“You Liii’ it Thai Schpishy?”

The beaches couldn’t come soon enough!  After spending two days sweating, complaining about sweating,  picking out our newly-required tank tops (‘grillin’ shirts’ for those of you familiar my summer cooking attire), stuffing myself with any and all foods that were grilled on the sidewalk and served on a stick, and peppering our conversations with “That smells like Bangkok!”, we boarded an overnight bus to the sleepy, fishy port city of Ranong.  From there we planned to ferry our way to Koh Phayam in the Andaman Sea. Ranong smelled like Bangkok. We arrived at the ferry dock during low tide, and the smell of uncovered delta mud and old fish reminded me of Bayou La Batre, Alabama. Turns out, parts of Alabama smell like Bangkok. Koh Phayam, situated two hours off  the West coast of Thailand and directly South of Myanmar, promised to be an island oasis boasting few inhabitants and fewer tourists, a lack of cars or real roads, limited electricity, questionable water sources, mile-long beaches, snakes, monkeys, hornbills, and teal water.      

Koh Phayam rocked our world!   After six weeks of Nepal: Kathmandu-craziness, my bushy ginger-beard,  my 10-day shower strike (Hillary paid up to $5 to shower off with a warmish bucket-full of water in the mountain villages along our treks), boring food,  it felt otherworldly to be clean, clean-shaven, and relaxing in a beach-front hammock while sipping Chang beer and wearing my purple Khao San Road-purchased board shorts. Let me break down our days to you:   wake up all tangled in mosquito netting (realize I am not actually being mauled by some wild animal), walk up the path from our beach-front bungalow to the bamboo building that served as family home/massage parlor/coffee shop (get coffee, no massage), walk back down to beach and read (I tore through some Hemingway- the only man who can make Paris seem as if it exudes testosterone), enjoy all day happy hours from the gal who slung cocktails our way, swim in crazy clear water all afternoon, and then hit up possibly the best food spot we found in all of Thailand. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present Mr. Ziggy Stardust, aka: Thai Spicy Lisp Guy.   What we found around the bend from our bungalow was the most affable, pudgy, smiling, stray/feral-puppy feeding, lispy, tasty-food-making local on the island.  As a whitey in Thailand, you have a hard time convincing folks to actually put some real kick into your meals. They will ask you “You want ‘pharang’ spicy or thai spicy?”- at which we reply “Thai spicy’’ (pharang=whitey).  Hey that’s racist!!  But, sadly, you hardly get a meal that makes you suffer. Ziggy asked on our first encounter, “You wan’ it Thai scphishy”?  “Yes! Thai Spicy! Kap kun krap” I told him. He tried to warn me that he would throw a “fishfull” of peppers into the soup I ordered.  But I told him to do his worst, treat me like a local. Having peppers in a stir fry or dry curry is one thing, but having 30 Thai chilies in your soup is like making a lava tea.   The first few spoonfuls weren’t so bad.. But the peppers started to brew as Ziggy wandered by to check on me every few minutes and walk away with a lispy giggle.  At the halfway point of my bowl, I had to abort the mission and pick out all the remaining peppers from the broth.. Much to Ziggy’s amusement. The stupid pharang had tapped out, beer was no good, time for ice cream.  Hillary had pointed out an upscale bungalow cluster almost a mile north of our patch earlier in the day that she insisted had a secret ice cream stash, and I shot the prospect down (citing the lack of reliable electricity on the island as a deal-killer for frozen treats). But now that my face was melting, we went running towards the healing powers of possible ice cream.    Alas, the home of the $200/nt bungalow (ours was $9) also had a deep freeze powered by solar.  Never have I been so happy to overpay for dessert.

We bailed off Phayam for the mainland once more, traveled for 14hrs via moped taxi (I promise you there is nothing weirder than riding down a bumpy dirt track trying not to press your thighs to the elderly Thai gentlemen who is whisking you across an island on a rickety moped), wooden boat, hitch hike truck, bus, van, and truck tuk to the beach town of Krabi to meet up with some of our trekking buddies from Nepal. The Brits, Mike and Allison, had lined us up a $7 room, two beers, and a pizza.. A bueno reunion!  Next stop: the island of Koh Lanta. Our first day on Lanta was Thanksgiving, and we spent our time explaining the holiday to the Muslim women who ran the BBQ at the spot we picked for our presumed feast.. After assuring me that she knew not of an edible bird larger than a chicken, one of the gals scootered off to the market to buy a chicken for us. We threw in some shrimp, too!  Reminded me of Thanksgiving back on the Gulf Coast: Dad would fry a turkey, but the real feast was in the shrimp, oysters, and crab bisque that became a staple of our family’s holiday shindigs.  Now if I only had some of my cousin Tracy’s cheese straws.. Thanksgiving would be complete.

I have a confession:    I enjoy riding scooters, mopeds, whatever you wanna call em.  I mean I REALLY love the feeling of zooming around beach roads and jungle corners at a top speed of 40km/hr while wearing a flimsy plastic helmet that only protects my noggin’ from sunburn (maybe) and listening to Hillary scream at me to not hit the chickens, pigs, puppies in the roadway.   We spent our time on Lanta “beach crawling”, as Mike coined it.  Wake up, pancake, moped, stop at beach numero uno, play in sand and water, moped, find beach numero dos, repeat playtime, moped, lunch, try and teach the girls how to moped, realize mopeds are too masculine for girls, beach numero tres, 7-11 for cheap whiskey and cola, moped, beach numero quatro, sunset and cocktails…   better than pub crawling.

A few days later, we ferried over to pretty little Ko Phi Phi.  Phi Phi is a bit of paradox  if you ask me. Smack dab in the middle of the archipelago where “The Beach” was filmed, it is a limestone juggernaut of beauty that embodies all things amazing and evil about island tourism. While I relished the opportunity to privately snorkel in spotlessly-clear bays underneath soaring limestone karsts, I sadly watched hoards of tourists aboard overloaded party boats throw cigarette butts, beer bottles, plastic bags, and food wrappers overboard surrounding the more touristy islands. Luckily, we had chartered a small long tail boat with the Brits, so we could kinda tell our driver where we wanted to spend our time. We cruised into a skinny, shallow bay that proved to be the highlight of our Phi Phi trip.   Sure, other boats came and went, but we spent the rest of the afternoon jumping from the bow, swinging of ropeswings, and getting pummeled by tiny fish that protected their nesting areas kamikaze-style by ramming into my ribs so hard that it left tiny bruises. I mean, these fish were finger sized..

Next up, the Railay-Tonsai-Pra Nang beach area.  Technically back on the mainland, but logisitically an island, this peninsular paradise boasted beaches routinely mentioned amongst the most dramatic in the whoooole World.    Previous statement: True. Gigantic pillars of limestone plunging into the sea.. Blue green water.. White beaches… obese eastern Europeans in banana hammocks.. Shockingly beautiful sights.   Also, one of the most fun places..   My favorite night in the area was spent in Tonsai beach: douchey-fratboy-esque buckets of local whiskey and/or rum, fire breathers/dancers, ROPESWINGS (I love ropeswing.. “Brick, do you really love ropeswing?”), and laughing my ass off with Allison as Hill and Mike did some funky hip-rolling-floppy-arm dancing to the local reggae band that refused to do a cover of Lady Gaga for Hillary.. Surprise, surprise.  Staying in the jungly ‘headlands’ area, we managed to avoid the vast majority of other westerners, but the skeeters found us for sure.   Thank God for OFF!  Confession #2:   I decided not to take anti-malarial pills.. Not really a problem in this area, but still.. I had doubted the reliability of OFF, but did not want to use cancer-causing, plastic melting DEET-laden products.. So I decided to use it in the non-malarial areas so we could see if it was trustworthy for the areas further north in Thailand and jungly Laos and Cambodia.   No symptoms yet, but I think I could take a round or two of Malaria and keep kicking. It would be a good souvenir!  

