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Entry 14 of 20 | show all | print this entry |
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[the following is from my personal journal and was written during the annapurna circuit trek that tam and i finished yesterday, november 10th.]
day 3, nov. 1st - 3:20 pm: we've finished the first four days of the trek (as described in my lonely planet trekking guide) in three days. from here on out we'll follow the same schedule as the book as altitude gain becomes more important than horizontal distance. we're at about 2700 m, having climbed almost 2 km in three days while covering about 63 km of terrain. on our first day i pushed my body harder than i ever have in my whole life and scared the shit out of myself by almost collapsing only 500 m from our final destination. my heart rate just jumped suddenly and i felt woozy. i had to sit down and it took about 1/2 an hour for my heart rate to get back to normal for being at rest. at first i was scared that i was having a heart attack or a stroke or something major. there was a funny moment (in hindsight...) when tam gasped and pointed at my right side. my first thought was that my shirt was soaked with blood...i'm not sure how that would have been possible...bleeding out my nipples or armpits? tam was actually pointing at a beautiful caterpillar that was crawling on the tree right beside me...! when i finally felt good enough to stand (after eating chocolate and emergency salt replacement powder (blackcurrant flavour!) mixed in with my water, both provided by tam)
we walked into jagat, tam kindly carrying my pack. i felt weak all night and part of the next morning. by lunch i felt much better and today i feel back to normal. tam took a picture of me while i was sitting down trying to recover...it might seem rude, but i'm glad he did. it gives me a quick visual reminder of the danger in going too far. we hadn't planned on having such a hardcore day. we got to what my guide said was the end of day one at 11 am (having left besi sahar at 6 am), had lunch, and then decided to continue on. jagat seemed like a
reasonable spot to aim for on the map...but i guess not. we gained a strange kind of respect from the porters and guides we talked to at our hotel about where we'd come from that morning, carrying our own packs...but it was easy not to let it go to my head considering what i felt like. i was worried that part of my collapse was related to the water purification tablets i'm using because of a gurgling or fizzing sensation that rose up from the middle of my belly just before my heart freaked out. i was paranoid about it all day yesterday. but it's become clear today that the tablets aren't to be suspected and that really i just hit a wall in a way i've never done before with physical activity. obviously, i've been careful with myself the last two days and will continue to be. i don't even know where to start in describing the
terrain...it seems almost impossible to get it right. it's beautiful and awe inspiring and magical and peaceful all at the same time. i'm too tired to attempt to describe it any further tonight...i've been taking lots of photos though. i had planned to write more and more
frequently...but it's hard not to just eat dinner and go to bed after a long day of hiking.
day 6, nov. 4th - 11:50 am: today was a short day because of the high altitude...we gained about 400 m over 7 km taking us to about 4500 m. both tam and i feel very good and have no signs of altitude sickness. this is fairly remarkable as we've taken no rest days so far to acclimatize...we simply haven't needed to. the only way i can explain this is that we spent about a week in tibet at 3700 m+ and did all of our hard acclimatizing in lhasa. we left tibet about a week and a half ago and spent the minimum amount of time possible before leaving for the trek so as not to get used to oxygen rich air...! we've also been careful to gain altitude at a reasonable rate. we're now sitting at the bottom of the high pass that we're going to
attempt to go over tomorrow (assuming that we sleep well enough at this altitude tonight). it's a bit nerve wracking to think about our day tomorrow...we climb straight up about 900 m to 5416 m (the highest i will have ever been in my life) and then go down 1600 m to muktinath.
the descent will be great for the heart and lungs but hard on the joints. i know that the climb is going to be long and hard and i'm trying not to dwell on it. tam and i have both agreed that if we run into trouble we'll retreat to the high camp at 4800 m and see how we feel. there will be snow tomorrow in the pass but there are so many people doing the trek that i'm not worried about it...and i'm well equipped. when i was in the annapurna conservation area six years ago there was already snow at 2700 m...but that was in february at ghorepani on the other side. there's no snow in thorung phedi at 4500 m.
let me make another attempt at describing some of the scenery. we started out in fields of terraced ride paddies and semi-tropical forests. the colours are all bright greens, yellows, and oranges. the trail usually runs along ridges above various river valleys. the rivers themselves
are basically tumbling out of the mountains and are almost continually rapids. the water is a light, milky blue, almost like liquid silver. waterfalls are everywhere (some small, some massive) falling from cliff tops or springing from cliff sides. there were moments in the lowlands where it all looked like paradise. as we went up things started to become more familiar to my canadian eyes...pine forests and the coloured leaves of autumn. the colours here are all dark greens, and muted oranges and reds. slowly as we climbed higher and higher the trees gave way to scrub brush. it becomes quite dry at around 3500 m, the trail all dusty and the landscape more uniform, everything all brown, beige, and grey. tam and i agreed that by the time we got to the village of manang we felt like we were back in tibet, but without all the hassle. this feeling came from both the landscape and the culture...northern nepal is full of tibetans. prayers wheels and prayer flags are everywhere. eventually even the scrub brush starts to give way to rock and scree slopes. vegetation stops being able to grow and a kind of beautiful bleakness starts to take over. throughout all of this are various glimpses of the annapurna range...sharp peaks and brilliantly white snow. soon i'll be close enough to them to see the spine they form across nepal separating south asia from the arid
plateau of tibet.
