A word to the wise...

I'm headed to India tomorrow. So if any of my readers have thoughts, suggestions, ideas, etc, please shoot me an email or comment. I'm going to be in Delhi first, then Goa/Karnataka, then Hyderabad, Andra Pradesh, and at the end, Kolkatta.

Scenes around the city

I spent the day yesterday hanging out with the brother of one of my best friends from university. Here are some interesting photos:

Nepal's constitutional crisis

So for anyone who's interested in all things Nepal besides the Himalayas, there's a constitutional crisis going on. Here's a piece I wrote for the Inquirer about it:

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/nation_world/20120527_Nepal_goes_to_the_wire_on_writing_constitution.html

Muktinath, Kagbeni, and the end of the trek

Headed down to Muktinath

 Muktinath - Hotel Bob Marley in Ranipauwa after descending the 1800 meters from Thorung-La – sweet relief. I’d been wearing the same pants for nearly a week, and my skin felt like it was covered with seven or eight layers of sweat (who wants to take cold showers in 40 degree weather? Not me!).

So I peeled the stuff off, and huddled under a hot, blasting shower, and let it haul the grime out of my pores.

Afterwards, I hurried out onto the hotel’s roof deck, and downed a couple of drafts with my fellow trekkers. It was a heavy brew, and I’d been avoiding alcohol for the entire trek (it can exacerbate altitude sickness). The trek had gotten me into great shape, but after ten days of hard walking, the long descent, and the high mountain air, I had about as much tolerance as when I was 17.

The draft went straight to my head, so after just half an hour I crawled to bed and blissful sleep.

Ranipauwa, which sits adjacent to Muktinath, (Nepal’s second most important holy site) sits on top of a natural gas jet tucked behind a small natural fountain. Ages ago, someone lit the gas jet (which is housed in its own shrine), and now, if you listen carefully, you can see and hear the water rushing past the small azure flame.

Hotel Bob Marley

Some of the 108 fountains with animal heads in Muktinath

Muktinath is also the home of two other temples – one Hindu, the other Buddhist. (Tibetan prayer flags cover a hill a huge swath of hill above the shrine like massive, technicolored spider webbing.)

I spent the morning after the descent wandering through Muktinath. Yuvash hopped on a jeep (a road runs all the way from the site south to Naya Pul and beyond) to Jomsom, and from there, flew to Kathmandu. 

But I wasn’t done trekking just yet.

In Paraguay, I’d met a former PC Nepal volunteer who’d told me that Kagbeni, just after Muktinath on the western side of the pass, was “heaven on earth.” It was high praise from a guy who’d spent two years in Nepal and so it was there that I headed, three Belgians in tow.

The view of Kagbeni from the wheat fields

We took a back road south to Chyang, past a series of irrigated rice fields that appeared out of nowhere in the still barren landscape. (The mountains that I’d passed through and around shield the whole region from rain.)

In Chyang, I saw the ancient wattle-and-daub fort of a dynastic prince, and an excited local stopped us to pepper us with questions about where we were going and how long we’d been trekking. And then he pointed at a decrepit looking tree just left of us.

The road to Kagbeni. Unreal.

Kagbeni, the oasis. Note the silver riverbed to the right.

“It’s been here for 1300 years,” he said – no small feat for the pathetic amount of rain the region must get.

From there we continued up the barren trail. The landscape remained stubbornly weird – shades of Utah’s Bryce Canyon – long, brown hills, huge, curving into the deep canyon to the south. Gusting blasts of wind spat pebbles into my cheeks and felt as if it might lift me off the ground, and all around were the gnarled mounds of stratified rock, the play-doh sculptures of some infant god.

Street view of Kagbeni

The hike, which was supposed to take two hours, lasted almost four. It turns out we’d taken a wrong turn and headed off the map, to the very border of forbidden Upper Mustang, a prohibited area in northern Nepal where foreigners have to pay a $500 fee just to enter the region.

A little pricey for my non-existent post Peace Corps salary.

Finally, we came to a long line of bluffs overlooking a huge riverbed. (Nepal is a tiny country, but the natural hugeness is disconcerting and almost disturbing.) North, the canyons opened into Upper Mustang, while below us, Kagbeni, an oasis of barley and wheat fields surrounded by barren fields of salt flats and and sand.

