I apologize for the epic nature of this blog entry, but it was an epic twelve days.
Before I could begin my trek, I had to get to the beginning, which turned out to be a grueling 10-hour bus ride into the foothills of the Himalayas, about half along steep, winding paved road and half along unpaved rocky dirt road. It was astounding that the vehicles were able to withstand the beating of such roads. There was a light, friendly atmosphere on the bus; we were all enduring this bus ride together. A Nepali woman named Rita sat next to me, and I learned that she is the radiographer at the only hospital in the region where I would be trekking. She spent much of the ride asleep on my shoulder, which was more comforting than uncomfortable. Indian music with a heavy beat pumped through the bus speakers as it wound up through the mountains, people and goods getting on and off at every hour's stop. A lot of people and goods also rode on top of the bus, and the bus attendant climbed up and down from the roof while the bus was going to collect money from the riders.
Just an hour from our destination, the bus broke down. So close! A few other tourists from the bus and I decided to walk in the fading light to the nearest guest house, and as we were discussing what to do next, another bus came along to pick us up. I learned later that I had a comparatively easy bus experience, as another trekker related his bus story of people vomiting on the floor early in the journey and not cleaning it up.
Trekking alone, without porter, guide, or companions, turned out to be the right choice for me. I wanted to carry my own things, as I don't think you should need more than you can carry and I don't like the idea of paying a poor person to act as your mule. Many of the guides I met along the way were more of a nuisance than help due to their poor English, and the well-beaten trail was impossible to lose. And having no companions meant I could go at my own pace and not get annoyed at people I might not otherwise spend time with. If I ever wanted company, there were always other trekkers on the trail and in the guesthouses with me, and I met a few interesting ones along the way. I was concerned that I might be robbed trekking by myself, but this turned out to be very unlikely with the number of other people trekking and the army presence.
Did you know that Nepal didn't open its borders to visitors until the 1960s? Since then, tourism has been Nepal's top industry. It's depressing to see from the number of guest houses and the number of tourists how Nepal's tourism industry declined a few years ago, presumably due to internal turmoil and danger for tourists. The guest house and tea house owners on the Langtang trail were desperate for business, and I tired quickly from their relentless requests for my patronage and recommendations of their relatives' guest house at my day's destination. But, as a crunchy Montanan said to me while we overlooked a stunning Himalayan view, "You can't blame them for trying – they're really fucking poor."
The days of trekking were much the same, with increasingly astounding scenery, lower temperatures, and higher winds as you went up. Wake soon after sunrise to cold morning, quickly get all your clothes on, eat breakfast of porridge or Tibetan bread, pack, and set off. Trek for 4-6 hours, taking small breaks at tea houses for a snack, soda, or tea. Stop midday for lunch of fried rice or daal bhat. Arrive at your destination, choose a guest house, maybe take a luxurious solar panel-heated shower, hang out and talk in the kitchen or dining room, eat dinner, and go to sleep. Here's the scene of a mid-day break, taken inside, sheltered from some cold winds and harsh sun:
Trekking by myself, I was able to change my schedule at any time, but here's how it turned out:
Day 1: Syabrubesi (1460 meters) to Lama Hotel (2470 m)
Day 2: Lama Hotel to Langtang (3430 m)
Day 3: Langtang to Kyanjin Gompa (3870 m)
Days 4-6: Back the way I came, but forking off at the end to Thulo Syabru (2210 m)
Day 7: Thulo Syabru to Dhunche (2030 m), one town towards Kathmandu along the main road
The trek followed the Langtang Khola (river) upstream into its mountain sources. The beginning of the trek went through lush green forest along the rushing river, with sounds of birds and sights of monkeys and bee hives attached to rock face.
As I got to higher altitude, beautiful snow-capped mountains appeared in the distance and slowly got closer.
The climax of the Langtang trek is arriving in Kyanjin Gompa, where you have spectacular views of glaciers and the Langtang mountains towering at 7000 meters along the Tibet border. The views were truly spectacular, the most amazing I've ever seen. I had lunch and then stayed at the Monastery Guest House, run by a friendly Tibetan (and therefore Buddhist) woman and her wonderful children.
One of the sisters, Dawa, was thirteen years old and was home on break from her Kathmandu boarding school. She had recently taken the same ten-hour bus ride I had from Kathmandu, and then walked in one day the same route I had hiked over the past three, though she did ride the family pony for the last section. She was wonderfully bright and friendly, and spoke great English due to her good education. She also worked hard around the guest house, doing dishes, laundry, and cleaning up.
