Sat Oct 13th , Sibang to Naura

We met the school director this morning. He came by to show us their computer lab - about ten PC’s, one with an internet connection using a satellite dish and photovoltaic solar panels set up on the roof for power. It was very cool to see a school so far out there with a computer lab.  We made a small donation.

Breakfast was cream of rice, pancakes, and eggs. We later found out that cream of rice would usually make an appearance at breakfast when Nima had made too much rice for the porters dal bhat the night before.
We heard from Ongchhu that our temporary porter wanted to quit three days earlier than planned.  Not sure how that all resolved itself, but after we started hiking for a while, we saw him, still carrying a load. Maybe he negotiated a few more rupees…who knows.

We were still a half day ahead of schedule due to being able to drive past Beni on the first day, but eventually we were going to have to start covering more distance….we tried not to worry too much about it, but it was a little strange being on a trip where so much of it was completely out of our control.

The weather was hot this morning and it was a sweaty climb up to Muri. Becky was dealing with a bit of a stomach bug and had a low fever.  At lunch today, the team got use of a house and Becky took some Aleve and some Nuun tablets in her water and took a nap inside. We’re both carrying Zythromax prescriptions, but were reluctant to start in with the heavy antibiotics at the first sign of some bug. Lunch today was surprisingly western, even for Nima’s usual standards of providing us with familiar food. We had hotdogs, cucumber salad, french fries, and a cheesy fried bread that Nima made from scratch.

As usual, by 1pm the clouds were building and the overcast weather was a welcome relief from the heat. Becky was feeling better after lunch and we put in a solid four hours of hiking that afternoon, which after our previous days of travelling in fits and starts, it was nice to feel like we covered some ground.
We met a couple guys from Annecy, France who were hiking the circuit unsupported. They had big packs and a grocery sack filled with ramen (what we assume was their limited resupply of food from the local markets along the way.)  it would’ve been interesting to try it unsupported, but I think the language barrier and resupply challenges would not have been that much fun. Plus having Ongchhu along was a huge part of making this trip so much fun! Having an interpreter and someone that can tell us about the villages and local wildlife & foliage made it a much more complete experience.

This night’s camp was a nice change of pace from the previous two nights that had kids around. We camped in the Chhonbarden Gorge just past Naura in the grassy yard of a house occupied by two old ladies. They were very friendly and let Becky take their picture. They laughed when Becky showed them the image on the screen. No dogs barking tonight or other village noise - just the roaring rapids nearby.   Tea time tonight brought a plate of Becky’s favorite cookies. After we’d had a couple, Becky walked the plate around to the team and they happily helped us polish them off. Ongchhu finally caved tonight to our incessant requests to help set up camp and he let us put our tent up. Maybe we’re finally wearing him down!

Dinner was fantastic - spaghetti with cheese and tomato sauce, mushroom pizza, okra, and pears for dessert.
Ongchhu mentioned to us that Sonam, one of the porters was getting a bit of a rash from his thighs rubbing together. I’d had a similar problem from long days & sweaty legs hiking the John Muir Trail, so I passed along my tube of antibiotic ointment and a fresh pair of boxer briefs. Poor Sonam looked a little embarrassed by it all, but the ointment and briefs did the trick!

...the next day

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Fri. Oct 12th, Phedi to Sibang

Our first full day without any jeep transportation! As would become the daily ritual, tea was brought to our tent at 6am along with a basin of hot water and towels to wash-up, then we headed over to the cook tent for corn flakes with banana (and hot milk! An interesting, and very tasty change-up to regular cold milk on ones cereal), then coffee, toast, and eggs with green onion.

Everyone seems to be moving well. The porters take frequent breaks, but Nima and his two cooking assistant porters scoot ahead of us just before lunch to set up the kitchen. Every day involves an hour or two break for a sit-down hot lunch.  One of the sillier highlights of the day was when a local man approached Ongchhu to ask him about the difference between Hollywood and Bollywood. Not sure why he needed to know just then, but Ongchhu was happy to explain.  Another gem was chatting with our team about who is married, has kids, etc, Chheten - one of our porters who only speaks limited English - piped up with ‘single life is golden life’. We all get a good laugh out of that.

No shade where we stopped for lunch today, so we used the umbrellas (as would become a regular occurrence) as sun shades.  Had our first encounter with large groups of school kids and as we’d heard usually happens, they immediately greeted us by saying ‘pen, pen, you give me pen?’ or ‘you give me sweet?’, or ‘give me doll?’  Ongchhu told us the best policy is not to give them anything. If you want to help them out, donate to the nearby school or a charity.  Eventually the kids lost interest in us and headed back to home or school.  Another funny incident this day was walking through the village of Dharapani and seeing what would be the first of many groves of marijuana plants just growing right along the side of the road. It appeared the biggest problem for the farmers was keeping the cows and goats from snacking on them.

