Oh my aching…

Nature enjoys, nay craves balance. Yin and yang, light and dark, male and female. In Nepal that balance comes in a couple of forms. The first being that for every down there is an up. The second being that for every ache and pain and protesting muscle there is a moment of amazing beauty.

Having virtually forgotten that I’d arranged it I was surprised to find out one night last week that I would be on a bus to Pokhara in the morning and starting a four day trek in the mountains the day after. It meant some rather hurried and unprepared goodbyes between Liz and me as she was finishing up her six weeks and would be on a bus back to Kathmandu the day that I was returning to Chitwan. It was entirely possible that our buses would pass somewhere on the road. Me going away for almost a week also threw our carefully constructed teaching plans out the window and left me with the scary prospect of a number of days on my own. Small children can sense fear, I understand and I almost made the decision to stay rather than do the trek.

After several hours on the bus the next day I was sure I’d made the wrong decision to go.

But everything has an end, another of those great balancing acts of nature, and eventually I made it to Pokhara. This was another of the potential places I could have been sent rather than Chitwan and I was keen to catch up with the two girls that had been my companions during the orientation week and also on the rafting trip. It turned out that they had a nice little set up with ensuites and hot showers in their rooms.

Pokhara is the second city in Nepal and has a much more laid back and relaxed feel than Kathmandu. It is set in a valley, like Kathmandu, but has a striking backdrop of the Annapurna mountain range as well as a large lake to give it (I imagine) a Switzerland feel. Of course that feel is purely from the setting and a few moments in the streets will bring home that you are in the Himalayas.

I haven’t done it yet but I feel that a quick look through the Nepali phone book would confirm that 90% of businesses start with either, Namaste, Himalaya, or Everest. Walking around, the admittedly tourist part of Pokhara, it seemed that nearly every business was either a restaurant, selling souvenirs, or selling trekking supplies. And they all had business names starting with one the three abovementioned words.

With Japan in the middle of winter and then a couple of weeks in Europe in their so called spring still to come on this trip I was debating whether to buy a warm jacket and figured that trekking supply shops may be the place to look. I wandered up and down the streets and elicited many prices but it always came down to two different prices for what seemed to be the same items. When I asked what the difference was one woman finally told me, in sotto voice, “This is good one, this cheap one made in Nepal.” In the end I bowed to the size of my bag and carrying capacity and decided against getting a “genuine” North Face jacket for the princely sum of $25.

I ended my first day in Pokhara by sitting beside the lake, watching the sunset and trying to convince a determined Tibetan woman that I had been here some fifteen years ago and already had all the Tibetan souvenirs and handicrafts that I needed. She tried really hard to point out that I hadn’t bought them from her fifteen years ago and that they must be of much inferior quality.

That night I got to stay at the home of the manager of the Pokhara project and had my own room with ensuite and hot shower. But the highlight of the night was being able to watch New Zealand beat Pakistan in the last on the One Day games while sitting on the floor with the manager and his wife.

An early start the next morning and the two girls and I clambered into a minivan along with our guide and porter. Two people whose sole job was to get us up and down a mountain in one piece and in the prerequisite amount of time. I couldn’t help thinking that we were being over accommodated.

The van took us out of Pokhara and dropped us beside another lake. This one seemed to be supplying water to a large collection of fish ponds and the fish ponds were supplying large amounts of fish to men who were sitting and gutting them on old wooden planks and tree stumps beside the road. I found the same thing in Laos where the demand for fish has far outstripped the ability of the wild to supply it and the fish you eat in a restaurant has invariably been farmed. I can remember one Luang Prabang restaurant that had both wild and farmed fish on the menu and the price difference was considerable.

We shouldered our packs, looked up into a clear blue sky that promised a warm day ahead and put feet to track. Our guide pointed up into the mountains and tried to show us the way we would be going.

“The third mountain range.”

“The one with the snow?” I asked a little impressed but also a little incredulous.

“No. The third one”

“Oh. The little one there?”

“Yes, that one.”

