Heading Home

Casey and I will be leaving Nepal for our long journey back home on January 11th. We'll be spending the next couple of days doing some gift shopping and sharing meals with friends both Nepali and tourist. We have a twelve hour layover (overnight) trapped in the departures area of the Dehli (India) airport which thankfully won't be as bad as the FIFTEEN hour layover we had on the way here from the US. I met a Brit a couple of days ago who is on the same flight with us to India from Kathmandu and he also has a long overnight layover. With three of us hanging out the time should go by faster than when Casey and I each did the fifteen hour wait by ourselves.
After that it's just a couple of quick (heh) flights first to England and then to NYC before we are no longer tourists and are just poor americans again planning for our next adventures....

Everest 3

That's me up there working my way up to Everest Base camp. The glacier to the right in the flats is the Khumbu Glacier. Basecamp would be in the flat rocky area just next to the glacier at the base of the mountain in the center of the photo. The tricky thing is that since it's all just a pile of rocks it's hard to get any real perspective. From where I am to the base camp area is about an hour walk at a rather brisk pace. The larger rocks you see in the "flat" area are the size of 2 story houses. There is a large crashed helicopter at the edge of the glacier that is in the photo but too small to be seen since it's so far away. Those close mountains stand around 1500 meters (almot 5,000 feet) above the base camp area.

Here is that helicopter that crashed at everest base camp. I believe this big russian MI-17 helo crashed here in 2005. It's been beat up worse since it's been lying there and Ali and I spent some rest time throwing rocks at the empty shell. The glacial ground and backdrop still don't give you a good sense of scale here. The MI-17 helo can have seats for up to 24 passengers in the back and the length of the fuselage from tail to front windows is just over 60 feet.

Some of the yaks up in the Himalayas were pretty cool looking creatures. Many had been trimmed of some of their wool to make blankets, scarves etc but many more were in their full glory such as this majestic guy up at Gorak Shep posing with Nuptse and Everest mountains in the background. The yaks were far less excited about me than I was about the yaks.



For example, here I am on a small frozen lake sliding around like a jackass taunting a yak for no good reaason. The yak just looked at me strangely and walked away disgusted.
One time I tried to get Ali to jump on the back of a sleeping yak and see if he could ride it. My argument was that he may never come here again and be in the vicinity of an unsuspecting sleeping yak. It was an oppurtunity he may only get once in his lifetime. He should grab the bull by the horns as they say and climb right on that guy! His argument was that he'd prefer not to get gored by a yak deep in the Himalayas at such a young age. We called it a stalemate and kept hiking.





This is one of the looms they used up there to make the handknit scarves and shawls from yak wool. Similar looms are used for making some basic carpets as well as other things I am sure. In some areas you would pass a little old lady working on a scarf with a rack of finished products for sale nearby. It's all quite old school. It was actually quite funny sometimes to see the items for sale on the side of the trail. The last thing I need to buy when I am a seven days walk from the nearest road is a six in tall bronze statue of Buddha. Perhaps I am wrong but it's just one mans opinion.







Below is a typical small teahouse with yet another yak wandering about. These are the types of places we would stop to get lunch now and then on the treks. Perhaps just some hot tea. One place like this we had somosas for only 5 rupees each which is equivalent to about 3 or 4 cents a piece!

More Everest Photos

Here's another series of photos from the Everest Trek. These are still all courtesy of Ali. I won't have mine till I get back to the states and save up enough money to develop around 14 rolls of film totalling around 450 prints.

The photo to the right is of the illustrious Ali himself. This was the day we got snowed on coming back down from Everest towards Jiri. We had gone over the 3500 meter Lamjura Pass less than an hour before this photo was taken. The smaller building in the background is where we stopped for lunch and to dry off a little.

This little dude was in the building that I just mentioned above. We first saw this guy on the way up to Everest and he was incredible. He was hanging around outside in the cold for a couple of hours totally by himself just having a great time while his mom made us lunch. He's maybe bang a rock on the ground for 45 minutes or make funny noises for example. Lunch is cooked on that wood fired stove the little dude is sitting next too. Most of our dinners on the treks were cooked on stoves just like that one in kitchens just like that one.

