On The Road Again

This is the first post for a long time. And, like the first post in this blog, it is being written in Kathmandu. This time around I am travelling with my brother Kirk, and my friend of too-many years/partner in crime Jamie. We are in Nepal for a month to do some trekking, then Jamie and I will be going to India where I plan to do lots of climbing in Hampi and eat a lot of curry (two of my favorite things.)

We flew out of Brisbane on the first at midnight. More often than not, flights involve some sort of cock-up for me, and this one was no different. At least in wasn't my fault. Kirk and I had adjacent seats because we have the same last name, but Jamie was down the front of the plane. When we got off for our stop over in Singapore he wasn't waiting at the gate. We waited half an hour, checked the sick bays and had him paged, because we had to be sure he was OK. It turned out that he had just wandered off to do some shopping without touching base as would be reasonably expected. We didn't see him until just before boarding of our flight four hours later.

You couldn't pick two more different international airports than Singapore and Kathmandu. One has automated everything (there are multicoloured LEDs above each urinal in Singapore that alert the user as the the status of the loo), the other has a chalk boards above the luggage carousels that are meant to have the appropriate flight number for the luggage written on them (the luggage seems to come out at random, with a head wobble the most detailed information that the staff can give you.)

We did quite well getting out of the airport and into a reasonably-priced taxi with a minimum of fuss. We got railroaded into a hotel run by some an annoying bunch of gentlemen by the smooth co-driver of the the tourist taxi. They turned each transaction, such as filling out the check-in forms, into a tag team operation to try and sell us tours, get us trekking permits or ask if we had ever heard of Nepalese "chocolate". But it was a clean room that took no effort to find.

Getting Ready

The next day we left the hotel with a minimum of fuss, and located The Hotel Red Planet which I remembered from my last stay. This was no mean feat, given that Thamel - the travellers' district in Kathmandu - is a rat's nest of twisting lanes, buildings on buildings, and every type of transport jostling and trying to sell you Nepalese chocolate.

Once installed in our more pleasant digs we spent a day organising our trekking permits, which has become slightly more complex than last time I was here. Which is to say, it took a lot of vigorous debate and research just to to determine exactly where we had to go to get the permits. We guessed correctly and got the permits after trekking across town and filling out a bunch of forms and dealing with a few grinning, head-wobbling clerks.

The next challenge was to determine which bus station our bus left from the next morning. Once that was done we celebrated with lots of Everest beer, which gave us hang-overs from hell. They put something in the beer over here, and it isn't healthy.

The bus ride from Kathmandu to Siabhru Besi was long and painful, and took all day. Things started well, with the first part of the 70 kilometre journey going smoothly, but the distance covered started to resemble some logarithmic curve from hell as the road surface deteriorated and the number of treacherous switch backs increased. With an hour left on the eight-hour journey, a young lady lost her curry lunch all over Kirk's pants, which made everyone except us laugh.

A Short Walk In The Langtang Valley

The first of two treks that we were planning was the so-called Langtang walk that starts at the bottom of the Langtang valley which is steep, narrow and formed by a river, and follows the valley up to the top where it is wide and flat-bottomed because it was formed by a glacier.

The first couple of days were walking through thick sub-tropical forests in the lower part of the valley, and as we climbed higher the vegetation started to thin out. None of us were very fit, so the constant uphill gradient combined with thinning air as we gained altitude had us working fairly hard. It was considerably harder for Jamie, because he got very bad blisters on his heels that deteriorated each day. By the time we were in Kyangin Gompa at the head of the valley he had been reduced to Teevas.

There were plenty of great views, and friendly people along the way, but the highlight for me was when Kirk accepted my idle dare to jump the largest Yak in Langtang Village (that is yak with a capital Y). Watch this space for video evidence on Youtube.

While Jamie was resting his feet, Kirk and I made a couple of day trips. The first was to walk right up to the end of the valley for a great view from the base of the mountains that extended into Tibet. The second was to climb the 5000 metre high peak of Tserko Ri (well, actually 4984m, but you always round these things up) for a great view of the tops of the same mountains.

We had planned to return back to Syabhru Besi where we started the walk, and then head to the Annapurna region to to the Annapurna Base Camp walk, however we figured that would be pushed for time. Instead, we decided to extend our Langtang walk by crossing the high passes at the holy lake (for Hindus) of Gosankund into the Helambu region.

Jamie's feet were not getting any better, so he finished the walk at Syabhru Besi, and Kirk and I headed for Gosankund. We got laid-up by bad weather in the village Syabhru, which is balanced along a steep ridge. We saw the snow line drop by 1000 metres over the coarse of an hour while we ate our lunch - the clouds descended to cover the tops of the hills, and they left snow behind when they lifted.

The walk up to Gosankund was much easier after our earlier acclimatisation walks, with a beautiful day spent climbing 1700 metres through rhododendron then alpine forests to the high, windy ridge of Laurabina. From there we had uninterrupted views of the Himalaya from the length of the Annapurnas, the Himal Ganesh, into Tibet and to the Langtang peaks.

From Lauribina we had a short climb to the first 4100 metre pass. After the pass the trail was very narrow, carved into a steep slope, with snow on the trail and views over the first lakes below us. Just as we got to the snow line proper, we saw the lake of Gosankund. Hindu mythology holds that the body of Siva can be seen as some stones sticking out of the water where he threw himself for relief after drinking poison. The water was very cold, which would explain why pilgrims come here for ceremonial bathing in the middle of summer. I decided that to wash my face and make a small coin donation to the lake was as far as I was prepared to go.

To get to Helambu we had to cross a second pass of 4600 metres in the snow, which we did in our shorts with big grins after two days of fantastic walking. From there it was a tiring and long descent to Gopte where we were kept awake by a Dutch lady who was a prodigious snorer (thankfully she wasn't as bad as "Our Latvian Friend"). We finished the walk through Helambu to Sundarijal on the outskirts of Kathmandu in a couple of days, with some wonderful views of the Himalaya from the east to the west and changing landscape as high-mountain slopes gave way to well-tended terraces around villages.

We are now back in Kathmandu. We had planned to go to Royal Chitwan National Park for some wildlife spotting, but have postponed that for a day while Jamie recovers from a tummy upset (for once I am not the first to fall!) The bakeries of Kathmand keep us well fed and we import beer for more tolerable hangovers. Life is good.