The village felt impossibly old, a maze of twisting corridors, mangy yaks, and high walls. The Belgians and I stopped at “the Red House,” owned by a guy named Tenjin Thakuri. The structure was 350 years old, with original paintings adorning the walls of the dining room. Tucked around the corner was Thakuri’s personal temple, a hidden room sheathed in red curtains and rugs, with flickering gold lamps and a 10-ft-tall Golden Buddha. (Unfortunately, he asked me not to take photos.)  

Thakuri said life in Kagbeni had been changing recently. “Not that big of a change, but it’s a change,” he said. The road came to the town four years ago, bringing with it more luxurious guest houses, Illy coffee, and other tastes of the outside world. “And the types of tourists have changed,” he said. “before, we had different types of tourists, people on long treks. Now these people come for short treks” [usually by flying from Jomsom and walking for just a few days,] he said.

Looking into Mustang

Tractors ply the riverbed. (Mustang is a special construction zone, whatever that means). And after the pass, the Belgians and I were alone in Kagbeni, (but for the most zonked out stoner I have EVER laid eyes on – a wastrel with long hair and a ratty mustache – and his altogether-too-sweet-c’mon-chica-you-can-do-better girlfriend.)

Thakuri, told me a little about life in Kagbeni, looking out of place – but stylish – in a black leather jacket and scarf.

Three mayors run the place, he said, rotating every year. “he [the acting mayor] chooses a council, look after the fields and tell when to plant, and harvest… If anything happens (like a crime) we go to his house. He puts butter lamps out every day at the temple.”

The Belgians and I wandered through the city, at one point cutting through lime green fields of barley (and then hopping a wall to escape a thuggish looking mastiff).

The next morning, I shouldered my pack (growing ever lighter as I finished munching my way through the massive bag of trail mix and chocolate bars I’d brought with me), wishing I had a day or a week more to stay in Kagbeni. One of the Belgians and I walked to Jomsom, where the news startled us that a small plane had crashed earlier that day – we saw the wreckage in the hill above the airport.

We might have kept trekking if there hadn’t been a road. But motorcycles and buses kept zipping by us, destroying the magic of farther north (and higher up). Worse, we checked the internet. Suddenly, our plans to continue farther south on foot seemed ridiculous. We hopped a bus and traveled to the town of Marpha (famous for its Tibetan settlers and apple cider.)

We spent the night devouring pizza and curried mutton and drinking (semi) dark Ghorka beer. The next day, it was time to leave.

I hung out the next morning waiting for a bus, then jolted down the mountain for nine agonizing hours, finally arriving in Pokhara at 1am.

And then, a night’s sleep, a glorious shave, and a hot and sticky ride back to Kathmandu and civilization.

The Pass!

On the walk up

I spent three days in Manang waiting for the penicillin to evict that pernicious bacterial infection from my lungs.

It was a relief to sling on my backpack, grab my hiking stick, and shake the knots and stiffness out of my body. But I was apprehensive – Thorung-La loomed large, equal parts “I’m going to cross one of the highest passes in the world!” and “Oh God, that’s high, am I going to be able to breathe???”

And the air WAS thin. Yuvash and I walked with the Israeli and Aussie backpackers we’d linked up with in Manang. We made slow progress – as long as we kept our steps slow and steady, the hiking didn’t pose too much of a problem. But upwards climbs or a faster pace reduced us into gasping gulps of air.

The landscape was about as stringent as the air – scrubby, dry views where green patches of grass looked like calm oases.

From High Camp

We stopped in Yak Kharka, a couple of hours outside of Manang. Four men were playing dice on a bedraggled Yak pelt, rattling the dice in a small bowl and slamming them onto the pelt with a high-pitched yelp.

I devoured some vile, greasy noodles while they played, and after lunch we made another quick high to Letdar, where we spent the night in a lodge with some Belgians and Frenchmen. I also ran into a contingent of adventure skiers on their way back from a trip. One of things that had puzzled me on my trek was the stubborn lack of Americans, and suddenly I couldn’t escape the surreal barrage of “Dude!” and Colorado skiing-talk from these boys from Telluride.

The next morning we set out for Thorung Phedi (4200 meters), where we started seeing melting piles of snow, and the color palette devolved to brown, white, gray, and blue. We continued to High Camp, where we would spend the night before hiking for the pass the next day.

