Hiking in Nepal: 3

Day three began in the hill town of Gorepani. Our original plan was to climb Pun hill at dawn to see the sunrise over the Annapurnas, but the overcast skies made that less appealing. In Cambodia, Amy and I got up in the dark to watch the sunrise over Angkor Wat, but the clouds reduced this to "gradual lightening" over Angkor Wat instead, which was kind of anticlimactic. So on day three we slept in and left Gorepani around 8 just as the skies were clearing. The views were magnificent. As I wiped the sleep out of my eyes, I gasped and groped for my camera, snagging this shot below and the one to the left for context.

After leaving town, there was a slightly better view of Annapurna south:

These next two were taken at the apex of our climb just east of Gorepani, at an altitude of about 3000 meters above sea level. On both sides there was an incredible, expansive view in the morning light, but the best shots were looking at the mountain peaks to the north.



From here we descended to the east headed towards Tatopani. I include below several shots of waterfalls, but for every shot you see here, there are at least a dozen unused in my camera. Some were gorgeous but oddly unphotographable, either because of orientation, lighting, or perspective. I could have easily filled three memory cards with the waterfalls and beautiful streams alone.

On this day I passed a lot more western tourists, including many French folk. As I knew I was headed to Geneva in a few days, I took every opportunity to flake some of the rust off of my French. What was really impressive was the number of families with young children trekking through the hills. One of the great things about hiking in Nepal is the ease of hiring porters to help with transporting gear. At first I poo-pooed this practice, and I still do for otherwise healthy young adults who just don't want to lug their stuff up the endless stone staircases. But for families its a great boon. Sometimes you'd see a party consisting of a guide, a married couple, a twelve year old on her own feet and a two year old in a wicker basket carried by a Nepali porter, with another porter carrying camping supplies. I often pictured my friends the Hamiltons composing a similar train with their little ones. What an amazing experience for young kids, how empowering to have hiked the Himalayas before high school?

We walked for more than eight hours that day, making our way through what Govinda called the "jungle" portion of the conservation area, which was certainly much more densely wooded than what we'd seen before. After the majesty of Vietnamese jungles, though, calling it by that word seemed a bit of a stretch; it was cool and the air was too fine and fresh. The tree pictured above seemed intensely Tolkeinesque. Just to the left is a steep drop of a thousand meters.

At the end of the third day my batteries ran out, and despite three separate attempts to buy replacements in villages we passed, my finicky Sony (which has begun experiencing power supply issues anyway) wouldn't work with them. So I have no pictures of the fourth day, when I was closest to the Annapurna peaks and saw Machuphurchre, in particular, at close range. This was a little frustrating, but I was surprisingly sanguine about it. It's hard to be disappointed when you're staring up at the glaciers of the Himalayas. They make you feel... weak, and slightly absurd, like you should stop wasting time doing whatever it is you're doing and start founding a religion or something.

This may seem like hyperbole, but by far the worst part of the trip was getting back and looking at the photographs immediately afterward. That night I was almost depressed that I hadn't gotten ANY good pictures of the trek. In subsequent days I came to realize that many of the pictures were in fact worth keeping, but the differential between what I saw and what made it onto the web page you are seeing now is too vast to describe. So if you like what you see here, get thee to Nepal posthaste. October and November are by all accounts the ideal months.


The only thing that made it ok to leave Nepal was the knowledge that I would return. Despite being largely on my own, this was one of the best months of my life. The scenery, the people, the food, the wonderful sense of peace and creative energy I experienced were unique.

The Annapurna base camp trek is about twice as long, and approaches the same mountain range from the east, and culminates at a 4000 meter plateau where the mountains surround you on three sides. I need to go home and get a job first, I think, and earn some more money before I can come back, but if you're interested in a weeklong trek in the Himalayas sometime in 2008, let me know. You should go, because the trek I took is supposed to be the less attractive part of the range, and these are really, really bad pictures.

Coming soon: Geneva and Cairo.