The end of the day came a little earlier than we expected. The porters were getting pooped out from their ridiculously heavy loads and were lagging way behind.  We had hoped to get to the town of Muri, but that was still a half-day away. We pulled off the trail and set up camp at an elementary school play field in the village of Sibang. After our lunchtime encounter with all those kids, we weren’t quite sure what to expect pitching a couple tents in a field that had fifty or more children.  Fortunately the kids were wonderful. Few asked for any treats, and Becky entertained a lot of them with her pictures of home, the slinky and yo-yo, and as requested, she sung a few songs. The deal was that she’d sing a song, then they were supposed to sing one. I think it worked out closer to them demanding two or three songs from her for every one song that they would sing. There were a couple soccer games going on and  a few of the little kids that didn’t have a real soccer ball made do with plastic bags filled with grass.

As we sat in the cook tent having our afternoon tea, this adorable, chubby little boy walked by several times each time saying something that sounded like ‘bizgood?’ I finally realized he was asking for a ‘biscuit’ It broke our hearts to say ‘no’, but these kids were doing just fine. This area was thriving with farmland; rice, corn, beans, quinoa, potatoes.

This afternoon was our first afternoon rain. This was a bit of a surprise. We thought ‘after the monsoon’ meant that we’d have dry weather every day, but apparently the common weather pattern in this area is clear weather in the morning, then the heat of the day causes clouds to build, then by mid-afternoon there are some rather threatening clouds and a bit of rain, then during the night the clouds clear out.

..the next day

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The village of Dharapani

Schoolkids in Sibang

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

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landslide that marks the end of the road for us...time to start walking.



the cute kids in Phedi

Wed Oct 10th, Driving to Beni and the start of our trek

Another bad night of sleep, but we were up early to meet the team and get driving.  At 7:30 we headed out to the street to find everyone around a Toyota Land Cruiser, the old bulletproof jeep-looking kind, not the soccer mom kind.  And amazingly, with the roof rack nearly overflowing with gear, Becky, me, Ongchhu, Nima, our four porters, and our driver all squeezed inside and we were off to the small town of Beni where we’d start our trek.

The ride could best be described as nine hours of the motorsport 'Gymkhana', except put nine people in the car, and replace the traffic cones of the course with broken-down buses, pedestrians, cabs, motorcycles with four people on them, and livestock, and you have a pretty good idea of what it’s like to take a jeep from Kathmandu to Beni.

We arrived in Beni at dusk. The plan had been to camp, but it was late and Ongchhu found a motel for us all. We were happy to opt for one more night sleeping in a bed before we started tenting it for the next two weeks.

...the next day

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Hard to believe we fit nine people and two weeks worth of gear in here...

Yum.... dried fishies on a stick

interesting traffic....

Tues. Oct 9th , A tourist for a day in Kathmandu

                                                                                                                                 
Breakfast at the hotel that morning was good. It was the start of our usual eggs, potatoes, and toast breakfast that we’d have pretty much every day while in Nepal.  We learned a valuable lesson though - when eating at a somewhat dodgy establishment, order black coffee. We asked for coffee with milk and our coffee had lumps. After breakfast we found a nearby ATM, and a decent Americano at a bakery a couple blocks away.
Furwa came back by to drop off the trekking duffle bags to put our overnight gear into and to take care of a mildly annoying chore. He had told us that a credit card payment would be fine, but he changed his mind upon our arrival and told us he needed cash instead to take care of some immediate expenses. We weren’t exactly happy to be spending our limited time in Kathmandu visiting banks, but we needed to get it done. In the end Furwa had to settle for half the payment in cash, the other by credit card. Nepali banks have some pretty decent safeguards to prevent thieves from draining westerners bank accounts, so trying to get more than a few hundred bucks out each day was basically impossible.

That afternoon we grabbed a taxi and headed across town to Swayambunath Temple which was well worth the trip - tons of monkeys, a cool old Buddhist Temple, thousands of prayer flags in the trees, and a nice view of the whole city.

That night we met the whole gang, our cook, Nima,  and our porters Dawa, Chheten, Kanchha, and Sonam.  Furwa talked a lot about the weather and cold temps. I knew that Becky and I had gear that would be fine for what we’d encounter, and our guide has spent quite a bit of time on Everest, so we were sure he’d be comfy, and our cook had done this trek before so he knew what to expect, but we were concerned that the porters might not quite know this trek is supposedly a little rougher than a lot of others they may have done before. We gave the porters gifts of new wool socks and a few random fleece jackets and polypro shirts that we didn’t use anymore.
Dinner that night was at a nearby Italian restaurant in Thamel. It was pretty decent grub and I think this was our first night of drinking Tuborg, a Dutch lager with a brewery in Kathmandu which became our preferred option amongst the rather flavorless beers (Gorkha, Everest Ice, San Miguel, etc) that are available.

...the next day

link to all the photos.

