James vs. Big Mountains

So, the Friday before we left to go to Namche, I got pretty sick. There’s was about a ten hour period in which I didn’t do anything except sleep and throw up, but I felt surprisingly good the next day. But, Sunday night, before we were planning on leaving the next morning, I started throwing up again. Going to Namche probably wasn’t the best idea, but it’s not everyday that I get to travel around Nepal. So, Monday morning, I packed my bag and we set off. I felt kind of terrible and I hadn’t eaten anything cause I was afraid I would just throw it up and I was pretty dehydrated and I hadn’t slept very well the night before. And that’s how I started the following journey:

Day 1: We all met up at Shah’s restaurant. By us, I mean myself, Natalie, Shah (local business man/restaurant owner/best English speaker in town who’s thinking about expanding his restaurant to Lukla – long story), Eunice (a Canadian volunteer who’s been working in a little town about 7 hours south of Nayabazaar) and Pharky (Eunice’s porter). I had decided that if I could make it to the Phaplu airport without puking, I was probably good to go. I made it, so we kept going. After about two hours we stopped for some delicious tea and later on we stopped for a really long time to eat lunch. Basically, we were taking our sweet time, not really conscious of how far we were supposed to walk that day. Eventually, the trail started getting really steep and it wasn’t until about 5:00 that we overcame our first major mountain. By this point, I was even more dehydrated and felt all kinds of terrible. But that wasn’t the end of our day. We still had to walk down another really steep trail about 500m (and at this point it’s starting to rain…) before getting to Nuntelah, where we stopped for the night around 7:30. At this point I was about ready to collapse and was extremely disheartened knowing that we were at a lower altitude than Nayabazaar, since Namche is up up up.

Day 2: I’m still not feeling that great, especially considering we start our day by hiking down for 2 hours. By the time we finally stopped for lunch, I was doing my best to convince Natalie and Eunice that we didn’t need to go as far as Bupsa (our planned destination for the day) since we didn’t need to get to Lukla until Thursday (a friend of Eunice was flying into Lukla and they were going to go trekking past Namche to Gokyo and maybe even Everest Base Camp). So we stopped in Kari Khola around 2:00 and I collapsed again.

Day 3: Maybe it was just because I had been sick the first two days, but our third day seemed like a breeze, even though it was by far the hardest day we’d done so far. We climbed up to Bupsa and kept going up to Khari La at around 3000m and then down a little to Puiyon, where we stopped for lunch (at this little place called the “Apple Pie Lodge” where the food was wonderful) and kept going up a really steep rock ridge and then down down down to Surke, where we arrived around 4:00. At the place we stayed I took my first shower of the trip, with a bucket.

Day 4: The sickness returns. It was a two-hour, really steep hike up to Lukla, which felt endless because I felt pretty sick again. Eunice’s friend’s flight ended up being cancelled so we decided to stay in Lukla for the night, even though we’d only traveled two hours that day. Lukla is the last airport on the way to Namche and Everest so a lot of trekkers choose to fly into Lukla instead of doing the seven day walk from Jiri, the last bus stop from Kathmandu. So, Lukla is just a series of overpriced lodges and restaurants and tea-shops and touristy places. We turned a corner on the main strip and paused for a moment, did a double take, and attempted to figure out what we had seen: a Starbucks. We’re pretty sure it was a knockoff (even though it was really really nice on the inside), but it was still pretty scary to find a Starbucks this far into the mountains (remember that we’re about a weeks walk from a paved road…).

Day 5: Natalie and I kept going, Eunice and Pharky stayed in Lukla to wait for Annie, Eunice’s friend flying in, and Shah stayed to do business things. We made it to Monjo by the end of the day. We did our best to try to find a hot-springs that we’d found on a map that supposedly existed between Benkar and Monjo (we both really wanted to say we’d been to a hot springs in Nepal, just like that monkey in “Baraka”….), but everyone we asked said it didn’t exist.

Day 6: After about an hour leisurely hike from Monjo and a brutal two hour hike straight up, we finally made it to Namche. We stopped at a really sketchy restaurant where the tea was really cheap and then walked around trying to find the cheapest lodge, since we were planning on being there two nights. We ended up staying at the illustrious “Buddha Lodge and Restaurant” which were very pleased to discover had a tv with one English channel: Aljazeera News. I had never watched Aljazeera before, I’m not even sure if you can find it in the States. But it’s basically the antithesis of Fox News, equally biased reporting except anti-US, anti-Iraq War, anti-Israel, pro-the underdog. I hadn’t really seen or read any foreign news since arriving in Nepal so I spent many hours in front of the tv. There was a ton of coverage related to all the protests surrounding the recent Iranian elections.

Day 7: We were planning on hiking up to “the Everest Hotel,” about an hour up from Namche where apparently you can get a pretty amazing view of Everest and the Himalayas. But, we woke up to find Namche drenched in really thick fog. There would have been no way we would have seen anything from the look-out, so we just hung out at the Buddha Lodge with Eunice and Annie who had made it up from Lukla, ate a lot, and watched more Aljazeera News. I was a little bummed that we’d come all that way and not seen Everest, but I couldn’t really complain since the entire way up had been gorgeous.

Day 8: We hike back to Lukla.

Day 9: We make it to Puiyan and stay at a really sketchy lodge. We wake up in the night to the sounds of mice, but we’re too tired to really care.

Day 10: Back to Kari Khola.

Day 11: We left a little after 6:30 and planned to make it to Ringmo, which is just over this huge mountain we knew would probably take four or five hours of crazy uphill to cross, plus a couple hours just to get to the base. We stopped half way up, played a couple games of Estimation (the card game that Natalie and I take very seriously), ate big plates of fried rice, and kept going. When we got to Ringmo around 3:30, most of the lodges were closed because there aren’t many travelers in the monsoon-season, and the ones that were open were kind of expensive. So, we decided to try to make it all the way back to Nayabazaar (we were told in Ringmo that Phaplu was four hours away). We made it to Shah’s restaurant in three hours (which is probably pretty impressive even by Nepali standards…) and collapsed. After a big plate of chow mein and two big cups of cardamom tea, we made it back to Nayabazaar around 8:30. We’d probably hiked around 10 hours that day.

And now I’m back in Nayabazaar and have today to rest. Tomorrow, I get back to work. Natalie leaves Sunday to fly back to Kathmandu and, assuming no other volunteers show up by surprise, I’ll be here alone for the next six or seven weeks.