……“That smells like Bangkok”

Now, let’s see….where did I leave off? Ah, yes, that’s right.  I was recouping from 4 days of gastrointestinal hell just in time to make an all-day flight from Kathmandu to Bangkok.  It’s best to test a finicky stomach with questionable airport food and a solitary in-flight bathroom.  Ha!. But alas, I was actually feeling much better on the day of our flight to the Land of the Smiles, as Thailand is known.  The Kathmandu airport (as I’ve previously described in the Everest trek blog) did not fail us in providing a comical façade of “order” and “security”.  The short story is that I was groped in security checks no less that 3 or 4 separate times, could not find the gate (because the flights are not posted at specific gates), and then made a mad dash with a hundred other people when finally our flight was randomly called to proceed to the plane.  Following another grope sesh- literally on the tarmac- we finally boarded our Indigo flight to Delhi, for a short layover and then on the Bangkok.
Now, I had many expectations (actually, just preparing myself for a very uncomfortable experience) about the New Delhi airport.  But, you know what? That place was a friggin’ palace.  I had just come from Kathmandu, and really, that changes everything.  But, the airport was…CLEAN, and Air-conditioned.  It had REAL BATHROOMS.  And McDonalds!  Which Jordan and I decided to feast on, since A) its probably been about 1 year since that we’d last had Mackies D’s, and B) you can order a Chicken Maharaja Mac.  That’s the next best thing to a good ol’ Big Mac since Hindus do not eat beef.  Special sauce and all.  I had a Spicy McChicken, which in hindsight was a terrible choice considering my very delicate constitution.  But, as it turned out, I held it down (and up, hehe) just fine, and my very dehydrated self really relished the 5 million grams of sodium.
Anyways, we boarded our flight a short time later to Bangkok, which landed at a convenient time, midnight.  Walking through the BKK airport was yet again an exercise in appreciating things, that I , as very spoilt American, have always taken for granted.  “Oh its so clean and modern!” “The bathrooms aren’t squat!” It was heaven in a terminal.
After a quick and ridiculously hassle-free experience with Thai immigration, we stepped out into the hot, sticky, humid Thailand night to find a taxi.  Immediately, J and I both zeroed in on a guy hanging out near his scuffed-up Nissan Centra taxi, several hundred yards away from the airport exit, where yelling and screaming taxi drivers tried to drum up our business.  Having done our research, we knew to ask for the meter rate (instead of negotiating a price beforehand) , but our new taxi driver, simply said “Nope, no meter. No have”.  Ok.  So I guess, we negotiate.  Its was late. He was nice.  Neither of us felt like shopping around.  So we settled on a 300 Baht fare from the airport to our hotel, assuming our new taxi friend knew where that was, which was questionable.
This is when the scariest car ride of my life took place.  Our taxi driver decided to be as efficient as possible whisking us from the airport to our hotel, driving around 160km/hr on the relatively traffic-free Bangkok interstate.  “This is how I’m going to die”, I thought.  In a head-on collision at 1 o’clock in the morning in Bangkok.  To the soundtrack of “Gangam Style”.  It doesn’t seem like a noble death.  (Now as I remember that night, I have “Gangam Style” stuck in my head.  Perfect.)
By some divine Providence, we made it to our hotel, which happened to be down a quiet and pleasant soi (small street), close to the main tourist area.  Again by some karmic fluke (acquired in Hindu Nepal), we were upgraded for the night into a VERY nice room.  Keep in mind that this expensive room was valued at $50/per night.  A big soft bed!  Complimentary bottled water! A TV (haven’t seen one of those in 6 weeks)! AIR CONDITIONED!  Compliementary breakfast!  Truly the high life.
The next morning, after a delightfully clean hot shower, breakfast, and a room-switch (you can’t live in a castle forever, I suppose), we set off to explore the strange, strong, revolting, and delightful city of Bangkok.  The first thing I noticed about Bangkok, apart from the oppressive heat and humidity that my mountain body was not at all used to, was the smell.  Or, smells, rather. First, the delicious, smoky scent of barbeque pork-on-a-stick, such a staple of Bangkok street foods. Its place in the culinary hierarchy is akin to Snickers or Pringles in the States.  Just a tasty little treat to grab and eat on the run.  Then, I noticed the coalescing fragrances of  motor oil and mud that emanated from the nearby river.  It reminded me of the Gulf Coast, and my childhood days spent bent over looking for hermit crabs on the lagoon of Gulf Shores.  But it was the next smell that I will, for as long as I live, always associate with Bangkok, and really with all of Southeast Asia.  The stuff that weird sayings are made of.  The “that smells like Bangkok” smell.  It’s sweet, deceptively, but also rancid.  It smells likes sewage and pastries mixed together.  Like day-old fried chicken and rotten candy.  Ubiquitously, Bangkok.  It hits me like a ton of rotten eggs.  One minute, I’m walking down the street, the air fresh and clean or maybe faintly sweetened by bougainvilleas or papaya trees.  I step cautiously over an open grate in the sidewalk and BAM! “That smells like Bangkok!” My nose crinkles and my stomach rolls over, a gag rises to my throat.  And then it passes. To be replaced once again by barbequed pork or river mud or beauganvilleas.  That’s Bangkok for you.
But I smell it everywhere.  In Bangkok, of course, but also on the southern Thai islands, and in the more rural northern Thailand.  And even now, here, in Laos.  I say it at least five times a day, as I stroll through new places….”blek, that smells like Bangkok..”  But its already so ingrained in my mind, so entrenched in my olfactory memory, this simultaneously pleasant and disgusting aroma conjurs up vivid recollections.  Khao San Road, the Bourbon street of Bangkok--all douche-y frat t-shirts and bucket drinks.  20 Baht Phad Thai.  Finding the perfectly nasty street stall with broken plastic stools and sticky tabletops,  and putting WAY too much red chili flakes in my Tom Yum soup.  And then having to drink 2 big Chang beers to douse the inferno in my mouth.
That’s what I remember when I come by a place that smells like Bangkok.  And I hope it will always be like that.

Just one more post about the joys of being sick overseas (hopefully).

Hello again.  Yes its me, your friendly neighborhood travel buddy.  Back so soon to write another blog post!  I am desperately trying to get caught up so that I don't give up and abandon the blog altogether.  I thought about skipping this blog post since we just detailed the highs and lows of being sick during the Everest trek, but Jordan said it was too funny not to post.  So, here we go.

Two days after returning from Everest, we were back in Kathmandu, basking in the glory of being kinda clean and eating something other than fried noodles.  We went out on the town with our new New Yorker friends. We moved up our Thailand flight to a mere 5 days away. Yes, things were looking good.  Jordan talked me into moving from a guesthouse to a hostel.  Now up until this point, we had stayed in guesthouse or hotel rooms with attached bathrooms while we were in the city.  But as a social experiment and as a money saver, we decided to give the whole dorm room thing a try.  Our hostel had a very cool vibe and seemed to have interesting and social travelers.  Yes, this would be a  good experience.

Our first night in the dorm was pretty uneventful, apart from the fact that sharing a room with 6 other people is a little annoying when said people come in at all hours of the night, at all stages of drunken-ness.  Not to mention the door to our room had a very persnickety lock, which made for a 5 minute long, knob rattling, key cranking, expletive-slurring process to get the door open.  Now imagine 6 drunk people trying to get in the room at any hour between 1 and 3 am.  Like I said, a little annoying.  

Anyways, the next day Jordan and I ran some errands in Thamel (tourist neighborhood) and found a delicious Israeli restaurant, serving the freshest looking salads we had seen since Seattle.  Now it had been 5 weeks since I'd eaten a fresh fruit or vegetable, and these salads were too delicious to pass up.  Plus, they were more expensive than any other meal we'd had, so they had to be safe.  Right?  And it said right there on the menu, "Our produce is soaked in iodine water and then washed in filtered water".  It has to be safe!  Whether or not the salad made me sick, I'll never know.  But we ate there twice that day, salads for lunch and dinner.  I went to bed early that night and woke up around 11pm a little queasy.  That's funny, I sleepily thought.  Its probably just because I ate a basketball-size amount of salad.  It will pass, I rolled over and tried to go back to sleep.  But it didn't go away.  The nausea persistently got worse until I was fully awake and fully uncomfortable.  Still I wasn't sure I would have to puke yet, but better to make a plan now, just in case.  If I do have to puke, I'm  not going to be able to make it to the bathroom, because of the pesky broken doorknob.  It will take me 5 minutes to get the door open and I'm sure I will just have to puke on the floor by then.  The window, I decided, was my best option.  It was right next to my bed and in an emergency I could get it open quickly and hurl there.  

Meanwhile, two of my drunk dorm mates were drunkenly trying to "get it on", shall we say.  I don't know much about these two lovebirds, but I'll let you know what I gleaned.  The guy, who had some stupid name like Marty, had the most Americany American accent I've ever heard.  But he told everyone at the hostel, when asked "where ya from", "well my parent's are Australian and Swedish.  But I live in Bangladesh."  Interesting.  When pressed by other Aussies as to what part of Australia he was from, he said reluctantly "uhhh...MelBORNe"  Pronounced just that way.  Now, I've never been to Oz but I know enough.  And Aussies pronounce Melbourne as "MelBUN".  Right, Marty, I'm sure you're from Melbourne.  Or Indiana.  Anyways, Marty was trying to seduce a cute New Zealand girl, who was trying her best to act like she wasn't a complete floozy.  But Marty was persistent and they started to drunkenly talk about love and the meaning of life, and that was the ticket to the Kiwi girl's heart, or her pants.

