Annapurna Crescent

Prologue: Get Out Of New York City.

This trip was motivated by the following story. In 1981, Linnea’s father, Jonathan, visited Nepal for several months to hike the Annapurna Circuit. He started in the town of Besi Sahar and hiked the first half of the circuit up to the notorious Thorong La. His progress was halted by vertical fields of snow which blocked the pass. He waited below Thorong La for weeks, lodging in the high altitude, but the snow continued to fall, and eventually he turned back. He hiked all the way back to Besi Sahar and then the other way around the Annapurna Circuit, eventually reaching Thorong La from the opposite side. He completed the whole Annapurna Circuit except for the pass.

My partner Linnea grew up hearing about this trip. During our PhDs she would talk about her plans to take time off for her research to hike the Annapurna Circuit. That did not happen. When we got married, she talked about Nepal for a honeymoon, but that did not happen. A full life made a wanted life hard and when she turned 30, with a career as a scientist in full tilt, she still had not visited Nepal.

In 2022, I asked my boss that year if I could take off a month from work to hike the Annapurna Circuit and was told “Absolutely not, you have to be realistic about how competitive this line of research is, if you go now you will not be able to continue in science.” Linnea held this against me until, at the start of 2023, I went back to my advisor and told them that I was leaving for Nepal in the spring.

We bough a small amount of trekking gear, got a house-sitter to watch our chicken flock, and tried our best to assign work responsibilities to responsible lab members thinking we could minimize the impact of our absence. The day of our departure I gave a lecture on the physical basis of disease with my trekking backpack propped up in the corner of the lecture hall. It fell over twice as I spoke.

From the lecture hall, I met Linnea at the Princeton “Dinky” train and started towards John F. Kennedy Airport. After several cancellations and a failed attempt to take an uber, we arrived in New York City three hours later than we had intended. From Princeton Junction we detoured to my parents’ place on Roosevelt Island. The subway system on Roosevelt Island was under construction, so we had to take a gondola, the alpine kind not the venetian kind, across the East River and onto the island.

We took a bus off Roosevelt Island into Long Island City and then took the subway system during rush hour. We bullied ourselves into an overloaded E train, holding our trekking bags above our heads. Then, the E train had a mechanical issue and stopped running right before Jamaica at Kew Gardens. It was half an hour in the crowded subway station before we got the opportunity to fight our way onto another E train.

At this time, New York City had just changed all public transport to tap-a-phone-to-pay system, except the airport monorail. So everyone going to or from the airport has to buy a MetroCard to take the monorail. There was an hour-long line for pseudo-functioning MetroCard machines, but our friends who had recently flown had warned us of this, and we had bought our cards ahead of time. We got on the monorail an hour before our plane take-off time.

We had 15 minutes to board when we got into JFK. We ran to security with our hiking backpacks, and the line was thirty minutes long. Despite our panic, we made our airplane just fine. JFK delayed our plane by four hours. Two hours before we boarded and another two hours of sitting in the plane on the tarmac.

On the plane, I watched The Bob’s Burgers Movie, Thor: Love and Thunder, Eo, Wakanda Forever, See How They Run, and Night School, in that order. I give them ratings of 5 out of 8 stars, 5 out of 21 stars, 5 out of 16 stars, 5 out of 24 stars, 5 out of 11 stars, and 5 out of 9 stars. Then, with bloodshot eyes, we sprinted through Qatar’s airport to catch our layover. We got into the next plane, took off, and watched the sparkling lights of Asia through the window—5 out of 5 stars.

Part 1: Getting In

We landed in Kathmandu in the early spring, at one in the morning. In the terminal we queued to fill out the digital Department of Immigration Tourist Visa Application Form at the one working terminal. Every passenger ahead of us took an exorbitantly long time, which I assumed was due to either their fatigue or senile incompetence. However, when it was my turn at the kiosk I too became befuddled at several steps such as when the system asked me to take the “soft copy” of the form and bring it to a bank.

Linnea’s father had arranged for us to stay at The Apsara Boutique Hotel, which had emailed to let us know they would pick us up from the airport. At three in the morning, we walked out of the airport to find two despondent men holding our names on signs. One, a younger porter at the hotel, and the second, his uncle, a chef at the hotel. They had been waiting for us at the airport since midnight and instead of being angry seemed greatly relieved that we have shown up at all.

The young porter took both of our trekking backpacks and walked us through the parking lot to an off-brand jeep. The vehicle had a broken rear door and only one useable chair in each row, so that Linnea and I had to sit in a line rather than side-by-side as we drove through the sleeping city. The one working headlight of the jeep occasionally illuminated large roaming packs of wild Nepali police armed with batons and large sticks. Some of these packs of police were dressed in dark blue uniforms, while other packs were dressed in gray uniforms. At the center of some larger intersections, there were small concrete silo that housed singular police officers. I will leave it to your imagination to fill in the purpose of those officers.

The Apsara Boutique Hotel stood off a narrow dirt road, secluded behind a series of progressively narrower dirt alleyways. The chef drove as far down the alleyways as the jeep could fit, and then we walked the last of the alleyway to the hotel. The porter carried our bags to the hotel and then bustled behind the hotel counter to check us in. He informed us that the hotel didn’t have hot water after midnight, but that there was a complimentary breakfast the next day and they were happy to hold any of our items until we returned from our trek in Nepal. Our room was large but dingy, and the toilet couldn’t accommodate toilet paper. While taking a cold shower I noticed a sizeable hole in the corner wall of the bathroom where perhaps a blowdryer or some other amenity was once mounted. We intended to wash our plane-clothing in the sink, but when enough water filled the sink basin, we discovered the water had a brown pasty color. Linnea had a neurosis concerning bed bugs, so instead of trusting the mattresses, we unpacked our sleeping bags and laid atop them. I say laid, not slept, because the smog of the city was so thick that I spent most of the little night left coughing on top of my sleeping bag.

At 6 AM the sun rose and I stood back up, dirtier and sleepier than when I had gotten to the hotel. I was determined to leave Kathmandu that day.

Our hotel was in Thamel, Kathmandu’s tourist ghetto. Upon description by the guidebooks, I felt like ‘tourist ghetto’ was an oxymoron. A section of town with everything tourists needed, hiking shops, restaurants, nightclubs, and upscale hotels. Yet once we walked out into the road in the morning, ‘tourist ghetto’ was a perfect description of what was going on. Although this portion of Kathmandu accounts for a lot of revenue, the vibe was that of a tiered shantytown. My Israeli mother would refer to the market aspect of this tourist ghetto as a “shuk,” which is a way of saying flea market. The other use of the word ghetto was also apropos; there was a virtual line in the ground between tourist lodging and Nepali housing. The rich shantytown abruptly stopped at borders made by a handful of arterial dirt roads. After those busy roads, the houses and markets of Kathmandu became typical Nepali houses and markets.

We organized our trekking supplies and made a list of what we still needed. We needed * a pocket knife * a lighter * vaseline for chafing * sunscreen for burning * a map of the Annapurna Circuit, which I had failed to purchase ahead of time. Finally, Linnea needed * some light pants for the hotter weather sections of the hike, * and some passport photos for her permits.

When we left the hotel, I heard a rooster crow and spotted the rooster tied by its leg to a post on the top of another hotel roof, maybe 10 stories off the ground. The crowing of a city rooster made me happy for a moment.

We navigated the tourist ghetto to a bank. We needed to take out $300 but dropped a zero when converting between currencies and tried to take out $3000. A nosy police officer watching us press the buttons on the ATM approached us and stopped us from making that mistake. $300 is 30000 rubles. We took these stacks of rubles and diligently split up and hid in our backpacks and various clothing pockets.

Flush with local currency, we shopped at the few stores open so early in the morning. Linnea got some excellent light hiking pants for $30, and we bought some fake sunscreen that caused us to get sunburned for $7. While I couldn’t find a pocket knife, I was able to buy scissors, which we used instead. We were not able to find a current map of the trail.

After shopping we sat down in the hotel lobby to plan. First, we planned out how to get from Kathmandu to the Annapurna Circuit trailhead at Besi Sahar. The original plan was to take a bus from Kathmandu to the eastern city of Pokhara and then a second bus to the village of Besi Sahar. We went to the concierge of the Apsara Boutique Hotel, a young man who appeared to be the porter’s cousin. While there were no printed bus schedules or maps, the concierge detailed the bus routes to us and explained that all long-distance busses in the country departed at the start of the day. So each bus trip would have to be done on a new day, and we had already missed the busses out of Kathmandu to Pokhara.

The concierge said that we should stay another night at the hotel and that he would arrange the bus tickets. If we were wealthy, he could also arrange for a private car either this day or the next as long as we left before 10 AM. The advantage of a private car was that it would take us directly to Besi Sahar, pause along the day-long drive when we wanted, and depart when we wanted. Upon investigation, the “wealth” required for this private car was $100, and I didn’t want to stay one extra minute in Kathmandu due to the smog, so we told the concierge to arrange the car for us as soon as possible.

This presented a problem. The second part of our planning was supposed to be acquiring the permits to hike the Annapurna Circuit in Nepal. The permits were the state ACAP (Annapurna Conservation Area Permit), and the federal TIMS (Tourist Information Management System). The former gives money to the Annapurna region to maintain the trail and the latter to the federal police. You get these permits in the capital, Kathmandu, or in the second-largest city, Pokhara, which is nestled in the western Annapurna region. But at the time, in the wake of the COVID pandemic, there was a large amount of misinformation about which permits were necessary and where we could get them. We knew we could get the permits at the two largest cities, but we were also under the impression that we could probably purchase these permits in Besi Sahar at the trailhead. Furthermore several hikers were reporting online that there were no more permit checkpoints in the wake of the pandemic.

We bought passport photos for Linnea in case we couldn’t get passport photos in Besi Sahar. I had one passport photo, which, for some reason, we thought would be enough for both the ACAP and the TIMS permits. In retrospect, the entire permitting decision tree was a series of tremendous mistakes or terrifically lucky decisions depending on your perspective.

The cab driver, a young man who appeared to be the concierge’s cousin, arrived in a sedan of no identifiable brand. We placed our hiking backpacks in the trunk and very slowly rolled out of the tourist ghetto into the collector and then arterial roads of Kathmandu. It took us about 2 hours to get out of Kathmandu on these arterial roads. Once at the edge of the city, there was a steep decline during which the car had pavement to drive on, and at the end of the decline the pavement was shed for the gravel and dirt that passes for a highway system of the country.

The car ride took us about seven hours. Shortly after getting onto the main dirt road, the driver stopped at a non-descript service center to use the bathroom, and I bought cheese puffs to eat in the car. At the stop point, there was a small box with chickens. Linnea thinks these boxes were for starving the chickens before eating them for food. Halfway through the trip, the car hit a large rock, which caused the suspension on the back right tire to make a concerning grinding noise for the rest of the trip.

Driving in Nepal is deceivingly safe. The cars never get above 20 kph on the gravel and dirt roads, so even though everyone is making hazardous maneuvers around each other, everyone is moving about as fast as a bicycle. I never saw a single car crash in Nepal, though I did see plenty of cars broken down or stuck in potholes.

Cars drove on the left side, but if no other cars were nearby, they would often drift to the right side for no discernable reason. Left and right blinkers, brights, and hazards all had some sort of communication use. Our car would often turn on the left blinker as an oncoming car came the other way, presumably to communicate something to that car.

These communications had some real meaning. Occasionally, our driver would stop after seeing some oncoming signals, and a minute or so later, a convoy of giant trucks would come around a bend. Once they had passed, we would continue along. Part of the professionalism of the chaotic driving seemed to be that relatively few people, if any, owned their own cars. All cars and trucks were company cars or bought by collectives of taxi and bus drivers. The only personal-use vehicles were motorcycles and mopeds.

We returned to the car and drove for about three hours until the road disappeared. I tried to navigate us around the disappeared road on Google Maps, but I led us to a place where the road was actively being constructed. We had to wait at the construction site with a long line of other cars until the workers finished before our car could get through the construction site and on to Besi Sahar. Everyone exited their vehicles for half an hour to watch the construction before they let us through.

At Besi Sahar, we left the poor driver. He turned around to return to Kathmandu the same day. We got to the ACAP permit station before it closed, and found out we needed two passport photos each to get our permits. One for the permit we would carry, and the other for the permit they would store at the ACAP station. Ludicrously, I had only brought one passport photo, but after some hand wringing the ACAP officer shrugged and gave me a permit with my one passport photo and put no photo on his copy document. Then we got some of the worst news of the entire trip. We learned that the federal TIMS permit was not available in Besi Sahar. The officer told us we would have to take the morning bus back to Pokhara, get the permit, and then take the next morning bus back.

We didn’t do that. We got a place to stay for the night, with not-so-clean and not-so-warm water, and went off to find dinner.

Besi Sahar was a single long strip. This turned out to be how many towns in Nepal were built. One long strip of buildings, sometimes miles long. There are no crossroads or grid patterns, instead, towns consist of a single long path of buildings. We walked from one end of Besi Sahar to the other end, twice, trying to find someplace that would have good food. About halfway down the strip I encountered a young goat walking down the road on its own. Linnea and I had been discussing purchasing two goats, so I became excited about the goat. The goat in turn then became excited about me and ran towards me hopping and bleating. I hadn’t expected this, and momentarily panicked, which in turn panicked the goat which turned around and ran away. I felt oddly guilty about the whole interaction.

We decided to go into a building where locals were playing cards and ask if they had food. We ended up ordering off a little menu, and we received standard lo mein and soup as if cooked at home. The restaurant food gave one the impression that the chef had pulled up a YouTube video on how to make lo mein and had made it for the first or second time. The meal had little flavor, but it did have fresh vegetables.

After dinner, we returned to our lodging, and I spent the night tossing and turning in my jet-lagged mind. I tried to convince myself that maybe the ACAP officer was wrong and the TIMS permit was unnecessary. Or when he said that the TIMS permitting office in Besi Sahar was closed, it was just closed for the evening, and the next morning it would be open. At midnight, the phone in our room rang, and someone asked us if we would like dinner. I said, “What? No!” and hung up.

We woke up with our first view of the distant Annapurna mountain range. From Besi Sahar, it has shapes reminiscent of the rocky mountains but scaled up. We paid for our lodging, and to my disappointment, the TIMS office had been turned into a bus/jeep ticket pagoda. We decided to try to start the hike without a TIMS permit and see how much it was enforced. We read that being caught hiking without the TIMS permit was a $40 fine. That seemed ok, except there was no way to pay with a credit card, so if we were fined repeatedly, we would quickly run through our $300 worth of rubles.

You can start hiking at Besi Sahar, but I wanted to get some altitude and then take my time on the backside of the trail. We needed to hire a jeep to bring us further up the trail, but the bus/jeep ticket pagoda was useless, and everyone seemed to be fighting about who would get to take the tourists. The problem was that to maximize profits, jeep drivers only wanted to take tourists if their jeep was jam-packed full, and everyone’s jeep was only half full, so no one was leaving. We went to get some snacks, I eyed a razor but quickly gave up on that idea, and when we returned the jeeps were still not full. I got fed up, but when I went to yell at the jeep drivers, they had vanished. Then, some time later, another group of tourists showed up, a jeep driver reappeared, and we were on our way.

Our jeep was populated by a high-class French couple led by a happy-go-lucky Nepali guide, a grungy French kid on a gap year (or the start of a gap decade), and a skeezy driver who was not the person we had bought the jeep ticket from. There were 6 seats in the jeep and 7 of us, and our bags were tied up in the truck bed. I was fine with this at first because we were jeeping about 20 miles. I assumed that would take an hour. But instead, we left at 9 AM, and we were still in the jeep at noon when we stopped for lunch. We had only gone 10 miles at that point!

We had lunch by an enormous waterfall. For lunch, we had Dal Bhat, which was an amusing dish for the first time. It’s dal and rice. Bhat means rice. The rice is surrounded by two pieces of each vegetable the local chef is able to find—usually, something pickled and something not pickled that is suspiciously sour. The nice thing about Dal Bhat is that after you have tasted everything and determined that it is a trash dish made out of trash, the local chef comes out with another serving of Dal, another serving of Rice, and servings of another two pieces of vegetable, and you can continue to eat until you want to throw up. They can afford to serve you infinite servings because the quantity of calories and proteins in a serving of Dal Bhat are infinitesimal, and so the finite sum of infinitesimal calories is the same regardless of how many servings you have.

But the first time we had it, it was amusing. The grungy French kid dug into it with his hands, and the rest of us used forks. The Dal Bhat comes with a paper-thin bread crisp that I always tried to use to eat with (like Naan), but the bread was a few atoms thick and thus couldn’t support any weight.

Writing about Dal Bhat makes me nauseous, so I won’t mention it much. Instead, assume that any meal I don’t cover consisted of Dal Bhat. As one last note about it, the Dal Bhat experience was so pervasive in Nepal that before we left the country, we got Linnea’s dad Jonathan a shirt that said “Dal Bhat Power, 24 hour”.