1:50 pm: i forgot to write about something interesting that happened on our second day. thinking back, it feels like the second day was one of the hardest, that the climbs were more
difficult and often wasted...which is to say, climbing over things instead of up things. at the foot of the longest, hardest climb (just before reaching the village of tal) a group of maoists had set up a table. the maoists have been active in nepal for a long time as an armed guerrilla movement, but apparently recently they've entered into some sort of ceasefire power brokering agreement with the government. politics in nepal are complicated in that it's technically a theocracy, the king of nepal supposedly being an incarnation of the hindu god
vishnu. for a while now there's been an active pro-democracy movement with which the maoists have played a game of simultaneously supporting and criticizing as not going for enough. there was a bombing in kathmandu in august perpetrated by a previously unknown maoist splinter group, probably upset at their former brethren for selling out and getting too cozy with the government. my aunt linda had told me the story of how she had encountered a couple of maoist 'fundraisers' on a trek several years ago when they were still an active guerrilla group occasionally attacking police stations and bombing rural airport runways. there were two men, one who spoke very good english, was extremely polite, and who asked for a 1000 rupee 'donation'. the other man stood quietly in the background holding an AK-47. naturally, they provided a receipt in case my aunt should come across any other
'fundraisers'. there were no assault rifles on display at the table the maoists had set up near tal. it would have very much contravened whatever agreement they have with the government. we were told they were collecting a trekking tax and asked us how far we were going...we answered honestly that we were doing the circuit and were told the tax would be 2000 rupees each. after some arguing, the man doing the talking, with excellent english and a polite manner, brought it down to 1500 each. we paid grudgingly. it wasn't apparent what they would do if we refused to pay...probably nothing, their hands tied by their newfound stature. we paid anyway just wanting to avoid a confrontation and get on with the trek. after talking to other trekkers later we learned that the tax is actually 100 rupees per day. this hadn't been explained to us, but the 2000 and 1500 amounts now made more sense: at
first the maoist considered the annapurna circuit to be a 20 day trek and then conceded that maybe we could do it in 15. some people told us that they lied and said they were only going as far as jomsom (9-11 days) and so paid less and one man told us he just walked through
without paying. he said that he told them that he would pay under threat of force, if, as he put it, they showed themselves to be terrorists. in absence of the threat of violence he refused to pay. his attitude is perhaps understandable but might have the effect of confirming to the maoists that they'll never get anything done without violence. it was strange for me to be face to face with left wing revolutionaries in an antagonistic sort of way considering my own
politics. i wanted to sit down and have a chat with them about why they chose perhaps the most twisted of left revolutionary schools of thought as their intellectual underpinnings...but it just would have been condescending and self-serving. in my opinion maoism is post-stalinist
and anti-marxist. mao openly admired stalin (before china's falling out with russia) and accepted some of stalin perversions of marxist thought, like the idea that it's possible to have 'socialism in one country', an obvious rationalization of the ultimate failure of the russian revolution and stalin's counterrevolutionary power grab and subsequent purges. maoism is anti-marxist in that if marxism's greatest strength lies in its analysis of the forces behind social and historical change (historical materialism) and its criticism of the development of capitalism, maoism spends a great deal of time trying to rationalize away the problem of a semi-feudal countryside jumping straight past capitalism to industrial communism. china suffered horribly under maoism and mismanaged collectivized agriculture until deng xiaoping essentially threw it out and introduced capitalism. chinese people suffer still...but more and more in the same way that rest of the world does under capitalism. i can understand why leftist movements in rural areas might find maoism appealing...but it's a theoretical boondoggle that provides too simple answers to very complex problems, not to mention its tendency to dissolve into self-destructive violence, murdering 'intellectuals' and anyone else deemed culturally inappropriate. a trekking guide told us that there's another maoist
checkpoint in ghorepani now collecting from people coming down from jomsom. those trekkers that lied about the duration of the their trek may find their receipts to be useless in ghorepani. ours should get us through without argument, although tam and i agreed that we're not giving them anymore money regardless.