Good God, I'm gonna puke from having to listen to this crap, I thought.  Well, there is no way I'm going to get up and interrupt this romance unless I absolutely have to.  But eventually I just couldn't lay there anymore.  I was going to puke.  I kicked off my covers, jumped out of the bottom bunk of the bunk beds, slammed open the window and proceeded to puke down two stories to the sidewalk.  Thank God Jordan woke up, even though he was wearing earplugs.  The lovebirds fumbled to put pants on and and then fumbled to get the door open.  I guess nothing kills the mood like a girl puking right next to you.  Finally the door was open and I ran out to the bathroom, just in time for another round of puking to start.  Then, wouldn't you know it, my large intestine couldn't let my stomach have all the fun, so it started coming out both ends.

It went on like that all night.  I timed it.  I needed to puke every 45 minutes.  For 7 hours.  Did I mention yet, that the shared bathroom didn't have a door but a shower curtain for privacy?  I finally stopped closing the door to the dorm room.  It just took to long to get it open again.  It was without question the most miserable I've even been in my entire life.  The next morning I absolutely demanded that I move to a private room WITH a private bathroom attached! There was no way in hell I was spending one more minute in the dorm room with hungover people shuffling about while my head was spinning and my stomach was churning.

I couldn't eat for 3 days.  Finally, the first day I felt well enough to walk around town again, I went with Jordan to get pizza.  I took one step inside the restaurant and ran straight to the bathroom, dry heaving from the mere smell of cheese and tomato sauce.  When I finally pulled myself together, I ordered plain steamed rice while Jordan chowed down on a Hawaiian pizza.  But when my rice came, I couldn't stand the smell of that either.  Jordan's favorite quote from the whole ordeal was me saying "I can't eat it.  It smells too...rice-y".  I spent our lunch hunched in the corner with my head turned to the window and my back turned to Jordan.  It was very rude but I couldn't sit there and watch Jordan French kiss his pizza.  

Three days later we flew to Thailand, where I've been trying to eat like its my job.  Oh the joys of traveling.

Things I've learned about myself from this experience thus far:

I'm not a hostel person, much to Jordan's dismay.  I want my own room. And preferably my own gosh darned bathroom.

Being at some level of sick is kind of an all-the-time thing when you are traveling in developing countries.  Especially if you eat sketchy street food.  And have delicious fruit shakes with questionable ice.  You just get used to it.

I don't care about eating healthy at all. I eat the most greasy, oily, fattiest food I can find.  Keeping weight on is more important than heart disease.

A Tale of Two Everests. A Tale of Two Sickies. Hmm

Hillary=normal
Jordan=BOLD

H:
It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.  Ain‘t that the truth.  This is the story of our adventure to Everest, and if it seems like a bipolar tale, its because it is.  Jordan and I have decided to co-write this post, so that we can let you in on how different our experiences were at different times.  So bare with us, it may be lengthy and a bit redundant.

Let me start out by saying the my expectations were quite high for this trek, 8848 meters high to be exact.  Everest was my Mecca of sorts, the whole reason for coming to Nepal in the first place.  Yes, Annapurna was great, but the REAL reason I were here is to see Everest with my own eyes.  I’ve come to view the Everest  region as somewhat of a celebrity.  Actually traveling to the little villages along the trek that I’ve read about so many times in “Into Thin Air” was both surreal and somewhat disconcerting, like I was meeting the lead singer of a band that I listened to thousands of times.  Or something like that.

I also felt like Everest was my baby.  I’d done the research (but I do most of it anyways) and I’d chosen a difficult route for Jordan and I.  The Three Passes Route.  It would take us to all three valleys in the region, cross over three mountain pass higher than 5200 meters and give us some the best and most varied views of the big hills.  It would take us around 20 days to trek, about twice as long as the Annapurna trek and longer than I’ve ever continuously hiked in my life…..My, how things change.

To back up a little bit, the week before we left for Everest, still in Pokhara, Jordan came down with what we initially thought was good ole bacterial travelers diarrhea.  So we loaded him up with antibiotics and called it good.  But he kept getting sick.  Finally after 4 days, he seemed to be back to his healthy six-meal-a-day-eating self again.  So we high-tailed it back to Kathmandu, taking a weekend pit stop in Bhaktapur for the Dashain festival, and then before we knew it we were sitting in the front seat of a tiny airplane bound for Lukla, where we would touch down at  the deadliest airport in the world and start our trek.  I’m gonna paint a little picture of how airports work in Nepal for you.  We walked with our backpacks into a giant, hot, squished-with-people room, and looked for our ticket counter.  Of course nobody who works for the airline is standing behind said ticket counter, so we plopped our bags down and waited in line (because we got there 2 hrs early).  Finally after an hour and a half of waiting with no signs of  “hey, lets check you guys in, now”,  Jordan approached someone at a different ticket counter to see what the deal was, and wouldn’t you know, our flight was delayed.  You see in Nepal, you aren’t on the 8am or 9am flight, you are on the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc flight of the day, and whatever time that leaves is when you leave.  So our flight was delayed, and because all the other flights before our flight were delayed too, it was starting to look like we were not going to get a ride to Lukla that day.  But Jordan was very sweet ,Southern, and flirtatious with the only female employee in sight and got us on the flight that was “leaving right now”.  So after a little groping/security check we were checked in and only had to two wait 2 more hours until our flight left.  The flight was uneventful, I think.  I honestly can’t recall specifics because I was too busy freaking out in my head. Since we were in the front two seats, Jordan was busy memorizing the fuel shutoff steps displayed in the cockpit.. In case we crashed into a fiery ball in the mountains. Most of my flight was spent chanting the Hail Mary in my head (the parts I could remember anyway) and then freaking out more that I couldn’t even remember the whole freaking Hail Mary.  Anyways, we landed.  So thank you 7 years of Catholic school.

Anyways, Lukla, from here we had a nice short walk, mostly downhill to Phakding, where we spent the night.  The next day was our biggest hike in terms of elevation gain, over 1000m to get to Namche Bazaar.  From here, I’m handing to laptop to Jordan:

J:   Oh Namche, the loveliest village on the mountianside. Resting at appx. 3500meters and 26 hiking miles Southwest of Mt. Everest, Namche Bazar is a common spot to spend an acclimatization day and do some last-minute shopping of quality locally-made down goods. I spent the first day successfully convincing Hillary that she did NOT need a full-body goose down expedition suit for the Three Passes hike. If you are familiar with Hillary and her opinion of cold-weather camping, hiking, surviving, etc.. then you know that this is not the first time I’ve had to coax her back off that ledge. The only difference was that in the US, these bad boys cost $1500.. And in the copy shop capital of Namche, you could bring home your very own goose down Michelin Man suit for about $200.  We finally decided on scooping up a black “Millet” down jacket for Hillary and a school-bus-yellow “Mammut” down vest for myself. All for 5000R.. Or about $60!

We had found a little lodge called Holiday Namche, which was nestled high on the Western flank of the amphitheater-shaped village and offered astounding views of the craggy spires surrounding the river valley from our room‘s window… all for about $3/night. I spent the evening  eating water buffalo curry, swapping stories  with a professional trail runner from Chamonix, France, and making fun of a rather pompous guided-n-portered British group all wearing hats, shirts, and sweatshirts emblazoned with “Everest Base Camp” who loudly professed over satellite phones to have just gotten off … ‘expedition’.. to the hardest hike in the world. 

Now it is quite hard to pinpoint a sickness on a single dish or cup of liquid when you’re enjoying such suspect culinary treats. Did I get the bug from the delicious roadside, hand-served 60rupee slop in Pokhara.. Was it the buffalo curry whose protein was sourced from a farm 8-days walking downhill from Namche.. Celebratory cocktails with questionable ice in Pokhara with the Anglo-Franco-Yanko team after the Annapurna Circuit?   Well we just don’t know.   But I can tell you for certain, that the last thing you wanna do is get sick at 11,500 feet, while using a shared bathroom, and after eating spicy veggie momos!   The next days are kinda a bathroom-bed-bathroom-bed blur, and luckily our room was up two flights of tunnel vision-inducing stairs. After three days of this nonsense, I was so weak and dehydrated that simply  walking the 100yds across the village left me confused, stumbly, and rather demoralized. We decided I needed to see a doctor, and the land donated for the newly built medical clinic was in the best spot possible.. 600 vertical feet uphill from the village. I decided that I would rather succumb to an unflattering dehydration-induced death in an unmarked toilet stall than walk uphill ANYWHERE.  Luckily,  on our walk back the lodge, I blearily stumbled into the front door of a previously unnoticed pharmacy. Hillary asked for some IV fluids, and the nurse who ran the shop cheerily handed her a 0.5Liter glass bottle of Lactate Ringers while saying, “Look, it doesn’t even expire until next week!” We decided against this option. After a quick chat, we concluded that I was suffering from a protozoal infection of Giardia. We picked up a few doses of Tinidazole, and I stumbled triumphantly towards the lodge and my bed.  I felt a bit better the next day, so we took a stroll up a ridgeline to 12,600ft to a vantage of Everest and my BFF, Ama Dablam (my favorite mountain of all time).