It was a little disappointing to look at. The snow capped Annapurna’s put all the other hills, mountains and peaks to shame but, as we were to find out, they also gave a false sense of scale to all the others and while we may not have required crampons and anti-yeti spray we were still going to be getting up there.

The first ascent had me struggling for breath and rueing not having had that knee surgery in my twenties. Sweat was running down me in a way it hadn’t since the heat and humidity of Laos and my pack must have soaked most of it up because it seemed to weigh two or three times as much as it had at the start. By the time I collapsed onto the balcony of the Lakeview Restaurant I was in a bad way.

From there it was up all the way and we found ourselves climbing a combination of paths and stone stairways. The paths I could handle, the stairs were hell on earth. If you ever plan to come to Nepal and trek then my best advice would be to find the tallest building you can some time before you leave and just spend a couple of hours every day climbing the stairs. Both up and down.

But, like I said at the beginning, nature loves a balance and every time that I stopped to catch my breath or to let the sharp stabbing pains in my knees subside I was able to just stare, in open mouthed awe, at all that was around me. Rather than looking up at the snow caps we now seemed to be looking across at them and with the aid of the zoom on my camera (it weighed a ton but I am so glad that I took it with me) my photos almost seem as if I must have been standing in the snow field to have taken them.

We climbed through a variety of different vegetation zones that I am embarrassingly ignorant about naming but I could recognize each change as it happened. Every so often we would reach a ridge and I was able to look back and catch a glimpse of our starting point beside the lake and be amazed by how far away and how far below us it seemed to be. The pain and discomfort went on but the scenery made it all worthwhile.

At one point we stopped in the large, goat strewn front yard of a house and had a Nepali family stare at us in a quite unmoved way as we shed our packs, collapsed on the grass and attempted to catch our breaths.

Camp that night was in a “home-stay” that may once have been someone’s home but was now set up to accommodate trekkers. We spent the last remaining hours of sunlight stretched out on the grass with our books watching, with a certain embarrassment on my part, as little old women would traipse past us heading further up the hill and doing it all while carrying massive baskets full of supplies supported by nothing more than a thin strap across their foreheads.

Dinner was the obligatory dhal bat and then we retired to bed but not before I managed to take a few more amazing photos of the sun setting and lighting the snow caps. The last thing I did before heading to my room was to pat the tiger fighting dog that was to protect us while we slept. Tiger fighting? Absolutely true, I was assured by our guide as he pointed out a gnarly scar on the dogs back leg, the result of the dog having fought a tiger. He said this with a completely straight face, which is the same way that he had been telling us that there was only a little bit more up to go all day.

After a breakfast of toast (or more technically, warm bread) and plum jam we set off for another day of trekking. I had woken up feeling surprisingly good. Maybe the bed of a board covered in a blanket was deliberately hard and I would have woken up feeling worse after a night on a posturepedic mattress and with a pillow stuffed with more than two tissues. Whatever the reason, I attacked the trail with vigour and enjoyed the day. As it turned out, the two girls enjoyed the day more too, which was especially good after one of them had really struggled the day before and had genuinely considered turning back.

We walked through villages that seemed to have little rhyme or reason for being where they were apart from the vertiginous terraces that had been carved into the hillsides and were now either full of mature wheat plants or were being harvested by woman bent double and slowly cutting handfuls at a time with small sickles before laying them neatly on the ground behind them. The terraces are marvels of engineering and resourcefulness in the face of hardship and necessity.

That night’s accommodation was in another home-stay that was actually more of a hostel. This time we arrived so early that it was quite a wait for lunch and I amused myself by sitting on the balcony outside our rooms and watching life in a small Nepali village as it happened in the intersection below me. To be honest not a lot happened. There were three small stores that all seemed to be selling the same thing and I’m convinced that I never saw anyone buy anything the entire time I sat there. Life seemed more a series of slow walks by elderly people who would sit and chat with shop owners and anyone else they passed. One man sat on his front step and wove a large mat out of reeds. Goats, chickens and buffalos would saunter in and out of buildings.

