Travel Update 1: Nepal

Hey you!

This is the first update I promised to share as I'm travelling. For anyone not caught up on my life (and I know there are a few of you, sorry!) I'm travelling in Nepal for about 2 months and then going to South America with my partner Kris until May. My goal is to share longer, in-depth updates on my travels, and to stay off social media as much as possible.

Getting to Kathmandu

I flew to Kathmandu through Seattle, USA and Doha, Qatar. The Doha airport has beautiful gardens, incredible architecture, and gigantic sculptures. Overall, the airport felt like a luxe shopping mall, with expensive brand stores everywhere, so my favourite space was the indoor gardens with large trees and little clearings for people to sit, nap, or play… plus a rubber chicken stuck in the fork of a tree to bring the grandeur down a notch.

Kathmandu airport was night and day different from Qatar, and might be one of my favourites after Vancouver. There was lots of traditional-looking wooden crown moulding, brick construction, and simple spaces that felt airy and relaxed. It feels like the airport equivalent of a well-worn pair of pants.

Tsum Valley and Manaslu Trek

I was in Kathmandu only a few hours before I met a Brit and an American at a hostel who were going on a trek to the Tsum Valley and then the Manaslu circuit the next day. My plan had been to take a few days to find my bearings, get grounded, and organize myself to do the Everest Base Camp trek… but as they say, make a plan so you can break the plan. I had a good feeling about the chance to do a less-travelled trek and about the vibe of the group going out, so I signed myself up and less than 24 hours after landing in Kathmandu I was on a bus heading west to the start of the trek. There wasn’t enough seats on the bus for everyone, so a few of us in the trekking group sat up front next to the driver to enjoy the ride. The roads where fine in most places and harrowing in others, and the brakes on the bus sounded like they were down to bare metal with no intention of replacing them any time soon (they still slowed the bus down, and had the side benefit of letting everyone else on the road know there was a bus coming, so why fix what ain’t broken?) The trip through the countryside during daylight showed us lots of farms and little villages, and many of them had big chimneys where the village would burn agricultural waste to fire clay bricks for building. As we got closer to Maccha Khola, the road got worse and there were streams and waterfalls flowing across the stones in many places; at one point we ran ran into a couple of trucks going the other direction and everyone had to pile out while the drivers figured out how to get past each other without one or the other falling off the side of the road, down a cliff, and into the river below. I was more than happy to get to Maccha Khola in the late evening and be done with roads for a while.

There were five of us on the trek, plus two guides and one porter, and we sorted out nicknames in the first couple days of the trek:

• Me (Canadian) → Merlin — Beard & hat combination

• Ed (England) → Boots — Ed got a pair of hiking boots in Kathmandu that he swore up and down were authentic Columbia hiking boots… and on the first day of hiking one of the soles began to come off. He fixed the sole with six tubes of superglue and bought another pair of boots in Jagat as a backup, but the original pair held up with the repair all the way through the trek and he was able to sell the backups in Lho.

• Trey (Florida) → Stones — We played a few games of poker using river rocks as chips, and Trey was the winner of the first game and the carrier of the stones after that.

• Severine (France) → Frenchie — Admittedly, this was the least creative nickname… Severine was a high-energy French woman with a thick accent who smoked like a chimney, and somehow found her way into every kitchen at every stop on the trek. We did get a lot of mileage out of imitating her cigarette-holding postures, which were always effortlessly nonchalant.

• Maytev (Israel) → Spoons — Spoons was a drummer and percussion teacher from Israel who was travelling with a pair of wooden spoons that he would break out and play at most meals. He had a gift for languages and picked up a surprising amount of Nepalese from our guides.

• Our guides were Mingmar and Tenzi, and our porter (well, Spoons’ and Severine’s porter) was Sukra.

The trek went north and east from Maccha Khola to start, towards Mu Gumpa (or Ghompa) at the end of the Tsum Valley. We then turned back and did a side trip to Ghompa Lungdang before continuing towards Sama Gaun and over Larke Pass. We ended in Dharapani and caught vehicle transportation through Besishahar to Pokhara.

The upside of having jet lag for the first few days of the trek is that I was awake in the early hours of the morning after the moon had risen, and I was able to get some beautiful long-exposure shots of the Himalayas in the moonlight. The trail wound past dozens of stupas: square, squat stone towers with prayers carved into pieces of slate; walking around a stupa clockwise (with the stupa on your right) is supposed to send those prayers heavenward, so the trail always snaked around to keep the stupas on the right. Some of them extended into quite long walls. We got to visit some beautifully colourful ghompas, and the recently completed Tsum Monastery where the monks were holding a musical cleansing ritual called a puja.

The Tsum Valley portion of the trek took as as far as Mu Ghompa, a monastery high up near the border with China, looking down over the rest of the valley. The monastery is several centuries old, and still dedicated to the preservation of Tibetan Buddhist traditions, but I wasn’t able to find out exactly when it was built. One of the younger monks took us for a walk around the monastery and shared the story of his life and how he got there, and a beautiful metaphor for the resilience that meditation brings: “If you have to walk a mile through thorny plants and rocky ground, don’t spend your time cutting down the plants and picking away the rocks… make yourself a pair of shoes!”