So instead of just one acclimatization day in Namche Bazaar, we spent a whopping 4 days there.  Jordan was real trooper through it all.  I, on the other hand, got itchy feet on day 2.  “What do you mean you can’t just go for a walk through town?” I would whine.  Its my own fault I suppose, I brought quite possibly the most boring book on this trek and I tried to find any excuse not to read it.  So after 4 days at 3500m, I figured we would be “super acclimatized” but it became clear that we were simply not going to be able to do our planned trek.  The fact of the matter was that Jordan was too weak and we didn’t want to risk being in more isolated valleys and him getting sick again.  Change of plans.  Instead of taking a clockwise, west to east trek over the Three Passes, we decided to continue the trek up the classic Everest Base Camp route, where, if Jordan was feeling better we could rejoin the Three Passes trail and do it in reverse, counter-clockwise from east to west.  The next day we set off for Tingboche, a little village in the saddle between two mountains with an active Tibetan Buddhist monestary and one kick-ass bakery.  It was a tough hike for the both of us.  I was carrying a little more weight in my pack and Jordan was still dehydrated and calorie-depleted.  But after the long uphill slog, we both had the most overpriced and delicious croissants and chocolate cake.  The next day Jordan was feeling much better and we had an easy jaunt to the next little town of Dingboche.  Per the guidebook, we were supposed to spend another night here to acclimatize, but Jordan and I figured we would be fine, what with all the extra time in Namche.  Plus we wanted to get up to Chukkung, a little outpost that serves at the starting point for climbing the nearby Island Peak.  Now, even after 4 days of Giardia-induced fluid deprivation, Jordan still had a bit of peak-bagging fervor.  Unfortunately, that night in Dingboche, I got the first symptoms of altitude sickness.  I’d had trouble sleeping the night before in Tengboche but I figured it was just the cold weather and lack of insulation in our tool shed excuse of a guesthouse room.  But the next night, in Dingboche, I didn’t sleep at all.  Well, actually I would sleep for 30 minutes or so and then I would stop breathing, which would of course wake me up with the terrifying feeling of suffocation.  You see when you climb to high altitude with less oxygen in the air, your body compensates by breathing faster and deeper, to get your lungs and muscles and brain the oxygen it needs.  But you also “blow off” a lot of carbon dioxide when you exhale.  So when you go to sleep, because your CO2 levels are low and that’s the primary drive for your brain to say “hey you idiot breathe!” your brain is all like “nah its cool the carbon dioxide levels are fine” and you stop breathing for long pauses, letting your CO2 levels to rise back to normal levels.  But because you aren’t breathing,  your oxygen levels drop low enough for you brain to get a little stressed out, at which point you wake up gasping for air.  So that was my night in Dingboche.  And after a few waking-up-by-suffocation episodes, I started to have a lot of anxiety.  That’s another symptom of altitude sickness.  Anyways, I decided it was time to give up the goose and start taking Diamox, a medicine to help the body acclimitize more quickly.  Its an annoying drug.  It makes your face, hands and feet numb and tingly, and it makes you pee all the damn time.  We also decided it was necessary to spend a rest day in Dingboche.

Dingboche turned out to be one of our favorite villages in all of Nepal. We spent two nights here, and spent the time gazing up at the Northern side of Ama Dablam, attending an education clinic concerning AMS, and drinking tea while being entertained by the young man breaking a coal-black stallion at our lodge. We spent a great deal of time getting to know our fellow trekkers and the village locals while watching the young horse buck and gallop his way down the stone path outside the lodge. We were fascinated by the stories from a Brazilian fellow who had climbed Everest, Cho Oyu, and was on high on Manasulu during the late September avalanche that killed several climbers. He was celebrating his 50th hike up to Kalapathar while guiding trekkers that night. Much dancing and beer ensued!

Our next destination was the village of Chukung: a contender for the top spot on our trek. Walking steadily through the remnants of a receding glacier, we boulder-hopped, stream-jumped, and yak-dodged our way to this tiny outpost near the bottom of  8,000meter (and seldom climed) Lhotse. I had a two-day struggle with my desire to climb a Himalayan peak.. And after much debate with the frostbitten angel and ice-tool-wielding devil on my shoulders, I decided it was not worth forking over $900 for a guided trip up the 20,000ft+ Island Peak.. Mostly because I had no clue how I would perform that high up after being quite sick earlier in the week. Nothing says “Wha Whah” like turning around and spending almost a month’s-worth of trip fund on a failed climb..  Instead, and for FREE, we spent our days hiking up Chukung Ri to a vantage around 17,500ft and simply looking in awe at the surround giants of ice and stone.      This was how I spent November 3, my 28th birthday: with my girl, an ear-to-ear grin, and an overwhelming amount of gorgeous alpine scenery before my eyes. (I declared that I had two birthday.. Since Nepal is 12hrs ahead of Seattle time, I had a Nepal birthday and an American birthday.. And I squeezed every minute out of it!)  On this day I captured my favorite picture from our trip so far: a panorama from Island Peak over to Ama Dablam.. Stunning (I should mention here that I started getting a gnarly headache and nauseous on the day hike up to Chukkung Ri.  I was a whiny, bitchy, slow-moving mess.  Jordan kinda got jipped in the happy-smiley girlfriend department for his birthday.  At this point, it was clear, I wasn‘t going to be able to do the first pass.  I was having acute mountain sickness symptoms starting at 4400 meters and was dragging ass.  A 5500+ pass was just out of the picture.   We would have to just go to Everest Base Camp on the standard, filled with European tourists, route.  Wha-wha.)

We decided to walk the long way around to the village of Luboche, which took us back down to Dingboche, and past Taboche and Cholatse.. Two Westward-listing peaks with strangely shaped chutes of alpine ice that we dubbed the Death Slides. Instead of following a lower trail that followed the river, we opted to gain a higher ridge to the North and wander Westward through seasonal yak “karkas” (pastures) in the direction of Lobuche. This turned out to be a great decision, as we were alone for hours on end, save the random yaks grazing. We pulled into Lobuche late that night, after an eerie stroll through boulder fields littered with chortens erected in honor of climbers who did not return from the surrounding mountains. We were treated to a blazing sunset set reflected upon the icy summit of Nuptse while chatting with an entertaining couple from Buffalo, NY. It was refreshing to talk with folks about dark beers, food covered with cheese, more food, buffalo wings, NFL, more beer, and cheesebuuuuurgers!

The next day from Lobuche we hiked a short 3 miles up to the last tiny outpost of a village, Gorak Shep, just a hop, skip and a jump from Kala Pattar and Everest Base Camp.  The start of the day was an easy flat walk through the terminal moraine of the Khumbu Glacier.  It was supposed to be a small vertical gain day, lucky for me.  I was feeling much better after descending down from Chukkung and then staying overnight in Lobuche, which was an almost net-even altitude gain.  That being said, any kind of physical activity apart from walking very slow on flat ground left me gasping for air and having to stop every 10 minutes or so.  About an hour into the walk up to Gorak Shep, we came to a pretty tall little hill.  Surely, I thought, this will be the only height we will gain and then it will be relatively flat from here.  Wrong.  After struggling up a dusty, chossy, steep hill, I realized we would only have to go down the other side and then back up another hill, and another hill after that.  Somewhere along the way I started to get a bit of a headache.  And then we saw it, the Khumbu freaking Glacier.  And then we saw the very start of the Icefall.  And then! And then! Everest poked its big black pyramid head out from around Nuptse! It was exhilarating. Here I am, close to something so huge and famous! We dragged ourselves into Gorak Shep, and then I started to feel like absolute shit.  Pounding headache.  Sensitive to light.  Every part of my body ached.  I choked down garlic soup.  Apparently, that’s supposed to help with altitude sickness.  Our plan for the day had been to rest for awhile at the guesthouse then take a walk up to Everest base camp.  But all I could think about doing was laying down in a dark room and moving as little as possible.  “I’ll just lay down for an hour” I told myself, then I’ll get up and we’ll take a walk up there.  I started to feel very fuzzy.  Sort of drunk and very very tired. But my head hurt so bad I couldn’t sleep.  I had an internal debate for about thirty minutes of “is it worth it to get up and go pee?”  At this point, Jordan came to check on me, saw that I was in pretty bad shape, and started to realize that we would probably have to go back down.  Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.  I belligerently argued with him for awhile that I was fine, I would be fine tomorrow to hike up to 5500m to Kala Pattar, even though at present I was quivering in the fetal position at 5200 meters.  But, in the end, I realized we had to go back down.  It was either that or risk getting worse and having to max out my credit card with a helicopter evacuation.  So Jordan took all the weight out of my backpack except for the sleeping bags and down jackets, and I ataxically stumbled my way down back to Lobuche.  Jordan took a video of me trying to figure out which way to walk around a boulder in the middle of the trail.  First I went left, then right, then back left.  Looking back, it was scary, and we made the right decision.  But at the time, I was so disappointed in myself.  How could I get altitude sickness now? I’ve already done the AC, and felt great at 5400 meters.  What was wrong with me now, when it mattered to me more?  Plus I felt  like I ruined Jordan’s Nepali birthday.