The altitude of Kyanjin Gompa itself is 3870 meters, and my guidebook warned that people often get high altitude sickness above 3000 meters. I was hiking very slowly to allow my body time to acclimatize, but still felt a little woozy for the relatively short day of trekking from Langtang to Kyanjin Gompa. After I arrived at the Monastery Guest House and had lunch, I felt better and enjoyed my evening there, hanging out with the friendly family and the two other interesting guests: Stephen, a crunchy 38-year-old from Montana, and Daniel, a similar-aged Italian guy who was a Shiva devotee.
It was freezing cold in the high altitude, so I bundled up for bed in my -10 degree sleeping bag, two heavy blankets, and most of my clothes and warm hat. I awoke at about 4am to an increasingly splitting headache, and I struggled to sleep it off until about 7am when the headache started causing me to feel nauseous. The headache was so bad that I could barely walk, and I managed to stagger outside and drink some lemon tea. The pain was not dissipating, and I knew that the best thing for me would be to descend. I slowly packed my bag, took a piece of Tibetan bread wrapped in a sheet of newspaper for the road, and started walking carefully back to Langtang. Almost immediately I started to feel better. In retrospect, I should have spent another night acclimatizing in Langtang. I had been looking forward to spending another day or two in Kyanjin Gompa, but I was still satisfied that I had made it there and seen the views.
As I descended, I ran into Dawa's father. We sat for a while by the side of the trail discussing Dawa's education and how he was unsure if he could continue paying the $600 annual fee (which includes tuition, books, clothing, and housing). I told him I thought the best thing he could give his daughter was a good education. We exchanged contact information and I told him I might be able to sponsor her. Later on my trek, I would talk to another local who complained that Americans rarely sponsor Nepali people, especially compared to the Germans, Dutch, and other Europeans. I said I thought this was because Americans don't travel to poor countries nearly as much as Europeans do (as has been my experience from meeting other tourists while traveling in poor countries). If you don't come to Nepal, meet the wonderful people, and see their poverty first hand, you have no motivation to help them.
When I made it back to lower altitude at Eco Guest House in Langtang, the proprietor made me a bowl of garlic soup, the prescribed remedy for high altitude sickness, and soon after I was back to normal, only a few hours after leaving Kyanjin Gompa. I had a long conversation with the proprietor, and he complained that too many locals in the area didn't understand about environmental conservation and taking care of the area where they lived. He also said that people in the area weren't living as long as they used to, and he attributed it to chemicals in the foods they bought from Kathmandu, like rice (which can not grow at the altitude where he lives). Therefore, he said he tried to grow as much of his own food as possible.
As we talked, a man with a huge (40 kg) sack of orange curry powder walked up and asked if the proprietor wanted to buy any. They briefly bargained over the price, and then the man dished out five large cup fulls, enough for about ten days of daal bhat.
That evening there was substantial snow, and we woke in the morning to the beautiful scenery painted white with snow. Here are some shots from my hiking down after the snow:
It was the usual hiking trip schedule, more or less, but trekking in Nepal not only has unbelievable scenery but also an added cultural element that doesn't exist while hiking elsewhere. The trails you are walking on are what locals use to get around and transport goods to and from their villages. It’s highly tourist-driven, but there are still villages that you walk through where people are just living their lives, and you can hang out with them or even opt for a home stay instead of the cushy guest houses. I was really happy when a local I met suggested this for my last evening on the trail -- it was just the variety I was looking for after six days of the same.
After an hour steep ascent, I rested and had lunch with a young woman who ran a tea house and her recently-married 22-year-old cousin, Nyima. Nyima was on his way home from selling a 20-liter container of homemade roxi, the local liquor, for 500 rupees (less than $10) at a village a few hour's walk away. He lived in Thulo Syabru, my destination for the day, and so we walked together for the two hour duration. Thulo Syabru was a beautiful little town built on a mountain ridge. We walked to his house, five minutes outside town, and rested while we drank tea that he made over a fire. Here's a shot of our approach to the town and then one from Nyima's house looking back at the town on the ridge.
After our rest, Nyima gave me a tour of town, including the construction site of a new school that a Dutch woman had donated money for. Some town people were being paid for the labor, while others, like Nyima, who wanted a good school for his growing child, volunteered their time. Nyima would volunteer his next six days carrying stone to the school site.
After the tour, Nyima and I set to making dhal baat. I peeled and sliced potatoes, he made the curry and rice, and his mother made the lentil soup. It took a number of pots and a fair amount of time. As always, it hit the spot, and we went straight to bed, leaving the dishes for the morning. My small, thin bed was in the same room as the kitchen, and I fell asleep to the sounds of rats nibbling the scraps. Also, there was a can of corn at the foot of my bed which I noticed was filled with tiny flea-like organisms. My accommodations had been quite plush up until then, so I was happy to trade comfort for authenticity for one night.