Most evenings, we would break out the playing cards and play one game or another… the favourites were President, Shithead, Blitz, and Dhumbal—a fairly simple but fun Nepalese card game where you discard and draw cards to try and bring the score in your hand down below five without getting caught by a player with a lower number. We would usually add a rule or two to President each night, and if it made the game more fun we would keep it permanently, so the game we were playing at the end of the trek was significantly more chaotic, loud, and fun than the game we started with. There were a few groups of older European trekkers along the way that seemed to regard our boisterousness as somehow improper and disagreeable… but since their version of fun seemed to be drinking hot chocolate and sitting quietly, we ignored them and kept on with cards. We played poker for apple pie deserts on a few nights; Spoons or Boots would be the first out, but since they both loved playing and betting, the other would bring them back in with some charity, which meant that in some hands Boots was losing his stones to Spoons, who was playing with the stones that Boots had given him two minutes before.

Cannabis grew everywhere along the trail, and Spoons would often grab a handful to smell and decide if it were worth drying out to smoke. At one point he tucked some away on a stupa that we knew we would come back to in a few days so that it could be dry… I’m not sure that’s how the builders intended the stupa be used, but it worked and he turned the plant into a beautiful joint. Tenzi is a bit of a photo buff, so he and Spoons worked hard to capture it in all its glory, set agains the beautiful sunset mountains.

We did one side trip in the Tsum Valley to Ghompan Lungdang, a nunnery well off the beaten track surrounded by the beautiful Ganesh Himal massif and other beautiful mountains. I was amazed that the nuns—some of whom must have been pushing seventy—were happy to strap a basket to their forehead and head down the trail for a three day walk so they could catch a ride to Kathmandu for the holidays, like it was the easiest thing in the world.

Once we passed out of the Tsum Valley, we started gaining elevation steadily. The trail took us through cool, thick rhododendron and bamboo forest on one side of the valley, and sunny, sparse pine forest on the other.  We got our first glimpse of the Manaslu massif in Lho, then continued up to Sama Gaun for a few days of rest and acclimatization with a hike to the Manaslu Base Camp. There wasn’t much to see at the base camp as there were no expeditions actively using it, just a marker covered in prayer flags and some built-up stone platforms to provide level spaces for tents. Everywhere in Nepal there are these stone walls and dry stone structures built out of local materials. Some are half finished, some are only occupied part of the year by nomadic yak herders, some seem to be abandoned, but the level of care and craftsmanship that goes into them seems high. The trail building is also beyond compare—for most of the 1,300m climb up to Manaslu Base Camp, there were stone stairs wide enough for two people to walk comfortably side by side. Mountain climbing is big business, so it makes sense in a way; the average cost for a foreigner to climb Mount Manaslu is somewhere around $60,000 USD.

After Sama Gaun we had a few shorter days, to Samdo and then Dharamsala and then over the 5,106m high Larke Pass. These were the days with the most incredible mountain views of the trip, and also the most difficult for me. I picked up food poisoning the morning we left Samdo, so I couldn’t keep any food in my body for the day and night at high elevation in Dharamsala, and I was running on empty when we started walking by headlamp at 4:30am to get over Larke Pass before the wind and clouds picked up. Spoons rescued me at the top by trading packs and taking my heavier pack for a few hours until we got to lunch. The reward for the early morning was a sky full of stars and some beautiful morning light on the peaks… but those two days fall firmly into the category of Type 3 fun.

After that, the trek was over suprirsingly quickly. The trail over Larke Pass dropped us down over 3,300m of elevation in just two days, and we were all glad to see our final destination of Dharapani come into view at the end of the last day of walking. We finished up with a lot of hugs and laughs and a few final games of President, then Severine and Spoons headed to the Annapurna circuit and the rest of us (plus Anna and George and their guide Ram, a few more trekkers from the same company) climbed in a truck and bounced down the road to Besishahar and a bus to Pokhara. I’d been intending to do the Annapurna circuit directly from Manaslu, but the sickness had me craving a few days of lower altitude and rest.

Of course, the bus ride to Pokhara wasn’t exactly smooth… this is the middle of a holiday season, so transportation was nearly full to bursting. Ram had to call in a few favours to get all of us on a bus to Pokhara, and Mingmar, Tenzi, and Boots found a private minibus that took them in but wouldn’t leave until it had all fourteen seats full, so they drove around for a while looking for other passengers. Boots sent a picture of himself holding a cardboard box with a chicken in it on the ride to Kathmandu. Our bus to Pokhara was doing a bit of a milk run, with locals hopping on and off at intervals and a group of teenagers riding on the roof. The ticket taker would swing out the constantly-open door of the bus while we were moving to climb up and smoke a few cigarettes with the band, and whenever we were about to pass by a police station or a major road all of them would come down and crowd into the aisle. All told, I think the 80km from Besishahar to Pokhara took almost seven hours.

So, for the last couple days I’ve been resting in Pokhara, spending time browsing shops, doing yoga, and sorting out my pictures. If you want to see more than are in this email, there are more pictures here: https://adobe.ly/4fIxJbB Thanks for reading this far! I’ll send another update soon 😊