Notes From a Stolen Time: September 2012

We knew that the scenery on the Annapurna trail would be amazing. What charmed and disarmed us were the people we met. Nepalis have a reputation for being kind, honest, hardworking folk. We were amazed that, despite the river of tourists that hikes the Annapurna circuit every year, people on the trail were genuinely interested to get to know us a bit and invited us into their lives.

Here are a few portraits of some of our most memorable encounters:

Meet Soba. We met her on our second day, when we stopped for lunch at Bahundande, a village at the top of a long, hot hill. She cooked us a delicious pumpkin, bean and veggie curry and, since we were the only customers, stopped to chat with us. She lives in Pokhara, the nearest city, for half the year and comes up into the hills during trekking high season. She proudly showed us her garden where she grew the veg and pumpkins we’d be eating for lunch. When I asked about the meaning of the tikka (red dot) she wore on her forehead, she insisted on giving me one as well. Then when she found out we were recently married... well, I had to have a proper married woman’s mark too! Out came the vermilion powder. “If you wear the mark, it is good luck for your husband,” she explained. She sent us on our way with more powder wrapped in paper. The rest of that day, my marks were the occasion for many smiles and discussion amongst the women weeding rice paddies on the sides of the trail.

Meet Bibita. We met her and her brother herding four goats down the trail shortly after lunch with Soba. We conversed a bit in English and it became clear that we had been adopted. They showed us shortcuts on the trail and whenever they got too far ahead, Bibita waited for us with a look that said, “So slow!” One of the goats they were herding was a baby. It couldn’t have been more than two feet tall, and it bounced down the rocky trail with unbelievable speed, sometimes leaping into the air with a jaunty full-body twist. Bibita, too, flew down the steep trail in her flip-flops and got a kick out of watching our ungainly progress. When Zach inadvertently stuck his hand in a bush of stinging nettles, Bibita laughed and laughed.

Meet Jessie and Jonathan. We were drinking tea in our lodge and looking at the nearby waterfall when a whole family showed up. It was the Smallbergers from New Zealand. Catherine (British) and Johan (South African) have raised an adventurous clan of five kids, the two youngest of whom accompanied them on the Annapurna trail. Jessie and Jonathan, thirteen and eight respectively, hiked the entire circuit start to finish with remarkable good humor. According to the sparsely kept records, Jonathan is the youngest New Zealander to ever go over the 5,416m pass. They taught us card games, kept a lookout for us wherever they went (“Mum, where are the Americans?”), and Catherine and Johan were the strongest advocates for taking kids along on adventures: “Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t do things with your kids!”

Meet Tula. We met Tula four days in. He was working as a guide/porter for a soft-spoken Israeli named Itan, who was taking a short trip between finishing his service as an officer in the army and starting university. Tula and I got to chatting when I saw him pull a string of prayer beads out of his backpack. I asked about them, and he explained that he is Buddhist and prays “Om mani pedme hum” for good luck and protection. “No landslide, no slip, no problem. Buddha brings good luck.” After hiking with them for awhile, he told us that he is a lama (monk)-- “You know Dalai Lama? He is big lama. I am little lama.”-- and he offered to give us a Buddha necklace for protection, which he put on with great ceremony. (Watch Zach get blessed here.) We ended up hiking with Tula and Itan for several days and got to know Tula quite well. He’s done the trail more than 100 times, and supports his wife, his mother, who is partially blind from cooking over an open fire her whole life, and his five kids. At the moment, he’s saving money to buy a new water buffalo. His last buffalo fell sick and died, and its milk provides essential nutrition for his kids. He prays three times a day, only drinks tea and Tang, and mentors some of the less-experienced guides on the trail. He’s a serious, thoughtful guy, but he has a giant smile and wonderfully theatrical hand gestures. After we parted with Itan and Tula, we found ourselves intoning, as he often said to us as we hiked up big hills, “Solowly, solowly.”