We spent some time looking at the waterfall as the driver of the jeep chain smoked cigarettes. A rooster that had made the mistake of standing downwind of our driver became flustered and let out a few shrill coughing crows before having the sense to move with the flock elsewhere. We got back in the jeep and came up to our first police checkpoint shortly after. I muttered to the happy-go-lucky Nepali guide in charge of the high-class French couple that we didn’t have our documents in order. He said, “Don’t worry, don’t mention it, don’t say anything, show what you have.”

This turned out to be the key to dealing with Nepali people: not bringing anything up. Everyone else showed their ACAP and TIMS permits. The ACAP officers stamped the ACAP permits; then the TIMS police stamped the TIMS permits. The TIMS police had guns. The ACAP officers had nicer chairs. I showed our ACAP permits to the TIMS police. The police perused our ACAP permits, shrugged, and passed them to the ACAP officers, who stamped the permits and handed them back to us. That was it. We had made it past our first checkpoint without being fined, yelled at, or turned around.

Right before we left the checkpoint, we encountered two Americans hiking toward Besi Sahar. These were some of the few Americans we would encounter during the trip. We asked them if they were hiking the circuit in reverse and, if so, how the weather was at the pass. They said they had hiked it the standard counter-clockwise way but had been forced to turn back at Thorong La pass because there was too much snow. We were a bit disappointed at this news, but we were still riding high from not being turned back by the TIMS permit police.

After this checkpoint, the skeezy jeep driver started picking up locals who would stand in the back of the jeep on top of our bags. The happy-go-lucky Nepali guide tried to complain about this to no avail. At one point, we had maybe 20 women standing in the back of the jeep, and the French couple had been given a baby to hold. These women paid roughly $1 each for the trip. They would all have to shuffle out each time we came to a new police checkpoint. Then, they would walk past while our documentation was being checked, and we would pick them up again once they had walked far enough that they were out of view of the police.

At 3 PM, we got out of the jeep and started hiking. We found that the women riding in the back of the jeep had been standing on our bags, and that weight had burst our water bladders open. Everything we had was soaked, and our paper Lonely Planet guidebook was a bit ruined. The French folks were headed forward another 20 miles and had 4 or 5 more hours of driving in front of them, bringing them way up in altitude and a day or two ahead of us. But we got out and started walking at Dharapani, elevation ~1800 m, about a two-day hike from Besi Sahar.

This story is going to involve a lot of town names. I’ll give a list of the towns here, broken into sections, and repeat the list at each section to help you get your bearings.

Getting In: Kathmandu (Capital) -> Besi Sahar (Last City) -> Dharapani (1900m)
Ascent: Odar (2131m) -> Bagarchap (2160m) -> Danaqyu (2200m) -> Timang (2580m) -> Koto (2640m) -> Chame (2710m) -> Bhratang (2850m) -> Upper Pisang (3310m) -> Ghyaru (3730m) -> Ngawal (3680m) -> Humde (3330m) -> Bhraga 3450 m -> Manang 3540 m

Part 2: Ascent

Linnea hung her underwear outside her sopping-wet backpack to dry it. Then, we tried to ensure our water bladders were no longer leaking. Even when old women were no longer stomping on them in the back of a jeep, these bladders were an ongoing problem. By the end of the trek, I swore never to use a water bladder again.

Once on the road, we encountered a side trail. We didn’t have an accurate or detailed map of the Annapurna Circuit, so we thought about the trail in terms of the road, the main trail, and the side trails. The road was obvious; it might not be paved often, but it was beaten into shape by the constant passage of jeeps. A red and white blaze marked the main trail. These blaze marks were not frequent. We might go half a day before seeing another one, but they were terrific to see, and they didn’t exist at all a decade ago. The main trail and the road were often the same thing, but there were side trails marked with a blue and white blaze. These side trails kept you off the miserable road and led you to beautiful places, but at great physical and temporal expense.

By the end of the trip, I was thinking about my whole life in terms of red-and-whites and blue-and-whites. I want the direct road to my work blazed with red-and-white, and the side-bike trail I sometimes use that is more beautiful but slower blazed with blue-and-white. I want papers that come across my desk that are important marked in red-and-white and beautiful but not necessarily helpful papers marked in blue-and-white. I want the main meals I order marked in red-and-white and the side meals and desserts marked in blue-and-white. My work emails would have red/white flags, while personal emails would have a blue/white flag. Maybe that last one is backward.

A side trail to the village of Odar was our first experience with the blue and whites. Two hundred meters straight up a flight of immaculate stairs poured with concrete. Why was the road made of dirt and shit, but the staircase to a nowhere town was maintained by Marie Kondo? I have no idea. I was still getting used to the altitude and the weight of my pack, so the 200 meters up took us about an hour. In Nepal, kilometers forward and backward seemed to have no meaning, instead it was better to measure distance in elevation change.

At the top of the stairway, we could see new snow-capped mountains between lush green pine forests. The steps then led into the village of Odar, which was partially chiseled into the mountain. The houses faced away from the road and up towards the mountain rather than facing the valley we had hiked up from. As such, instead of views of the road and river below, the village had views of the viridian green rice patties they had carved into the slopes above. The slate gray of the town and the thin air brought particular color to the green of the rice patties and the blue of the sky.

At the top of Odar, we came to our first junction. The town road went one way, and a blue and white sign had the lettering “Bagarchhap” on it. Spelling was inconsistent in Nepal, so when I spell the same town differently, it’s sometimes because they are two different towns, like Chame and Chamje, which are two days apart! Other times, spelling was inconsistent because the transliteration from Sanskrit to Roman characters is not well-prescribed. As we sat at the sign talking and researching, a black Himalayan sheepdog puppy came and sat with us. We had no real map of the Annapurna area, but we had two primary navigation resources: the first was a Lonely Planet from 2018, which was 1 COVID and 1 enormous earthquake out of date. The second was the mad scrawlings of a German hiker that Linnea had downloaded onto her Kindle at the suggestion of a Latvian YouTuber we had watched. These half-sane writings were such an essential guide for us along our trek that I will refer to the Kindle, the German hiker, and his writings all by the same noun: the DeutscheKindle. The DeutscheKindle’s incoherent pictograms and descriptions of the trail were pre-covid, but not pre-earthquake, and thus were vastly more relevant than our Lonely Planet book.

While checking the DeutscheKindle, the puppy’s mom came and sat with the puppy and side-eyed us. I said we had two resources for navigation, but of course, we had the locals. A local Odarian pointed us towards Bagarchaap on the blue and white trail. We asked if the other path went anywhere, and they insistently pointed us toward the blue and white blazer.

On the way out of Odar, we came across the first of many Jewish stars. The Nepalese use the Jewish star, with the Israeli colors of blue and white, to denote primary schools. This is doubly confusing because there are many Israelis on vacation in Nepal, and they mark Jew-friendly hotels with Israeli flags and Hebrew. We came across the first of many chickens. I took pictures of all the chickens we passed for the whole hike and put them into a single PowerPoint slide to present to my lab. The chickens are similar to chickens in America, which is interesting because the breeds aren’t frequently interchanged across continents. Instead, there are feather colors and patterns that chickens are genetically predisposed to, so different breeders on different continents end up coming up with remarkably similar chickens.

The path to Bagrachap was smooth concrete. We encountered a few cows on the concrete. The level of agency animals have in Nepal is terrific. I’ve never had to think so much about who has the right of way, me or a cow, before. The cows had a silly way of pretending to ignore us. They would give us side-eye whenever they thought we weren’t looking, and then they would look away when we asked them to move over so we could pass.

Bagarchap, in retrospect, was a beautiful town. It had bright colors and a modern hydro dam built by the Chinese that gave power to the rest of the towns we would encounter during our ascent. Bagarchap had the first Chorten that we saw on the trip. These Chortens don’t exactly strike the eye, but they are noteworthy. They are white monuments with square bases and oval tops, often with a gold bar on top. The shape can be imagined by gluing two chess pieces together: a short bishop on top of a large castle. It is supposed to be a grave for a Buddhist monk, but we never understood the cultural significance of these Chortens.

Since we reached Bagarchap and the main trail / main road again at around 4:30 PM, we thought we would walk on to Danaqyu, 40 minutes down the road. Because most towns are one-dimensional lines, larger towns, such as Bagarchap, can take a long time to walk through. It’s also hard to figure out when a town ends. Houses would get sparser and sparser as we walked along. It might be a minute until the next house, then 2 minutes, then three minutes, then five minutes later, a dozen houses would appear, and the town would go on. After an hour of walking through Bagarchap, we reached the end of town and decided to double back and find a place to stay. We had taken 50 steps back before someone came out of a house and asked us why we had turned around. We said we had decided to stay in Bagarchap, and they said we should stay with them. We asked if they had hot water, and they said yes, which was good enough for us.

Then, they took us further out of town because it turned out we weren’t at the end of Bagarchap yet, and we stayed at a bright pink house on the second floor. The cottage had two floors, the first floor being someone’s semi-permanent residence. We had dinner in a dining room off from a kitchen and rinsed off using hot water in the bathroom of a room we were not staying in. From our room, we could see a bit of the Annapurnas and a helipad down by the hydro dam. We hung our clothing outside the room, but we had to tie it down because the wind was picking up. Around the cottage were Tibetan prayer flags: blue, white, red, green, and yellow square flags with little drawings and writings. And these flags fluttered so hard I thought they would rip off the sticks, poles, and wires they were attached to.

We changed into shower clothing, and I got the first look at my feet of the trip. We had only hiked a few hours, but the bottoms of my feet had enormous blisters all along the back left of the heel; significant white cushiony areas that had trapped some liquid. We hoped that the blister would calm down after a night off my feet. We had clarified that they had hot water, but the hot water was generated by a gas boiler that you had to ignite, and there was no shower, so you had to ladle the hot water over yourself. The gas boiler made the shower smell of unburnt gas, which terrified Linnea, and in the future, she would sometimes refuse to use this sort of hot water bathing arrangement. I couldn’t blame her either; with the sun going down, it quickly dipped below freezing, and the ladles of hot water made me colder and colder. After our hot water baths and change of clothes, we went into the kitchen for dinner.

Dinner was a bit of a disaster. I don’t think our hosts had made food for guests many times before. It was clear while ordering that they had never seen their menu before. We found out that the menus are handed out by the ACAP/TIMS permit people. Hosts wouldn’t have half of the things on the menu and wouldn’t know what the other half was. The dinner took about an hour to prepare. We managed to get some chicken momo (after ordering, we learned momo meant dumplings) and an apple pie. The apple pie was a paddy of old apples, deep-fried in a pita pocket. It tasted better than it sounds but requires a novel bending of the word “pie.”

After dinner, we had some ginger tea. The ginger tea was sugar, lemon, and finely sliced ginger in boiling water. It was stupid and not tea, but it started a long tradition of ordering 2 ginger teas at each place we stopped at. This was a costly habit, as prices on these Annapurna Circuit menus were random. Dal Bhat, $5. Ginger Tea, $4, a whole chicken marinated in tomato sauce? $5, but they don’t know how to make it. Apple Pie? $3. The prices were stochastic, and Ginger Tea was one of the expensive things.

With the sun down, we went back out into the frigid windy air and up the outside spiral stairway to our uninsulated, unheated room. There, we crawled into our sleeping bags with long underwear on, and I covered my head, pseudo-suffocating myself in the sleeping bag. This was how every day ended. As soon as the sun went down, we had to be in our sleeping bags, and we would pop in and out of our sleeping bags for a few moments to go to the bathroom.

I spent most of my time in my sleeping bag, thinking about how long the past two days had been. I’ve written about 6000 words describing two days during which we went from Kathmandu to Besi Sahar and from Besi Sahar to Bagarchap. We hadn’t done much hiking, a few hours, but it felt like we had been on the trail for 100,000 words, not 6000 words.

My feet were fine the following day, so we packed up and hit the road heading north while the sun was still behind the mountains. Most days, we woke up around 6 AM, packed our bags, went to the bathroom, and left around 7 AM. Our backpacks were plastic sacks with sleeping bags stored at the bottom of the sack. We had to empty our backpacks every night to get to the sleeping bags and repack them every morning. Usually, at least one of us found that after packing our backpack, the bottom was damp, and our water bladder was leaking. The water bladder was in a slot on the side of the backpack, which also required unpacking everything to access and fix a leak. Once we fixed a leak, we would have to repack everything again.

Mornings were beautiful. The sky was clear in the mornings, and we could see all the mountains. It was also when roosters would crow, a noise that brought tremendous joy to my heart. Here in Bagarchap the chicken flocks had been in small wooden containers the night before, but they had either been let loose, or escaped and now were exploring the a ravine near our lodging. Once morning passed, as the day rolled in the sky would get a little misty, the mountains would get hazy, and by afternoon, big opaque clouds would cover the sky. Oddly enough, mornings were a time when Nepal was empty. We rarely saw cars on the main road or people out and about in the towns we passed before 10 AM or sometimes even later. The Annapurna circuit seemed deserted.

About 15 minutes onto the trail, we encountered a small white dog at the edge of the town of Bagarchap. This dog decided to follow us along the trail. Then, a second larger dog joined the small white dog, and we were a little pack. I told Linnea that this happened all the time in Israel and that sometimes another dog pack would come and attack your dog pack, and it was always quite confusing. As I finished my little description of the different things that can happen when your dog pack meets another dog pack, we started crossing a bridge and crossing from the other side was a pack of 4 or 5 dogs coming the other way. Sure enough, our two dogs fought with those dogs and had to run away. The large dog got separated from us, but the small white dog managed to sneak past the bridge and continued to walk with us.

It walked with us for an hour or two. I felt we had doomed this dog and torn it away from its life in Bagarchap on the false promise of companionship. But this sort of thing happened quite a lot during the trip, and I began to think that maybe the dogs were using us as protection from wild predators. We escorted the dog to the outskirts of the next town, Danaqyu, at which point it took off, and we never saw it again.

By the time the sun was in the sky, we were walking through a Rhododendron grove. Small gnarled trees, maybe 15 to 20 feet high, with bright pink flowers that had a plastic sheen. I had seen a few of these trees during the drive from Kathmandu and had thought they were alienesque. Up close, they seemed more natural. Hiking in Nepal in the spring is considered the off-season due to the clouds that roll in each day. One of the benefits of hiking in the spring was the Rhododendrons. Linnea’s father also hiked during the spring and spoke of an enormous Rhododendron forest he walked through, so Linnea was excited about the small groves we passed through.

We came to our first suspension footbridge. These were common during the hike, and we often traveled over 3 to 4 of these per day. Their main support came from four metal cables about as thick as your wrist anchored on two sides of a gulch by large concrete platforms. There was the high pair of metal cables you placed your arms on to steady yourself, and the lower pair of metal cables held up metal slats (sometimes wooden slats). The suspension footbridges were one and a half people wide, such that you could pass someone going the other way, but we never saw it happen. They felt sturdy in construction. I mean, they swung violently side to side when you were in the middle and rocked up and down at high frequency when you were at the edges, but I was never worried that these bridges were going to give way. It is worth noting that we saw quite a few bridges destroyed or fallen throughout the hike.

We crossed our footbridge with not much ado. At the start of the footbridge was a red and white marker, but at the far end was a cliff and a road that ran in both directions away from the footbridge and along the cliff. Standing at the footbridge, it was unclear which way to turn, left or right, to follow the path. I was across the bridge first, and Linnea had been checking directions on her DeutscheKindle as I crossed. Then, as she was crossing, I noticed Hebrew writing and an arrow to the right pointing the way chiseled into the cliff. When I turned around, Linnea had stopped on the bridge, and behind her, crossing the bridge, was a donkey.

The animals in Nepal had a tremendous amount of agency. They could decide where to go each day, where to sleep, and who to interact with. Most animals, except dogs, were owned, but they weren’t kept in coops, pens, or cages unless their owners needed something from them that day. This donkey probably had a job, but it wasn’t needed that day, so it was walking from Bagarchap to Danaqyu. Linnea, shocked by the donkey, scuttled off the bridge. The donkey, in turn, came to the Hebrew sign, turned to face the sign, turned to face us, and continued on to the right. We followed it.

When the village of Danaqyu was in sight, our Donkey guide got off the path and walked into an orchard where it began to eat some thin reeds, grass, and twigs growing out of the rocky ground. The donkey’s ribs were outlined by taught skin, but it didn’t seem unhealthy or sad. Since Nepal was coming out of winter, many of the animals we saw were famished but otherwise healthy, and this was the way of things in Nepal. Spring brings warmth, but I guess it doesn’t immediately bring food. The food mostly comes in the Fall. The reason the donkey was so skinny might be the same reason why our Dal Bhat was so bad.