You can see high camp to the right

Crazy, huh?

The hotel had been planted in cleft high above the river, which snaked its way south below us. It was a compound of three buildings surrounded by huge piles of shale which climbers would scale to get a scrap more altitude and ever more epic and beautiful photos.

I scaled to the top of one, crowned by rock towers other trekkers had built for good luck, and a series of shrines adorned with streams of Tibetan prayer flags, the once vibrant colors fading beneath the harsh mountain sunlight.

The whole valley spread out below. A scattering of mountains on my left looked like a series of craggy spikes. In front, a whole shelf of peaks wreathed in clouds. And all around, the brown and black scree, like unroasted coffee beans.

I spent the night buried under two blankets (which seemed to have more dust than stuff, but no matter).

Headed to the Pass

The next morning Yuvash and I headed for the pass. We started at 5:30 – we’d been warned that if you cross the pass too late, the winds make the pass almost impossible.

The air was startlingly clear, and the peaks were haloed with light from the sun that hadn’t yet risen above them. My memory of that portion of the trek is more scattered flashbacks – the wheezing and gulping in the paper-thin air, skidding across the icy track, the almost instant transition from mostly dirt to above the snowline.

A teashop appeared out of nowhere, one of the two way stations put in place for weary trekkers. Two ponies passed by me, steam shooting out of their nostrils like geysers, their riders whooping as they charged up the mountain.

And finally, the sun crested the peaks, puncturing the icy chill.

After one long last climb (where there always seemed to be ONE MORE ridge just head, we arrived at the top! It was sort of hard to believe, a bit of an anti-climax after the 10 days that Yuvash and I had spent sweating our through to get there. A teahouse (maybe the world’s highest?) was selling tea at 150 rupees a cup. I stripped off my sweat sodden shirt and changed into a new one, gulped down some tea, chocolate, and Ibuprofen (the altitude was giving me a headache that wouldn’t quit) took the required snaps. 

MADE IT!

From Whence We Came.

Me and Yuvash, my intrepid trekking buddy

To Muktinath

The views, as at High Camp, were unreal. A long line of prayer flags, and behind us, the icy, snowy peaks. In front, Mustang (Nepal’s closest region to Tibet), and the nearly 2km drop to Muktinath, hidden in a rain shadow that left whole mountains devoid even of scrub. There, there were mountains as well, soaring above a thin line of recently formed clouds.

I started down to Muktinath once my toes started going numb. My knees started aching almost immediately. 

The descent is 1800 meters, most of it sharp angled switchbacks.

Three hours later, I was in Muktinath, with its hot running water. Yuvash and I headed for the restaurant – and the bar. I soon found myself in heaven - slurping down a beer and munching my way through a Yak burger (an immediate, unbeatable argument against vegetarianism).

Tomorrow: Last entry!

Chest goop in Manang - Part three

I woke with a start, almost choking, and bolted out of bed, moving for the bathroom with determination and a little bit of panic. Once inside, I almost immediately started coughing – wet, goopy hacks, until a wad of malicious green goo rocketed out of my upper respiratory passages and collided with a wet “thwack” against the white porcelain.

I had been worried about altitude sickness from the beginning of the trek. But my biggest challenge ended up being not the thin air, but a vicious little beasty that took up residence in my lungs while I was sleeping inGhyaru. Perhaps it was the cold, or unsanitary conditions, or the dry mountain air, but when I left Ghyaru, I was feeling off-balance, and I my voice had the rasp of a middle aged jazz crooner whose vocal cords have marinated in a lifetime’s abuse of cigarette smoke and whisky.

The trail to Manang, the capital of the district below Thorung-La, was another day of beautiful trails. I traveled upwards overlooking Ghyaru, which in the distance looked like a little pile of scattered bricks against a patchwork of barley fields and denuded hills.

But I couldn’t really appreciate the view. I found my energy sapped, and I’d started to cough, weird chest rattlers punctuated by little phlegm missiles. Already tired by the ever-more thinning mountain air, I was losing steam faster and faster.

The trail to Manang continued through Ngawal, with its lush green hills and temples. In the middle of town, a massive tree stood guard over the main line of prayer wheels. It curved through a long plain punctuated by scattered pines and pint-sized coniferous bushes, and past weird otherworldly rock formations.