Walking back down to Lobuche was the strangest experience.  Like, I actually noticed my head feeling clearer and clearer. Like my brain was working that much better with the tad bit more oxygen.  Once we reached town, I was coherent and even intellectual.  We had birthday grilled cheeses and went to sleep in the coldest bed I’ve ever slept in.  At this point, after having admitted to myself that it just wasn’t meant to be (or that I was just a big baby), I felt like I couldn’t spend one more minute than I had to in the mountains. I was just….done.   We left Lobuche bright and early and decided to go as far as we could.  Typically people stop in Dingboche or Tengboche for the night.  But I figured, why stop hiking at 3 in the afternoon and spend another cold night eating crappy noodles, when we can walk all the way  back  to Namche and eat slightly less crappy noodles and sleep in a much warmer bed.  So that’s what we did.  Twenty-three miles of downhill-uphill-downhill for 9 hrs, the last hour of which was walked in the dark with headlamps.

Returning to Namche was like returning to modern civilization.  Hot water showers!  Expensive crappy beer! No more headache!  After a completely gluttonous rest day (like eating 2 large yak cheese pizzas for breakfast) we knee-banged it back down to Lukla to try to get a flight outta there.  Back to the craziness of Kathmandu.

Side note:  We started this blog entry right after returning to Kathmandu but as you know, we didn’t finish it and now, I’m sitting here in Chiang Mai, Thailand trying to recall events and thoughts that are already starting to blur in my memory.  Re-reading the earlier portion of the blog, I realize now that my side of the story  is almost solely describing  my various ailments and bodily discomforts, which is a large part of what I remember from that particular trip.  But of course, I also remember the scenery. Its just harder to describe.  Its there in the background of my head.  It almost silly to try and talk about  it. It would sound stupid. The mountains were ….Big is all I can say.  Making me feel small.  Making me wonder how in the hell people can carve a life out in a very inhospitable place.  Its also weird how my mind’s eye was sort desensitized to beautiful, huge mountains.  The first couple dozen you see, its like “whoa, oh my god, awesome” and all that.  And then when its all you see for 6 weeks, its just….what’s there.  Funny huh?


Anyways, we left Lukla on a similarly tiny airplane, in a similarly organized and orderly process as how we came.  Haha.  But as I sat in my front row seat and peered out the window, chanting my abridged version of the Hail Mary, I became sort of sad to think that I would never come back to the Himalayas.  It just didn’t seem right, that this experience would be my first and last.  No, I was already starting to miss it, just a little bit.  I was mesmerized to look out and see the huge looming mountains of pure, hard white give way to the scrunched up blanket of green, earthy hills, terraced into concentric shapes in such a way that it looked like a topographical map.  To see huge rivers, diverge into various smaller ones and then disappear between mountainsides.  Then those thoughts of piqued curiosity and maybe even adventure crept back in.  “I wonder how far that river goes”….”I wonder what’s beyond those last hills”…”I wonder what those  people down there are doing right now”.  Yes, I’ll definitely come back again.

Geez.. I just read through this blog entry again now that it is finally done.. Thanks for getting through it guys! Long one..

Nepal, meet Left Arm. Left Arm, meet Nepal.

  After 11 days of hiking on the Annapurna circuit, it was finally Friday, October 13th.  The day I've been waiting for for 6 weeks.  The day my left arm gets to be a part of the world again.  No more Left Arm solitary confinement in blue cast prison. No, from here on out, left arm would get all the good things again: sunshine, fresh air, a long-overdue shower.  Just a few pesky things to get out of the way before Left Arm's Emancipation.  It turns out the Friday the 13th-bad luck thing, also true in Hindu-Buddhist countries.  First, we took a flight from Jomsom, "big" village on the Circuit, back to Pokhara.  Now normally I wouldn't think twice about flying, but just a few weeks ago, the exact same type of plane crashed taking trekkers to the Everest region.  And the airport doesn't exactly make you feel secure.  Not when the airline ticket officers are wearing knock-off North Face fleeces no name tag in sight and the security officers give your backpack an outside squeeze then slap a "security checked" sticker on your bag.  Never showed my passport to anyone.   So then we get on the plane, a Twin Otter, and take off climbing steeply into the blue sky to avoid a lesser Annapurna foothill.  For all my anxiety though, the plane ride was smooth as can be.  25 minutes later we landed back in Pokhara to the heat and humidity I'd forgotten about.  Left arm didn't forget.  She started to sweat immediately.  I was so excited.  The cast will be off in a mere hour or two I thought!  Off by lunch time to enjoy a celebratory beer.  But then I couldn't find my backpack in "baggage claim".  And then I was trying to keep Jordan from going ape shit on a tiny middle-aged Nepali man, screaming for some reason in a Southern accent "Find that f*cking bag!  You better find that bag!"  Crap was all I thought, I don't give a hoot about this backpack, but now it looks like Left Arm will be staying locked up for the rest of the morning.  We were led to an office where some airline lady explained that my bag was removed from the plane because the plane was over weight limits. Hmm, curious because all our bags were weighed before we got on the plane.  So after an hour of sitting in this office, Jordan giving a kill-stare to the poor ladies, my bag was miraculously returned to me!  After cabbing back to our hotel, ditching our bags, and me scolding Jordan about not being a hothead and thinking he can go "Big American" when there's a problem, we finally were off to get my cast cut off!  Now before we left the States, we researched a travelers clinic in Nepal that seemed pretty legit, recommended by the State Department and everything.  But since Kathmandu is kind of a nightmare and it would mean even more days with the cast, I decided to just get the cast cut off in Pokhara.  Surely, as the gateway to the Annapurnas, they would have a real-deal hospital.  But after talking to several people in town, I decided to go to a private-pay clinic that claimed to treat orthopedic and traumatic injuries.  Jordan and I both figured, if it claimed to be an ortho practice, then surely they will have a cast saw and an x-ray machine.  So Celestial Healthcare would be Left Arm's savior.  I had a short consultation where I was told Dr. Gupta could cut my cast off and get my x-rays, no problem, just $50.  What a deal! But they didn't have a cast saw, so blue cast would have to be removed by hand, with what appeared to be a short hack-saw blade.  So that's how I spent about 2.5 hours on Friday the 13th, laying on a dirty exam table, while two Nepali men, one with the blade, another with a pair of scissors, sawed and hacked and stabbed away at blue cast.  Neither of them were doctors, and neither of them knew to put the blunt end of the scissors towards my skin.  To be honest, I really thought, I was going to have my brachial artery severed.  Contingency plans were running though my mind:  Is there a tourniquet close by?  Hopefully they have semi-sterile gauze to cover what will surely be a squirting puncture wound.  And then my planning was interrupted because I could feel the blade sawing close to my skin, having gone all the way through the plaster.  It was actually Jordan who finally muscled the cast off, prying it open where they'd been sawing for two hours.  Needless to say, it was an experience I'll never forget. But once it was finally off, I've never been more relieved.  And then Dr. Gupta, my "orthopedic surgeon" told me we would drive in his car to the nearest hospital to get x-rays done of my wrist.  Because, they don't have an x-ray machine.  So off we went, but at the hospital, the x-ray tech was at lunch.  Apparently, if you have a life-threatening emergency in Nepal, it will have to wait until after lunch.  No one could do my x-ray.  So to 2 more hospitals we went before we finally found one that had a x-ray tech willing to do my films.  As for describing the hospitals, well, lets just say it makes Harborview's ER look like a royal palace of cleanliness and medicine.  But finally, after 4+ hours of hand sawing my cast off and an impromptu tour of Pokhara's hospitals, Left Arm was now free.  But feeling like it won't ever work the same way again.  I know I'm exaggerating.  Its getting better slowly everyday.  But I still can't flip my wrist over to face palm-down.  Permanent low-five is still in action.  But Left Arm is now clean and fresh smelling, and I'm working on the awful reverse farmer's tan I got on the trek.

Since then, Jordan got the first tummy bug of the trip, we came back to Kathmandu from Pokhara, and went to a Bhaktapur for a couple days.  Its also Dashain festival right now in Nepal, a national Hindu festival that involves a lot of partying and animal sacrifices.  I've had my fill of passing herds of goats, ducks, and water buffalo on their death march to the temples. Tomorrow we are heading out to go trek around Everest for about 3 weeks.  Wish us luck!