Since I wasn't sleeping very well, I sat outside on the deck to watch the sun rise over the beautiful town and mountains in the background, bundled up in my sleeping bag. I listened to the birds greet the morning and the tiny town slowly awaken. For breakfast, Nyima made me champa, porridge made with water, flour, butter, sugar, and bits of very hard cheese. As I left, he gave me a white scarf for good luck, a Buddhist custom.
A brief interlude regarding daal bhat: it's the national dish, and my favorite by far. Daal means lentil, and refers to the small bowl of thin lentil soup that accompanies a huge plate of bhat, or white rice. Add vegetable curry, yellow from curry powder, on the side and you have the foundation of daal bhat. The curry usually contains cauliflower and potatoes. One great thing about daal bhat, besides its well-rounded nutritional profile, is how everyone makes it a little different, and the same place even makes it different from day to day. Usually another element is boiled collared greens, and the restaurants with more resources (read: close access to a paved road) will throw in curried pickles, somewhat like Korean kimchi, or other tasty spicy onions, and maybe even a piece of thin, crisp bread like you get when you await your food at an Indian restaurant.
But one of my favorite parts of the daal bhat institution is what happens after you food is served: immediate refills. Within moments of digging in, a person from the kitchen appears with a bowl or plate of one of the components and serves you more as you wish. The person disappears to the kitchen and returns with another component. This continues until you refuse one round of all components, and then you struggle to finish what's on your plate.
One of my favorite parts of trekking was hanging out in the kitchens of the guest houses. Most guests would go to the dining room and talk amongst themselves, but I was memorized by the kitchen action and enjoyed talking with the proprietor (who was usually also the cook) and the guides, all of whom hung out around the kitchen stove. If someone ordered a vegetable fried rice, someone would run outside into the garden patch and return with two carrots and some greens. There was a big sack of garlic cloves which would get peeled and then mashed with mortar and pestle. Oil was in a plastic bag hanging on a nail in the wall. Chapati and Tibetan bread were prepared on a wooden plank on the floor. The menu and prices were set by the Langtang National Park and consistent from guest house to guest house.
I was mostly amazed at the quality and quantity of food they could produce with such limited means. Most stoves were made of clay and fueled by wood fire, and smoke would escape through a hole in the roof (but would also unfortunately fill the kitchen). To turn the burner up, push in more wood, and visa versa. There were two holes in the stove surface for cooking, the larger one naturally being hotter than the smaller one. The cook usually had a kettle on one of the burners, as hot water was always useful for something, otherwise it was stored in thermoses for later use or drinking. Instead of using oven mitts, he (the cook was rarely a she) just moved things quickly with asbestos fingers.
This adorable twelve-year-old boy was the helper in one of the guest house kitchens, getting water from the spout outside, cleaning dishes (in the freezing cold outside), peeling potatoes, or serving food.
Here's what the cushy guest house rooms looked like, and the basic bathrooms:
Porters carried astounding loads, some over 60 kilograms (130 pounds). I saw one guy with two 30-kg sacks of rice strapped to his back. They anchored the load with their foreheads, and then bent over so the weight was on their backs. They walked slowly, wearing cheap plastic flip flops. They were paid about 500 rupees ($8) per day, and they got free Tibetan bread for breakfast and daal bhat for lunch and dinner, which they would always take after the tourists had finished eating. Guides were only paid a few hundred more rupees per day for their skilled labor. The first person below is carrying two large hiking packs strapped to each other. The second photo is of a forty-person Korean group trekking with about a hundred porters and guides. But there weren't many large groups and the trail wasn't too congested, as this was the end of the tourist season leading up to winter.
Here are a few more photos of adorable children I encountered along my trek. They loved having their picture taken and then looking at it on your camera.
My last day of trekking was quite enjoyable, with an easy, slight downhill on soft dirt and leaves shaded by rhododendrons in red bloom (did you know you can eat the flowers and they are sweet and delicious?) with beautiful views down huge valleys and of terraced hillside land. I had my usual vegetable fried rice with egg at my lunch stop when I arrived at the main road, my first sight of it in a week. I could see clearly the large town of Dhunche across the valley but it would take another three hours of walking until I would arrive. It was a nice change to walk on the road, since I ran into more locals doing their thing.
After I checked into my hotel room in Dhunche (here was the view from the balcony outside my room)
, I went exploring around town. I decided to find the Dhunche hospital and pay a visit to Rita, the radiographer who had sat next to me on the bus the week before. She was understandably surprised to see me, but still invited me to her living quarters on the grounds of the small 40-year-old hospital, offering me chai and some freshly made pan-fried bread. Then she gave me a short but interesting tour of the hospital.
Next to the hospital, I found soccer field with match in progress, overlooking the town and mountains in the distance. As I watched the play, a group of four eager twelve-year-old boys who attended the local boarding school began practicing their English on me, and then gave me a tour of town as they talked my ear off and asked me lots of questions.