On the road to Manang

Then, to Mungi, where I gulped down a glass of sea-buckthorn juice, made from a Himalayan berry, which (in juice form) tastes like a cross between a mango and an orange. Half an hour later my friends and I reached Braka, and stopped for lunch at a local bakery. Heaven – which we demolished with almost maniacal efficiency – came in the form of a collection of pies, croissants, and cinnamon buns.

We lolled in the sun for a few minutes, loathe to shoulder those packs once again. But finally, we threw them on, and made the last short dash to Manang, 3500 meters up, isolated from everything.

The road into Manang

The city – basically one long track filled with trekking hotels, a small cultural museum, and a bunch of shops hawking everything from laundry soap to knee braces to a schizophrenic assortment of books (I found everything from Hunger Games to the philosophical teachings of the Dalai Lama).

Luckily, it also had a small health post of the Himalayan Rescue Association of Nepal, where the next day (after a phlegmy night) I was able to buy some penicillin. The doctor there forbade me from trekking for a day or two, so I cooled my heels in the Tilicho Hotel (named after the world’s highest lake, about a day’s hike from the city, and which I was NOT able to see because of that chest infection).

Yuvash and I spent the time downing garlic soup and dal bhat, and getting to know some of our fellow trekkers, principally among them, Lenny and Ittai. Lenny was an Australian stricken with wanderlust (he’d already worked his way through Thailand, Burma and quite a bit more of SE Asia – and he was planning to go to Europe after the trek). And Ittai, was a sardonic long-haired Israeli with an infectious laugh sense of humor and bawdy wit.

Some of the scenery just outside of the city

We spent three days playing chess and drinking tea while I waited for the meds to kick in. Finally we set out for the town of Letdar, and Thorung-La (though that was still three days away). The pass loomed large, something to get over and past. That’s how I was feeling about the trek in general, for a few days. Those once pristine mountains, which had filled me with awe, didn’t do anything for me.

“Oh, more mountains,” I thought.

Yuvash shared my apathy.

“I just looked down and walked,” he told me after one long day’s trek.

But our collective indifference would evaporate the next day after we passed Yak Kharka.

Headed higher!

Part two.

I ended my last post right before my ascent to the village of Ghyaru. I started my trek on May 3^rd – that’s when I arrived in Besi Sahar from Kathmandu. The hiking didn’t start until the next day, from Chamje. So the first installment of the trek, covered in the last post, would have gone from Chamje to Brahtang, covering perhaps 30km and rising 1500m.

After spending a shivery, sneezy night in the guesthouse in Brahtang, Yuvash and I set off. My pack, which had seemed so manageable at the start of my trek, was making me a little crazy. The shoulder-straps started cutting into my collarbone, and after only a few minutes walk, the compression on my back had me sweating uncontrollably – thin air be damned!

The hike passed through Dukhar Pokhari, a quaint collection of lodges with a couple of broken water taps. We swept through, passing a fetid pond covered in red algae, and a long open plain studded with pines and firs.

At this point, we decided to take the upper route to Manang. There are two routes – one that ascends sharply to 3600 meters, and passes through the villages of Ghyaru and Ngawal, and the other that follows the river to the south west, passing through Lower Pisang and Humde. The pros of Lower Pisang and Humde were that they had internet, cheaper lodging, and probably better food, but the guidebook we were using suggested the upper route for the views and the benefits of acclimatization. (After 3000 meters, Altitude sickness – characterized by nausea, tingling in the extremities, lack of appetite, coughing up blood, and in the worst case, death – is a serious concern.)

So we took the high road.

Right before the climb up

We crossed some spitting rapids first, and lost the trail. After some determined scrambling and bushwhacking – not that there was that much to whack at that altitude – we arrived in Upper Pisang, a sun baked collection of stone houses clustered against powerful bursts of gusting wind.

I scarfed down as much trail-mix and tea as I could, and some veg fried rice. Then my friends and I set off again along one of the foot-wide, willy-inducing trails cut into the mountain. Eventually the trail widened and snaked through a forest of firs and pines, dead ending at a cable bridge.

“Oh crud,” I thought, looking upwards.

