Tuesday, June 3 – A Change of Itinerary
When we awoke this morning, the clouds had cleared and we had an amazing view of Annapurna I. I’ll have pictures at some point, but they won’t do it justice. We left Ghandruk at 7:30 this morning feeling better than we should have. I liked Ghandruk a lot; it is a small village built on the side of a mountain. The trail we are on, which is a 5 foot wide stone path, would be considered ‘Main Street’ here. There are no cars, no motorbikes, no motor anything. There is a school somewhere in the village, but other than that, no central gathering place. Many of the homes that line the path offer food and drink for sale for hikers. While their life seems dull and meager to us, every villager I saw had a smile on their face. As we traveled out of the village we ran into young kids coming down the path we were going up, headed for school. They were neatly dressed in uniforms and I watch a group of boys about 9-10 years old stop along a creek and were laughing and having the greatest time throwing rocks a something in a tree. Not a bicycle or video game in sight. They walk 2-3 miles, one-way, to school everyday . . . with smiles on their faces.
We received our second dose of ‘ass-kicking’ today as we left around 7:30 and trekked for 7 hours with some significant ups and downs, the ups being more significant than the downs. I’ve come to understand the real definition of ‘trekking’ here in Nepal. What Patrick and I have done is ‘hiking’, we tend to meander, our trails up a mountain have switchbacks to lessen the degree of incline. In Nepal there is no lessening the degree of incline, when they build a path they use the ‘shortest distance between two points is a straight line’ theory and build a stone ‘stairway to hell’.
Exhausted (again), we ended our trek today in Chumrong, an even smaller village than Ghandruk and even closer to the Annapurna mountains. After we arrived we got a short thunderstorm and thus the clouds have covered our view, so we’re hoping that the morning is clear.
Due to the last two ‘ass-kickings’ we’ve received, we asked our Sherpa, Dom how these first couple of days compare to what is ahead. The news was not encouraging, the trail gets steeper and the air gets thinner. Dom tells us that we can actually get better views if we take a different route down the mountain rather than continuing up. That was his way of saying, “There’s no frickin’ way you guys are making it to Annapurna Base Camp and I don’t want to be carrying one of you out of here on my back (I felt him looking right at me!). We concluded that the views were the most important thing and who were we to argue with a Sherpa. Whew!!! So we changed our itinerary to something that we think will be more fun and less . . . life threatening.
We awoke this morning to beautiful views of the sun rising over the Annapurna Mountains, and with smiles on our faces we head DOWN the mountain.