Stories from the Himalayas

I'm lucky enough to have spend the last three weeks hiking in Nepal with my mom and even luckier to have a mom who understands that yes, even though we are still here in this foreign country on an adventure, I want to shut myself up in front of a computer and write about it. 

The result is a longer blog post than usual, but even this doesn't do justice to the friends we made along the way, especially our excellent guide, Kapil. Many thanks to all of them.

After a few days in the town of Pokhara, Mom and I are now back in Kathmandu, playing tourists until our flight home. We'll arrive in San Francisco on April 3. Stay tuned to hear more about our post-trail Nepali adventures!

Stories from the Himalayas

What a bus ride! The sheer cliffs and sharp dips made the bus feel like a roller coaster run off its tracks and the dusty road turned the air into a sandbox. Personal space? Try explaining that to the guy practically sitting in my lap. There were as many people on their feet as in seats, all of them clambering to be near the door, many hanging out it, and while I was holding on for dear life inside of the bus, people were climbing onto the roof.



This was the road to the Arrughat Bazaar, the starting point for my mom's and my three-week hike around Nepal's Mount Manaslu. On the bus, as on every part of this trip, we traveled across bumpy roads,  peeked at mountain views, and worked hard just to breathe. Although my mom, our guide, Kapil, and I weren't the only recreational hikers aboard, most riders were locals on their way home. With this bus ride, we had joined one of the world's most beautiful commutes.

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Ok, the bus ride was weird, but the hiking part I should be able to handle, right? I slung on my pack, laced up my boots, and felt confident until we rounded a bend and group of women burst out laughing. I knew I was out of practice, but really? Could I possibly look that funny? Warm, sweeping, glorious relief descended when I realized that they were all looking at our guide, Kapil, whose face and hands were covered in pink powder. It was a celebration day in Nepal and one of the local girls had helped Kapil get into the spirit. Thank goodness!

Besides being glad that I wasn't the butt of a joke, I was happy to see Kapil laughing because this whole guide business still made me feel weird. Last year, my friend Alison and I spent 25 days hiking in Nepal and managed just fine on our own. The first time I put on my pack this year, Kapil reached out to help me with it. While that's not something to complain about, it sure was different--but having a guide was a legal requirement in this area, so I was going to have to get used to it.

The good news is, not having responsibilities is (surprise, surprise) actually pretty easy, so hiking with a guide soon began to feel natural. For hundreds of years, feet have been the primary means of transportation in Nepal and people have never used maps; if they get lost, they ask for directions.

As a result, Nepali maps, which cover broad areas and huge ranges of elevations, lack detail. Our trekking map map would barely register the hill I grew up on, no matter how many times running up it wore me out. In fact, San Francisco, one of the hilliest cities in America, would look almost flat. Never mind that the map itself was so flimsy we couldn't open it without hearing a ripping sound. We were glad to have Captain Kapil around--especially once he became a vision in pink.

(With that said, a guide was where I drew the line. Sure, I may some day want to pay porters to carry my gear, but where's the fun in busting out a Scrabble board at 16,000+ feet if you didn't get it there yourself?).

(What? You don't hike with a Scrabble board?)

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Turns out that if you don't backpack for a full year (whimper), you lose the hardened hips and tough feet that make long walks with a pack comfortable. Your feet hurt, your pack feels heavy, and breathing becomes a challenge. If you put your running shoes in storage back in December (I admit nothing), that doesn't help.

But old habits die hard. An hour into our third day, I reached up to put on my sunglasses and realized they weren't in their usual spot at the top of my pack. This might sound like a small thing, but we were hoping to be at a high elevation on snow in a couple weeks and I would need eye protection. I took off the pack, rifled through  it, and announced, "I'm going back."

"I'll go," said Kapil, ready to be the dutiful guide, but I didn't budge. He had been complaining of a stomach ache and besides, if I was the idiot who had left her sunglasses, I would be the one who walked back for them. "But I'll be faster than you." Right. Like the competitive jerk inside me could let that fly. He shouted, "Be careful!" as I took off down the trail.

I was back in just over an hour--probably not as fast as Kapil could have done it, but quick enough that a German guy we had met on the road next greeted me with one word: "Respect." Can we just talk about how much I missed hiking?

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Now that I was getting my hiking legs back, the trek got interesting, and not just because my internal monologue varied beyond "Owwww." That afternoon, we entered the  Tsum Valley (sounds like "Choom"), where we planned on a week-long detour from the main Manaslu circuit.

