The night before our first trek out of Pokhara, we went out for dinner and ate wild boar curry at a happy hour at a bar we found which was playing live music and offered lounge chairs on the terrace overlooking the lake. It was dark, but we could still see little lights on the other side of the water of families who live in these incredibly remote areas on mountains. We also accidentally ordered two drinks each, but c’est la vie. Then we ordered one more because it was still happy hour and a “dirty banana” sounded like a really good investment (it was). Pokhara is a charming little area, and much, much cleaner than Kathmandu. They apparently also have power outages, but the hotel we got uses a back-up generator for those several hours per day. Despite the fact that it sounded like there was a truck waiting outside our window to take Dumbo back to the jungle, it was still nice. It’s almost like a beach town, with a lot of tourists and a strip of hotels, restaurants and shopping, all next to the enormous Fewa lake. A little more laid-back than Kathmandu, much less crowded and much less polluted. We liked Kathmandu a lot, but I could feel my throat starting to react to the extreme amounts of exhaust you constantly breathe in there, along with the incense and … occasional monkey poop. The weather was beautiful that day, so of course we went out without our umbrellas and decided to go for a post-dinner stroll. And of course it started raining exactly when we were about to turn around, about 15 minutes away from the hotel. It came down, though. The Hindu gods were just urinating all over us. It didn’t let up, so Seth and I walked back to the hotel in the rain, just accepting the fact that we’d have to let the sun dry our clothes the next day on our trek. Because of course it would be sunny. Right?

Wrong. The first day, we walked for 3.5 hours, and it came down in buckets for approximately 3. Eventually Seth and I accepted the fact that we’d have to pay too much money for a big plastic cover for our backpacks, and also that we’d have to use our Japan-level tiny umbrellas. These things were made for chiwawas, I swear. We figured out how to jerry-rig them to our backpack straps and attach a giant piece of plastic to each of our 20-pound bags, and set off.

A rare moment of less rain

The path that day was mostly dirt road for jeeps with some gravel, with pretty easy inclines and eventually amounting to 500 meters that we climbed over the course of three hours. It was a breeze (except for the whole swimming through the rain part) and we thought:”This is going to be too easy. We should have gone to Annapurna base camp, or Everest base camp! We are such good hikers.” We ate lunch and dinner at our first tea house (tiny hotel area), witnessed a Buddhist ceremony performed by Tibetan sherpa monks for a reason I still don’t really know but has something to do with a rite of passage maybe, then spent the night at the lodge where we ate and read books.

Rite of passage or naptime? Either one sounds pretty cool.

A few people we talked to said they were nervous about the next day. Something about stairs. We shrugged. We’d just climbed to the top of Hideyoshi Toyotomi’s tower a week before, and that was eight tall floors! We can do stairs. Wrong. The next day, Reywati our guide took us to a place they call the THREE THOUSAND STAIRS. I have no idea if that number is accurate, but god did it feel like it. Try to imagine big slabs of rock. Now, imagine them in stair form. Now, imagine you are going up these stairs, and every time you think you see the end, it’s not the end. Imagine doing this for FIVE HOURS. I’m being conservative here, because we hiked for about seven hours (starting around 7:30AM) and we didn’t climb exactly that the entire time, but it took up a good chunk of the time. Also, because of global warming, monsoon season has not been as predictable as normal. Usually in September, the skies would be at least mostly clear and we would be able to get some kind of visual reward for hanging out on the never-ending stairclimber. But instead, we were inside a cloud. The whole time. It didn’t rain as hard as the day before, but it drizzled, and we couldn’t see more than about a 25ft radius from ourselves. Reywati is very kind. He’s about 5’3” and has a body built like a soccer player (although his sport of choice is Nepal’s national sport kobardi, which involves running into another team and holding your breath until you reach the finish without getting tackled to the ground, but I digress). The point I’m trying to make is that this is extremely easy for him. He’s not even wearing hiking shoes, but rather shoes that resemble crocks which he uses to walk through water and kick heavy rocks into a safer place for us to step on while holding an umbrella (and while we wobble on rocks across streams). After the first two hours or so, Seth and I wanted to fall over and attack the next donkey we saw and eat the whole thing. He hardly broke a sweat. He looked so bored going at what I’ve named his “tourist pace,” but didn’t seem to mind and has been carrying a bunch of apples and pomegranates for the two fat Americans to munch on for when we start to whine that our feet hurt.

Even though the path is mostly stairs, we were really surprised at how well-maintained it is. Reywati explained that it’s the “main highway” from the bottom town of Noyopool to the Annapurna base camp. Then how, I asked myself at first, do they actually make BUILDINGS of concrete with restaurants and beds and tin roofs and toilets (sometimes)?? Well, my question was quickly answered after we passed the third group of five to ten load-bearing donkeys being herded up the mountain. Basically what happens is they each get about 60kg (130-ish lbs.) of stuff, and then a guy in flip flops walks behind them, whipping them with a stick or a whip if they take a break when they’re not supposed to.