These two girls came out to look at the wierd tourists that walk in the mountains for no good reason at all so Casey gave them each a candy and as you can see they were terribly excited. Well, it's a little hard to discern from their faces but generally speaking the kids are excited about free candies even if their expressions are still sometimes that of horror or confusion.











In the area between Namche Bazaar and Gorak Shep we passed many amazing homes. It's well above treeline so they are nearly entirely built of stone. Stone walls, stone roofs, stone everything except for doors and windows. The firewood is carried up from as much as a few days walk away. One day on the hike down we passed at least thirty to forty people with huge bundles of firewood being hauled up the mountain on their backs.


Here's one of the many bridges we crossed on the Everest Trek as well as the Annapurna Trek. The old valleys have been dug deep and tight by the fast flowing rivers fed by snow and galciers melting high above. The bridges save a lot of time and effort but at times can be a bit sketchy. Most of them are newer steel bridges but some are still wooden planks for the base as you see in this one. The horizontal sections of wood are usually patches...

X-Mas in Kathmandu

Still just hanging out in Kathmandu and even here where only some of the tourists are of the christian or related faiths it's hard to escape the pull of Christmas. I'm staying at a Buddhist Meditation Center and even here the monks gave us all free chocolate cake on Christmas eve and there were candy bars stuck to our doors with a note saying "Happy Christmas". It's quite funny at times.
I spent christmas eve dealing with a bit of a gastrointestinal disorder that had me on the toilet far more often than I cared for and I even broke my 13 year long run of not vomiting. The last time I threw up was I think 1993. Fastforward to Nepal, 2006 and halfway through watching a bootleg DVD copy of the movie "The Departed" in the buddhist meditation room here at our hotel I got up to use the bathroom and while I was there I had this growing suspicion, "I think I might actually throw up" which shortly after changed to "I totally am going to throw up" and throw up I did. It was not as bad as I remembered but I would be more than happy to go another 13 years without another episode like that.
Today, being Christmas, has been a bit better. No vomiting and things are feeling a bit more settled internally. I might even have an actual meal for dinner tonight instead of the few pringles and coconut biscuits I've eaten since lunch yesterday. In the christmas spirit I did get out to do a little gift shopping for the friends and family back home but mostly just hung around the hotel area reading.

Two days ago on the 23rd Casey and I went to a punk rock show here in Kathmandu. We missed the first band to play but we caught the entire set of the second band Rai Ko Ris. They were pretty good politically influenced hardcore punk stuff along the lines of a Crass of Ebullition Records type band. There was even a female playing guitar which I thought was great considering the culture here. There is a long ways to go still in terms of womens rights and gender equality. The third band was pretty more gimmicky drunk punk style stuff with 2 or 3 westerners and wigs and a santa clause costume etc. We hung around for a few songs of their set and halfway through a Dead Kennedies cover but we were less into that style and decided to take off. It was a cool thing to see a young punk scene in a place like Kathmandu. It's something I was not expecting to find. There is supposedly an "Infoshop" here in Kathmandu that I will have to go check out soon. Here's the website for the band Rai Ko Ris.

Everest Photos

Being that I am still here in Kathmandu where the internet moves at a snails pace I am not going to bother trying to type up a full diary of the past twenty five or more days. Instead here are a few photos of the trek to Everest Base Camp. Im sure I'll be adding more in the days to come along with more stories to accompany them but in the meantime this will have to do.
(click on the photos to enlarge them)

Here we have the entrance to a monastery in the village of Tengboche. This is already about eight or nine days into our trek. We took a bus from Kathmandu to a town called Jiri. The next morning we started hiking. Six days later we passed Lukla which is where most people fly into to start their trek. A couple of days after that we hiked up here to Tengboche. This is where Casey also exploded from the suspected altitude sickness that turned out to be food poisoning. He was feeling like shit for a while and had vomitted outside once or twice. He came back in to the dining area of our guest house where some helpful souls were trying to lend him a hand when he suddenly lurched forward and sprayed whatever liquid he had left in his stomach onto the floor of the dining room. Then repeated this action a few times into a large metal pot which was procured rather hastily by the incredibly nice woman who ran the place. At this point we decided to take Casey back down the mountain a few hundred meters thinking it was altitude sickness.