This area only opened to trekkers a couple years ago so I was expecting it be off the beaten track, but I still can't believe the next day's trail really existed. Who built it?! You'd have to be crazy to go to the trouble of making a trail that climbs 1,000 feet up one side of a valley only to drop back down to the bottom, cross a stream, and climb right up the other side. Even on the vague Nepali map, it looked ridiculous. 

In fact, the only thing crazier than the trail itself was the scenery along it. At the bottom of the valley, Appalachian rhododendrons surrounded a cobalt blue, rushing river; in the middle, towering rock walls enclosed a Rocky Mountain pine forest; and above them all, in every direction, white Himalayan peaks ruled. Every once in awhile, we spotted a monkey and I always ended up a quarter of a mile behind because I could not go more than three feet without taking a picture. (If Heaven doesn't look like this, I don't really want to go there.)

Holding my camera, I felt like a visitor from another universe. As we entered one village, a group of kids saw my mountain paparazzi act and, like most people of any age around here, they craned their necks to get a look at the camera and poked the screen with dirty fingers. When I turned to photograph the building behind them, they all ducked as though I were wielding a gun.

These villages had just gotten minimal electricity in the last few years and "running water" consisted of black pipes that diverted springs to a tap in the center of town. We often saw women heading out with baskets on their backs to collect wood and yak dung for their wood-burning stoves. After a few days of staying in local homes and lodges, I wasn't surprised that the locals treated my camera like a magic wand.

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We had just dropped our packs when Captain Kapil mentioned that there wasn't anywhere for us to stay in this town. He said this nonchalantly, as though he were telling us they had run out of our favorite ginger tea, but we could have mint instead. Wait a minute? What? 10,000 feet up in the Himalayas in March isn't exactly ideal conditions for crashing outside.

Kapil said we could probably find a patch of floor somewhere, but recommended climbing the 2,000 feet to the highest settlement in the valley, a gompa (Tibetan monastery) with empty beds. We took a deep breath, slung on our packs, and started walking up.

That was when the wind kicked in. Every time I looked, more clouds had blown across the formerly brilliant blue sky and by the time we arrived at the gompa, at above 12,000 feet, it was cold. Along with four other hikers and their guides, we squeezed in the kitchen for tea with the old monk who looked after the place in the winter.

Even after the tea, Mom and I were still shivering. We cleaned a snowball from the last storm off of my bed, put on all our clothes, got into our sleeping bags, and huddled together for a frigid game of Scrabble. That night, we both took boiling Nalgenes to bed ("It's like having a man, but without all the drama!") and when I peeked out the window the next morning, the whole valley had become a snowy wonderland.

Which leads me to a question: who decided to build a monastery here? I mean, this place could probably sleep 50, but we were a week's hike from the nearest road in a poor area that never gets above freezing at night, in any season. Although we had been hiking through villages, we hadn't even seen a hole-in-the-ground outhouse in three days.

But such is the strength of the Buddhist establishment in this largely Tibetan area. A few days before, we had spent the night in the storage room of a Tibetan family home and played with the one-year-old daughter, who's two favorite toys were plastic drink bottles. Mom and I loved meeting the little girl, but we were confused because the parents seemed too old to have only one child. Didn't people marry young here? Where were the other kids? As it turned out, the girl's four older siblings were off at various gompas  studying. Buddhism is the infrastructure that allows rural Tibetans to get an education, the faith that gives a backbone to people's lives.

Our real introduction to the Tibetan Buddhist establishment came after a snowy hike down the valley. There, we stayed at Rachen Gompa, a nunnery. Since we were now at a measly 10,500 feet up, the facility was even more ambitious and, although all but a half dozen nuns had decamped to other gompas for the winter (it must be extra cold with a shaved head!), we drank tea in a cavernous kitchen that normally churns out food for 100 . 

But even in such a huge facility, the isolation was palpable. We peeked into the main sanctuary at 7 a.m., when the young nuns had told us their morning worship would begin. At first I was amazed. What a practical religion! The girls were all praying under a blanket. Then, I realized they were still asleep. Their clock was ten minutes slow but, since this was the biggest establishment in the area, they had no idea.

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On our last night in the Tsum Valley, Kapil made curry with pumpkin and greens in it. Even if these hadn't been the first real vegetables we had seen in days, the meal would have been delicious because Kapil is an excellent chef.

This might not seem like an essential quality in a guide--weren't we staying in guesthouses?--but in the Tsum Valley, we were mostly in people's extra bedrooms or storage rooms. The menu consisted of fried potatoes, instant noodles, and dahl bhat: the rice, lentil, and mild potato curry dish that Nepalis eat (with their fingers) at almost every meal. Families were glad to have Kapil's help and we were glad to have his culinary expertise.