The road became a series of serpentine switchbacks crawling up an immense crag maybe 400 meters high. At the top, I could just make out the gleaming white of a Buddhist ghompa.

Halfway up

“We’ll make it in 30 minutes,” I said, grinning at the moans of my hiking companions.

An hour later, panting, quads aching, gasping, (and praying for a quick and compassionate death), I stumbled through the gate to Ghyaru, elevation 3600 meters.

Overlooking Ghyaru

A woman was waiting at the first lodge, the Yak-Ru lodge. She was dressed in a blue and white sweater, a green vest a long skirt, and she had an amused, slightly alarmed look on her face.

Her name was Da Minh Do, and she was the owner of the Yak-Ru. The lodge felt like it was perched on the edge of the world. Below, the river we’d been following snaked around the Annapurnas like a piece of blue silk ribbon. A massive wedge of rock sat in front of us, but Da Minh Do’s son quickly corrected me when I asked its name.

“It doesn’t have a name – it’s not a mountain. Sometimes the snow at the top melts,” Dorje said.

He was a gregarious guy, and sat with me while I slurped down tea and munched on biscuits.

Ghyaru has 60 inhabitants now, Dorje said. Before, there were as many as 800 people in the town, but now most of them have moved out to work in Kathmandu, Manang, or Pokhara, two other nearby cities.

The village is almost 1200 years old, Dorje said. “A long time ago, a lama (Tibetan monk) was going by here. He was carrying his stuff on a yak, and the yak died about 600 meters from here. The lama couldn’t carry his stuff, so he took the yak’s horns, and buried them in the ground with wheat in them.”

“’In seven days, if it grows, it will be a good place to stay,” the lama said (according to Dorje). ‘If not, I’ll leave.’”

The wonderful Da Minh Do

Five days later the wheat sprouted, and the village was born… along with its name. Yak-ru, Dorje said, means “Yak-horn.” It was only later that a surveyor came along and mistakenly dubbed the place Ghya-ru, or “cow horn.”

The monk settled in the area, and became the “Ghale,” or the highest of the Gurungs, the inhabitants of that area.

That night, the cold set in, raw and constant. I slept fully clothed and wearing my down jacket. Despite the oncoming summer, it’s still incredibly cold at night up there. I learned from Dorje that it had snowed the night before we arrived. This was also the point when a vicious little infection took up residence in my lungs, which would sideline me in Manang for three days.

Go to Ghyaru.

But that’s for the next post.

The trek! First installment.

I arrived in Nepal just over a month ago, with the vague idea of going trekking. When in this neck of the woods, head for the Himalayas, right?

My goal was more than a little ambitious - the Annapurna Circuit trek is a 300km trek through the Himalayas around the Annapurna range from Besi Sahar in the east, through the wheeze-inducing pass of  Thorung-La, and then south to Naya Pul in the south. It’s a trek that needs to be negotiated with more than a little care because of the high altitudes, which can cause Acute Mountain Sickness.

The trek is one of the world’s most famous, and because it runs through local villages for the entirety of the trek, affordable enough and easy enough so that even amateur hikers can make the trek without a guide fairly easily. Even if you don’t have any trekking or backpacking equipment, you can probably get outfitted in Kathmandu, and spend a solid a couple of weeks exploring the Himalayas for well under 500 dollars. It is a potent bang-to-buck ratio - this trek has one of the world's highest passes, and incredible mountain views - two above 8,000 meters, 13 others over 7,000, and 16 scraping above 6,000.

Unfortunately, new road construction along the route is despoiling the once pristine trail, bringing noisy, bouncing jeeps, zooming motorcycles, and clogging dust clouds. And although the Annapurna Conservation Area Park (ACAP) is cutting new trails parallel but away from the road, the work will take years to complete. Now’s the time to go, before this trek is fundamentally changed.

The adventure started with a seven-hour bus ride through a series of nausea-and-vertigo inducing hairpin turns with narrow shoulders leading away from the smog and chaos of Kathmandu. I was traveling with my friend Yuvash – the brother of my best friend from college (who is the reason I’m even in this pocket of the world, I originally came to Nepal to attend his wedding).

