is probably colder than 6C. That’s life in the mountains I guess!

The morning walks are usually the easiest, as you’re well rested from last night and you have a belly full of breakfast (which has been massive pancakes almost everyday!) to keep you going. Before you know it, you’ve walked 2hrs and hit a stop. This stop was slightly different, as the town was actually only 1 hotel instead of the 5-6 you’d usually see, but the best part was this village has an apple farm! It’s been a while since we’ve had fruits, and we need some vitamins. It also helps that the apples were crispy and delicious. Yay.

We continued to trek higher and higher in altitude, and you can feel the vegetation change. The trees become taller, and evergreens start to dominate the landscape, and glaciers slowly come into view. Think so far, this part of the trek has been the nicest, most “in-our-element” kind of trek, until we realized “Oh boy, this looks totally like Canada eh?”. And for lunch, we ate at a hotel built out of wooden logs, and one tourist made a loud remark “Wow, wooden log cabins, now we’re really in Canada!”. Turns out she was Australian. Continue reading →

As we get deeper into the circuit and higher in elevation, it gets cold real quick once the sun sets. Dining close to dawn at 6:45am, we had some corn flakes with apples. I’m not quite sure how it works, but corn flakes in the middle of Nepal’s mountain ranges seem pretty impressive to me. Problem was, I got pretty hungry pretty quickly.

Today’s walk required an elevation change of about 1100m, and knowing this it made every descent twice as painful, as you know later on you’d have to make up for it! After a steep climb up hill, we stopped at the top of the section with a rest stop for porters. Built out of several wooden wooden logs put clumsily together, it looked like those drug manufacturing sites you see on Discovery Channel with a wooden fire burning some blackened pots and selling what looked like to be Nepalese donuts. The craziest part though: they have Snickers for sale. Whoever is the sales guy for Snickers, they sure are doing a good job, considering there’s nothing else remotely recognizable or appetizing that you’d want to eat after gasping for air in the middle of a mountain trail.

Snickers seems to be the food of choice in the hills, along with Red Bull. Talk about a sugar high…. Continue reading →

Wanting to make distance today, we wanted to leave at 7am, but problem was our porter was still nowhere to be seen. A bit upset at the lack of commitment, we left about 45mins past our scheduled departure.

Despite the early morning, the trails were already full of people. Today was an uphill climb, and the trails have turned into a dusty, rocky road. As the tourism industry continues to grow, that also increases the facilities and goods needed and the infrastructure must follow suit. Before long, roads will probably be connected around the Annapurna Circuit, relegating trekking to a less popular alternative than the 2-day scenic Jeep ride. Why would anyone want to walk 6hrs a day for 12days to see some you can see in 2 days?

We stopped at 10am for a rest and some tea and biscuits (how English, I must say!), while being harassed by clucking chickens and a drunk man. Again, this was 10am. Right now, it is the biggest festival of the year in Nepal, Dasain, which is equivalent to CNY or Christmas, but getting drunk at 10am is just too crazy for any standard. Continue reading →

Waking up at 4am to the sounds of people creaking their doors open, and wandering about outside past the paper thin walls, we fell in and out of consciousness for another two hours before succumbing to the noise. Also, we ordered breakfast to be served at 6:30am so we needed to wake up anyways. Breakfast was a delicious apple pancake, omelette and a type of Nepalese naan bread while sitting atop a verandah, with clear views of a snow-capped mountain far off in the horizon. Compared to other hiking trips we’ve had, this is luxury! Continue reading →

Too excited for our trek, we barely got 3hrs of sleep before waking up in a daze at 530am. Our porter met us at our hotel, and a short taxi ride got us to the bus station which was already jammed pack with people. As the Dasain festival continues, workers in Kathmandu begin the journey back home.

The bus station was hustling and bustling, and it felt like we were at the heart of it all, weaving between locals yelling for tickets and carts selling bananas. So far we’ve seen two fruits available for sale, bananas and apples. We were glad we had a porter to guide us through this as all the signage was in Nepalese, if there were any at all. The buses don’t have any specific numbers, or signs telling you where they’re going, but people hopped on and off, paying the bus attendants whenever they were asked.

Bus attendants have earned our respect. Hopping around in flip flops, he’d climb to the roof of the bus to pack people’s baggage, and the bus would just drive along at a slow speed. He’d climb down the ladder and hop onto the ground continue calling for more people to get onto the bus (no tickets required). Once full, and we don’t mean all the seats were full kind of full, but that every nook and cranny was filled from end to end and people were literally standing at the doorway, before the bus would start moving. The bus would reverse out into the nightmarish traffic while the attendant helped leading the way with rhythmic pounding on the sides of the bus. And once the car starts moving forward, the attendant would hop onto the moving bus and stand at the doorway, with his body being outside of the bus. All of this was done in a natural, fluid motion like a dance of sorts. Hop off, run around yelling for passengers, and catch the forward moving bus if nobody would come. Continue reading →