Delicious as the dahl bhat was, the truly amazing thing about that night was the number of people we managed to cram into the family kitchen. Throughout the region, people cook on wood burning stoves, so the room wasn't just full of people but also smoke. Still, the storm had been raging for two days and Mom and I didn't budge from the stove side all evening.

Luckily, the company was good. This was the night when Shambhu (sounds like Samboo), one of the other guides, started calling me "my lovely." His logic was that I had called him "my hero" when he served me curry but my hunch was that Shambhu wasn't great with names and "Lovely" and "Mom" were much easier than "Piper" and "Carol."

There were only a few other trekkers on the Manaslu circuit so we had spent much of the last week with Shambhu and his charges--two young Israelis named Felix and Eli (sounds like "Ellie"). Of course, the boys found Shambhhu's nickname for me hilarious. "She's married," they joked over breakfast, so I started telling Shambhu I had a new husband every day: Barack Obama, Justin Bieber, Bryan Adams...

Although other groups came and went, we ended up hiking with Felix, Eli, and Shambhu almost every day. At first, this was coincidental (We were leaving at the same time. Our guides got along) but the two guys and their goofy guide soon grew on us. We were glad to have people to eat dahl bhat with.

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"The pass is closed," Felix warned at dinner, shaking his head. Eli agreed, "We're turning around." After a week in the Tsum Valley, we were back on the main trail and hearing news of the outside world (or at least the rest of the Manaslu route) for the first time. The Manaslu circuit has one crux hike, the nearly 17,000-foot Larke Pass. We had just a few more days and then, if we couldn't get over Larke, we would have to turn around and backtrack to the bus stop. 

No matter how often the Israelis said it, no matter how many times they considered just going back now and saving themselves the trouble, Mom and I refused to believe we couldn't take pass. "It's not over until it's over," I insisted, but this just made the boys smile. Finally, Kapil had a frank talk with us. After that big storm, without crampons or ice axes, we had a 10% chance of making it. 

As we loaded our packs the next morning, a foreigner came walking down the valley. When we asked if he had news of the pass, he said, "I came from the other side!" Mom and I wanted it so badly that, for a split second, we believed him. All day, the normally quiet trail bustled with back trackers. We asked every group for tidings, but everyone said the same thing: there was too much snow. When we saw a particularly large, prepared team walking down, Kapil sighed, "No hope."

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But it was hard to dwell on our disappointment because the sun was back. The good weather reminded me about some important things I'd been neglecting, like my hair. When we stopped in a warm lunch spot, I combed through it with my fingers, shedding blond threads into the wind. I might have low standards since I last saw my hairbrush in September 2010, but I felt like I was at a spa.

I was just tying off a pair of French braids when I realized Felix and Eli were soaking wet. The Israelis had finally lost their marbles! Oh wait. No. The opposite! They were washing their hair in the spring nearby! Then, they offered Mom and me something worth its weight in gold: shampoo! (Maybe they really were crazy?) The fastidiously clean Kapil and Shambhu had already started making fun of my dirtiness and when I considered not washing now (my braids!), Eli put his foot down. "Piper, you are making a mistake." As soon as I caught a whiff of that sweet-smelling shampoo, I knew he was right.

Besides my hair, I also used the warm weather to pay more attention to the back of my throat, which had started to get scratchy. I could feel a cold coming on and, since I spent most of my time in Nepal last year sick, I was determined to squash it. I put on warm clothes at the slightest breeze (yes, even at that sunny lunch spot), popped Vitamin C tablets like candy, and hydrated. That evening, I downed a liter of water and ended up out of bed and in the outhouse twice. Both times, pants down and pee rag at the ready, I realized I was dreaming! Miraculously, I didn't wet the bed. Even more miraculously, the next morning I felt better and within another day, I was giving myself a clean bill of health.

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We had eaten nothing but rice, lentils, potatoes, and instant noodles for a week, so I just about peed my pants (Sensing a pattern?) when I found out our lodge had cheese and tomato sauce. That's right: pasta party!

Newcomers joined the Israeli boys, Mom, and me at the table that night. Anni and Katharina, pair of energetic young Germans, had skipped the Tsum Valley, so we didn't know them yet but, within an hour, Anni was teaching us a complicated German card game involving a 32-card deck, a lot of multiplication, and acorns. Or something. We gave up on learning the game but resolved to find out more about the German girls.