A few moments of excitement came when I discovered a bee hive attached to the balcony railing just a few feet from where I was sitting, a discovery that came about when a swarm of bees flew past me and settled into the hive amid much buzzing and jostling.

Another moment of excitement was a bus arriving. Up what I had obviously mistaken for a rutted walking track but what was actually the local main road came a local bus of the type I was all too familiar with. It stopped at the intersection and a number of people got off, including one man who was carefully carrying a window sized pane of glass, his hands protected by nothing more than a couple of rags. How far he had nursed the glass and how many heart stopping moments he had had as the bus worked its way up the hill and over all those bumps I will never know but it was intact as he got off and he carried it carefully away to where it would undoubtedly become the only glazed window in the village.

I had another good night’s sleep on another covered board and we set off, full of toast and plum jam, for our third day.

Quick note. This place had had a toilet that not even Stephen King would have been able to describe the horror of.

We had been warned that this day would be our hardest and it was easy to see why we had been warned. It was pretty much all up hill. The funny thing was that I found it easier than the first day. Maybe I had worked off the last layer of excess body fat that riding by bicycle every day had left or maybe I was just getting into the workload and enjoying the view. Either way I powered ahead of even the guide and would often find myself waiting on ridges for the rest to catch up. I was so into it that I even missed the dead cow just off the path that caused a long discussion about potential tigers between the two girls.

The only thing that slightly marred the day was the overcast conditions that kept us from seeing the bigger mountains, even though they were so tantalisingly close. A short time before we were due to stop it even started to rain and I ended up spending the rest of the afternoon sitting on the front porch of the little guesthouse (honest enough to call itself that) watching clouds scud by in the sky above us and, surreally enough, scud by through the valley below us. I went for a walk in the light drizzle at one point and just stood on a path for a long time watching as thick white clouds poured like whipped cream from valley to valley below me.

The next morning (porridge!!) and it wasn’t raining above us but looked to be raining below us. This was our last day and we had been told that it was down all the way back to the trail head. What they didn’t mention was that it was straight down.

A short walk through a few villages and we suddenly found ourselves at the top of a sheer staircase of rocky steps. If your knees hurt going up then they sure as &%& hurt going down. Again I found myself in the lead, maybe because of my leadership qualities and goat like surefootedness or maybe because I could find all the loose and slippery stones first and warn the others with my death screams. Or maybe they just didn’t want me at the back and landing on them if I did fall.

At first the stones were dry and it was just a matter of looking out for the loose ones and the ones not big enough to accommodate my petite feet but after a little while we came down into rain and they got wet and slippery as well.

Did I say, down into the rain? Sounds strange but we were high enough when we started that it was raining below us and we walked down into the clouds. This was a truly strange feeling. It started out as a mist then became a fog and then gradually turned into genuine rain as we got low enough for the fog to coalesce into fat drops.

We not only passed through the cloud and rain level but we also passed through the monkey level. Out in front again I was surprised by a large tree branch just off the path suddenly thrashing around. Thinking tigers I peered through the branches and spotted a troop of monkeys that were leaping from branch to branch. I waited for the others to catch up by I was probably the luckiest one to scare them initially and set off a chain reaction of athletic prowess.

A few hair raising slips later and we were down to flat ground. The path wound through wheat fields and paddy fields for another couple of hours and we were ignored by the buffalo, evaded by the chickens and entreated to supply chocolate by the small children who seemed to have a sixth sense that we were passing and would stand on their front porches or on stone walls and greet us with “Namaste…chocolate?” That phrase somehow had become one word and sounded more like “Namastechocolate?”

There was one more uphill section before we found our minivan parked beside a small roadside shop and we sat under the tin roof and polished off cold bottles of coke (at a highly inflated price) before settling back for the ride into Pokhara.

My memories of the last trek I did, three odd weeks long all those years ago, didn’t really prepare me for the discomfort of the first day of this one. I do remember back then struggling at first but quickly becoming used to the workload and then really enjoying it. The same thing happened this time and the last three days were extremely enjoyable. I’m glad I did it.