Meet Bhim, alias Dipak. We meet Bhim on our last night on the trail, when we’d descended back into the tropical heat and wanted to linger for one last night in the mountains. As with many of the lodge owners, he was sprucing up the lodge in anticipation of the rush of high season. As he painted yellow and red stripes on the beams beneath the balcony, he told me about his life: “I grew up in the jungle, in Chitwan.” He laughed heartily as my eyes widened. He had grown up in one of the nine villages in what is now Chitwan National Park, a major tourist attraction. He told me about foraging for food, being scared of going to the toilet at night for fear for the tigers, and being taught at a young age how to scamper up trees in order to escape any large, aggressive animals. “It was a hard life, but now, looking back, I think it was very sweet,” he reflected. He saw his first house made of something other than dry grass at the age of 11, when his father took him to the nearby city of Chitwan. At that time, he believed that was the only city, the extent of Nepal. Around the same time, the government decided to forcibly relocate all the people inside the park. They were given five years, $3500 rupees (about $40 dollars) and an equivalent amount of land to what they had inside the jungle. Bhim found himself, at age 14, in a city without education, skills, or knowledge of the outside world. He got a job as a dishwasher, where a lady noticed his “good nature” and asked him if he wanted to come to Pokhara to work in her restaurant. At that time, he didn’t know where Pohkara was and thought all foreigners were American. The next morning, nervous but determined, he got on a bus. Over the course of years, he worked his way up from dishwasher to waiter to porter and guide, learning to speak English and write along the way. He described, always with incredulous laughter, tasting foreign food for the first time, and being asked to greet someone with a “Namaste,” something they didn’t do in the jungle. Now, he rents the lodge he manages from someone in Kathmandu and supports his wife and two boys, who live in Pokhara so the boys can go to school. In a measure of just how far his reinvention has gone, when I asked him his name, he initially replied “Dipak,” which is also the name of his lodge, Dipak’s Guest House. But later on, he explained that his real name is Bhim. Everyone just assumes his name is Dipak because of the lodge, and after a while he just decided to go with it. Even the locals call him Dipak: “I’m only Bhim in Chitwan.”

Hello! After three weeks trekking around the Himalayas, we’ve returned to the land of Internet and are eager to share. Be prepared for a few rapid fire posts as we catch up. Full photographic evidence will be posted in a couple of days, once we’re back in Kathmandu. But first, a general overview.

The Annapurna Circuit (or Annapurna Round, as most Nepalis call it) is basically that-- a big ol’ circle around the gigantic Annapurna range. See a map here. It's a “teahouse trek,” which means that you stay in lovely, family-run lodges in small villages on the way and are treated to (gasp!) three hot meals a day while you trek. You begin in tropical lowlands surrounded by rice paddies, hike through pine forests and over a high, snowy pass, emerge into a high-altitude desert and slowly hike back down through various ecosystems until you are back in tropical jungle. Culturally, it’s an incredibly rich experience. The villages at lower altitudes are predominantly Hindu, while those higher up are Buddhists of Tibetan descent, who themselves are divided into four groups with their own languages and traditions. Along the way, we attended puja (prayers) at Buddhist gompas, saw holy fire at a Hindu pilgrimage site, celebrated an ancient Tibetan holiday that in a tiny desert village, herded goats, ate yak, practiced math facts with Nepali kids on their way home from school, had a couple of near-death experiences, and generally had the time of our lives.

Since we’re geeks, here are a few numbers to put things in perspective:

Kilometers walked: >220 (we took a few detours from the main route)
Days to complete: 21
Highest Point: Thorung-La Pass at 17,769ft
Amount of oxygen in the air at 17,769ft: 50% less than at sea level
Highest lake we saw (and highest lake in the world): Tilicho Lake, 4,900m
Most altitude gained in a day: 2000m (Yes, meters. It was a hard day.)
Number of times we ate dal baht (rice and lentils with veg curry): we lost count
Cost of a room in a village lodge: $2
Cost of a cup of tea on top of Thorung-La Pass: $1, and totally worth it
Peaks higher than 8000m within spitting distance: 2
Leech bites: 5
Encounters with active landslides: 2
Crossings of Kali Gandaki river by bridge: 23
Crossings of Kali Gandaki by wading across: Only one. One too many.