Danaqyu was a beautiful compact village, maybe half a mile long and consisting of 20 lodges and huts. Starting at Danaqyu, we were on a paved road, and jeeps started buzzing us. At the end of the town we came to a shop. These shops tended to hang candies, snacks, and essential goods on lines and strings dangling around the front of the shop. Then, they would have a glass counter, and underneath that glass counter would be even more snacks and candies, as if they were jewelry. Linnea bought me a Snickers and 6 ChocoPies. She ate one or two ChocoPies every morning until they ran out. I had one, and they were terrible.

On the way to Timang, we met a single American hiker walking in the other direction with a dog and a Nepali guide. I pointed to some clouds and asked if that would be rain. The Nepali guide took a while to understand the question and replied, “No rain, just cloud.” This became one of our mantras during the hike “No rain, just cloud.” The American was haggard and had turned back at Thorong La Pass due to the snow accumulation; not a great sign for our journey.

The hike to Timang after that was uneventful. I took maybe 20 or 40 pictures of chickens as we went. Then, we took a blue and white side trail to get off the road and came to an absolutely beautiful village called Thanchouk, halfway between Temang and Koto. The whole village was made out of stone, with stone pathways and little stone walls on either side of us at the pathways. We rested there for a few minutes as I redid the attachment of my backpack bag to its frame. Then we noticed people were watching us and left. Shortly after Thanchouk, the path became utterly disheveled. Tiny makeshift wooden bridges helped us over trash piles, which led us to a work area where several old men were actively creating or destroying the trail. Their side of the trail was about 8 feet below our side of the trail, so they offered us a ladder. Their ladder was made out of a log split in half, with footsteps hollowed out of the log every so often, giving the appearance of an enormous flute. It worked well and felt as natural as a ladder, perhaps even more natural than a standard folding ladder.

Back on the main road, we found a sign pointing us forward with the directions “Wye to Chame!” My little sister is dyslexic and spells everything wrong, and I felt the country of Nepal was severely dyslexic. On the wye to Chame we encountered our only other trekkers of the day—two German women who had also started in Bagarchap. We walked with them to Koto for about an hour, exchanging stories. We told them we didn’t have the correct documentation, and they thought that would be a big problem. One of the German women had attempted the Annapurna Circuit in March 2020, right as Covid was hitting. Her parents managed to contact her and begged her to come home, so she got to the airport and took the last airplane out of Nepal and back to Germany before the transferring airports shut down. Three years later, she was back to give it a second go.

As we entered Koto, the German women paused for food. We said goodbye, that they would pass us soon, and continued. At the end of Koto, we were stopped by police and asked for documentation. Again, I showed them our ACAP permit without mentioning the TIMS permit. There were no ACAP people at this police checkpoint, and the police stared at our documentation for a while, handed it back, and let us go on our way. I walked away from the police, my heart pounding. Linnea decided this was a good time to readjust her backpack frame, and I almost had a stroke. As we were leaving the police checkpoint, the Germans were walking up to it, and we waved them goodbye again.

Further up the road we came to Chame, a large village built on top of a river. The village was more or less an enormous bridge. The village had an ATM, which I used to top us off with another 10000 rupees. When I was done, the ATM said, “Thank you for doing business with us, Namaste!” which I found confusing because I thought Namaste was a greeting. Here, we stopped for lunch at a “Dutch Bakery.” After going through the menu and being told we couldn’t have a bunch of things, we came upon an order of 1 cheese roll, 1 apple pie, and 2 ginger teas. The ginger tea came instantly, and the apple pie came quickly; it appeared to be a microwaved normal apple pie, much to our disappointment. The cheese roll took two hours to arrive.

While waiting for the cheese roll, the proprietor of the “Dutch bakery” challenged me to a game of chess. I hate chess. I used to love chess. I loved its logic puzzles and playing it with my friends. At 18, chess became a competition for me, and I hate competitions. For the rest of my life, chess has made me anxious. As a result, I have avoided it, and now, without practice, I have become terrible at it.

The proprietor was even worse at chess. I beat him in the first game despite making many stupid moves. Then I decided to be done with it and turned off my brain. This is the best way to get rid of a chess player: keep playing but stop thinking critically. I played, making the best of each move, but without looking more than one move ahead, and lost a few games until he lost interest. Finally, when he lost interest, our cheese roll appeared. Linnea was livid.

It wasn’t a good cheese roll. More like an anorexic hot pocket.

We passed through the end of Chame, where they were selling on strings not only snacks and candies but also long underwear, parkas, and many other things a hiker might need. Linnea and I had been talking all day that we had misjudged how cold it would be in Nepal, and we were only at 2000 meters above sea level. Dangling long underwear in front of cold hikers works! We each purchased a pair of long underwear, which we barely managed to stuff into the top of our bags. Linnea’s long underwear was low quality and didn’t hold up in the long run, but I still wear my pair when skiing each year.

From Chame, we climbed up and up, traveling on a blasted road carved into the mountain. At the end of this carved path, we came out into a river bed. I imagine later in the spring when the river rises, this whole part of the trail is knee-deep in water. Here, it started to drizzle. Linnea suggested we stop to put rain covers over our backpack, but I insisted that it was “No Rain, Just Cloud” and we kept on. The drizzle did indeed stop a few minutes later, at which point the “village” of Bhratang emerged from the river bed.

Bhratang was not a village. It was a single lodge and an apple orchard. The story is that one of the wealthiest people in Nepal decided to buy up the whole village of Bhratang and replace it with an apple orchard and an upscale lodge. It’s the largest apple orchard in Nepal, and since it was early spring, it appeared around the corner as one out-of-place building surrounded by acres and acres of twigs coming out of the ground. Linnea didn’t want to stay at the apple lodge because it was too upscale, and she wanted to rough it. I did not want to rough it; I wanted to shower and love apple orchards. After a terse conversation, we decided to stay at the lodge. In retrospect, this was an excellent decision because there wasn’t another town we could have easily made it to. We didn’t know it at the time; we still thought the town of Bhratang lay ahead, but the next town was several hours away, and the sun was starting to dip below the mountains on the other side of the valley.

The apple orchard lodge was expensive to stay at—around 4000 rupees. Our beds had little packages of dried apples on the pillows, and there was even a space heater to warm our feet. The dried apples were terrible; Linnea couldn’t eat hers. Taking off my boots, I found my feet were forming severe blisters on the backs of my heels, but this turned out to be a routine for the whole trip. My feet were always blistered when I went to bed, but they recovered by the morning.

Our room had an en suite shower, a real luxury, but the shower was ice cold. We went to ask about hot water but had difficulty finding anyone who worked at the lodge. When we finally got help from the lodge chef, we had to wait a few hours for the lodge’s central hot water to heat up before we could shower. So first we went to dinner. At dinner, the lodge owner said a large group of Chinese tourists would arrive late that night to ski by helicopter the next day. Dinner ended with a new, different type of apple pie, this time resembling a gummy apple strudel.

As the sun set, we showered and went to bed. Indeed, several hours later, we were woken up by Chinese tourists arriving in a fleet of jeeps. I found that the space heater had stopped working halfway through the night, so despite the facade of the lodge, it was another cold night in Nepal.

The next day, we woke up and packed up, and the fancy lodge in the middle of a sea of twigs that would someday turn into an apple orchard looked even more ridiculous than before. I heard no rooster crow that morning, and knew that I had made a mistake staying there. Still, I’m happy that such a place exists. Nepal needs fancy places so that Nepalese people can take more money from foreigners and improve their country. If everything they have is super basic, they will never be able to charge much money, but this place was nice enough to charge 4000 rupees for lodging.

With a silence in the air and the Annapurna Himal looming large above us, we set off on the red-and-white trail toward Pisang. We tried to get off the main road by taking a blue-and-white. We passed back and forth at the location where the blue-and-white was supposed to be, and we asked a guide as he passed with a Western man and a porter in tow. We asked him if he knew if there was a NATT side trek in the area. He asked what NATT was, and we explained that it was the red-and-white and blue-and-white blaze program under the Natural Annapurna Trekking Trail. He didn’t understand and then said we should take the red-and-white instead, and he kept telling us this as we walked away hoping to eventually find a blue-and-white trail.

We passed through a nice town painted all bright pink, then crossed a small wooden bridge near a collapsed suspension footbridge. This was the first suspension footbridge we had seen that had failed, but it was not the last. At this point we came to an important fork in the road.

There are two ways from Bhratang to Manang, and oddly enough, both are marked with red-and-white trail markers. The first way is to follow the main road that jeeps take and stay low in the valley, gradually climbing to Manang. I called this the Lower Pisang path. The other way is to climb up to Upper Pisang and then up through several villages on a rest above the valley, combing down about 600 hundred feet into Manang at the end of the path. The second route is considered better for acclimatization, and the DeutscheKindle told us that it had “awesome and breathtaking views.” The impulse to take this more challenging but more beautiful path turned out to be a crucial junction point of our hike that changed the course of the entire trip. But we had no idea of that at the time. We were feeling good and wanted a challenge.

As we rose above the valley, the views heading up to Upper Pisang were terrific and breathtaking. The Annapurnas wrapped around us and became so tall, broad, and overbearing that we couldn’t capture them properly with our phone cameras.

We eventually found our hoped-for blue-and-white trail. However, the original blazes marking it from the main path had been removed, and the trail was no longer used. A nearby farmer hated all the people walking near his farm, and so he had removed all the indications of the blue-and-white trail that he could and had essentially killed the side trail and the village it went to. We tried taking it for about 30 minutes, but it became apparent that any trail not used in this region for too long would be covered in growth and slick with pine needles in just a few years. Without much ado, we returned to the main red-and-white trail on the jeepable road and continued to Upper Pisang.

Without the jeep traffic, we spent most of the time on this trail thinking we were the only people hiking the Annapurna circuit. However, right before the town of Upper Pisang, we encountered a German man bike-packing the Annapurna circuit. It was an event for both of us to encounter another traveler, and he stopped and talked to us. We talked some about his equipment or lack thereof. It was hard to see how he fit all his clothes, sleeping bag, and equipment in the tiny bags on his bike. He didn’t even have paneers. However, he was adamant that the discomfort was worth it, as he needed to be as light as possible to make it over Thorong La Pass.

Upper Pisang was a fantastic town, overlooking the town of Lower Pisang several hundred feet below. We stopped there and had our best lunch experience of the trip. We ordered two types of porridge from a polite 30-year-old man who kept calling us “Sir.” My porridge had little apples cut up into it and had a similar texture to grits. All lodges were restaurants, and most restaurants were lodges. This would have been a great place to stay, but it was too early in the day. We ate while talking to the lodge owner’s son, a 5-year-old boy who had a lot of fun playing with Linnea’s DeutscheKindle and draining the water out of our water bladders. I bought some candies from the lodge owner, which turned out to be cough drops and another Snickers bar. After lunch, we left our bags at the lodge and climbed a hundred meters to a Ghompa at the top of Upper Pisang. So now there are Chortens and Ghompas. A Ghompa can look like anything and can be anything. It was a confusing term, but Linnea had a good heuristic: a Ghompa had things inside it. A Chorten never had things inside it, but Ghompas had doors that opened to reveal a cluttered array of little trinkets, doodads, and paintings inside. Ghompas frequently had enormous prayer wheels inside of them. Prayer wheels the size of an SUV standing up on its trunk.

While we are walking away from Upper Pisang, it is a good time to mention the prayer wheels. Nepal is covered with Tibetan prayer flags, which litter the trees with white, red, yellow, blue, and green square pieces of cloth. It also has hundreds of little cylinders that rotate on poles stowed away on roads, towns, and Ghompas. These prayer wheels always had the same prayer written on each wheel. This prayer is the Om mani, or Om mani padme hum, and roughly translates to “praise to the jewel in the lotus.” Every time we came up to new prayer wheels, I would check to see if they were the same Om mani or a different prayer. They were always the Om mani, but sometimes it took me a while to realize that because Sanskrit has many different scripts, which would cause me to misinterpret the characters at first.

After an hour or so of walking from Upper Pisang, we came upon a suspension footbridge that led over a gorge at the foot of a tremendous dusty mountain covered in switchbacks. To me, this was the single most arduous ascent of the entire hike, all the more so because it came so unexpectedly. I had to stop several times to catch my breath, and we ran out of water about halfway up. Damn that adorable five-year-old. The trail got confusing several times, but it didn’t matter; all ways were up, so all path routes were the same. We had brought foldable trekking poles with us, and about three-quarters of the way up this mountain, I decided to take my poles out and try them to conserve energy by not having to deal with balance. This worked well, and while it was still grueling to get up the hill, it was a little less grueling.

There was a similar mountain in Santa Barbara called Gaviota. It was a three-hour hike in Santa Barbara, but it was steep switchbacks all the way, and Linnea and I would routinely hike it for the exercise. It never stopped sucking. Someone had transported Gaviota and placed it down in Nepal. It didn’t even look right. It was a California yellow dusty mountain in the middle of Himalayan greens and whites. When it was done, though, instead of a view of the Pacific Ocean, there was a view of Upper Pisang and a shack with a little old woman selling tea.

The tea shack had two cows, which the old woman kept trying to shoo away, no running water, and a terrific view over the mountain we had climbed. She tried to point out the Annapurna peaks. She would point out Annapurna 2, 4, 7, and 5, and we would nod. But when the peaks are numbers, not names, how can you possibly be interested in information presented with those labels? After rehydrating from ginger tea, we made the final push up the mountain and into the beautiful stone village of Ghyaru.

Ghyaru reminded me of an ancient fortress town atop a mountain in Israel called Matsada. That’s another hike I’ve done several times in my life with the same mountain made of the same yellow dust. It must be a tremendous amount of effort to collect all that yellow dust and move that mountain from place to place before I get there. Dozens of chickens were walking around in the town’s streets, and the roosters had engraved thin stones with Sanskrit that lined the streets. This decoration of the streets gave me an odd sense that walking through the town was like scrolling through a Sanskrit story. At the far edge of town was a Chorten built on top of the stone sides of the path, so you had to duck and walk underneath it to continue. Underneath the Chorten, the townspeople had painted beautiful images inside a hollow area of the Chorten. So maybe that was a Ghompa because it had something on the inside?

From Ghyaru, we walked along the upper skirt of the mountain and around a giant bend towards Ngawal. This bend doubled back gloriously revealing everything we had hiked that day from above. Way off in the distance, we could see the brown fields of the Bhratang apple orchard and the road leading from it along the river bed to Lower Pisang. Above Lower Pisang, we could see the blue tin roofs of Upper Pisang and the suspension footbridge that led to the ascent up to Ghyaru. Behind all of it was the Annapurnas. I was fatigued, and I could barely take in what might have been the most heart-wrenchingly beautiful view of the whole trip.

At the edge of the bend, right before all of that disappeared behind the mountain we were walking on, was a stacked-cube structure. Similar to a Chorten, but instead of having a rounded top like a bishop, it had a square top, like a three-tier square cake. These were Stupas. So now you have Chortens (round-top), Ghompas (have something inside), and Stupas (square-top). Except these are ways to differentiate them that I made up, and sometimes I would walk up to a Stupa or a Chorten and try to guess what it was, and then ask a local, and often I would be wrong.

We took a short break at this Stupa, and the clouds began to roll in. I became panicky looking at the clouds. There were moments of slight rain, which I thought might turn into downpours, and a tremendous wind that kept us deeply cold. I imagined scenarios where a squall would pin us to the road, and we would have to downclimb the mountain into the brush below and bivouac. To ease my panic, we started walking again, and to further ease my panic, a cow and her two calves decided to walk with us. They spent most of the time behind us, but it seemed they were trying to pass us. We came to an archway with prayer wheels tucked into the pillars that framed the first view of Ngawal. At this archway, we waited for the cows to pass us, but as soon as they passed us, they stopped and stared at us. So we passed them again, and when it seemed like they were getting impatient, we let them pass us again. This pattern continued until we entered Ngawal, where they finally parted ways with us at the first lodge.

The lodge owners of Ngawal each tried to get us to stay at their place, but I wanted to stay in the center of Ngawal at the base of thousands of steps that led to several Ghompas overlooking the town. This was one of the more annoying parts of hiking in Nepal. Constantly telling lodge owners that I didn’t want to stay the night at their place, no I didn’t want lunch because it was 10 AM. No, I didn’t want another tea. I always wanted to reply to everyone because I thought it was too rude to pretend they weren’t asking me questions, but they never took no for an answer. I learned to dread passing by lodges because they were always filled with some Nepali person waiting for me to make eye contact so they could begin asking me to buy things.

At the center of Ngawal, we had a lot of difficulty picking a lodge. There were four or five identical lodges, each several stories tall and made of wood, leaning precariously. We picked one and ate a terrible dinner.