Also, porters. Porters are guys who carry lots of weight (up to 45 or 90lbs depending on the area) for any purpose. You can hire a porter if you’re hiking and you don’t want to carry all your stuff and he’ll take your backpack, or if you’re building something like a guest house on the mountain and the donkeys can’t be trusted to carry the enormous windows because they might break them. So how, you might ask, do porters carry these heavy loads up the mountain? Well, that’s a great question. They strap the loads to their foreheads. At some point the cost-benefit ratio of putting a backpack around your waist with the straps doesn’t cut it anymore, so they do it the traditional Nepali way: they have a basket, or a backpack, or in some cases a big glass window pane, bring a strap around it and fix the strap on their foreheads (sometimes with a folded towel under it to make it more comfortable), then just bend over a little and voila. Don’t try this at home kids: foreigners trying to do it have broken their necks, since any movement in a particular direction can literally paralyze you. It’s amazing to see and I know it’s their job, but I’m really glad we didn’t hire a porter because I would feel like a total asshole watching someone else carry all my stuff by their forehead. The tops of my hips are starting to bruise from my own 20 pounds of burden, but I definitely don’t want to triple or quadruple that onto someone else for my own comfort. Usually though, it appears porters graduate to guides like Reywati, whose job now consists of babysitting foreigners on long hikes to see outstanding views and getting free room and board on said hikes, which beats some other jobs.

Badass porter and Seth with slightly less badass 20-lb. backpack (also notice asshole stairs)

Anyway, this morning we woke up in Ghorepani at 3:45 in preparation for a clear sky to watch the sunrise from Poon Hill. We had climbed 1,300 meters the previous day, then we hiked another 400 by the light of the moon for an hour to witness a view of a section of the Himalayas with about 50 to 75 other tourists. It was spectacular, and perfect timing for the only clear skies we’ve seen thus far, in all three days we’ve been hiking. We saw Annapurna 1, Fishtail, Dhaulagiri 1 (which is over 8,000 meters) and several other mountains I really couldn’t remember if my life depended on it.

WE MADE IT TO MOTHER F-ING POON HILL

We must have asked poor Reywati the names of these mountains about 47 times, but eventually we just took a video of him telling us the names again so we wouldn’t have to ask. We could have seen even more if there had been even fewer clouds, but we took what we could get. It was the reason Seth wanted to come to Nepal, and thank Buddha (or Vishnu, or the Shinto kamis or whomever) he got it. I did a timelapse photography of the sunrise and it turned out really well.

Then we walked down 400 meters back to Ghorepani and had breakfast. And then, guess what?? We went up another hill, for an hour, and got to the same elevation as Poon Hill. Rephrased: This morning, at 4:30, we walked up 400 meters, saw the sunrise, went back down, ate breakfast, AND THEN WE WENT BACK UP. Oh sorry, THEN WE WENT DOWN. Very far. For two and a half hours. Oh yeah. THEN WE WENT UP. For another half hour. My butt muscles are so pissed off. And so are my feet, from going downhill for so long.

And that brings us to our guesthouse, which, as we’ve officially come to expect from Nepal, has very steep stairs. Up to the room, then back down a hill and up a hill again to the dining room for dinner. Then back down the second hill and up if the first you forgot anything (phone charger), like some kind of cruel joke. I can’t believe I will be doing this again tomorrow. But! We shall be rewarded at the end of the day with hot springs.

Some observations on the point of view I have acquired:

– I get excited when I get to sit on a toilet, instead of squat over it. If it flushes (instead of having to scoop water out of a bucket and doing a manual flush), well, I feel like a queen. Especially when I remember to bring toilet paper. Last night we had our own private toilet and gas powered-shower, and it was glorious even without the sink. Oh, but we had to turn on the gas out of an enormous gas container, then one of us had to hold a button because it was broken while the other showered, and vice versa, and then we realized we didn’t have towels and the room was freezing, so we had to use our sarongs then hang them up to dry. But still… private toilet.

– Even here, in the foothills of Nepal, in a village that can only be reached by foot, yak or donkey, THE BEDS ARE STILL MORE COMFORTABLE THAN IN KOREA. I would just like to say, that’s pretty sad, Korea. Maybe some food for thought.

– New foods I love: yak cheese, Tibetan bread, roasties (big fancy hash browns), and curds with fried things.

– The caste system is very prominent here, and effects everything. This probably doesn’t surprise a lot of worldly people, but Reywati explained that since he’s a Brahman and the highest caste, he will sacrifice a billygoat (or several) during their holiday Gadhimai in October, whereas lower castes will sacrifice a yak which they can share with other families. (In Gadhimai, animals are sacrificed to appease the gods, then eaten. We’re talking lots and lots of animals.) Also he didn’t really understand what was going on in the Tibetan Sherpa ceremony because it wasn’t his caste, and different castes practice different forms of the same religion. There are 104 castes in Nepal. It’s all very fascinating.

– It’s totally normal now for us to see a chicken or ten just kinda wandering around outside a restaurant or a store or guesthouse. Also, cows. Not in the mountains, but cows hang out everywhere in Pokhara. Goats, donkeys sometimes ducks and buffalo, roosters waking us up (whenever they want, not just at dawn): these are all completely normal parts of this surreal life we have now gotten pretty used to.

Next time we write it will be done from a hotel room in Pokhara, in two nights. I’ll have another update then! 🙂 Seth slept through the entire making of this one so maybe he’ll have more to say then.