Your Scrawny Left Arm friend,

Hillary

Tramping Around Lady Annapurna

It has been just past two weeks since we set out to hike around the Annapurna Himal, a mountain range made up of peaks towering 6,000 to 8,000meters into the sky, on the trail known as the Annapurna Circuit. The entire route is 300km, but we decided to bypass parts of the western section due to the annoying progress of a road that is snaking its way into the wilderness and overtaking the trail. I feel that we tramped this trail during the last few years that it will remain a wilderness walk.. But then I realize that 20years ago, trekkers were grumbling about word of their secret Himalayan walk being spread to the Western masses. And bear with me here, this post is long.. it covers nearly two weeks, and there are no pictures.. takes too long to upload them. Facebook is faster with pictures. Go over there to see pictures. Mk?

Crammed onto a sardine-can-bus, we set off from Pokhara at 5:30am, on a morning that drenched us with rain. Our bus consisted mainly of would-be trekkers, including a Belgian fella who intended to mountain bike the entire Annapurna Circuit, a Russian girl who was trying to convince other people to help her rent a jeep to take them far up the trail and bypass several days of rice terrace-filled hiking, and our future trekking partners. Arriving  in Besisahar after a bumpy 6-hour ride and at the end of the bus-able road, we skarfed down a big plate of veggie macaroni, changed into our boots, and organized a trekking ‘team’ made up of Hillary, myself, the Frenchies (Christophe and Julie), and the Brits (Mike and Alison). The trail was wide enough for a jeep to creep slowly by, and I could not help but notice the ashamed look on the faces of ‘trekkers’ who had opted to pay their part of the 10,000rupee jeep fee in order to shave off some effort involved in reaching the Annapurna views. I couldn’t help but think they looked like older siblings of toddlers who insisted that they ride the TeaCups with them at Disney World… they knew better than to be excited about being on the ride, but they still felt a little queasy from a mixture of subtle motion sickness and boredom. However, the jeeps had a roof, and we did not. The sky opened up and rained on us like Mother Nature herself wanted us to have a horrible first day of hiking. This didn’t really present a big problem for me, because if you have ever hiked with me, you know that I start sweating at the trailhead. I am gonna be soaking wet no matter, might as well not be stuffed into a rain jacket. Let it rain!   Hillary, on the other hand, had her arm cast.. And she realized that her pack was in fact NOT waterproof (as I tried to hint to her in Seattle), she had to use her rain jacket as a pack cover.. So we stopped in the first village and bought her a purple plaid umbrella for 300R. Problem solved.  We stopped that night in Bhulbule, got to know our new friends, and slept in pitiful jail cell-like rooms. Our nightly routine went like this: dinner at 6pm, order breakfast to be ready at 6:30 the next morning, then settle onto our comfy plywood beds.

The first four days greeted us with clear skies in the morning, but a humidity that resembled being inside an enormous mouth and afternoon thunderstorms that reminded me of Summers growing up in Alabama. We hiked North along the trail, avoiding the newly built road, through steeply terraced rice fields, past waterfalls systems several hundred feet tall, around recent landslides, through scrubby villages, and over sweaty-back-inducing ridges. During the initial days of our trek, we were unsure of the commitment we really held towards our trekking partners. During a steep, multi-hour climb, we left a previously unmentioned fellow, Kunal, when his overloaded backpack left him too far behind the rest of us. At the village of Ghermu, consisting mainly of a few guesthouses pocking the rice fields, we somehow got separated and Mike and Alison slipped by to the next village. We had a good night learning a few card games with Chris and Julie, but I couldn’t help but think that Hillary would probably be tormented to trek alone with me while I did my outdoors freakout thing over the next ten days. Luckily, we bumped into the Brit’s the very next day and the six of us walked triumphantly in the riverside village of Tal. As the evening thunderstorms raged, our nervous chuckles melted into genuine laughing fits as we played games accompanied with chaang, locally brewed ‘beer’. It tasted more like Mike’s Hard Lemonade mixed with chicken broth, but I had a nice buzz when I finished Hillary’s for her.

The walk from Tal to Chame posed our longest, hardest day yet. Always opting for the trail that went furthest up the hillsides and avoiding the easily graded road… you must know that the road is being blasted into the vertical cliffs of the gorge that we followed.. This road will undoubtedly be an asset to the villages who rely on the current system of trails, donkeys, and porters who ferry food and supplies, but selfishly, I still felt annoyance at the sight of blasting and machinery….   Back to the story:   we hiked fifteen miles of jungly hillside trail that more than once made me question my Outdoorsy Snobbiness Ideals that had left me perched on rain-soaked, landslide riddled ridge, just waiting for the whole thing to slide me off into the river below. I’ve gotta hand it to Hillary: carrying an umbrella in her good hand, nursing a badly sprained ankle, other arm in a full cast… she’s tough as they come. She negotiated down logs, river crossings, waterfall jumping, landslide walkarounds… all without complaining. We entered the relatively large village of Chame as another band of storms came down the valley, but the night presented us with hot showers, great food (both my customary dinners), and the ever increasing fun that came from playing cards and dice with our new friends over bottles of Tuborg beers.

Waking up the next day to clear skies at 4am, I lay in bed and stared out my window at 8,000meter+ Manaslu to the East..  The massive hunk of stone was catching the fading moonlight, and I continued watching in darkness as the sun rose and lit up only the summits of peaks further west of Chame. These quiet moments were foreshadowing to what would become one of my favorite days spent in the mountains.

As we left the village behind and headed Westward up the valley, I finally decided on a name for the rust-colored dog who had been tailing us for the past hour. It seemed only fitting that she be named Blistie, since the girls were all battling deep sores from their boots. Blistie moved out in front of the 6 of us, ferociously cleared the trail of stray dogs, and waited as we plodded up the inclined trail. I don’t think Blistie liked goats, after wading through a herd of no less than 300 goats, I noticed Blistie was nowhere to be found. I’ll take it tho… our bond was too strong to say goodbyes, I’ve never had a dog into old age, and I don’t want to either, because having Blistie for an hour or so.. And then losing her.. Made me feel a bit of sadness..  Farewell, Blistie: The best goat-fearing, trail-leading, brown dog in the world!

The day’s trail took us past the 4,500ft Paungda Danda.. A glacier-carved rock wall resembling a giant curved X-Games snowboarding obstacle that I imagined an overgown Shawn White sliding effortlessly across (ginger hair flowing), around abandoned Tibetan settlements with roofs little over 6 foot, and through sub-alpine environments that reminded me of the Enchantments, Yosemite, and Glacier Nat’l all in the same instant. I had the strongest urge to have my hiking and climbing buddies from back home with me. Taking the higher, more rewarding route, we ended up in Upper Pisang village a little after lunchtime and found a guesthouse with rooms and a dining room perched precariously on the steep hillside, but granting unobstructed views of the peaks across the valley floor.  I now entered Jordan’s Outdoor Freakout Zone. I had to physically remove myself from the group.. Because nobody likes the giant kid who smiles stupidly for hours at enormous inanimate hunks of rock and ice. The peaks of Annapurna II and Annpurna IV sat mockingly across the valley, their summits no more than 4 miles away as the crow flies. I smiled, I sat in the sun, we walked up to the monastery and smiled some more, and I tried to keep from running around and hugging people and telling them how happy I was at that very moment. Come to find out, our good friends, Eric and Dieny, stayed in this same guesthouse in Upper Pisang last year.. So I know they felt some of the same excitement. The afternoon was brilliant, as the previous days’ storms never materialized.. We were in the rain shadow of the Annapurnas now.. Dry and crisp from here on out… Booyah!!!

We set out early the next morning, again on the high route, to the village of Manang. We could have reached this spot in three hours, but our route was to take us higher in elevation and provide better acclimatization for the days to come. This was the day that we all realized the power of Porridge and Boiled Eggs. I capitalize them due to the respect they came to command during the strenuous days following. Christof ate Porridge that morning. Hillary ate Boiled Eggs that morning. The two of them left the four of  us straggling behind on the steep, rocky switchbacks that climbed from the riverbed to the hillside village of Ghyaru. After climbing nearly 600 meters and basking in the glory of Pisang Peak as they waited for the rest of us, Chris and Hillary agreed to let the remaining guys and gals onto Team Porridge and Team Boiled Eggs, respectively.  We ended the day’s hike by overtaking a group of New Yorkers (with a porter-guide) who had taken the lower route. I cannot deny that my pace quickened as we neared them. Hillary and I realized, with a little embarrassment, that we rather enjoyed being one of the fastest groups on the trail. We had done a 6-hour trail in less time than it took these other folks to do a 3-hour route. Forget the embarrassment!