Having terrible dinner next to us was a German family of two parents and their adult son. They had been hiking the other way around and had made it through Thorong La Pass the previous day. This was a good sign, but they were geared with mountaineering gear, technical boots and equipment, and big maps of the area. In retrospect, they were morons with expensive gear and an excellent Nepalese guide.

Our lodge was four stories tall and made of limber wood. It had a noticeable lean to it so that our room on the third floor hung out in the air and the window of our room was slanted towards the ground below. The thin mattresses lay on top of a sheet of plywood held up by four posts, rather than the typical American slat-style bed. My parents refuse to buy bed frames, and instead, they build beds in this way, with a sheet of plywood supported at the corners. This was typical construction, but it was in this all-wood leaning lodge that I got the impression that all of Nepal had been constructed by my dad and mom. They are good carpenters but not perfectionists.

We had some internet at Ngawal and I emailed our families to say we were okay. We were at high altitude now, so I took my first altitude pill of Acetazolamide. Linnea did not take Acetazolamide, as she didn’t want to be constantly peeing, which is one of the main side effects of the drug. In the leaning lodge, I took a hot shower provided by a gas generator that you turned on. When Linnea went to try to take a shower, she was so freaked by the smell of gas and the sound of the flame in a closed room that she barely even got wet. While waiting for dinner I checked the news online and read that the government of Nepal was going to ban hiking without a Nepalese guide at the start of April. That would be right after we finished the trail, which would make us some of the last people to trek the Annapurna circuit without a guide.

That’s a shame.

The next day was a short day and a downhill day. We woke up as early as the sun and watched it light up the lining of the Annapurna mountains. We went out for a brief walk up to the Ghompas above the village, and at the top, I pointed out to Linnea all the mountains whose names I knew. I pointed out Annapurna 17, Annapurna 34, and Annapurnas 12, 96, and 22. Linnea was impressed. We were at about 3000 meters above sea level or about 12500 feet.

Hiking down and away from Ngawal, we passed by a Stupa, a Chorten, and a Ghompa. But I’m not sure which was which. We must have passed all three because each one was different. I guess because I didn’t verify that any of them had things inside, it might have been a Stupa, a Chorten, and a Stupa, or a Chorten, a Chorten, and a Stupa. The sky was clear on this day, and the views of the Annapurnas were crisp. It was fun to lose sight of certain Annapurna peaks over time and have new mountain features come into view. A face in one of the Annapurnas (Annapurna 2) watched over us until this day. Then the mountain face disappeared behind Ngawal.

After descending a few hundred feet back below the tree line, I had my only poop-in-the-woods of the entire trip. I’ve pooped in the woods four times now in my life, all of which have occurred after marrying Linnea because this is the sort of environment that Linnea brings me into. The environment where pooping is a weird balancing quads exercise, and all used toilet paper needs to be carried around for an entire month in the disgusting transparent ziplock used-poop-paper bag.

At the end of the descent, we came upon the abandoned town of Humde. Here, we once again had the option of a more challenging and higher path or a more straightforward path back to the main jeep road. We were having some difficulty that morning with trail-finding, so we opted to take the easier path back to the main jeep road. We had to do a little bit of bushwacking back to the road through these berry bushes called seabuckthorn.

The DeutscheKindle was excited about the upcoming town of Braka. He spoke of a bakery: “The Braka bakery has a wood-fired oven and makes delicious cinnamon rolls.” So, in the next village of Braka, we went to the bakery, talked with the deceivingly pleasant owner, and had the stalest cinnamon rolls I’d ever eaten. It was like if you left a scone out for two days, then microwaved it for two minutes, and then threw that in the trash and served crushed-up rocks instead.

While having lunch and losing teeth, we discussed whether or not we should go directly to Manang or attempt a side trip that day. We were now an hour away from the major village of Manang. Manang is the traditional staging and acclimatization area used before attempting to gain more altitude for Thorong La Pass. Think Annapurna Base Camp or Everest Base Camp, but for the Annapurna Circuit rather than those respective summits.

The two traditional day hikes offered is the Ice Lake hike, an 8-hour hike to see a small ice lake. And the Tilicho Lake hike: a three-day hike up to see a much larger ice lake that is considered a real feat in and of itself. We had a lot of options, and one of our ideas was to go from Braka towards the Ice Lake and try to knock it out in a day. We decided that the previous day had been such a nightmare for me that we would continue to Manang and have an easy day. I didn’t realize it then, but Linnea was not considering anything other than an easy day and was just amusing me. In truth, she thought I was too fatigued, and she was hoping that an easy day would help me recover.

We left the village of Braka and walked for about thirty minutes before approaching another village. This one was also called Braka, and it had a nicer bakery with baked goods displayed in glass window panes! We had been tricked! Apparently, this bakery had gotten such a reputation that Nepalese people had built an entire second decoy village whose economy was run by tricking people into buying crushed-rock-rolls thirty minutes before they saw the real bakery. Absolute shenanigan masters these people. I should have been able to guess because, at many villages, there were little Hebrew notes scrawled around the village for Israelis to tell other Israelis where to stay and what places were kosher or at least jew-tolerant. In the fake Braka, there had been a conspicuous absence of Hebrew notes. At the real bakery, there was a sign in Hebrew behind the glass, endorsing and advertising the place.

Then, at around 2 PM, we strolled into Manang. We had heard from locals that Manang was under several feet of snow, but there wasn’t any snow. Instead, there was a blazing sun and one tiny cloud in the bright sky. We again had trouble picking a lodge, but this time we picked well. The place had a terrific hot shower, but it was not so clean that I would dare remove my shower slippers and let my bare feet touch the tiling. It had actual food, not good, but not Dal Bhat, and we ordered Seabuckthorn juice. After ordering a few times on this trip, I am convinced that Seabuckthorn juice was a juice box melee. Usually orange juice and papaya juice and whatever else they could find. If it was gross, that was no problem; that was the mystique of the Annapurna Seabuckthorn juice. But the first time I had it, I didn’t realize it was just more Nepalese shenanigans, and I felt it perked me up.

I took a nap, and when I woke up, Manang was covered in white people. Every room in our lodge had been booked, and when we had dinner, we had to share a table with a Spanish man and an Italian woman. At this table, talking with these two and discussing weather predictions with other white people, we came up with our plan of attack to get over the Thorong La pass for the next few days. Making these plans was tricky because no weather stations were nearby. The weather programs averaged over Himalayan peaks and valleys, so the peaks were reported as warmer than they were, and the valleys as colder, and all the weather was always wrong by tens to twenties of degrees. Based on the Windy app, I came up with a prediction: it would lightly snow the following evening, and two days later, it would start coming down hard for a long time. I thought it was a total guess.

We went to bed, and I dreamt of a Chorten, a Stupa, and a Ghompa, but I didn’t know which was which.

Getting In: Kathmandu (Capital) -> Besi Sahar (Last City) -> Dharapani (1900m)
Ascent: Odar (2131m) -> Bagarchap (2160m) -> Danaqyu (2200m) -> Timang (2580m) -> Koto (2640m) -> Chame (2710m) -> Bhratang (2850m) -> Upper Pisang (3310m) -> Ghyaru (3730m) -> Ngawal (3680m) -> Humde (3330m) -> Bhraga 3450 m -> Manang 3540 m Snowfalling: Yak Kharka 4050 m -> Letdar 4200 m -> Thorung Phedi 4450 m -> High Camp 4850 m -> Thorung Pass 5416 m -> Charabu 4230 m -> Muktinanth 3800 m

Part 3: Snowfalling

You are supposed to spend one to three days in Manang to get used to the altitude before continuing along. Not doing that is reckless. One rule of thumb we use is that you can go 500 m higher each day if you feel no altitude sickness symptoms. If we had taken the Lower Pisang path, the highest we would have slept at would have been a single day in Manang at 3500 meters. But we had taken the Upper Pisang path and slept the previous day in Ngawal at 3700 meters. We were on our second day at this altitude already, and we were actually 200 meters lower in Manang than we had been previously. With that altitude math in mind, we felt no qualms about moving further up in altitude towards Thorung La Pass. With the threat of snowfall on our minds, we planned to hike to the village of Letdar the next morning and forego an extra day in Manang.

We left at daybreak, passed an ornate Stupa on the way out of town, navigated our way around a stubborn horse blocking a narrow road, and finally moved into a territory of the Annapurnas where there was no jeepable road. The term “jeepable road” or “jeepable gravel road” is an official Nepali term, by the way, and I loved the noun-to-verb to-adjective linguistic journey that is the word jeepable.

On this road, looming up into the sky was a crystal clear Annapurna mountain range. It made me sad, to be honest. I couldn’t imagine ever going back to Nepal, and even then I felt I couldn’t properly absorb as much of the mountains as I needed to. I have a memory of standing next to a simple white Chorten, with prayer flags of blue, white, red, green, and yellow strung up and down on two poles behind me, and behind that is the Annapurna Himal, and that memory makes me unbelievably sad—homesickness in reverse.

We traversed an awesome suspended footbridge, and while Linnea was eating some ChocoPies at the far end, the German bikepacker came along, rode over the footbridge (terrifying!) said hello to us, and continued on. Then, shortly behind him, at the end of Linnea’s ChocoPie time, we saw several Nepalese people on horses ride across the bridge with big bags of goods, presumably to keep the lodges ahead of us in stock with Dal Bhat and absolutely nothing else.

We walked behind a string of Nepalese horsemen until the village of Yak Kharka, where we started to see our first Yaks. Yak Kharka more or less means Yak Place, and it was indeed a place with Yaks. In addition to the village’s namesakes, we saw a herd of animals called Blue Sheep. Blue Sheep are dust-colored and are a type of goat-antelope called a caprine. They are not sheep.

The sheep might have been miles away, too far to take a picture with a phone camera. Yet I was so used to staring off towards the distant mountains that my eyes were happy to focus on the blue sheep at those distances. Much like other animals we saw, these (not) blue (not) sheep seemed to have slim pickings to graze on. The history of Manang is one of farmers barely able to survive off the food they grow, and now we were traveling above Manang into territory where almost nothing grew.

In Yak Kharka, we had a long lunch. As we sat there, we watched dozens of white people pass us on the trail or stop in lodges at Yak Kharka. At a distant lodge down the hill, I spotted the German bikepacker, and at a different lodge, I spotted the Italian-Spanish couple. Typically, our long lunches were because it took the people at the lodge two or four hours to figure out how to cook a cheese roll or something equally inane, but this time, Linnea was having a problem with the filter on her water bladder and hadn’t been able to get water all morning. She went outside in the cold and the wind and spent thirty minutes or so cursing, and she tried to reverse flush the filter and narrow down where it was getting clogged. Upon inspecting my own water bladder, I eventually found that the bladder had a locking mechanism, and when Linnea came back from the cold I showed her that her lock had rotated into place.

But not even the awful water bladders could ruin the beautiful sky and mountains. We hiked on and up with fitter and younger white people passing us with their Nepalese guides occasionally. By early afternoon, we were at the village of Letdar. 4200 meters, up from Manang at 3540, or up from Ngawal at 3680. About as high as we dared go that day. In retrospect, I bet we could have gone on to the next village and been fine, but you don’t take those kinds of chances, especially when the nearest hospital is so far away.

I use the term “villages” loosely. Letdar appeared to be three or four lodges and a small area where two dozen Yak lived. One of the lodges, painted in bright Nepali Pink, appeared to be inhabited, and that is where we stayed. The lodge was half stone, half wood, but the stones didn’t exactly fit together, so the wind and cold pierced the lodge. While we were shivering in the sunroom of the lodge, we saw the French couple from the initial jeep ride walk up the hill with their friendly Nepali guide in his blue jacket. We waved enthusiastically to them. The French couple held themselves limply with their mouths hung open as if recovering from a bout of vomiting, and the Frenchmen complained of a grinding headache. If I had those symptoms, I would have turned back, but the blue jacket Nepalese guide seemed to think they still had some rope left to use.

At dinner time, it started snowing—a lot. The lodge had filled up with maybe 30 or 40 Westerners and 10 Nepalese guides. We were the only people there without a guide, and staring out the window at the snow, we wrung our hands. The feeling in the lodge was tense and pensive. Nobody went into their room to sleep; we all sat in the common room, pondered over the views out the windows, and tried to eat the inedible food. I asked the blue jacket guide what we should do, and he replied in a characteristic Nepalese manner that we should wait and see and not jump to conclusions or make any decisions early.

Tensions were high. I got into a little tiff with Linnea about her not ordering food for me, and we were all irrational and snappy. Then, we met another American—a professional poker player who resembled a cousin of mine. We talked with him and his inexperienced guide for several hours and played a version of gin rummy with him. We weren’t playing for money, but he won every hand.

The inexperienced guides were pervasive. Blue Jacket knew what he was doing, but several other guides did not. If I asked them how often they had done the Annapurna Circuit, they would all dodge the question but give the impression that they had done it and many other hikes in the Annapurna many times. But their decisions and the help they gave to their wards were often more harm than help. Many people in the room were suffering from altitude sickness, and it seemed our French friends were doing well in comparison. Our poker-playing friend, who had a headache that he compared to his worst migraine, seemed both aware that he was stuck with a dud and unnervingly ready to voice that opinion to us right in front of his guide. We saw many of these people again the next day at the next lodge, but we never saw the poker player again.

Late at night, the latest we had ever stayed up, we trudged to our beds through a few inches of snow, with more snow still coming down hard. We slept with the thought that we would wait and see and not jump to any conclusions or make any decisions early. I dreamt of Stupas, Chortens, and Gompas wearing blue jackets covered in snow.

The next day, we woke up before sunup to find a few inches of snow, not even enough to warrant attaching gators above our boots. With enormous smiles and our trekking poles out, we trudged past the two dozen sleeping yaks and out onto the fresh trail. There were no footsteps ahead of us, and the red-and-white markers were all covered under the snow, but we could make out the contours of the path for miles ahead of us, and it was a beautiful experience to pierce the trail for others with our footprints.

After an hour or two, we came to the last suspension footbridge of the ascent, which was now covered with snow and ice, and carefully made our way along it, trying not to slip. I couldn’t get a good grip on my gloves, but Linnea had stickier gloves which we split and walked along the bridge with one gloved hand each. On the other side of a valley, we could see way back to Letdar and spot the trundling dots of the next earliest hikers several miles away.

We saw a couple of horses on the side of the mountain eating the little shrubbery they could find. We saw some big cousins of Ravens and a few more blue sheep. The animal sightings stopped when the snow-covered trail pierced into an upper biome of the hike. Soon, we came up to the arches of Thorung Phedi at 4450 m. Most people attempt Thorung La Pass by starting the day at Thorung Phedi. It is not a village but instead a single enormous lodge. We could have stopped there, but it was still early in the day, and we weren’t feeling any of the effects of altitude sickness. We applied some more sunscreen, and hot from all the climbing, we changed out of our long underwear despite the freezing temperatures and proceeded to walk towards the highest lodge you could stay at if attempting Thorung La Pass: High Camp.

High Camp was more or less visible from Thorung Phedi. While we couldn’t see the lodge, we could see where the path evened out, and it wasn’t a false peak. But the 400-meter climb took place in about half a mile at an altitude now higher than any mountain in Colorado. My heart rate rose to about 150 beats per minute and stayed there for the entire hour-long climb. My water bladder was frozen, and while it was melting in the sunlight, I had to suck hard to get drops of water. Every time I did this, taking one second to drink water instead of breathing, I had to stop and gasp as if coming up for air after swimming an entire lap without breathing at the pool. I would continue breathing this way every time I exerted myself for more than 24 hours.

I wasn’t exactly fatigued, I felt happy and physically in control. It was difficult though. I couldn’t take big steps because I would run out of oxygen, so I had to make sure to take tiny steps. The poles felt sort of awkward when I took the tiny steps, so I began a mantra in my mind as I ascended to High Camp that went “tiny steps, big poles, tiny steps, big poles, tiny steps, big poles.”

When I drank water, I had to stop to catch my breath. During these moments, I would face away from the mountain and look out on the view. Below us was the Thorung Phedi camp, and beyond the camp the mountains rose so that Thorung Phedi and the path we had taken drew out the shapes of an intricate winding valley. We stood on one steep bank of the valley, and across from us on the other steep bank of the valley was a series of black cliff faces speckled with snow that gave the impression of a giant onyx cube. It was vertigo-inducing, a spot where the world folds in on itself.

After an exhausting but happy hour, we clambered up to a small bend that had hidden High Camp from view. Once High Camp was in view, it was only 200 meters away, but I lost all will to walk towards it. I kept stopping and catching my breath, and I wasn’t all that happy. Something about having the goal in sight made the last bit of the climb absolutely awful. When we got a little closer, we could see a Nepalese man who was running the camp. We waved to him, and he waved back, followed by a full thirty minutes of awkwardness until we made it up to him to say Namaste and ask for a room.