I came back up to Tengboche the next morning to meet up with Ali and let him know what was going on. This was supposed to be an acclimatization day a anyway so we were going to hang out in the village and let our bodies adust to the altitude. We decided to take a walk up a little side mountain since we had nothing better to do. It was only a few hundred meters up this bump on the ascending ridgeline but the views were quite nice and it afforded us the oppurtunity to take some great photos my mom is just going to hate. In the photo here we have Ali taking in the view from a perch that looks a little more precarious than it is.

I believe this photo was taken shortly after leaving Dughla and heading up towards Base Camp. The elevation is a bit higher and the views getting more dramatic. This is the area where we had started to reach the terminal morraines of glaciers; the area where glaciers had retreated leaving behind massive piles of stones scraped from the mountains above. I think this was also just below or just above an area of numerous head high square stone memorials built for climbers who have died on the mountains above. They are a sobering reminder of what may come if you are heading up for a summit attempt and are unprepared or just unlucky in many cases.

This next photo is from the area of Everest Base Camp itself. Coming down from high above between Mount Everest and an adjacent mountain called Nuptse is the massive Khumbu glacier. The most common route up Everest first climbs up through the slowly moving iceflow from basecamp to camp one. It's the very beginning but also the most dangerous part of the climb. Being up close you can really appreciate why. I'm on the glacier in the flat section. To my left behind me (outside of the photo) the ice climbs steeply up and much more ragged than where I am standing.

From Everest Base Camp the views are amazing, surrounded on all sides by some of the tallest mountains in the world, but you do not get a view of the summit of Everest. To do that you have to backtrack a little ways to the village of Gorak Shep. We spent the night there at 5,185 meters (17,011 feet) and the next morning climbed up a small mountain called Kala Patthar. From here you get the best view of Everest you can possibly get without doing some technical climbing up one of the nearby peaks or Everest itself. Everest is still just a big piece of stone rising up from between some other peaks. It's impressive but some of the mountains you are standing closer too seem to dominate the skyline due to the perspective. Off camera to the right would be Nuptse and slightly to the right of me in the background you can see the Khumbu Glacier (or Khumbu Icefall) coming down from between the mountains.

Just below the summit of Kala Patthar there is a spire of stone that demanded I scrambled up to the top to pose for some photos. It was quite windy and getting windier by the minute so my Karate Kid pose never worked out but I did get a few good shots. I wish I knew the names off all the mountains in the background but we didn't hang around up there long enough to find out. I do know that at the base of the valley below me you can see the morraine fields of a few glaciers including one or two beautiful ones creeping their way down from Pumori which is off camera to the right and directly behind and above me in the following photo.

Ahhh the summit of Kala Patthar. It was a festive but brutally cold place. When Ali and I got there it was crawling with other trekkers and the wind was howling at a good 40 mph or more the entire time. It had to be below freezing out. As you can tell I am cold. Ali had less clothing on than I had and I think about five seconds after snapping this photo he literally ran down the mountain. When he realized he couldn't feel his hand or his face he decided it was time to go. I found him at the base of the mountain lying in the sand in a warm sunny spot basking like a lizard.

Drive Like Jehu? Who's Jehu?

Casey and I are headed out to begin our Khumbu (Everest region) trek tomorrow morning. We'll be hiking the long route from Jiri all the way up to Everest Base Camp, Kalla Pattar, and Gokyo. Should be nice. We added a Brit named Ali to our entourage for this trek. We met him in Pokhara after the Annapurna Trek and he seems like a good guy.Should have some funny stories after this one too. I'll try to post something when I can during the trek hut I fear that the prices for internet access while en route will be too high. We'll be gone for twentyfive to thirty days most likely.