A rest day was spent in Manang, as we were now sleeping at an elevation of 3,540meters. We drank Tuborg, we met fellow Seattlites, we hiked up to the 4,000meter ruins of a Tibetan village… we ate enchiladas! It seemed that with the increasing elevation and dispersed Oxygen, that our team was conditioning quite well. Our girls were tough and stoic about blister pain, the men were Men. I felt great about the coming days’ hikes. The next two days were short and sweet. Out the door at 6am, to our desitination by 9:30am and drinking tea on the lawn as we glanced at the weary-looking hordes who paid porters to carry their excessively packed rucksacks plodding by. We realized the gratification that comes from doing things on your own.. But I must admit that the porter’s wages mean a great deal to the local economy.. So no method is better, in my mind. If you’re a middle-aged gal who wants to see backwoods Nepal without lugging her own pack.. Go on with your bad self! Get a porter! If you’re a 20-something athlete who wants to contribute to a rural economy.. Get a porter to carry you pack.. No judgment!

It was during one of these short days that I ate my first Yak burger. Listen.. when you’re eatin’ yak.. You know you’re eatin’ yak.. (I wish I could have Chris Rock saying that part)..  Yak is grissley, gamey, and somehow tastes like you’re eating Andre the Giant’s ground-up fist with some onion mixed in. Didn’t stop me from ordering a Yak steak later on tho.. Still a meaty fist.

The last stop before we headed to our main objective, Thorung Pass, was the trekker-supported ‘village’ of Thorung Phedi. Basically, this sloping spot in the valley was no more than a guesthouse and a barn.. The latter being a place to keep the donkeys and yaks that would lucratively carry sick hikers over the pass. The owner of the guesthouse, Michung, was a mixture of Mr. Miagi and Crocodile Dundee.. Nepali Hipster Grandpa.. And I desperately hoped he liked me! We were now resting at 4,540meters (14,982feet), and if one of us got sick, the only option was to go back from where we came. We were actually higher than we had ever walked.. Higher than anything in the Continental US. Luckily, we only had 1,000meters to go, and we felt great. We spent the evening drinking tea, eating soup and freshly baked bread, and roudily playing cards. A great time was had by all. We awoke at 5am, and were on our way up the braided trail by 6:05am after a breakfast of… Porridge for the guys. Boiled Eggs for the gals. We had aligned ourselves by Team Porridge and Team Boiled Eggs days ago.. And there was no turning back now. Our fuel was reliable, our legs were strong, the competition amongst us was stiff…

Our first step out the door of the dining room was onto snow-crusted ground, the first of the year. The Sun was shining the first rays of the day onto our Southeast-facing slope, so we were cautious of foot placement on the sometimes icy, sometimes sloshy footpath. Our 3,300foot climb was not in full view; we had to crest a never-ending serious of false summits that twisted amongst the towering peaks surrounding our path. After an hour of hiking, we stopped to layer down our clothing, as the clouds had lifted and the sun was warming our backs. Actually, the air temp was just above freezing, but I had somehow drenched my warm wool shirt in sweat. I was now down to a single long sleeve synthetic shirt while everyone else were in insulating layers. I don’t understand it. After a quick sitdown for hot lemon tea and a Back40 Gnar Bar, we were ready to make the final push up and over 17, 872ft. Thorung Pass. Hillary left us in her wake, and never looked back. If you have ever been on a backpacking trip with this girl, you know why we call her SlothBear. She is pretty damn slow (horribly ornery)  to get outa bed, but once she gets going.. Good luck catching her! We made the 4-hour hike from the guesthouse to the top of the Pass in just under three hours, and we felt great. We stopped to take some pictures, Team Porridge had a pushup contest (the highest 35pushups I have ever done, and I think Mike and Chris let me win), we did a French dance that Chris and Julie taught us, and we beat our freezing hands against each other to promote some blood flow.

The walk down the North side of the pass was a little confusing. Our thighs ached, our knees  banged, we slipped on melting snow, we ended up on the wrong side of deep gorge,  then had to pick our way down and across to the correct trail because going back up for thirty minutes was not an option. Our stop for the night was just outside the pilgrimage destination of Muktinath, in the Hotel Bob Marley. Strange, going from bare-wooden rooms in an alpine setting to a hotel that blared reggae beats and served delicious pizza.. We celebrated, we played dice and cards loudly, we took long hot showers to wash off the 5-day-old grime.

Our last walk was 13miles down a braided river valley to the town of Jomsom. If we left early and hurried, we might beat the jeep-loads of Israeli and Chinese trekkers who paid huge fees to avoid walking down the rocky river bed. The prize for beating them to Jomsom? Two tickets on a DeHaviland Twin Otter 18-seater airplane back to Pokhara. Our reason for wanting to get back to Pokhara? It was Thursday; Hillary’s arm cast was due to come off on Friday! We dragged in to Jomsom after noon, dusty from battling blowing sand and a constant headwind that drove for hours. It had taken us much longer to walk than I guessed. All morning, my heart sank as we watched jeeps full of our adversaries bump along the riverbed, knowing that they would scoop up all the seats on the three daily flights out of Jomsom. I thought of the four buses we would have to take as we slowly snaked around the mountains and took 11 hours to reach Pokhara. I prepared myself for Hillary’s mood when she realized that her cast would have to remain on over the weekend. But alas! Hillary and I found two seats on the first flight out of Jomsom the next morning. We paid $95 per seat. Best $95 ever spent. As we waited at the ‘airport’ the next morning, I laughed quietly as the Israeli group walked in proudly and demanded to be placed on a flight to Pokhara.. It was an hour before the flight, and there were no seats until Monday. They had taken a 30minute jeep the previous day to overtake us on our 7 hour hike, but had not gone to the airline office to purchase tickets in all of their time on Thursday. The Chinese girls showed up to the ticket counter along with us, holding maroon flight vouchers in their hands. There was a big commotion that I did not understand entirely, but we understood that they had purchased their tickets for this flight from an agent in China which turned out to be a scam. They also did not have seats on the flights. These misfortunes were our saving grace. The flight was spectacular, as we slipped by the summits of Tilicho, Nilgiri North and South, and the dominant Annapurnas. Landing back in Pokhara, after a 20-minute flight from a destination that took us twelve days to reach was a bit disorienting. The story continues.. But I will hand that over to Hillary. The rest of the day is her’s to tell…

50 Shades of Tie-Dye

Well, hello there Americanos, Hillary here to bring you an update from the lovely lakeside village of Pokhara.  But to catch you up, I'm going to back up for a minute and re-cap Kathmandu for you.  As Jordan has already described in the last post, Nepal's capital city smacked us in the face with smog, hellish traffic, diesel fumes, tons of people everywhere, and mangy dogs at every corner.  I must say my first half day in Kathmandu as a bleary-eyed, jet-lagged hot mess was not a great experience.  Turns out, its not my favorite thing to get hip-checked by a Nepali taxi's side-view mirror, whilst trying to avoid stepping in cow shit and politely declining a passer-by's offer to "smoke hash?".  But now after about a week of acclimating and desensitizing myself to the organized chaos, I'm really starting to enjoy the peculiarity of my new life. Its helps that Pokhara so much smaller,quieter, cleaner.

Anyways, Kathmandu was delightful in its own way.  Our 2nd day there (only full day mind you), we met up with our new friend Matt, who we met on the plane ride from Kunming, to do a walking tour of several temples or stupas ending up in Durbar Square.  It was quite the experience, getting out of Thamel, the tourist district, into neighborhoods where NOTHING is written in English, and you just kind of hope you're going in the right direction.  Long story short (and I know I'm not doing them justice) saw some really cool temples of both Hindu and Buddhist origin,but mostly the cool part was seeing daily life so dramatically different than my own (or at least how it used to be).

Later that evening, the three of us piled into a taxi and went up to Swayambhunath Stupa, a temple on a hill overlooking the city.  Holy site for both the Hindus and Buddhists, also home to an absurd amount of monkeys.  The view was beautiful, but also kind of sad.  Such beautiful land and topography but sort of covered up by people living in squalor.  

The next day we headed to Pokhara, where we've been ever since.  We've shuffled around hotels a bit, settling now on the northern end of the lakeside area in a quiet, spacious room with a beautiful view.  There are tons of Westerners here, and yet its been difficult to really "meet" people.  I figured people would tend to say hello to a fellow non-Nepali at a restaurant, maybe pull up a chair and have a conversation, but it hasn't quite happened like that.  My theory is that I (we) look too touristy still, too fresh off the boat, here for three weeks and then back to busy American lives.  This morning I found myself, for a minute, wishing I had dreadlocks, a macrame tank top and some kind of god-awful tribal tramp stamp so the hippie yogis at the table next to me would think I'm cool enough to talk to.  Jordan and I both sat there silent eating our breakfast, eavesdropping on their conversation, hoping for an 'in'.  Then I snapped out of it and thought "hey what do I care if this tie-dye wearing douchebag with a man-purse talks to me or not"? Why should I change who I am touristy-clothes wearing, arm cast and all for somebody I don't even know? And then I felt a lot cooler because hey at least i don't have a dreadlock mullet (business in the front, dirty in the back), and at least i don't pretend to have a European accent when I'm from Southern California.