We were the first people of the day to make it to High Camp, which rewarded us with the privilege of picking our room for the night. We chose carefully, looking for a room that was on the higher side of the camp, close but not too close to the kitchen and sunrooms and close, but not too close, to the outhouse. While situated perfectly, the room itself was a little dungeon. The mattresses were as thin as a rug but somehow still had enough volume to noticeably lose half of their volume in the middle. We went into the kitchen and ordered some chocolate pudding to eat while we waited. After about an hour, other Westerners started to clamber up to High Camp.

Each of them seemed to lose heart at the end as well, and everyone seemed miserable at that last ascent. We saw the bicycling German dragging his bike up the mountain, a peculiar schadenfreude experience that lasted for over an hour and a half. We saw the Spanish and Italian couple come up but then turn around when they saw the lodging and head back to stay at Thorung Phedi. We saw most of the cast from the previous day at Letdar and nobody else because to reasonably be in the altitude zone of High Camp it was necessary to have spent the previous day at Letdar. But we didn’t ever see the poker player come up, and a few other people were missing. Right before we ordered dinner, we saw the French couple and their Nepali guide with the blue jacket come up the hill. Lastly, one Chinese man and his guide came up the hill. The Chinese man had a series of solar panels hanging from his backpack to try to charge his electronics as he hiked.

We talked a bit with the Chinese man and the German bike man. The German had done his PhD in a field similar to ours, and it felt odd that we never exchanged information with him to meet him again. The Chinese man was a programmer who had quit his job in China and would move to America for a master’s program in a couple of months. I asked him if the solar panels worked well, and he said they didn’t and that he got about half an hour of charge for his phone per day of hiking. We met a large older Australian man who had attempted this hike in the 90s with his wife, but they had turned back when she became altitude sick. Now, he was back alone with a small porter who carried his enormous bag.

We’d been sitting at High Camp for about four hours, and with no internet and nothing to do we went into the sunroom and practiced a little bit of Tai Chi we had been learning from my cousin. Then once the lodge had filled up, we left the lodge and trudged through some foot-deep snow along a little ridge and up a peak next to the lodge. The views from the top of the peak were incredible, but up there, we found we were sitting with four Americans from Tennessee. These Americans were pastors-in-training and ruined the view by aggressively berating and proselytizing their Nepalese guide. We took in the sights for as long as the beauty overwhelmed the discomfort of being around such people and then trudged back down. I took a fall on the way down, but it was powdery snow beneath me, so it was ok.

We sat at the French table for dinner, which was unpleasant because we couldn’t understand the conversation. However, it did mean I got to talk to the blue-jacketed Nepalese guide. I asked Blue Jacket for his card if we ever returned since guides would be mandatory after this trip. I asked what time he was planning to get his French wards on the trail the next day, expecting 6 or 7 AM, but instead, he said 5 AM! I balked a bit. Why was it so early? But he said at this time of year, an awful wind starts to whistle through Thorung La pass at around 11 AM and that it would be best if we were all headed downhill at that point. The French man looked ill, and I asked the Nepali guide why he didn’t turn around. He said he expected that there would be a massive snowstorm the next day in the evening and that at this point it would be faster to descend by pushing forward than by turning back.

Before we went to bed, I purchased two rubber containers of hot water to put in our sleeping bags for the night. I went up to use the bathroom several times that night, which I thought would be unpleasant, but it was the one time while we were in Nepal that I gazed up at a clear sky of stars. I didn’t have my glasses on during these trips, so the sky was a bunch of blurry dots, but still, it was beautiful. I often chastise people for not looking up more when they visit the southern hemisphere, which has beautiful views of the center of our galaxy. Nepal is in the northern hemisphere, but I still feel that my nighttime downward eyes condemn me as a hypocrite.

At 5 AM, we got up, put our headlamps on, and returned to the water bladder. I saw the blue-coat Nepali guide and got a card from him. Then, we filled our water bladders with some freezing cold ice from a giant barrel at the side of the camp. Water at lower pressure freezes earlier than water at higher pressure, and yet this was the coldest water I’ve ever drunk. Maybe it was super-cooled because it started to freeze the moment it was in our water bladders. I returned to our room to pack the rest of my stuff into the backpack, but when I was done packing, I realized the carpet-thin bed was frozen with water. My bladder had opened up and leaked all over all of my stuff!

I cursed as I unpacked as quickly as possible, now covered in icy slush. I tried my best to dry the backpack off, then I had to get more super-cooled water and repack. I swore that, come the end of this trip, I would never use a water bladder again. I’ve always enjoyed drinking from the little tube of a water bladder and the convenience of it, especially on runs. But I was betrayed too many times by the water bladders on this trip.

In an absolutely terrible mood, we started climbing out of High Camp in the darkness with our headlamps. Because everyone had left at roughly the same time, we more or less had to hike in a line. The trail was narrow, so I neither wanted to pass people nor did I want them to pass me, so I had to make sure to hike at the average pace. Sometimes the pace was so fast I felt I was going to pass out from breathing so hard, and sometimes it was so ponderous that I felt I was going to freeze to death.

A particularly ponderous moment was at the first bridge crossing. This was not a rope bridge but a solid truss with slick icy metal beams to slip and fall on. By the time we had crossed the bridge we were at our coldest moment of the hike. I was warmed by a deep anger of the hiking line and I didn’t have any altitude sickness thanks to the Acetazolamide pills. Linnea had not been taking the pills, and she is 50 pounds lighter than I am. Shortly after sunup, she was freezing. Not cold, but actually freezing, and when she realized it, she had a panic attack.

Linnea kept saying that she couldn’t breathe, but her gator was underneath her chin and not around her face. I convinced Linnea to put her gator over her mouth and breathe through it for about a minute. I couldn’t take a breath without my gator over my mouth; my throat would close up, but breathing through the ice-covered gator was such a humid experience that it was half-breathing and half-drinking. She breathed through it for about a minute before she refused to do so again and started ignoring everything I said. That minute was enough though; she got herself under control, and we started moving again traveling up and up the never-ending white slopes.

I expected the final push into Thorung La pass to push me to my limits. I expected my chest to burn for air and my legs to be giving way before I saw the prayer flags that marked the crest of the valley. But before Linnea could have much more trouble with the cold, and before I felt any exhaustion, I started to spot some flags on a pole behind a rock outcropping. And then, as we moved around the rock outcropping, the highest valley pass in the world came out into view. We were at the height of Thorung La! In the middle of the pass was a pile of tricks strewn with Tibetan prayer flags, and to the side of it sat a little tea shop with a bunch of people celebrating and drinking tea. I put down my pack for a second near the tea shop to take a selfie with Linnea, and I got an awful blast of natural gas from the boiler in the shop.

I gave Linnea my heaviest jacket and the sun was up by this point, so her cold problems were over. We had reached the 5.5 km (18,000 feet) highest point of the hike, but now we had to walk down to the city of Muktinath, 1.6 km (5200 feet) down. We did not have crampons or yak traks to handle the downhill, so it took us a long time to make this descent. We had not brought yak traks because we had promised ourselves that if the weather was bad enough to need them at Thorung La, we wouldn’t attempt the pass, but in our excitement at beating out the snowstorm, we went ahead with it.

I took two bad falls on the way down. The first of the two was the worst; it was so sudden; one second, I was standing, and the next second, I was hitting the ground. My right leg had nerve pain from my hip to my knee for the rest of the hike. The important thing at the time was that I could still walk. With pain shooting into my hip, I trudged down the mountain, poking at any potential ice spots with my poles. I still slipped plenty of times and fell one more time.

The German biker passed us, speeding down the mountain in what must have been the most rewarding downhill mountain biking experience. Then, the Italian-Spanish couple had crampons, so they passed by us while Linnea was having a ChocoPie snack. The snow gave way to gravel; at one point, we even found ourselves on a gravel road. We had taken a wrong path going down the mountain and had to bushwack a bit from the gravel road back to the main down-road path because the gravel road was made out of gravel the size of baby heads, and we absolutely could not walk on it.

Heading down, we now had the Annapurna Himal behind us and the Dhaulagiri Himal ahead of us. A thin layer of clouds beneath us hid the valley between. This valley region between the Dhaulagiri Himal and the Annapurna Himal is called Mustang, and sure enough, as soon as we made our way under the cover of the clouds, we started to see wild Mustang horses in the valley. We came to several small lodge areas on the way down that I believe are staging areas for people heading over the pass in the other direction. Then, we came to a big fork in the road to head either to Muktinath or further into the Mustang Valley. The deeper regions of Mustang are off-limits to non-Nepalese unless you have extra special permits and guides, so we turned off to the village of Muktinath.

Continuing towards Muktinath, we crossed a long suspension footbridge across a deep chasm. On the other side of the footbridge, in the middle of nowhere, there were a thousand sheep and two hundred people in red and black cycling uniforms with red helmets and iPads. They were mostly women but a handful of men were in the crowd. On the backs of their cycling uniforms, they had vague positive words like “Love Heart.”

When we came within view of Muktinath it was glorious. Both the internet and the DeutscheKindle say that Muktinanth is the temple’s name, and Ranipauwa is the village built leading up to Muktinanth. However, all the signs there said Muktinath, including two big signs at the start and end of the village, with maps of the village that said MUKTINATH in giant letters at the top of them.

The temple is enormous; it is so huge that, at first, we couldn’t figure out how to get into the village because the walls of the temple were blocking our way. A Russian hiker barreled past us, but in the end, she turned out to be heading in the wrong direction and must have overshot the whole village before she figured out her mistake. “Village” is a bit of a misnomer because the village is also enormous and many multi-story concrete buildings were going up. It was a single long block of a growing city.

We got into the city and found a place to stay that had a Sanskrit name and was catering to Indian tourists. Muktinath was bustling with Indian Hindy and Buddhist tourists who came there on a pilgrimage to the temple. The commerce brought by this religious pilgrimage also brought hot water, electricity, and infrastructure unlike anything else we had encountered in days. It did not however bring good food. We ate a late lunch of barely cooked momo and seabuckthorn juice at our hotel and watched the long-dreaded snow begin to flood down from the sky.

From then on, it snowed every day until we reached a low enough altitude that the snow turned into rain. If we had been delayed by even a single day at any point, we would not have made it through Thorung La.

If I had not freaked out about the air quality in Kathmandu and insisted that we leave the same day that we arrived, we would not have made it. If we had stayed in Kathmandu for permits, we would not have made it. If we had doubled back from Besi Sahar to get permits, we would not have made it. But perhaps most subtly, when we had chosen to go to Upper Pisang instead of Lower Pisang, it forced us to spend a day at a high altitude, 3700 m. When we came to Manang, it was our second day, not our first day, at that altitude, and let us continue up the pass. If we had taken the lower pass and been forced to take a day to acclimatize, we would not have made it through the pass.

How does the Robert Frost poem go?

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

Or, in a more traditional Nepali manner, they say “La so so,” thanking the world for permission to cross the pass.

We talked about this in the coming days; what a miracle of rushing, bad decisions, and random decisions that had allowed us over the pass and onto the other side of the Annapurna Himal. Before nightfall, we were in such good spirits that we trudged out into the falling snow and explored the temple of Muktinath. Climbing up the steps to the temple, we saw someone being carried down into town on a stretcher. At first, I thought it was a Westerner who had still been on the pass when the snow started. But then, about ten minutes later, we saw another person on a stretcher and another. This third person was an elderly woman sitting up and talking to the people carrying her down. At the top of the temple, we found a whole team of stretcher-people with sports jerseys on and numbers, being organized to help Indian tourists who were fainting at the temple.

Part of the fainting might be the immense religious experience of coming to this point of pilgrimage. But the fainting is also because these Indians are coming from sea level, and Muktinath is at 3800 meters, or two miles, straight up into the sky. Pilgrims come via all sorts of methods. Some walk, some take motorcycle tours, some take jeeps from the cities of Kathmandu and Pokhara, but many take planes from a sketchy little airport nearby and jeep there within a day, and those people don’t get any days of acclimatization. So I doubt all the stretchers had anything to do with the dangers of our little adventure and instead were a result of the much larger pilgrimage site we had stumbled into.

We walked around a giant statue of a person praying, held up by carved monkeys. Then, we walked around a courtyard with one hundred fountains and a natural gas flame in the center. Finally, we walked into one of the side temples where a young boy was canting his prayers while davening back and forth. It was the first holy site that we walked around in. We felt uncomfortable doing it, but the boy did not seem to mind and even stopped his prayer for one microsecond to indicate that we should walk around the temple clockwise, not counterclockwise. We left $10 inside a little box and returned to our lodging for dinner and a night of sleep.

That should be the end of the story, right? For almost everyone else, it was. But we had budgeted 14 days of hiking to give us the best possible shot at getting through the pass. We weren’t even halfway through that time yet. This had always been the best-case scenario plan, with our extra time we were going to hike the far side of the Annapurna Circuit which people rarely trek. We still had to walk all the way down from four kilometers above sea level to one kilometer above sea level, then back up to 3 kilometers, and finally down to one kilometer again before our hike would finally end. The most challenging and most technical part of the climb was done, but the next day was arguably the most awe-inspiring and important day of the hike.

Getting In: Kathmandu (Capital) -> Besi Sahar (Last City) -> Dharapani (1900m)
Ascent: Odar (2131m) -> Bagarchap (2160m) -> Danaqyu (2200m) -> Timang (2580m) -> Koto (2640m) -> Chame (2710m) -> Bhratang (2850m) -> Upper Pisang (3310m) -> Ghyaru (3730m) -> Ngawal (3680m) -> Humde (3330m) -> Bhraga 3450 m -> Manang 3540 m Snowfalling: Yak Kharka 4050 m -> Letdar 4200 m -> Thorung Phedi 4450 m -> High Camp 4850 m -> Thorung La 5416 m -> Charabu 4230 m -> Muktinath 3800 m Wind: Jharkot 3550 m -> Jomsom 2720 m -> Marpha 2670 m -> Tukuche 2590 m -> Kobang 2640 m -> Larjung 2550 m

Part 4: Wind

It snowed every day after we made it through Thorung La except on the first day down between the Annapurna Himal and the Dhaulagiri Himal. That first day it was crystal clear. If we thought being surrounded by the Annapurna Himal was an overwhelming landscape, being between two Himals was fantastical.

We woke before the lodge owners did not, and the door out of the lodge was locked. We walked around calling out for anyone, and I went behind the front desk, took the keys, unlocked the front door, and placed the money we owed them and the keys back underneath the desk. I expected the lodge owners to jump out and say, “Hey you! You left and didn’t pay us enough!” but it never happened. We paced back and forth along the length of Muktinath, trying to find the path to the village of Lubra. The Lubra detour was intended to keep us off the main road, and away from the tremendous winds that pick up in the valley between the Himals.

Theoretically, there are multiple routes by which one can leave Muktinath, and we wanted to pick the route to Lubra, but could not find it. Instead, we took the main road to a nearby village called Jharkot, from which we thought there was another trail to Lubra. Jharkot was to the south and at lower altitude, so whether or not this other path to Lubra existed, it was in the correct direction. Before we left Muktinath, we finally managed to purchase a map of the Annapurna Region, and while the map was from 2019, it said that a path from Jharkot to Lubra existed.

At one end of Muktinath, we saw the stretcher team with their bright yellow numbered jerseys, set up to receive the busses of incoming Indian tourists for the day. From there, we continued down a hill along a main road. We walked along paths going on and off this road, following signs to Jharkot. Along the way, I saw a tiny golden shiva encased by rocks on the side of a mountain. Songbirds along small cliffs made the most peculiar songs. On the ground, there was a pheasant-like bird that would run in packs, alarming each other through comical chatter.

Jharkot was a lovely little village. The DeutscheKindle recommended a Dutch Bakery in the village, but this bakery was closed. The village’s layout was not the standard Nepali straight line, but a multi-layered labyrinth. Various signs pointed us to Gompas and Stupas; each sign said “Donated by The Dutch Bakery” in little letters underneath the sign. Jharkot was once a stopping point for pilgrims and trekkers before the roads were built. Now that the roads allow instant access to Muktinath from the Dhaulagiri side, the only thing left for the town is this Dutch Bakery that sometimes attracts a hungry tourist who reads about it in this DeutscheKindle’s ramblings.

From Jharkot, we once again tried to find the path to Lubra. We saw many signs in the town pointing to Lubra, and we asked locals who pointed in a direction, but we could not make out an actual trail anywhere. The path from Muktinath to Jharkot was already a blue-and-white trail, making this trial an unmarked sub-detour.

Two townspeople walked us to the edge of town and pointed us out of the town on a muddy area that dreamt of being a path. What’s a word similar to “path” but describes an elongated strip of mud that doesn’t lead anywhere? Let’s call it a Garbo; that’s what we were on, a garbo.