Most tourists take the bus back to Kathmandu the first morning they are in Dhunche, since there isn't anything in particular for tourists to do there. But I had a day to kill and thought it would be a nice setting for my first rest day since my trek began. A second reason why tourist tend to leave quickly is that strikes and other disturbances happen not too infrequently, something I was about to learn about first-hand.
After my tour from the four school boys, I noticed that there was a tension in the air amongst the locals in the street, and then a brigade of Nepali army began patrolling. I learned that there had been a fight between two political groups, the Maoists and the Congress, and that someone had had their hand chopped off in the scuffle.
As I sat down for breakfast the next morning, ready to take the bus back to Kathmandu, the hotel proprietor told me that the bus was canceled since the road would be closed for the next five days due to a murder that happened the previous day in a nearby town and other fighting between the Maoists and the Congress. It was likely that smaller tourist buses would be allowed to pass, and maybe also chartered jeeps, but it was uncertain when. There were about ten other tourists in Dhunche in the same position as I, and I began walking back and forth between our hotels, collecting information and trying to figure out how to get out of there.
A couple of Congress men in their late-teens rolled a truck tire in the middle of the street in front my hotel, threw on some chunks of wood, doused it in kerosene and lit a substantial fire, blocking the road. Army patrolled the streets with bamboo sticks, rifles, and shields; there was no violence, but palpable tension.
Then two chartered jeeps arrived, heading towards Kathmandu, but had to stop due to the fire in the road. I approached the jeeps with low hopes that they would take another passenger. I had a significant advantage compared to the other tourists stranded in Dhunche, as I was only one person and had very little baggage. The second jeep was a group of four college girls from Colorado with a driver and a guide, and they cheerfully accepted when I asked if I could join them. As a went to get in the jeep, I apologized to the other tourists left stranded. After the driver and guide had negotiated with the Congress blocking the road, we were on our way.
For the next hour, spirits were high and we sang songs as the jeep violently bumped along the road until we ran into group of forty Maoists walking down the road in our direction but blocking our path due to their numbers. They were loudly and violently chanting something that must have been pro-Maoist and anti-Congrss. Then they moved some huge rocks to block the road and continued on, stranding us again. We learned they were heading to the town of Kalikstan to have a meeting with the Congress regarding yesterday's violence, and we had to wait there until the meeting was over.
After about an hour of waiting, a pickup truck full of about twenty army appeared to our rescue, and would escort our four jeeps (two others had since arrived) past the rocks and through Kalikstan. Soon before Kalikstan, we stopped as the army surveyed the scene, fired some tear gas, and arrested a number of people. Since they had no room in their pickup truck, they stashed a few handcuffed prisoners in the back of our jeep as we were escorted through Kalikstan, at which point the army took the prisoners out and we continued on to Kathmandu.
The rest of the long, slow, and bumpy drive back to Kathmandu was going fine until it started raining heavily with spectacular thunder and lightning. The road was very windy with steep dropoffs, and there was definitely potential for landslides due to the rain. Also, it was getting dark due to the numerous long delays during our journey. As icing on the cake, our windshield wipers stopped working.
But miraculously, we made it back in one piece to Kathmandu. I was dropped off on the edge of Thamel, and found my way to my hotel where I had left my bag the week before. I was happy to be alive and finished traveling, about twelve hours after leaving Dhunche.
Back in Kathmandu, I had some time to relax and also explore the crazy city a little more. In between scheduled power outages (four hours in the morning and evening, euphemistically called "load shedding"), I caught up on email and my blog.
I had a fun trip on an electric-powered three-wheeled mini bus to the recently-built U.S. embassy. It was a cool-looking building, so I took a picture of it, and immediately after an armed guard at the embassy blew his whistle at me and called me over. I then noticed the clearly posted no photography sign, and felt pretty stupid and a little concerned as I was passed on from one guard to another, and then led into an interrogation room in the embassy. I was apologetic, and the guard told me it was no big deal but that he had to fill out some paperwork to document the event. He took down all the information from my passport, and took digital photos of my camera and passport. Fortunately, he allowed me to delete the photograph instead of confiscating my memory card or my entire camera. After I deleted the photo in question, I scrolled around my photos to show that it was gone, and came across the photos I had taken of Nepali army from the previous day. The guard asked a few more questions to confirm that I wasn't some kind of spy, and then let me go.
My last day in Nepal, I wandered into a small barbershop to get a haircut. After almost an hour of patient waiting as Nepali men cut in front of me in queue (standard practice in many Asian countries), I got a good haircut followed by a thorough head, shoulder, and back massage by a thirty-something Nepali barber with either bad bed-head or a strange sense of hair style. It was a great local experience.