Motorcycle mayhem

I noticed the rear wheel on Keiths motorcycle lock up and skip sideways a little as he was headed into a curve but then it was back to normal. A second later he and his bike were on their sides and sliding off the side of the gravelly paved road into the drainage ditch. He had some substantial scrapes but no major injuries thankfully. I was a bit concerned since when I pulled over to assist I noticed his calf was pinned under his bike in a sort of odd fashion. It was not as bad as it looked however and when I lifted the bike off his leg he got up and was already more concerned with the condition of his rented motorcycle than he was with his own ability to funtion properly. Crazy Australians. He'll have some minor gashes and a couple of good scrapes to tend to for a while but nothing requiring more than some antiseptic and maybe a few bandages.

Yesterdaey we had taken a ride up from Pokhara to the lookout tower at the top of a small ridge. A place called Sarangkot. You leave Pokhara and head out onto the more rural streets and wind your way up the hill through many sharp turns. About two thirds of the way from the top the paved road ends and it's a rocky (at timess VERY rocky) and steep jeep path. It was Keith, Karl, and myself. The guys had picked up fancy newer bikes that were a bit more of a standard or sport bike style in design while I had what would be better described as a cruiser. The picture here is of a newer version of the bike I had rented. If you have ever ridden a dirt bike you will know that to be scrambling uphill over lots of loose rocks, big bumps, protruding boulders, washouts, etc such as you encounter on a jeep road things are much more comfortable in a standing position. My bike is more like sitting in a recliner with your feet up. Its certainly not for off orad use. It was quite a bit of excersize to just get my ass up off the seat when hitting the bumpy stuff.

Nevertheless we made it to the top and enjoyed the view, despite the odd military post and the cellphone tower there as well. We even made it back down through the rough stuff. It was back on the paved roads that Keith had his little slip up. Today I'm probably going to go for a ride about 15 kilometers out of town to a couple of lakes that are supposdly tourist free which could be nice. The bike I rented seems to be reliable enough but it doesn't like to idle very much. If I hold the clutch in too long or leave it in neutral for more than a few seconds it has a habit of stalling out. I suppose I can't exptect too much for 350 rupees a day, that's about $5 US.

Glutton For Punishment

One thing that I will always take away from this trip as being singularly and profoundly "Nepali" to me will be Dal Bhat. Dhal Bat is a simple meal that consists of white rice, vegetable curry, some lentil soup (that gets poured on the rice) and something they call pickle but in reality is sort of like a glob of spicy yet slightly sweet something. A couple of times I have identified mango but usually the "pickle" is a blob or chunks of spicy unidentifiable plant matter. It's most commonly served on a partitioned metal plate with a seperate bowl for the lentil soup (dal). This dish is sometimes served with other items such as papadum (a crispy cracker type of fried bread with pepper in it) or you can order a non-vegetarian version for the carnivores.

There are two things that stand out about this meal. The first is that Nepalis seem to eat it like mad. IT's available in every restaurant, any time of the day. In the mountains they would have it at at 10am, then again for a later lunch, and again after that for dinner. Just insane amounts of dal bhat which brings me to the second thing that will make this meal so memorable for me. It's an all you can eat meal. They continue to fill your plate until you forcibly turn them away. If you know me at all I need to be in pain before I do such a thing so many times now I have eaten my way to a near comatose state combined with stomach cramps. I will probably come back home with stretch marks. It's usually quite cheap (last night it was the equivalent of $1.30) and it's damn good most of the time. You should probably just come out to Nepal and try it sometime. It's worth the flight.

To The Bat Cave!

I was up on the roof of the hotel watching the sunset when Sina came up to join me. We were sitting for a few moments when she pointed out a little dried blood spot on my foot, "Looks like you had a leech too". I discounted the small spot of dried blood as just an unnoticed cut from walking around barefoot at the hotel. It was a short while later when I was getting ready to go out for dinner that I discovered the huge spot of wet blood in my sock.