We took the garbo until it led to a chasm in the ground. We walked around the chasm until we found ourselves in the middle of a field. We heard a whistle, the kind some people can make by putting their fingers into their mouths, and spotted a farmer waving for us to get off his property. Instead, we walked towards him, and before we said anything, he said, “Lubra?” We said yes, and he pointed us towards another garbo and gestured towards the entire mass of the Annapurna Himal, and said, “Lubra!”

With those amorphous directions, we followed that garbo and stumbled into an abandoned village. From the abandoned village, we walked towards the nearest foothills of the Annapurna, where we reencountered these weird birds. Then, even the garbo disappeared; we were walking through abandoned farmland toward the side of a mountain. These silly ground birds would burst from the bushes, running and jumping away, alarmed that a human should come out to this region of Mustang. The birds sounded like you mixed a turkey’s gobble with a cow’s moo.

Our gaze lifted off the ground and up to the horizon, and it was awe-inspiring. The view of the mountains opened up in a way you would never see if you were on a path. We were surrounded by flat farmland, and in the clear air, the Himals shined. I tried taking photos for maybe thirty minutes to capture it, but I never came close to succeeding. It was like trying to take a picture of the moon.

At around 10 AM, we gave up on Lubra, and instead began to bushwack our way back to the main road leaving Muktinath, which we knew headed south. We found ourselves on a mountain ridge above the road and walked that ridge for a pleasant hour before we had to come down and walk in the road. The large buses filled with Indian tourists screaming up towards Muktinath were not terrific, but at least we saw some red-and-white markers on the road that meant we were headed the right way.

Along the windy road to Muktinath, we had the most important talk. I wanted kids when we met in Boston, but Linnea didn’t. When we moved to Santa Barbara, Linnea wanted kids, and I didn’t. Linnea felt that we would inevitably have kids because even if we didn’t want them 75% of the time, all it would take was one prolonged period for us both to be in that 25% state, and we would be stuck with kids. In early 2022, Linnea stated that the solution to this problem would be to consider having kids at discrete times.

Thus, a rule: no talking about having kids until we were in Nepal. Then, the Nepal trip got pushed back, and it got pushed back again. Finally, more than a year after this rule had been established, we were in Nepal. But we had gotten so used to not discussing having kids that it felt impossible to bring up. So, while walking down from Muktinath, we came to a giant Stupa, and I said. “Do you think this is a Stupa or a Chorten?” “It’s round, so it’s a Chorten, but it’s got a lot of decorations, so it’s a Stupa.” We came up to it, and it had a door leading to an inside, which should make it a Ghompa, but it had the words CHORTEN emblazoned in an archway in front of it. So I threw my hands up in frustration and told Linnea we needed to discuss having kids.

We started by talking about fears. What could go wrong if we had a kid? In the end, the list seemed to encompass everything. Our health, our wealth, our love for each other, our highly unforgiving scientific careers, our hobbies, there wasn’t much we could think of that having a child couldn’t potentially ruin. This was poignant for Linnea, who risks her health significantly more and has no major baby-friendly hobbies. Having a disabled baby, or a child who brought illness to Linnea, could wreck everything, but even worse was having a healthy child who might cost one of us our careers and might drive a wedge between the two of us. Then, of course, it was guaranteed that it would cost us all of our wealth and at least a significant portion of our hobbies, mainly Linnea’s more intense physical hobbies.

I honestly hadn’t expected the list of what we could lose by having a kid to be so long, but after an hour of listing scenarios in which bad things happened, it seemed nothing I had or was could be untouched. The conversation was interrupted when the grizzly Australian man came behind us with his small porter carrying enormous bags. The Australian man said he was headed for Kagbeni before doubling back to Jomsom, where he would end his circuit.

We hadn’t intended to go to Kagbeni, but upon breaking out our new map we found that, yes, indeed, we must be on a red-and-white trail to Kagbeni, which was southwest, while Jomsom was south. On the map, a dashed red line read “Jeepable Gravel Road” went direct to Jomsom from the main road we were on. Trusting the map, we headed south while the road drifted west, walking through the sand and brush, hoping to intersect the jeepable gravel road.

Without a path to follow, we started talking about all the good things having a child together could bring. We talked about the chickens and how having chickens had changed our priorities in life. I changed my entire field of study as I became interested in life, disease, and death once I watched the chickens grow up and old. We had made sacrifices for the chickens, spent time on them, bought a house to give them a place to live, and it had all been more than worth it for the greater sense of purpose the chickens gave. I suffer from tremendous existential dread, which sometimes dominates my life, and one concept was that having a child might give me something to live for that would temper my existential dread.

We wanted to discuss each happy scenario, how a kid might improve our health, wealth, hobbies, or something similar. Although the number of problems a child could cause was vast, they were countable, finite. On the other hand, while it was hard to think about the specific beautiful ways a child could expand our lives, it might be uncountable, infinite. But we never managed to get into it because, by the time we were done comparing a child to a big expensive chicken, the wind had started to pick up.

We had wandered around on a quest for Lubra, and now our conversation about the positives of having a kid was drowned out by the afternoon funneling of wind through the deepest valley in the world. The DeutscheKindle describes this as “in the afternoon there will be then a lot of wind blowing in you face.” The wind was strong enough to throw small pebbles from the ground during gusts. We put on our rain jackets and scrunched the hoods over our heads to protect ourselves from the abrasive wind and shield our ears from the whistling noise.

It seemed dire for a moment; we were no longer on the red-and-white main trail as we searched for the Jeepable gravel road, and the wind was hammering us. But before I got worried, we found a path that led us into the shadow of a mountain. The path seemed to go right up to the mountain and ended. When we reached the end of the path, there was a carefully carved path through the mountain’s rock, a secret dwarven tunnel from a fantasy novel. If this is a jeepable gravel road, the map makers have some unusually skinny jeeps if this is a jeepable gravel road.

Cutting through the mountain was gorgeous. We walked out of one valley, with the Annapurnas and the Dhualagiri, and into a new valley with a new half of the Annapurnas visible. The stone and the narrow corridor framed the mountains to create a scene that was in the truest sense of the word, picturesque. I became morose that the Nepalese government was no longer going to let non-Nepalese walk around this beautiful land on their own. The Nepali guides we had met, even the best of them, would never take a detour this off the beaten path. Most wouldn’t even consider something as inane as going to Jharkot to see the Dutch Bakery. Guides scoffed when we asked them about optional blue-and-white trails because their jobs were to get their clients onto the peak, over the pass, or some other specific goal. This day was my favorite day of hiking, and this moment coming out of the carved rock and overlooking the road to Jomsom was my favorite moment of my favorite day. I do not think many people will get these moments while guides are mandatory in Nepal.

From the jeepable gravel road, we started to descend back to the main road which was returning from Kagbeni, the village we had skipped by our mountain-carved shortcut, and heading back to the major village of Jomsom. Right before our “road” matched up with the actual road, it turned into a garbo, and we had to clamber the last hundred meters down the mountain and back up a ledge onto the road. If a bus had come at that moment, the Indians on their way to Muktinath would have seen two white people with bright blue backpacks seemingly rise out of the ground like zombies and roll into the middle of the street.

The road was now at level with the Kali Gandaki, an enormous, almost dry river bed. I didn’t think of it much at this point, a giant river bed with a trickle, but I wanted to introduce the word Kali Gandaki early as I love the sound of it. The Kali Gandaki river will be a bit of a star in the next few days of our trek.

As soon as we were on the road, the wind was back and blustier than ever. Stones the size of my fist would roll from the gusts of wind, and it was a two-hour slog to make it to the city of Jomsom. Even once we could see the city, it took us a full hour to get there. The whole time, the wind slammed into us, and busses driving on the wrong side of the road tried to run us over. Busses couldn’t decide which side of the road they wanted to drive on, so nowhere was ever safe. To make it even more challenging to hike along, the road would sometimes disappear beneath the mud of the Kali Gandaki.

When we got to Jomsom, it started snowing. I’m unsure if I should call Jomsom a city or a village. It has an airport, which allows Indian pilgrims to get in and out of Muktinath quickly. It has many multi-story buildings, and it was the first place in the Mustang region where I felt that people lived there all year round and raised their children. It was the first place in the Mustang region where I saw children returning from school. Instead of one long road, the town consisted of two parallel roads on both sides of the Kali Gandaki and the occasional bridge between the sides, with one side significantly less developed. Jomsom had maybe a population of two hundred people.

I hated Jomsom. I hated the lodging run by a preteen boy who kept walking into our room in the middle of the night to ask us if we wanted anything. I hated the lack of a hot shower. I hated the extra-terrible food we had for a late lunch and dinner there. I hated how dirty the city was; it was the only place in Mustang with smog. I hated the traffic horns of the buses. I hated the police station they put in the center of town, where we had to show our ACAP papers and sweat about not having a TIMS card every time we wanted to go anywhere.

Every bus in Nepal had a weird horn that played a little discordant song. It was loud, a truck horn but with several notes in quick succession. Not every bus song was the same, but most had this one song. Occasionally, the song would be amusing or pleasant, but it was usually the worst sound. Once we were in Mustang, getting away from that sound became difficult. It quickly became part of the soundscape, like seagulls at the seashore or cheering at a stadium. Nepal had buses honking out discordant songs, and if we were within a mile of anything that could be driven upon, it was always in the background. It didn’t matter if it was daylight and there were no other cars on the road or 2 AM and people were trying to sleep. It didn’t matter if the town had put up a giant no-honking sign with a skull and crossbones, a thing I saw more than once. If you were within a mile of a road and listened for a few minutes, you would hear that quick, successive scale of honks.

We had lunch and listened to the bus honks at another Dutch Bakery. The Nepali associate the Germans with good pastries; by Dutch, they mean German. We tried to order a cinnamon roll, but they didn’t have those. We tried to order 10 other things on their menu. They didn’t have any of those either. The man said we were too early in spring for bakery chefs to come to the villages. If we had come in the fall or later spring, all the food would have been much better. I’m not sure I believe that, but at least it was the first suggestion I had heard that sometimes Nepalese food is better than what we were having. We had a similar terrible dinner and went to bed. The teenager running the lodge must have knocked on our door ten times that night. Once, he came in to hand us a bunch of dried apple slices.

We woke up to the buses honking at 5 AM. They had been going on all night, but 5 AM was roughly when our fatigue had lessened to the extent that we could no longer sleep through the honking. We took our earplugs out, were completely overwhelmed by the honking, and packed up with our earplugs in. I wanted to tell the preteen running the lodge to fuck all the way off before leaving, but he was nowhere to be seen that next morning. The only good thing about the preteen was that when he had tried to charge us $20 for the lodging, and I was shocked at the price, he lowered it to $5. If he had been older, he would have known to keep it to $20 because Linnea and I would have assumed that was a typical price for this town. After all, it was a town with an airport.

From Jomsom, we wandered off in no particular direction. We had to go through the policemen again, and I worried they would complain about our lack of a TIMS card. I tried to explain to them that we had already been through this checkpoint several times, but that made them suspicious, so I shut up. We traveled west to a village overlooking Jomsom called Thini. There, we visited two caves called Leopard Cave, which seemed to be made out of chalk. I have no idea how they have stayed up through all the earthquakes in the area. But they haven’t aged all that well because the path leading up to them had been washed out by an earthquake, and there used to be three caves, but one of them collapsed due to the earthquake. On the sides of the walls were little writings in Sanskrit and little drawings. When we left the caves, the village’s roosters were up and crowing. I cannot explain what joy that rooster crow gives me. It’s the antithesis of the bus horn to me.

We couldn’t quite pick up the trail again from Thini, as it was sort of a detour but not a blue-and-white detour. We saw the giant two-hundred-person cyclist crew again; this time, they had their bicycles, but they were heading back to Jomsom to pick up the main road from wherever they had been. We saw a man walking out of town along a road and followed him. When we turned the bend, the road was destroyed and turned into a cliff, and on the side of the road was the man squatting with his pants down and pooping. He waved us off toward the correct path, and I didn’t know what to do; thank him? This made me pause for an awkward second before we turned around.

The actual trail was a sharp descent into a valley below, followed by a long walk back up the other side. Once we got up the valley we were placed into an unexpected village. We asked an old woman where the lake was, and she pointed us on our way. Then she asked us if we wanted tea, and we said no, and she looked disappointed. This village was a non-linear rarity, with a couple of forks in it that we had to navigate. At the correct end of the village was an enormous tree branching out over another valley. It was the kind of hundreds-of-year-old tree that should be a holy point for some religion. From this world-tree we headed down into a valley back up towards a highland lake.

When we got to the lake, it was a small green swamp with a little bridge over it. The lake had a fence circling around it and cost $10 to enter. But we could see the entire lake from the road, and it wasn’t clear why anyone would pay the $10 to enter. We saw a Nepalese couple walking over the bridge in the park, but I imagine they didn’t pay the $10, which is a decent chunk of money for a Nepalese person.

From this lake, we continued to walk in the direction of the village of Dhumba. Shortly after the lake, we ascended a steep set of dirt-carved stairs to a plateau with an old monastery. We walked along the plateau and passed several chortens and stupas of varying sizes and ages. The old stupas were made of primitive red bricks, and the newer chortens were elegantly plastered and painted white and gold. We put our backpacks down by the base of one of the old stupas and walked up the rest of the hill toward the monastery, feeling light as a feather. At the top of the hill was an amazing view of the valley, including Jomsom, its airport, a landing propeller airplane, and several villages ahead of us that we were yet to reach. From this viewpoint, my eyes followed the motions of two specks in the mountains, which became two people on horseback racing in the valley.

On closer inspection, the monastery at the top of the hill wasn’t old but unfinished. It was made out of concrete and rebar but had either been permanently abandoned or at least abandoned for the season. It had a couple of glass windows but no roof, and some of the windows had already shattered. Linnea went to the bathroom behind this monastery, and as I walked around, I thought I saw a man standing on the roof of one of the larger and older stupas. Then I saw a sign at one of the Stupas that it was $1 for entrance, which meant it was a Ghompa. The Kutsab Teranga Ghompa, according to the sign at the door, except for Ghompa, was spelled “Gumba” because the spelling is made up on a sign-by-sign basis in Nepal.

I got two dollars from our backpacks below the hill. When I returned, I told Linnea that we could go into a Ghompa and that I thought I had seen a man and that this place might be inhabited. We walked up to the Ghompa, and from out of the doorway stepped the man I had spotted before! He was extremely thin, wore dark clothing, and never stepped out of the Ghompa’s shadows. He didn’t speak English, but he took our money and graciously showed us around the interior of the Ghompa. The sign had a town name now sloppily covered in white paint.

This Gompa was the largest religious building we entered during our time in Nepal and the one we interacted with the most. It was deceivingly large and slightly sunk into the hill. Inside, he let us spin some of the enormous van-sized prayer wheels with the same Om mani padme hum mantra we always saw written on the small prayer wheels. The Gompa has several rooms inside it, and the most interior room had a large fresco painted on the side of the wall that was starting to deteriorate and was chipped away in places. At the front of that room was a glass wall with doll-sized golden statues behind the glass. The golden statues didn’t seem well sculpted, more like a highschool project by a talented teenager.

We left the Gompa and scrambled down yet another valley. The wind had started to blow up the valley again, threatening to become the same gale forces we faced yesterday. At first, we tried to rush and take a short direct route, but the descent was too steep for us. To keep our footing we had to take a longer zig-zagging way down the hill. At the bottom of the hill, we were supposed to come up to Dhumba village, but Dhumba village had been flattened by an earthquake that rolled an entire mountain down onto the land. We saw one sign for the next village of Chairo sticking up out of the rocks and pointing up into the air. Another sign that had been reoriented pointed across a field of enormous boulders that must have been where the farms of Dhumba once lay.

With the wind at full blast, we scrambled through the field, over boulders, and onto a thin trail on a mountain with a red-and-white trail marker. We hadn’t seen a red-and-white for quite a while, so we were relieved to know we were on somebody’s main path. While walking south on this main path, as we passed an elegant Stupa (Chorten?), we were passed by the two men racing horses that I had spotted hours earlier. How long can you race a horse before it dies? Not to be crude, but how long can a guy race a horse before his balls explode?

Despite the howling wind, the trail on the side of the mountain was beautiful, with great views of the Kali Gandaki below and the town of Marpha across the river. We intended to stay at Marpha that night, a town that is an hour and thirty minutes walk from Jomsom by the main road. The trail we were on overshot Marpha and came to a Tibetan refugee camp before we could find a bridge over the Kali Gandaki to double back. The Tibetan refugee camp has existed for so long now that it has become its own village of Chairo.

The suspension footbridge over the Kali Gandaki was solid, but it was built next to another older suspension footbridge of the same design that had failed, which was disconcerting. From there, we walked through several apple orchards and an agricultural research center, the “Temperate Horticulture Development Center,” which was responsible for bringing apples as an industry to Nepal. We had lunch before we entered the town of Marpha proper. As we entered Marpha, it started raining and snowing in interchanging wind gusts. We were far enough away from Marpha and exposed enough on the road that we tried for the first time on the journey to put rain covers around our backpacks. Our backpacks were rated at the same 38 L, but my backpack was larger than Linnea’s because it was the male model. The rain cover ended up not fitting on my backpack! I was annoyed, but Linnea was furious. It was funny how angry we got at inanimate gear during this trip.