Anni and Katharina, who had managed to get around hiring a guide with some under the table dealing--were unyielding about the pass. Mom and I had finally, really started to accept that it might not happen when we met them. They said, "We're doing it!" and we made little indistinct noises. We really wanted it, but we also needed to be realistic.

But, one day I realized that Kapil had stopped shaking his head at their enthusiasm. While I had been busy washing my hair, dreaming about toilets, and learning complicated German card games, rumors emerged that a big group ahead of us--nine French hikers with as many Nepali guides and porters--planned an attempt. Kapil and Shambu said that if the big group did it, we would try. Since there was strength in numbers, we invited the German girls to join us for the three days it would take to reach the pass.

There was hope! Now, Mom and I shared Anni and Katharina's enthusiasm and we spent our first hike together singing Christmas carols, the easiest common songs across our languages. Although we were now eight--Kapil, Shambhu, Eli, Felix, Anni, Katerina, Mom, and me--it was amazing how quickly the group thinned out when the singing started. Suddenly, the boys lagged a quarter of a mile behind. The snow covered trails were even more fun. Anni particularly liked to juggle snowballs, and (once the boys had rejoined us) she wasn't above tossing the occasional icy projectile into someone's face.

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But the snow also made the pass hard to forget. For two days, we ascended towards it, finishing our hikes by noon in order to tackle the powder-covered trails when they were firmest. Although we were having fun, my mind rarely wandered from the pass for long. I watched the sky for signs of bad weather and my body for signs of wear or altitude sickness.

The last to reach the high altitude town of Samdo, Mom and I found our group sitting in the small front yard of someone's home, one of the only places in town not buried under snow. Eli's greeting was ominous. "It's closed," he said, "There are no beds here." I wasn't quite ready to believe that--the guides usually managed to find us somewhere to sleep--but I shared the feeling that we were here on borrowed luck. We had seen so many people heading down and most hadn't even made it this far. Every step went beyond my expectations.

Although Kapil and Shambhu did, in fact, find us a place to sleep, our hopes sank after lunch when someone spotted a group walking downhill. I joined the knot of onlookers as Kapil counted the hikers. We saw at least seven. Who could this be but the big French-Nepali group we had pinned our hopes on? "It's the end," Eli said.

Could this be it? I walked away and circled around the town, imagining the long walk back to Arughat Bazaar and the dusty bus ride back to Kathmandu, but trying not to jump to conclusions until the hikers arrived. After one more look at the group, I sat back down in the sunshine, telling Mom, "It's not over until it's over," but thinking that, this time, it might really be over.

Five minutes later, a cry went up among the onlookers, "They're Nepali! They're local! They have baskets!" Sure enough, Kapil soon had even better news: these locals had come from the other side. Felix and Eli, the most pessimistic in our group, were first in line to buy candy bars from our hosts. We would need them for our long hike because WE WERE GOING TO ATTEMPT THE PASS.

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My alarm went off at 3:30 am, but I was already awake, my mind reeling with thoughts of the pass and fears of oversleeping. We saddled up (Of course my flashlight chose this morning to malfunction.) and started walking across the snow. The mountain landscape looked otherworldly as the starlight paled and then brightened into sunrise, casting an alpine glow ahead of us. After half an hour, my camelbak was frozen.

Although she's one of the fittest 59-year-olds I've ever met (Not to mention coolest. How many moms go hiking in the Himalayas?!), Mom was soon huffing and puffing and when we stopped for a snack, the group disappeared into the distance. Shambhu came back to offer to carry her pack (she refused) and Mom, Kapil, and I were on our own.

I certainly didn't have the spare breath for small talk, so I alternated between taking pictures and taking internal guesses at how much longer the uphill could possibly go on. Was that rise the top? The next one? At 9 am, Kapil said, "We are close to the first pass." First pass? Woah, woah. Wait a minute. "Kapil," I asked, "How many passes are there?" Turns out there were two, twenty minutes apart, so even when we got to the "top, " there was still more uphill to do. Welcome to Nepal.

The view from the top(s) was amazing, especially since the second pass marked our entrance into a new valley with a whole new skyline. But, even as we ate Snickers bars and stared at the eye candy, we knew that the real challenge still lay ahead: descending the steep, icy scree field below. This was the the place where were were most likely to fall, and we needed to get over it before the snow softened and avalanches became a further worry.

The pass was at nearly 17,000 feet and by the time we started going down, Mom was feeling the altitude and seemed almost too tired to string together a sentence. Kapil, the true hero of the day, often acted as a human tether, holding her to the mountain. But when he said, "Carol, let me take your pack," she shook her head. I felt like I should step in here, tell her it would be okay to accept his help, but I know my mom and when she took a deep breath and said, "I can do this. I want to do this," she meant it.

