Trekking.

For some reason this blog is being really strange and not letting me upload pictures right now. On to the blog though.


"Mountains have the power to call into their realms and there, left forever are our great friends whose great souls were longing for heights. Do not forget the mountaineers who have not returned from their summits." Anatoli Boukreev, 1997

Well I've been to the mountains, not nearly as close as I would have liked but close enough. I'm got back from trekking yesterday completely tired and my feet are very sore. So on Sunday April 4th, we started the trek. By we I mean Adam and I who I met in the dorm and is from the US. So we went to get the trekking permits which were 2000 rupees and then we had to get another permit which is normally free but they change that on April 1st when they made it 1400 rupees. So in total it was like 30 bucks just to get the permit, some of the money goes to the conversation of the trails but for the most part it's a money grab from tourists. I had arranged a taxi from the hotel to the permit office to the bus station for 300 rupees. After we got the permits though are driver informed us that he was leaving us there because someone else needed a taxi to go to Naya Pul which is where we were going but we are going to take the bus. So I told the driver that I wasn't paying him anything and he seemed okay with that, I guess because he was going to get like 1200 rupees to take these other people. Eventually we made it too the bus and started the 2 hour trip to Naya Pul. We started walking at 2pm and kept walking until 4:30, we stayed in a village called Tikedhunga-1500m for 100 rupees. All the lodges are cheap, the food is not though. Most food is about 3 times as much in the lodges because they have to bring everything up there that they can't grow.

So we just chilled out there for night and the next morning we were headed to Ghorepani-2750metres. This meant that we have to climb all day. We left at 9am and started to climb, at one point we climbed about 3,000 steps. Lunch was in a town called Nangethanti-had spaghetti at Hungry Eye Restaurant. After lunch we started climbing again to Ghorepani, my legs are on fire at this point but by 2:30 we were in Ghorepani. All the climbing was well worth it once I saw Annapurna South7219m...

Day 3 started at 4:30am to watch the sunrise over the Annapurna Mountain Range at place called Poon Hill, which is at 3210m and 1.5 km up from Ghorepani. Nothing about this climb was fun, and it got colder as I went higher. The sunrise was great but there was about 200 people around so that took away from the experience and also the fact I had to go #2 very badly(probably from the pizza I ate the night before) So I felt like crap and started to head down. I ended up crapping just off the side of the trail which isn't fun because the leaves on the trees here aren't like back home. I would have killed for some maple leafs. That's probably enough details about that. Well anyway I made it back down and then chilled out for a while, at 9:00 am we started the 7 hour walk to Grandruk-1940m. Being much lower in elevation this meant we had to descend for most of the day, which was fine with me. The crappy part was that before the descent we climbed pretty high up and had another great view of the mountains. That sucked because the view was better then the view from Poon Hill and I could have saved that energy. We left at 9am and got to Grandruk at 4pm, completely exhausted and ready for bed. I had some great pizza for supper and then quoted Seinfeld lines with Adam for an hour or so. I didn't bring a book to read because I wanted to go with as little weight as possible. During all the trekking we met a lot of people because the trails are extremely popular because everyone wants to see mountains.

Day 4 was Grandruk to Naya Pul, which took about 4 hours and was fairly uneventful but tiring because all the steps we had to go down, I was still at 1940m and Naya Pul is 1070m. All the steps were made by someone along time ago, they are all flagstone. The trails themselves are interesting, although because of all the trekkers it's common to see garbage which is awful because it's such a nice area. A Snickers bar wrapper takes away from the scenery. On the way down there were a lot of locals working on the side of the trail, there were older women-at least over 50 crushing rocks with a hammer to make gravel so they could fill bags and then sell them. They just sit down with a hammer and crush rocks all day. Another interesting site was seeing 4 women carrying a huge steel pipe up the mountain. The pipe was about 10-15feet long and supported by 2 pieces of bamboo, in a formation like an I. The top and bottom parts of the I would be bamboo and at the 4 corners there was a women. In the real Nepal there isn't a thing as retirement, they keep working until they can't anymore.