Marpha was a beautiful town, and it was a proper town. It wasn’t a bunch of buildings lined up along a main road; it was a half circle, with a series of blocks built up on the outer side of the circle in a crescent shape. The rest of the circle was a communal farm used to grow vegetables in little plots for each family, and at the straight portion of the half circle was the main road. This gave some separation from the ever-present chord-honking of the busses and the lodging in Marpha. At the center of the housing in Marpha was a series of stairs leading to a temple. From up there, you could see that people used the tops of the buildings to hang out and that they stored firewood on the edges of each building to give them a wooden crown. Because all the buildings were close to each other, people could walk from roof to roof as if it was a second level of the village. I didn’t see any bridges across the two or three curved roads that ran the long way of the crescent. Then, before we could understand the architecture of the village, the alternating rain-snow became too much for us, and we shuffled back down.

We stayed at a terrific lodge named Tampopo, which I chose because Tampopo is my parent’s favorite movie. It was a great lodge, one of the few immaculate lodges in Nepal, but the beds were thin and hard, and there was no warm shower. There hadn’t been any sun that day, and all of Marpha used solar water heating. When we got there, we ordered two glasses of apple cider, the only alcohol we drank the entire trip. What we got was high enough proof that I would have preferred it in a shot glass. I could smell the alcohol evaporating off of our cider, and it came in oversized mugs. We sat under the porch, taking in the semi-circle of garden plots, and sipped our 200-proof apple cider. It was pleasant, and with the alcohol and the cover of the lodge, it was one of the first times since we had started hiking that I wasn’t moving, and I also wasn’t cold. It made me realize that I had been cold non-stop for days and days now.

We took a nice long walk along the border of the half-circle and through the garden plots. I wasn’t feeling 100% during this walk, and at the time, I thought I was getting sick. In hindsight, I was just shy of throw-up drunk. A dog followed us for half the path, then jumped over a tall garden fence and disappeared when we came near the main road and the honking busses. We cut through the garden and returned to the lodge through the back entrance. A Japanese man ran the lodge, and it offered some of the best Dhal Bat we had in Nepal. I had a Tibetan bread sort of thing called Tingmo, which is unlike anything I’ve ever eaten before. Was it half-bread, half-gelatin? It was halfway between the texture of rye bread and jello, with a flavor halfway between white rice and gum that you’ve chewed too long. It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t good. I was happy to have something new. I still think about this Tingmo food from time to time.

While we were eating dinner, two other Americans in the lodge were saying goodbye to a group of fifteen porters who had led them on a journey. At first, I thought they must have managed to get a Mustang permit, but I asked them about it, and they decided to camp around the Mustang Valley rather than Mustang proper. They didn’t feel they were in the right shape to tackle the mountains or the Annapurna circuit, but they still had the time and resources to go on a big adventure. So they went on a long flat hike while camping. I never saw anyone else doing that while we were there but I found the endeavor encouraging and think about their adventure more than any other adventure I heard of during the trip. I returned to our room and went into bed, restless and unhappy. I felt we hadn’t gone far enough that day, and I told Linnea that tomorrow I wanted to trek as far as we could to get to lower altitude and finally be warm.

The following day, we packed up and headed back to the Tibetan refugee camp. We always left before having breakfast because I’m not much of a breakfast person, and Linnea would eat her ChocoPies. This irked the lodge hosts because breakfast is so traditional in Nepal that you don’t pay for the room; you pay for breakfast instead. However, because there were few Westerners besides us, we could negotiate paying a little more for dinner and not having breakfast. We usually left the lodge before our hosts were up.

There was some hysteresis returning to the Tibetan refugee camp because if we had come straight from Jomsom to Marpha, we would have never found the bridge crossing the Kali Gandaki. But since we had already been here, we knew all the twists and turns to return to the red-and-white path again. The path oscillated between being pristine and being garbo. We weedeled our way to a village named Chokopani to find a way to cross the Kali Gandaki. So, from Chokopani, we clambered down into the rocky bed of the Kali Gandaki and approached the low banks of the early spring river.

We found a small bridge made out of logs that crossed the river. As we crossed the logs, several barking dogs emerged from Chokopani’s direction and started running towards us. These dogs had gotten wrapped up in their own aggression, so I picked up a big rock to get ready to throw at them and told Linnea to pick up one, too. But we got to the other side of the bridge before they got to us, and then they seemed unwilling to cross the river in their pursuit of us. Who knows, maybe they just wanted a good pat.

We walked along in the middle of the river bank until coming up to Tukuche. There, we stopped for an early brunch. We had a slice of toasted white bread with butter and a single egg each. It was the best meal we had during our entire trip. Linnea has been hit with cravings for toasted white bread ever since. Tukuche was our first encounter with a water buffalo. I thought an Ox would be the cool thing in Nepal, but an Ox is a cow simile. They had the same manner of staring that cows do, where they stare at you without a thought in their head. The water buffalo had personality. They had these big goofy donkey ears that would go up and down and sideways. Their eyes were so expressive, providing these terrific expressions of surprise, doubt, intrigue, and suspicion.

At the end of Tukuche, there was a police stop, but they only seemed to be stopping people in jeeps and weren’t interested in us. We walked quickly by and didn’t stop until we could no longer see the town of Tukuche. From there, we had an odd day. It rained and snowed throughout the day, and we came to blue-and-white after blue-and-white trail. However, I wanted to make progress and get to lower altitudes that day, and each blue-and-white trail detour was at least half a day.

We barely saw the beautiful villages in Kobang Valley and the fascinatingly thoughtful village of Larjung, which had recycling bins along the road. We skipped the “2 Lakes” blue-and-white detour and the blue-and-white to the ancient village of Naurikot, as well as the blue-and-white to the Ice Fall, an arduous two-day journey.

At one point, we tried to walk in the river bad, along the Kali Gandaki, in order to get away from the busses on the main road. The problem with this path was that the Kali Gandaki itself meandered from one side of the river bed to the other and was several feet deep, even this early in the spring. We didn’t want to keep fording the river, and the path of the river often edged us into farmland on the sides of the banks. A farmer came out of nowhere and escorted us off his land and back onto the main road, which put an end to our riverbed walk.

We kept walking, going from Chokopani to Larjung to Khkohetanti on our way to Kalopani and became hopelessly confused with the town names. Further down the road we wanted to go to Kopchepani, then Tatopani, then Ghorepani, then Nirethanti. The reason why all these names sound the same is because they have standard meanings. Pani means rainwater and indicates a town at an important river junction or a town with a spring. We would have done better to differentiate all these towns in our heads if we had dropped the last bit and referred to them instead as Choko, Kopche, Tato, and Ghore. Alas, we never thought of this; instead, we had to keep rechecking our maps to ensure we were walking in the right direction.

We crossed the Kali Gandaki along a bent-up suspension footbridge. A local man on a motorcycle rolled up at the footbridge and talked to us about where we were going. He suggested we hike to a large lake a day or two away before he rode his motorcycle along the footbridge. Its everyday use as a motorcycle path is why it had so many metal bits bent out of place. Crossing the bridge and coming to the other side of the Kali Gandaki, we hiked on, more or less walking through a constant drizzle. The wind abruptly died, like a giant cold blow dryer just flicked off.

Part 5: Rainfalling

Getting In: Kathmandu (Capital) -> Besi Sahar (Last City) -> Dharapani (1900m)
Ascent: Odar (2131m) -> Bagarchap (2160m) -> Bhratang (2850m) -> Upper Pisang (3310m) -> Ghyaru (3730m) -> Ngawal (3680m) -> Bhraga 3450 m -> Manang 3540 m Snowfalling: Yak Kharka 4050 m -> Letdar 4200 m -> Thorung Phedi 4450 m -> High Camp 4850 m -> Thorung La 5416 m -> Muktinath 3800 m Wind: Jharkot 3550 m -> Jomsom 2720 m -> Marpha 2670 m -> Tukuche 2590 m -> Kobang 2640 m -> Larjung 2550 m Rainfalling: Kalopani m -> Ghasa 2010 m -> Kopchepani 1480 m -> Tatopani 1200 m -> Ghara 1700 m -> Sikha 1935 m -> Chitre 2350 m -> Ghorepani 2870 m -> Ulleri 2010 m -> Tikhedhunga 1500 m -> Nirethanti 1025 m

The trail on the other side of the Kali Gandaki was outstandingly beautiful and well-manicured. It was over half a mile away from the main road, with frequent villages and stretches of stone paths and carved stairs. It was the best-maintained stretch of trail on the journey.

When we saw another group in Nepal, we would say Namaste to them, and they would say Namaste to us. Everyone had their own style of Namaste. The default was a sort of Japanese anime girl, “Konichiwa!” but instead with “Namaste!” But the range of Namaste’s went from 1000-year-old-smoker, to singer baritone, to ancient Nepali mountain man with the throat of the mountains, to begrudgingly muttering the greeting, to sincere religious zeal behind the meaning of the Namaste, that you greet the holy in the other. I was always confused about if Namaste was similar to the Italian Ciao! where you had to say it to each person, or if you could Namaste an entire group. During this last stretch of the day, we walked through an unnamed village and past a bunch of small children. “NAMASTE!” all the children said, and we responded with an end-of-day polite “Namaste!” But then one four-year-old child who hadn’t been part of the initial namaste came out to say namaste to Linnea, and she didn’t return the namaste because she had already namasted the group. That child ran up behind her and kicked her in the butt, which outraged the mother of the child, shocked Linnea, and caused me to laugh so hard my sides hurt.

We wanted to end the day either in the village of Kalopani or the village of Lete. However, upon walking through Kalopani, we found out that the two villages had gotten so long that they had met up and become a single ultra-ultra-long village. We stayed here at a place that in America would have been considered a motel called the “See-you Lodge.” It was a chain of lodges in Nepal, or at least we saw several lodges in different villages with the same name, and it seemed to be a franchise. It had great hot water, decent food, and was up to the standards of the most shitty American motel. It was one of the best lodges on the whole trail. It rained most of the night while we were there, and it was still cold, but at dinner, they had a table with a blanker surrounding it and a fire underneath the table so that my lower half under the blanket was toasty warm.

When we woke up, a thick, chilly mist obscured both the Dhaulagiri and Annapurna mountain ranges. We hadn’t seen much of the mountains since our first day out of Muktinath, but I would say that this was the second-best morning for views of the dual peaks. As the mist boiled off from the morning sun, it revealed in little wisps the enormous mountain ranges that lay beyond, and it felt magical. When the mist was boiled off, the overcast clouds rolled back in and hid the mountains.

Heading out of Kalopani and then heading out of Lete, we came upon the most wiped-out portion of the red-and-white trail during the journey. An earthquake had destroyed an enormous suspension footbridge, and a new road snaked around to where the footbridge had once gone. Off the new road were the remnants of an old path, presumably the path the destroyed footbridge had once led to. We made the questionable decision to bushwack off the road and up the hill to where the path once was and try to walk in the general direction of the next town of Ghasa.

This was a lot of fun. Not beautiful and not practical, but it was a dramatic change of climate. Before long, the trees turned from pine trees to palm trees, and we were bushwacking through a thick jungle on the edge of a cliff overlooking a road that dipped lower and lower beneath us. For a long time, I thought we were following game trails, but we found a sign sunken halfway under the group pointing towards the cliff with an arrow saying “Ghasa.” At some point an actual path had been roughly at the same location as us.

A little later, we found the carcass of a freshly eaten half-deer. Then, right when I was thinking we would have to scale our way down the cliff to ever regain the road, we came upon a series of ancient switchbacks. The switchbacks brought us down into a town called Eagle’s Nest, which was an unusually western name for a town.

Eagle’s Nest had a neat little bakery, but I thought it was a little early for brunch and that we could get better food at the large city of Ghasa, which is supposed to be one of the classic places to stay on the trail. Shortly after Eagle’s Nest, we walked by a broken-down bus, and on the side of the road were a bunch of Indian tourists in blue jeans and saris. When we passed them, we didn’t say Namaste, we said “hello”, and they said “Hello!” They seemed in good cheer considering a difficult bus ride was going poorly, but I guess if it were me, I would have considered it part of the pilgrimage experience.

Ghasa sucked. It was Jomsom 2.0. There was a police checkpoint there, but they were so confused by us that we never even got to try to show them our ACAP or try to explain why we didn’t have a TIMS card. The police panicked when we showed up. I swear the ACAP person ducked underneath their post to pretend they weren’t there. In hindsight, the police checkpoints were as anxious about dealing with us and trying to speak in English as we were anxious about dealing with them. We walked on without actually talking to anyone.

We didn’t eat in Ghasa, and we had a hungry day. Instead we descended a thousand meters to the next major town of Tatopani. Along the way, we went through Kopchepani and several beautiful villages with exotic chickens. Including the only bantam breeds I saw while in Nepal, as well as a breed of chicken that had no feathers on its neck. I was expecting to see one or two breeds of chicken per flock in Nepal. I figured if you have a Rooster, and you have a hen, then all your chicks are the same. When I noticed that flocks were purposefully heterogeneous in Nepal, I assumed there must be town-to-town chicken swaps.

In Kopchepani, I got a different impression. Chicks need to be vaccinated against certain diseases before they are born, or they usually die. This wasn’t always the case, but starting in the 1940s, ducks and geese started to carry Marek’s disease, which kills most chickens. Since there are ducks in Nepal, chicken eggs probably need to be vaccinated for flocks to be viable. Thus, I expect that a trader went around from village to village selling vaccinated chicks or day 18 vaccinated chick eggs to the locals. And because the locals were buying chickens, not hatching them out themselves, they were free to get whatever exotic chickens they wanted. Maybe this theoretical trader came to Kopchepani first, walking the trails clockwise from Tatopani, and so Kopchepani bought up all the fanciest chickens.

Finally, we came to Tatopani. At 1200 meters, it was 1300 meters below where we had started in the morning. We had started the day in the misty pinewoods and ended it in a tropical resort town known for its hot springs. Most of the Westerners we met had planned, after hiking through Thorung La, to get into a jeep at Muktinath and drive all night to Tatopani where they could relax and soak in the hot springs. Now, it was our turn.

We booked a fancy room at the fanciest hotel in the town. This was $40, which was approaching Western hotel prices. Unlike the apple orchard at Bhratang, we got actual hotel service for this purchase. We still couldn’t flush toilet paper, and everything was still sketchy and dirty, but it was an actual hotel. The concierge bragged that the hotel had the only elevator in Nepal east of Pokhara. I made a snide comment to Linnea that I bet there wasn’t an elevator repairman except at Pokhara, which turned out to be prescient as the elevator broke after an hour and stayed broken during our stay. Occasionally, the broken elevator would come to our floor and scream at our floor, a mechanical ghost haunting the hotel room. If I had been in the USA, I would have been pissed off, but in Nepal, I thought this was funny, and it wasn’t nearly as loud as the buses playing their horn songs outside.

We had fancy food that night. I had a terrible Yak burger for dinner, but at least it wasn’t Dal Bhat. I also ordered a chocolate milkshake but got a thin chocolate milk with possibly rotten milk. Still better than Dal Bhat. Outside, they lit up the hotel to give it the appearance of a high-class nightclub. Except it was occupied by us and a bunch of tired Indian tourists. There was even a nightclub dance hall that was playing loud music and had absolutely no one in it. No DJ even, just a lonely heavy dubstep track left to play in an empty room. There were a couple of places lit up with color-changing LEDs and some plastic palm trees where tourists could take photos.

We spent the evening on the 5th floor of this resort, looking down and trying to spot white people coming off the trails among the Indian tourists heading up to Muktinath. At first, it was a challenging game, but as the sun started to go down, we saw quite a lot of white people walking around the resort town in heavy boots and technical wear. We talked a little bit more about having a kid from our vantage point, but shortly after the conversation began, the screaming elevator came to our floor, and we went into our room.

We were on the last stretch of the Annapurna circuit now, a stretch nobody hiked because it was ridiculous. We had to go up a massive mountain and then right back down it to get to the classical endpoint, and we figured that would be two days of strenuous walking. Since we had extra time, we decided to split that into three days at a more casual trekking pace and spend the morning of that first day at the hot springs in Tatopani.

We got up with the sun, put on our hiking slippers, which are down slippers with thick rubber soles for grip, and walked to the local hot springs. The place was filled with people. At first, I thought these might be locals, but when we got closer, it became apparent that they were Indian tourists who were either spending time here before or after going to Muktinath. If you didn’t want to take a dangerous plane into Jomsom, you could take a plane into Pokhara and drive on terrible roads for 2 days, or you could take a plane into Kathmandu and drive on terrible roads for 3 days in order to get to Muktinath. Tatopani was apparently a popular spot to stop and try to heal your back if you were taking such a bus.