And she did it. We got to the bottom of the scree field and Mom checked her GPS. We were still above Mt. Whitney, the highest mountain in the continental US, but the worst was over. Although the soft afternoon snow would still make hiking hard, we had reached the gentler slopes of the glacial moraine. After a 20-minute rest for lunch, the longest break we took all day, we pressed on.

A few hours later, we rounded a bend and saw a sight for sore eyes: trees! I didn't realize how much I had missed them. We were back in the land of living things. Then, we noticed something even more welcome: buildings! From a quarter mile away, we could see people walking around. Could it be our group? The French?

As we got closer, the shapes formed a line. Sure enough, it was our friends, waiting to welcome Mom, Kapil, and me with streamers (no doubt the work of the German girls). We had made it! We all stood around for a few minutes trading high fives and then collapsed onto a bench in the dining room. Only Felix and Eli could find any cause for disappointment: they had hoped for a phone in this town so they could assure their families (who expected a call days ago) that they were safe. Well, we suggested, you could always go back...

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The next morning, when we had all regained the ability to move, we celebrated for real. Mom pulled out a pack of Peeps that she had carried all the way from San Francisco and we roasted those Easter-themed, sugar-covered marshmallows over the wood burning stove in our lodge's kitchen, with Kapil and Shambhu presiding. After a last group picture, we started the day's hike separately.

When we finally  arrived that night (Of course, that day took even longer than the pass...), the town of Dharapani took us by surprise. Although we weren't done with our trip, this was the end of the Manaslu circuit, the the place where our trail joined the Annapurna route, one of the most popular trekking trails in Nepal. We were used to small villages with few (if any) lodges. Here, there were a dozen! We had hoped to reunite the group in Dharapani, but we couldn't even find each other.

Still, being at only 6,000 feet had its perks. After weeks of feeling the wind go right through our walls, we now had an air-tight second-floor lodge room with windows on three sides. I awoke in the middle of the night to look at the stars through the glass and then got up to pee (yes, really) in my bare feet. Declaring a layover day the next morning, we enjoyed a breakfast of apple pancakes and cornbread.

But I wasn't really happy until Kapil flagged me down on my way to do laundry and I saw Felix and Eli standing outside our hotel. The boys made plans to meet us for lunch, but, along with Shambhu, they wandered up half an hour later with their backpacks and announced that they were moving in. Our team was back together! (The girls, we later learned, turned to go the other direction on the Annapurna route.)

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Kapil and Shambhu accosted me on my way to breakfast the next day and started dancing. Of course, I just had to join them, the three of us bobbing to the beats of different internal music. So began our last hike as a group.

We saw more foreign trekkers during that first morning on the Annapurna circuit than on our entire trip up to that point combined. Lodges and restaurants replaced little villages as the primary settlements. Meanwhile, a haze had moved in and the mountain views became a memory. Although we were still on the trail, the nature experience had ended abruptly.

And then the trail became the Annapurna road, a wide, dusty scar cutting through a deep valley. This nascent jeep highway is one of the biggest controversies in the Himalayas. Although we would only spend two days on this route, the road runs along all but a few days of the Annapurna circuit, and construction is ongoing.  

After the beautiful trails we were used to, Felix and Eli found the road so frustrating that within a few hours they had hailed a jeep, hugged us goodbye, and jumped inside. As their car disappeared, Mom turned to Kapil and said, "We're walking." For the next day and a half, we trudged along the dirt road, rarely meeting other hikers because almost everyone had opted for an automobile. I'm pretty sure Kapil thought we were crazy.

As we walked, I kept thinking about a wildly bejeweled woman I had met in my Thai cooking class. Over tasty pad Thai that now felt worlds away, I had told her that my mom and I planned to do the Annapurna circuit because we didn't want to pay the extra money for a restricted area. She looked me in the eye and said, "You may only do this once. What's a few hundred dollars?" (Of course, the area she recommended would have cost an extra $1,500 per person for permits alone but...) As we watched people start their Himalayan adventure on that road, I was glad I listened to her.

In some ways, this dusty road was a strange ending for a journey filled with tiny villages, vast mountains, and great new friends. On the other hand, one of the reasons the Manaslu circuit originally appealed to me was that people billed it as "the new Annapurna." Well, this is where the Annapurna route has led. Of course, the reasons for building this road were complicated but if this were my commute, rather than my vacation, wouldn't I want the journey to be a little less bumpy?