Earlier in the day Sina, Irena, Yvette and I went on a long walk out of town and up a ridge to the "World Peace Pagoda". You start off on city streets and then cross a dam at the base of the largest lake in Nepal before entering the woods and ascending to the pagoda. We crossed paths with a herd (?) of monkeys but thankfully they were more concerned with frenziedly chasing each other rather than frenziedly chasing us. We pushed on and arrived at the gleaming white and quite monstrous pagoda about 30 minutes later. We took off our shoes and headed up to the white steps when Sina realized she was leaving bloody footprints on the massive shrine. She was wearing teva sandals for the walk and had picked up a few little leeches on way up. Three to be exact. The rest of us did a quick leech check but didn't spot anything. I was wearing shoes and socks so I just checked my calves and all was clear. I must have missed the little bugger who comitted the atrocities in my sock. We rested and took in the views from the pagoda before descending a different route to the lake where we negotiated a reasonable price for passage back across the lake on a small flat bottom canoe style boat.


That was two days ago and we travelled on foot. Yesterday our goal was a bit further away so we opted to rent bicycles. We were headed out to the Bat Cave. It's a medium to smallish cave that houses a medium to small amount of bats as far as gatherings of bats goes. The ride was sketchy at times in hectic city streets. I believe it was Sina who admitted a little trepidation since she was unfamilliar with the rules of the road to which I helpfully responded, "There are rules?". The cave had a modest 10 rupee entrance fee and it seemed to support a local school which was good. We picked up a local kid to guide us through the maze and it was quick but well worth it. The cave entrance was a large opening and you climb down a flight of stairs to get in however the exit was like being reborn and not in a religious sense. You climb vertically up a few gaps in the rock then slide on your belly through an area not much wider than your shoulders (or your hips for the ladies). We had a nice break before hand and a nice long break afterwards. I have discovered that Pokara is all about taking breaks. I've been making the most of this bit of enlightenment.

The Glacier and Shooter McGavin

Here's just a few photos from the Annapurna Trek so far. This first one is of Myself, Sina, Casey and Irena crossng one of the many wire bridges along the trek. We met these two hoolgans along with Livio (thanks to him for these photos) on the arduous bus ride from Kathmandu to the start of the trek. They're still putting up with us as a matter of fact!

I mentioned in the last post that I would be back with more stories. I'm not much of a story teller so I'll say agan to read Casey's blog for more details and better use of adjectves. Here now though will be a short recounting of what was possibly my favorite day on the Annapurna Circuit although technically the day was spent entirely off the trail. We took a day off to acclimatize at a small village called Manang. It was one of the more lively of the small villages we passed through and in fact boasted no less than four movie houses but more on that later. For our day "off" a few of us decided to hike up to a viewpoint that looked across to a glacier working it's way down from the Annapurnas. It was a bit of a climb and a rewarding view but being only near to a glacier seems like a tease to me and we opted to find a route to the base of it. Our guides who hiked up to the viewpoint with us seemed to dissapear shortly after we decide to push on despite the lack of any real trail. I ended up further ahead of Livio, Sina, Irena, and our new friend Nora and I suspected that they had turned back to town. That suspicion was based on the fact that I was traversing along some rather steep scree slopes, around large icefalls, through small birch forests and all with no trail to follow. There was just occasonal glimpses of the glacier ahead to keep me going the right direction. I finally worked my way there in a fashion that was going against numerous basic concepts of safety in the backcountry. Once I arrived it was pretty incredible. Sheer walls of ice standing at least 50 feet high directly above. I took some photos and started to head back to town by following the small river that was fed by the ice melt. About 15 minutes down spotted the rest of my expedition working their way up the river bed as well. I joined up with them as it started to snow and we walked back up to the base of the glacier. The picture above is of myself, nora, sina, and irena being dwarfed by the massive ice flow. We eventually worked our way back to town in a steadily growing snow fall and it was probably the second most tiring day of the whole trek.
Now back to the movie theatres of Manang. This same evening we went to one of these theaters to watch "Into Thin Air", the tragic book turned into an even more tragic made for TV movie featuring the actor who played Shooter McGavin in Happy Gilmore as the lead. The theater was a small slanted room with wooden benches lined with yak fur. There was a wood stove in the center of the room and you had the option to order popcorn which was brought out to you in a small silver bowl during the movie. It was rather surreal.
After that it was back to our guesthouse for dinner and lots of games of cards with the rest of our crew. It was a good day.