The hot springs were rudimentary but the nicest hot springs I’d ever been to. Normally, hot springs smell of sulfur, which elicits the feeling of bathing in hot rotten egg. But somehow, this hot spring was not smelly. Instead, it was filled with fresh, but warm, river water. One corner of the hot spring was lukewarm, and the other corner of the hot spring was scalding hot. This temperature gradient was nice because you could choose your temperature by where you placed yourself. However, the baths were crowded that day, and I had to take a spot that gave me a vibrantly hot spring experience.

Because of the crowd, I didn’t personally experience the temperature gradient. Linnea told me about it, but only after we had left, as at the hot springs, we were separated into male and female sections. There weren’t any signs saying to do this; it wasn’t even apparent that we would get in trouble if we didn’t do this. There were two baths, and all the guys were at one, and all the girls were at the other, and it would have been weird if we didn’t follow along. You could see one bath from the other, they were a dozen meters away or so, so it wasn’t a modesty thing. It reminded me of the sort of partition of genders you get in middle school, where nobody knows why all these divides exist, but no one bothers to upend them.

After the refreshing hot spring experience, we now had to hike from Tatopani at 1200 meters all the way up to Ghorepani at 2870 meters. On our way out, I asked a local jeep driver how much it would be to take a jeep 500 meters or so up. He asked where I had in mind, and I pulled out a map and pointed at a town halfway between our destination and where we were: Ghara. “Ghara!” he sang with excitement and said we could take a jeep with him to Ghara for $10. “$10!” we said with great excitement, a low cost to skip a brutal hike in a tropical climate on a rainy day. I assume he was ripping us off; he was so happy with the price and the place, but we were also happy, so it was a good trade.

We got in a jeep and rode off away from the Kali Gandaki. I was much sadder to leave the Kali Gandaki than I was to leave the Annapurna Himal. This wave of sadness might have been because I was precisely aware of the moment that I was moving away from the Kali Gandaki never to move back towards it. Whatever was the last time I saw the Annapurnas up close, I wasn’t aware it was my last great view of the mountains. The jeep ride was incredibly steep, and we went through several beautiful villages. There wasn’t much in the way of blue-and-whites at this end of the trail as few people bother to walk up to Ghorepani that the red-and-white is de facto the blue-and-white. We didn’t feel like we were missing all that much in our jeep, as without it we would have simply been walking in the the road all day without any possibility of beautiful detours.

We got out of the jeep. Linnea almost forgot her DeutscheKindle, but the happy driver noticed it. Then, starting from the much easier altitude of ~1700 m, we had to go one km into the sky to get to Ghorepani. Again, we ate essentially nothing the whole day until we got to Ghorepani, but this was an enjoyable hike and not the dreadful slog through warm weather and rain that I was anticipating. The villages were beautiful, with blue rooves, stone walls and paths, and the occasional blue siding to a patio or pink fresco on the non-stone houses. We saw a lot of animals on this stretch of the hike. I had a lot of encounters with water buffalo, chickens, and one Muscovy duck sitting in the path.

The climb to Ghorepani wasn’t easy, but it didn’t feel awful. We passed by two Westerners, women in their early 20s, with the only female guide I remember seeing on the trip. I’m unsure if they were going up or down, but the Westerners were absolutely miserable.

We had one or two moments when enormous trucks were coming down the road, and we decided to avoid them by cutting straight up the hill to the next switchback. The first time we did this, it worked, and we cut through a little fairy garden. It was a disaster the second time, and we had to scramble up some sketchy loose rocks. In an alternate timeline, I broke my arm in this scramble.

While the Himalayas still hung in the background of our climb, we were now too far out of the valley to be enveloped by the white-capped mountains. The overcast may or may not have hidden the Annapurnas or the Dhalagari, but that wasn’t the real highlight on this final leg of the hike. The highlight was the Rhododendron Forest, which covered the upper half of the mountain leading to Ghorepani. These were old gnarled rhododendron trees, perhaps over a hundred years old on average, and each tree had hundreds of flowers that ranged from fluorescent magenta to neon pink to pastel white.

We explicitly made sure to hike this final mountain rather than detour around it because Linnea’s father had hiked it and thought that hiking the Rhododendron forest in the springtime was one of the main benefits of going in the spring. The forest was lovely, but it is much more impressive in photos than it felt in real life. Maybe after a thousand-meter climb, I wasn’t able to appreciate the flowers.

About an hour before we got to Ghorepani, there was a sign saying “Welcome to Ghorepani Poon Hill! Namaste!” When we saw that sign it started hailing. There was about an hour of steep stone steps in the hail before we reached the actual village and lodges. Luckily, this was an hour of walking under the cover of the rhododendron trees, so the hail was not a menace.

The town of Ghorepani had enormous lodges. Each lodge was taller than the next to try to command the view at the top of the hill. There was “View Lodge” and “Good View Lodge,” “Great View Lodge,” “Excellent View Lodge,” “Super View Lodge” etc. We did a terrible job at picking a lodge and ended up staying at Fish Hook Lodge, the worst place we stayed at the whole trip except for the few days right before Thorung La Pass. We were back at 3000 meters, and it was freezing cold again. The thin air and the terrible lodging made for an apropos last night on the Annapurna circuit. I hadn’t internalized it yet, but that was our last night on the Annapurna circuit.

As we ate dinner, we watched the streets of Ghorepani (and there were multiple intersecting streets!) fill up with Westerners. The tourists we had seen since Muktinath had been Indian, and we had seen almost nobody at all from the start of our hike at Besi Sahar to Thorung La, twenty or so of the same Westerners again and again. Now there were hundreds of them. Hundreds. We saw huge Americans come through town, and I had forgotten how large Americans can be. We saw an entire school of Westerners who must have been on some elaborate vacation, all walking in a line with chaperone teachers at the front and back. It was overwhelming.

The power to all of Ghorepani went out several times that night. The place had internet, but they wanted to charge us per device. I figured out the password for the internet, and we watched some YouTube videos before going to sleep. This is the only time on the trail that I can remember doing anything before sleep other than cocooning up in a sleeping bag and passing out.

The next day, we walked out of town past an unoccupied police checkpoint. We had to walk down from Ghorepani at roughly 3000 meters to Naya Pul at roughly 1000 meters. This was our single largest descent in a day for the entire hike, and it was our final descent. We got a decent view of the Himalayas from the roof of our lodge, but even at sunup clouds heavily covered the views of the mountains. The “Poon Hill” part of Ghorepani is why so many Westerners were in town. When people don’t want to commit to one of the mid-sized treks such as the Base Camp treks or the Annapurna Sanctuary trek, they can take the three-day trek to Poon Hill as a quick adventure out of Pokhara. Before leaving Ghorepani, you are supposed to hike for an hour up Poon Hill to get an incredible view of the Annapurna Mountain range. Linnea and I had been hiking through overcast rain for the last several days, and we had a good sense that the weather wouldn’t allow for much of a view compared to being right against them in Muktinath for instance. So much to the consternation of everyone we met, we didn’t go to see the views at Poon Hill.

We left at 6 AM, which means we were the first people coming down the mountain. Every Westerner that was headed up asked us how the view from Poon Hill had been and what the weather had been clear. They wanted to know if their two days of hiking up the hill would be worth it for the view. We didn’t think so, but we had no idea because we hadn’t gone to Poon Hill. Most people didn’t know what the Annapurna Circuit was, and only the guides knew where we were coming from. We tried a few times to say that we didn’t know or that it had been hailing when we were at Ghorepani, but people with all sorts of accents were pushy and insistent. We quickly learned to come up with fun little lies that would play off previous lies, “Oh, the view was amazing!” Or “oh, it was overcast; we couldn’t see a thing.” Or “Oh, I saw a blue sheep!” I would have bothered to do the stupid one-hour hike up stupidly named Poon Hill to avoid having a whole morning of incessant awkward conversations and lies.

It was a long hike down. The top half of the hike was cold, wet, and slippery. But unlike most days, rather than clouds rolling in as the day went on this time, the clouds rolled out, and the day became quite clear. The sun beat down so hard on rocks that wet patches of moss had visible wisps of steam coming off from them by the late morning. I took a video of this, but I took the video upside down and I can never figure out how to rotate videos 180 degrees after I’ve taken them. This is one positive for vertical videos: I rarely hold my phone upside down when I’ve got it vertical, but when I turn it horizontal, either orientation feels ok in my hands.

This last stretch of the trek was yet another biome and the most similar to hiking in the USA. I could have been hiking in upstate New York or Washington on a warm day. At first, everything was wet, but the wet all burned off. The plants were not tropical but instead temperate, as if half the year it was cold on the path and the other half of the year it was a sauna. The views were too beautiful compared to upstate New York, even this modest lowlands portion of the trek would be a national park in the USA, but it could exist in the USA. It reminded me of walking around Yosemite, minus the redwoods and plus some chickens and water buffalo.

The water buffalo did their best to stop us from leaving. We encountered half a dozen of them, and one of them stood on a narrow portion of the path facing towards us. It stopped dead, its ears rose, its eyebrows rose, and it gave us a guilty look. We got as close as we dared and then spent about five minutes asking it to move to the side. It moved its forelegs and head off the path but left its hindlegs in place on the path. Because its head was off the path, the water buffalo thought that it wasn’t on the path anymore and the problem was solved. I was not happy about passing near its hind legs, but after another five minutes I realized I didn’t have a choice unless I wanted to grow old in Nepal. We passed by, and the water buffalo didn’t kick us. I never saw another water buffalo in Nepal after that.

At some point, we passed by a dozen jeeps that had brought tourists from Pokhara up the hill for their adventures to Poon Hill. They wanted to bring us down, but they were asking $30 for a walk that was two more hours, and I didn’t want the trip to end yet. They were insistent, and I’m glad my reaction was annoyance rather than acquiescence. We were passed by a jeep every 10 minutes for the rest of the hike. Which isn’t that frequent, but it makes you constantly worried at sharp bends that a jeep will come and run you over. When we got to villages we could usually duck off the gravel road and take a village path.

Early in the afternoon one of the villages had an ACAP checkpoint without the TIMS police checkpoint that usually accompanies it. We walked up to the checkpoint and handed in our ACAP cards. The ACAP lady congratulated us on finishing the Annapurna Circuit, and it was over. I realized that this town had a real road and a few taxi cabs waiting to take us wherever we wanted to go. This was Nirethanti, and we were aiming for the next village over of Naya Pul, but Naya Pul had become too crowded and developed to work for ACAP as the end of the trail, so they had moved a village forward. It was such a sudden ending to a trail that had gone on for so long. One of the taxi cabs made us an offer: $30 for a 3-hour trip back to Pokhara. We got in, drove through the crowded and unpleasant town of Naya Pul, and off towards Pokhara. As we got on the main road, we passed by two hundred red-and-black uniformed cyclists biking out of Naya Pul.

Getting In: Kathmandu (Capital) -> Besi Sahar (Last City) -> Dharapani (1900m)
The clear days of ascent: Odar (2131m) -> Bagarchap (2160m) -> Danaqyu (2200m) -> Timang (2580m) -> Koto (2640m) -> Chame (2710m) -> Bhratang (2850m) -> Upper Pisang (3310m) -> Ghyaru (3730m) -> Ngawal (3680m) -> Humde (3330m) -> Bhraga 3450 m -> Manang 3540 m Snowfalling: Yak Kharka 4050 m -> Letdar 4200 m -> Thorung Phedi 4450 m -> High Camp 4850 m -> Thorung La 5416 m -> Charabu 4230 m -> Muktinath 3800 m Lost in the Wind: Jharkot 3550 m -> Jomsom 2720 m -> Marpha 2670 m -> Chokopani -> Tukuche 2590 m -> Kobang 2640 m -> Larjung 2550 m Rainfalling up Rhododendron Mountain: Kalopani m -> Ghasa 2010 m -> Kopchepani 1480 m -> Tatopani 1200 m -> Ghara 1700 m -> Sikha 1935 m -> Chitre 2350 m -> Ghorepani 2870 m -> Ulleri 2010 m -> Tikhedhunga 1500 m -> Nirethanti 1025 m Getting Out: Naya Pul 1070 m -> Pokhara -> Kathmandu

Epilogue: That’s Nepal

Pokhara was an enormous city. Kathmandu is bigger, but I never saw Kathmandu from above. Pokhara was surrounded by big hills that we got on top of a few times, and it looked like a jungle version of Coruscant from Star Wars with blue and pink roofs. We stayed on an island lodge named Fish Hook Lodge, where President Carter stayed when he visited Nepal. It was lovely. To get to the lodge, we had to get on a barge, which was attached to both the island and the mainland by a rope. Twenty-four hours a day, a man sat on the barge and pulled it back and forth between the shores via the rope. It was silly but wonderful because the island was quiet. On the mainland bank was a park, and in that park were 20 tents, and in those 20 tents were the two hundred south-Asian “love heart” cyclists. Pokhara was a vast city, but all the tourists came to the same tiny part of the city.

We didn’t want to return to the smog of Kathmandu, and instead stayed in Pokhara until one day before our plane departed. During this time, I got great news that the NSF had granted me a 3-year PRFB (Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology) to pay for most of my research. The glow of that news kept me walking on air for the rest of the trip and beyond. We tried to celebrate with food, but this was Nepal, so there wasn’t much. The Pokhara food wasn’t great, but it wasn’t terrible. I had a mint and lemonade smoothie, the second-best thing I ate in Nepal, coming in behind the egg and toast delicacy at Tukuche. We made some day excursions. We went up a hill to a giant blue Shiva and down into a beautiful cave with a waterfall inside it. We bought some new clothing. I got a green shirt and khaki pants, 4 sizes down from my normal size because I had lost that much weight on the hike. Linnea got a beautiful yellow dress that she still wears occasionally. We walked the length of Pokhara’s tourist district ten or twenty times, tried to shop for gifts for our families, and encountered a bull wandering around town twice.

On our last night in Pokhara, it rained properly. We were going to get massages, and we decided to walk through the rain to get to them. But the rain was so intense that the massages didn’t feel relaxing. This was Linnea’s first massage, and I don’t think it sold her on the concept. When we got back to the hotel, Linnea arranged for two bus tickets via the hotel.

The next morning, we walked to the bus parking lot and had difficulty figuring out which bus to get on. We showed our ticket to a few attendees, but they pointed us to the wrong bus each time. One convincing attendee even had us almost board the wrong bus, but I went to get a snack before we left, and when I came back, Linnea realized it couldn’t be our bus. When we found our bus, we encountered a Spanish and Italian couple. The Italian woman was staying in Pokhara to work for a few more days, but the Spanish man was taking the bus to try to hike Everest Base Camp before April started, and the law preventing trekking without a guide came into effect. It was fun to see someone from the ascent one last time, and I gave them my email address in case they ever came to NYC. I have no idea what their names were.

The bus trip was slow. We left at eight in the morning, and the 200km to Kathmandu took until five in the evening. We had two bathroom/food breaks, and we didn’t talk to the Spanish man much, but we learned that he had hiked the Annapurna Base Camp right after getting down from Thorung La and thought it wasn’t an exciting hike. He regretted taking this bus instead of a plane from Pokhara to Kathmandu, which I agree with. Sure, a plane crashes every once in a while, but these buses drive at 2 km/h with no AC.

In Kathmandu, the bus dropped us off in the middle of nowhere. We were swarmed with taxi cab drivers trying to grab our backpacks and give us a ride. We fought them off and opted to walk to our hotel, 30 minutes away. The walk was almost pleasant, except Kathmandu is a smog trash heap. We checked into the same hotel that we had arrived at. The water was still dirty, and the air was still hard to breathe, but the hotel was crowded with Chinese and Israeli tourists this time. That night, I could hear people screaming in Hebrew in the hallways. Ema!!! Emaaaaa!!!!

We spent one day in Kathmandu. We spent the morning going to important squares that I thought were less than inspiring. We got harassed at the first square by a guy who wanted to be our tour guide. Then, when we turned him down, he stalked us from site to site. We were in a different square, and he would come out of nowhere and say, “Don’t you want to understand and not only see!?” The worst and creepiest person we met in Nepal.

The best thing we saw in Kathmandu was the monkey temple, a complex of temples on a high hill. There were monkeys, which is why we went, but they weren’t interested in interacting with humans. If you stared at them, they glanced away like a dog; if you kept looking at them, they moved away and hid, which seems apropos to me. The temple complex itself was fantastic. It offered the only real views we ever got of Kathmandu and was geometrically fascinating. At the entrance I had to pay $10 for a ticket, but the ticket guy didn’t hand me a ticket. When we went to the entrance guard, he asked for our ticket, but I just shrugged. Then he shrugged. Then we walked in. That’s Nepal.