Mon. Oct 8th, Our first day in Kathmandu

Our flight to Kathmandu had an overnight stop in Seoul (here’s a tip…it’s not well known, but if you fly with Korean Air, and you’ve got an extended layover at Incheon Airport, they’ll put you up in a hotel for free if you arrange it with them in advance).  We slept poorly in Korea, both waking up at 2am - our brains thinking it was around 8am - but we got enough rest on the final 7-hour leg into Kathmandu that we were pretty functional when we landed Monday afternoon.

The trek organizer, Furwa, met us at the airport, which was certainly welcome as the crush of humanity orbiting the airport exit was rather overwhelming and we weren't quite ready to dive into the world of Kathmandu taxi fare negotiations just yet. I’d always heard that its best to get out of Kathmandu as quickly as possible because the air quality isn’t particularly good, but I still wasn’t prepared for what we saw. Somehow I expected an ancient city filled with climbers and Buddhist monks, or something way overly romanticized like that. What we got instead was an ancient city that was a loud, chaotic, dusty beehive of activity.  It seemed like only the main roads are paved, everything else is cobbles and/or dirt.  There are no traffic lights. Some of the biggest intersections do have cops directing traffic during the busiest times of the day, but many intersections will have six lanes crossing four lanes with the intersection being a complete free-for-all.

Our hotel, the Hotel Nepalaya, was a simple old building with zero views and was down a narrow alley off an already small street in the middle of the Thamel tourist district of Kathmandu (imagine Times Square, Nepal style). I don’t think we realized that staying in the middle of Thamel would be as loud and busy as it was.
After a couple hours, Furwa came back with Ongchhu, our guide for the trek, and the four of us headed off to the nearby supermarket and picked up a few final odds and ends. Most of the food had been purchased already, they just wanted our opinions on which candy bars, cookies, and canned meat we wanted to have along. I think Becky and I might’ve tossed a few more items than necessary in the grocery cart as when we go climbing/hiking we eat of lot of packaged food, and it hadn’t really been explained to us that our cook would be stuffing us with three large meals a day and we’d have little room for our usual 2-3 daily candy/energy bars.

Dinner was with Furwa and Ongchhu at a Nepali restaurant that had a little cultural dance program before dinner that Becky got to participate in. We also had our first introduction to dal bhat, the rice and lentil dish that the Sherpa on our trip would eat for lunch and dinner every day. While that might sound monotonous, it seemed like every time we had dal bhat, there were slight variations depending on the cook. Sometimes the curry side dishes were meat, sometimes veggie, and the green vegetables were usually different as well. Becky and I could see how one could eat this all the time and never get sick of it.

Jet-lag reared its ugly head and we were both wide awake at 2am.  And if the time change wasn’t bad enough, Thamel was just one loud noise after another. Cars honking into the evening hours, with dogs barking through the night, and roosters crowing just as the dogs finally went to sleep.

...the next day

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    Thamel tourist district

    Pete and Ongchhu at a traditional Newari restaurant

    Our first (of many) dal bhat

Nepal 2012 - pre-trip planning & logistics

Becky and I mulled over many destinations for our first trip to Nepal….the Annapurna circuit (loop) or a trek to the Everest region are options that lots of people go for, but we were looking for something a little less popular (i.e. less crowded).  I was interested in a trekking peak, like Mera Peak or Island Peak, but those are usually trips that go out and back the same way, and Becky and I are big fans of one-way trips where every day offers new scenery. Additionally, Becky was interested in seeing a bit more culture than just a crowded alpine camp filled with westerners sitting in tents.

The Dhaulagiri area is a massif to the west of the Annapurna area and the Dhaulagiri circuit is a 12-15 day hike starting near the town of Beni, following the Myagdi River up to its origin at the Chhonbarden glacier, then up and over a couple high passes north of Dhaulagiri (the worlds 7th tallest mountain), and then down to the Gandaki River and the towns of Marpha and Jomson.  It seemed like a good balance between visiting villages, seeing some wilderness, getting way up above treeline, and new scenery every day.

We read a ton of reports from other Dhaulagiri trekkers…some folks had pulled it off going unsupported, and many more had opted for joining a large guided party of 10 or so clients with around 30+ support staff.  As usual, we don’t quite fit with either category. Going unsupported meant huge backpacks, and language barrier challenges attempting to do any food resupplying at remote villages along the way. Going with a large guided group meant that we’d be sharing our vacation with a bunch of random strangers. Our friends Pat & Nadia had used a Kathmandu based guiding company before and had good results, so we decided to organize a trip with them. Becky and I would be the only clients and we would have a guide, a cook, and porters. It was a somewhat strange concept to get our heads around. We’d never been guided on any kind of trip before, but having a team handle all the complicated logistics, and carrying the lion’s share of the gear, would let us focus on enjoying the scenery and culture.

The first day of our trip....

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