We stopped in the town of Mugling for a massive meal of dalbhat, Nepal’s national dish of rice, curried potatoes, greens, pickled chili sauce and a spicy curry lentil soup. It came on a gleaming round serving platter in small ordered piles. I stuck my fingers into the steaming clumps of food and mixed it all together, eating with my hands along with the dozens of other patrons of the restaurant. 

From Mugling, the bus traveled to Besi Sahar, the last city before the start of the trek. Unfortunately for trekkers (but not for Nepali locals) the new road has already snuck its way north from Besi Sahar, eliminating what was traditionally the first 2-3 days of the trek.

The next morning I took a spine-destroying jeep from Besi Sahar to Chamje, where the road ends. I strapped on my backpack (which for all the work that I’d done trying to make it as light as possible, still felt like I was strapping an RV to my back), and started down a steep rock path behind a train of pack-horses. I spent the day scrambling up and down the trail, dodging the pack horses, listening to the melodious tinkling of their harness bells (and trying to avoid the rank smells of their malodorous farts).

The path continued up through steep rock defiles to the town of Tal, where I munch of curried vegetables and flat chapati bread, hot and filling against the rapidly approaching afternoon chill. From there I spent another two hours climbing steadily until I reached the mountain village of Dharapani.

This became my pattern. In the morning, a fast breakfast and a long hike, followed by a siesta to avoid the midday heat (which is formidable in the high, thin, air). Later in the afternoon, the bite and pull of my pack’s straps, and another two-four hour hike to a higher elevation and a guest house where I spent the night.

On the way to Brahtang

First snowy mountain sighting - look in the far left

In Dharapani, I spotted one of the Annapurnas for the first time, a gleaming white cone nestled in the long canyon that runs north-northwest. The Annapurna Mountains, which sit squat in the middle of the horseshoe of the circuit, have something of an august pedigree. They are huge, craggy snow covered peaks, the highest of which is over 8,000 meters tall. (And the tenth highest mountain in the world. I’m content having just walked around the beastie.) They were the first Himalayan peaks of that height that Westerners were able to conquer. Maurice Herzog and Louis Lachenal made the first successful ascent in 1950, in a finger-chewing cold that claimed digits left and right. (It’s hard to imagine how miserable that climb must have been – the pair didn’t have the benefit of modern gear or supplemental oxygen – and both climbers lost all of their toes from frostbite.)

Herzog’s spirit is still alive and well – the trek was crawling with Europeans. I ran into Belgians and  Frenchmen, a motley assortment of Czechs, a German man with some friends from Kathmandu. Sadly, there was a distinct paucity of adventuring Americans. In my two weeks in the Annapurnas, I only ran into 3-4 other Americans who were trekking.

After the city of Chame – and there’s something disconcerting coming to these wide open valleys inaccessible by road, but never the less holding city-sized settlements – it started to rain. Fat, windy drops, and leaden skies that blotted out the sun and send the temperature crashing from the 80s to the mid 50s or 60s. We pushed through a series of apple orchards before arriving in the tiny village of Brahtang. A few years ago, an avalanche destroyed the whole place. Now, the town is a place of about six-seven structures, most in different states of completion. The one hotel  was a dusty, two story lodge that lacked power, (but not extortionary room rates, which were four times everywhere else we’d seen on the trek.)

That night was the first frigid night of the trek, probably due to the rain and increasing altitude (I’d crossed above 2500 meters). The landscape was changing too. Until Brahtang, I’d passed though the twisting bamboo lined trails cut into rock walls above the Marsyangdi river, with views of icy sky-blue streams rushing below us.

After Brahtang, the landscape widened out, the vegetation started to get smaller, and the color changed, from rich blues and greens to (gradually), a more khaki-mustard kind of brown. Yuvash and I (with an American and a Malaysian I’d run into) made a steep trek up through a forest with huge views of the Swargadwari Dande, a long curving ridge scraped smooth by eons of glacial erosion. Locals here believe that they ascend to heaven from the top of the behemoth.

Swargadwari Dande

From there we passed through the village of Upper Pisang, located 500 meters above the long curving trail to Humde (the last city on this side of the pass with an airport.) Even though the trail wasn’t particularly hard, it was a little disconcerting realizing I’d just passed the last bail-out point.

It was time to push on to the crow’s peak village of Ghyaru – but you’ll have to wait a day for that.

More peaks, more pics.