Becky + Pete: Thurs. Oct 11th, The trek starts! Babichaur to Phedi.

Another rough night of sleep with us wide awake by 2am. We all piled back into the jeep for the last few miles. The road beyond Beni was unknown territory, but we were all game for driving as far as we could. After another hour or so of dusty, pot-holed, single-lane road we reached a massive landslide in the village of Babichaur that was the end of the line for the Land Cruiser. None of us had eaten breakfast yet, but the team was so busy sorting gear we certainly weren’t going to gripe about getting fed. The amount of gear these guys were about to carry was staggering. Wicker baskets with the traditional head-strap carrying system, with each basket holding what looked like at least 80lbs, maybe 100+lbs. Becky’s and my contribution to the pile of gear were two half-filled duffles containing our sleeping bags, pads, crampons, and ice axe - a drop in the bucket compared to all the rest of the gear.

Ongchhu decided that four porters wasn’t going to cut it so he started asking any locals if they wanted to work for a few days as our fifth porter. The biggest holiday of the year in Nepal (Dashain) was about to begin so many people were already busy and he wasn’t having much luck. We tried not to be too worried about how the heck this pack train was going to start moving. They eventually found a kid, maybe 11 years old, to carry our 55-liter jug of kerosene as far as the next village Darbang, where we might have better luck finding a porter.

There was now a narrow trail with a couple ‘no-fall’ zones where the road had disappeared in the landslide, but everyone got through it just fine. Unfortunately, shortly after that section when we were just walking along the road, the kid with the fuel dropped his load. We weren’t sure how, maybe his head strap slipped or something, but the end result was that our huge jug of fuel fell to the ground, right on a sharp rock and cracked across the middle of the jug spilling our fuel everywhere. They righted the jug, and limited the loss to maybe ¼ of our total fuel. The porters headed to the nearest shop and returned with another fuel jug and after rinsing out the spider webs and dirt, transferred the fuel and away we went again.

By lunchtime we were in the town of Darbang. Nima arranged with a local woman to use her kitchen (this would become fairly common!) and Becky and I took a seat on the covered porch to get out of the sun. While Ongchhu found us a fifth porter to help for a handful of days, the porters tracked down the one shop in town that sold kerosene and were able to top off our reduced fuel supply. Furwa thought they’d be able to resupply fuel all along the way, but that was not the case. Whatever fuel we took out of Darbang would be all we’d have for the trip.

After a long break for lunch we didn’t go much further, maybe 40 minutes of hiking to the tiny village of Phedi. The late start and heavy loads meant we weren’t going to get to the next town, Dharapani, but since we’d been able to drive well past Beni we’d still covered more distance than we were supposed to today. We set up camp in a small clearing next to a couple houses. Becky entertained the local kids with her slinky and yo-yo toys that she’d brought.

Dinner was great, but as we sat in the cook tent, the father of the kids came by and started begging. He didn’t speak English, so we just said ‘no’ and tried not to engage him. This was the first of several situations where we said to one another ‘we gotta find a good Nepali kids charity and make a donation when we get home’. Ongchhu closed up the cook tent and asked the fellow to not disturb us. This was the only night that he told us as we headed back to our tent to put our valuables in the bottom of our sleeping bags. It’s a rare occurrence, but trekkers do sometimes have their tents cut into at night and people will run off with whatever they can get their hands on.

...the next day

link to all the photos