That being said, Pohkara otherwise has been absolutely delightful.  The first day we were here, we rented a little boat and paddled around the lake.  The best day so far was renting a motorcycle for the day and exploring the hills around the city.  We started out by going up to the World Peace Pagoda, a beautiful temple on a hill overlooking Pokhara and the lake, with a great view of the Annapurnas peaking here and there behind the clouds.  After that we took the bike up north of town, on a pot-holed, some-times paved, sometimes gravel, a lot of times dirt road, until it ran out at the river.  It was truly a moment I'll never forget riding down a winding path, with vistas of terraced hills to my right, dzos (cows) mulling about in the river cooling off, and vibrantly dressed women hauling in loads of harvested grass (to be honest i don't know what it was, but it looked like long blades of grass) in handmade baskets strapped to their foreheads.  I felt like i was in freakin national geographic.

 Jordan walking the streets of Kathmandu

Me, pulling the Asian tourist move, at Monkey temple

Oh I probably forgot to mention that our first night here, I rolled my ankle stepping off the curb.  So I've been gimping around with an arm cast and an ace-wrapped swollen ankle.  God, I'm such a clutz.  Anyways, flimsy ankles be damned we are going to start trekking the Annapurna Circuit on Monday.

Sincerely, your very bug-bitten friend,

Hillary

PS more photos later when the internet isn't from 1999

Aaaaaand It Begins!!

Well.. It is safe to say that we have gotten in way over our heads (in a good way). We realized that our travel credentials are pretty weak: I have only traveled in Europe, and Hill has only been to the Bahamas and Mexico. Nepal is an entirely different world! There is so much going on, it’s dizzying. People everywhere, cows/goats/dogs in traffic, on the sidewalk, in your hotel garden… but it works. It is a pretty steep learning curve, but we’ve had a great time so far! Our first night was spent at a hotel frequented by climbers of the tallest peaks in Nepal, so it was a treat for me to see pictures signed by climbing legends all over the walls. However, our room was right above a bar that featured a local cover band that blared Dave Matthews, Bon Jovi, and Cold Play. We didn’t get much sleep that night. We switched over to a great little oasis of a spot a bit further out of the Thamel district. It was a great place to relax on the lawn after a day of running around town. Simply walking for an hour or two is an adventure in Kathmandu, since we don’t have a detailed map of the town. (Our only Nepal book is based around trekking, with only a 5page section on Kathmandu) There is absolutely no order in which the roads are laid out, and many of them are about 8feet wide and twist and wind their way into each other. Needless to say, we got lost plenty.. But we had a blast doing so. Fortunately, the local folks are so friendly that I never worried about having real issues if we wandered into the wrong part of town. We got lost in a district that seemed to specialize in goat butchers and dog poo, so we just hopped on the rickshaw we saw. Now the driver insisted he could take us, but he looked like he was born in the 1800s and he weighed less than my left leg. He was the little driver that could. He got us home, but it was not pretty.

We are now in Pokhara, Nepal, a lakeside town of 250,000 folks. Although Pokhara is only 200km west of Kathmandu, the “highway” is such narrow, twisting pig path that it took us 7 hours to get here on the bus. You ever crossed a creek in a bus? Us neither. Now I am not sure if the drivers in Nepal are the absolute worst or the most amazing drivers I could imagine..  On one hand, the traffic is absolute chaos, but on the other.. It’s wonderful how well all the vehicles and people intertwine into an insurance adjuster’s worst nightmare. After 30 hours of flights and airports, which presented us with very little stimulation, we get our 90day visas and walk out into the blazing sunlight and are bombarded by taxis drivers. Luckily, Hotel Garuda sent a driver for us.. This guy was Nepali Richard Petty. Within seconds of leaving the airport parking lot, we were in a jumble of cars, trucks, mopeds, motorcycles, bicycles, tractors, steamrollers, pedestrians, people in wheelchairs.. I desperately wanted to see a fella in rollerblades in the mix. I dared not put my arm out the window because it came clear that I wouldn’t get it back! We were inches from the trucks and tractors on either side of us, and if traffic coming the other direction got clogged up.. They just merged into oncoming traffic and swept right between cars in our lane. Our driver assured us that the conditions were due to rush hour, but that must last all day. Our ride to Pokhara was more of the same: We were passing other vehicles on hairpin turns with no guardrails without a hint of slowing down.. All on a two lane road.. No brakes,  Just a lot of honking. I forgot to mention that the drivers were performing these bus stunts while texting.. Sketchy.   There are no traffic signals here, so you just kinda walk across the street and trust that people will swerve around you. Our first crosswalk was a near death experience.. We got halfway across a 9 lane road (6one way, 3 the other way), only to be trapped on the centerline. I had to suck in my gut, so to not get hit. Luckily Hillary is a tiny person, so she only had to make sure her arm cast was not sticking out into traffic. Now when we cross streets, we just keep moving and don’t think too much about the thud of getting smacked by a truck.. They are pretty good at swerving.

We plan on hanging out in Pokhara for maybe a week, then set out trekking in the Annapurnas.

Come to find out Jordan's a craigslist freak

The past several weeks have absolutely blown by.  My last day of work seems like ages ago.  I already feel so removed from medicine and hospitals.  Its lovely.  A brief synopsis you ask?  Lets see....parents have visited, we've done our best to convince them we aren't unprepared idiots who will surely need medical evacuation or a third world jail bail out at some point.  Jury's still out.  Goodbye parties have been held, "parties", with an 's'. as in multiple.  I didn't know my friends loved me enough to have more than one hangover in my honor.  I'm touched.  Wrists have been dislocated.....wha wha wha what????? Yep, its true. Just one wrist though, mine. My left one, the same one I write with.  Its very annoying.  As we speak I'm typing with one hand palm up in a purple arm cast.  Everyone who reads this has already heard the story, but I'll indulge you again. Took a spill on my bike, wrist was wonky, rode bike 4 miles home, commenced beer drinking, wrist felt better until the morning when it felt very, very wonky and painful and I couldn't turn my hand palm up.  After 2 doctors, an unneeded MRI and some x-rays, my dislocated ulna was reduced (re-located) after a giant needle of lidocaine was stuck in my joint.  That hurt too. Now I get to hang out with this cast for 6 weeks (almost 2 weeks down! just 4 more to go).  So the first 3 weeks of our adventure in Nepal will be +1 casted arm.  Don't worry though, I'm still planning to do the Annapurna Circuit trek cast and all, then go back to Kathmandu to get the thing cut off and more x-rays done.  An then move on to Everest base camp.  Should make for a good story right?  I  thought so too.

This week we've been packing up our house.  Jordan is selling anything he can on craigslist.  Like, anything.  No boundaries.  But honestly, it feels kinda good to know our life fits into 4 bags and 5 boxes.  The only furniture I still have to my name is a $75 green thrift store chair that I refuse to part with.  Stuff is just stuff, and almost everything I had is replaceable.  Which makes it really easy to get up and leave.  

Gonna try to get one more backpack in before we leave.  Kind of a swan song to the PNW for awhile.  Its weird, this is the first time I've had truly bittersweet feelings about leaving a place.  I just wish my backpack was big enough to fit all my friends so they could come to.

OK i'm rambling, bye now

H

Welcome to our blog!

We did it! We finally agreed on a blog name! So, come on in, make yourself comfortable, because we'll probably only update this thing like twice.  Ha.  I kid.  But seriously, it may be difficult to regularly update this bad boy on the road...er... trail.

Now, on to business, we will be embarking on our grand adventure exactly one month from yesterday, on September 21st. And today is our 2nd to last night of work!  Hurray Funemployment!  Now we will have approximately a month off here in Seattle before leaving, which is supposedly going to be filled with much productivity and plan-making for the trip.  But if you know us, then you know, we will play for 3 weeks and scramble the last week to get everything done.  Its a good system.

Speaking of plans, I know all you parents out there would like a little briefing of the goings-on.  Well, so far we've gotten all the required immunizations we need (Hep A, Typhoid, Tetanus) for Asia.  We are debating about pre-emptively getting the Yellow Fever vaccine just in case we decide to pop over to Africa or South America.  We also have about 19 lbs of anti-malarial drugs, antibiotics for your run-of-the mill respiratory etc infections, and a little bit of Diamox, a drug that helps with altitude sickness (mostly for Nepal). So now we just have to figure out how to get all of our stuff into two 40L backpacks!

So the first destination is, of course, Nepal. We will arrive in Kathmandu on September 23rd, after a refreshing 30 hours of travel.  We plan on staying in Kathmandu for a couple days to get our bearings, then head off to the hills.  Our big plan is to do an Everest Base Camp trek, likely via the Three Passes route.  Its a less heavily traveled trek and a bit more strenuous than the main out-and-back route.  Jordan suggested that since we have 2 full months in Nepal, we may do an easier trek first in the Annapurna region to acclimatize and sort ourselves out.  More on that trek later.

Very exciting times!  Thanks for reading

H and J