day 9, nov. 7 - 4:45 pm: it was two days ago now that we crossed the thorung la but it still
resonates through every moment since then. it's hard to describe just how emotional it was to be standing at the top after an evening and morning wondering whether i could actually do it. tam and i both had moments on the way up where we felt doubt creeping in, where we weren't sure that we could handle the altitude or the effort required to get us to the pass. it's funny to think that the pass is actually the lowest point between the mountains! crossing the pass is something that hundreds of people do every day during the height of the trekking
season (oct-nov), but somehow knowing that doesn't lessen the sense of accomplishment. i don't know that i've ever done anything else as physically and mentally challenging in my entire life. i won't go so far to as to call it 'spiritual' but as i stood at the pass, my eyes
tearing up, i ruffled some of the nearby prayer flags and tried to let go of everything that i've been holding in or holding on to.
it's a strange sight to see dozens of people scattered across a barren landscape of rock and snow all slowly shuffling along the same faint trail, putting one foot in front of the other with such deliberate, painstaking effort. it looks like everyone's trying to make their way through a sea of molasses when actually it's the thinness of the air that makes it so difficult to move quickly. there simply isn't enough oxygen to do anything other than plod along with an oxen's gait. it becomes a kind of meditation...finding the point at which heart, lungs, mind, and body all work together given the environmental conditions. to go too slow is to lose to ability to carry on; to go too quickly is to overload the heart and risk exhaustion and collapse. finding the place where it all works and then putting one foot it front of the other over and over and over again is the only way forward. it results in a certain emptiness of the mind that meditation often strives for.
we went up about 1 km over about 3 km in 3 1/2 hours to get to the pass...but i only know this in retrospect...i lost all sense of time while climbing. the descent from the pass to the village of muktinath is shockingly steep, dropping about 1600 m over a few kilometres. it
was delightfully easy on the heart and lungs, but extremely hard on the muscles and joints of the legs. muktinath is at an altitude of 3800 m, which is quite high...but after two nights of sleeping over 4000 m and climbing up to 5416 m it seemed like an oxygen rich paradise. what made it even better was that we stayed at hotel bob marley complete with rasta rock breakfast, rasta tea, and bob cake. naturally, the same reggae cd was played over and over while we were there. other amenities included gas heated shower, pool table, and charcoal brazier under the dinner table to keep the legs warm. i don't know how anyone could stay
anywhere else in muktinath. since then we've hiked to kagbeni which is the furthest anyone can go into the dry tibet-like region of upper mustang without special permits. the near desert extended all the way down to jomsom, the administrative headquarters of the region (complete with airport and banks). so far the trek on this side of the pass (and it's hard not to put everything in terms of before and after the thorung la) has been less impressive. thanks to jomsom, much of the trail so far has been expanded into a road, meaning that we have to
deal with trucks and motorcycles while hiking. as well, the river valley that we follow down this side (the deepest in the world apparently) is a giant wind tunnel, the wind blowing up...it becomes tiring to fight against it very quickly. the valley has narrowed here at kalopani and so hopefully the wind will cease to be such an annoyance. the landscape had moved from desert to pine and cedar forests...and will continue to become more lush as we descend. it's
hard for me to gauge how much being past the pass has affected my mindset, whether being past what we spent a week building up to has made this side of the trek a bit anti-climactic. maybe it really just is more developed and less remote...but i remember from six years ago
how beautiful it is at poon hill. i'm still happy to be here and to still be doing this...there are still things to look forward to on thetrek...like dinner...i'm starving.
[that's all that i wrotewhile i was actually on the trek. i think it might possibly be the most
amazing thing i've ever done. it's already starting to blur together a bit, although there are moments that i will remember vividly forever. there's something about the mountains in nepal...i'll have to come back again sometime, maybe trek in langtang in spring when the flowers are in bloom. on our way down from jomsom we heard about two french people
who died climbing the pass a few days before we did (although the details are sketchy and we heard nothing about it in thorung phedi). tam and i had a hard time understanding how they could have let it happen...either they were being cowboys or they were totally out of
touch with their own bodies. i figure they must have been suffering heavily from altitude sickness in thorung phedi and decided to try the pass anyway. maybe there are details that i'm unaware of, but tam and i always held in our minds that it was ok to turn back at any moment, with any sense of danger...and we supported each other in that knowledge. it's strange to think of the euphoria of reaching the pass and to then think of it as a place of dying...but i guess they're not the first...or the last.
for interest's sake here's a breakdown of our trek by day...you can follow along using this map: http://www.guyshachar.com/eastories/anapurna.jpg
the distances in kilometres are very rough estimates made by me using my fingers to measure distances on my map.
day 1 (oct 30th): besi sahar (820m) to jagat (1370m) - 30 km
day 2 (oct 31st): jagat (1370m) to dharapani (1960m) - 18 km
day 3 (nov 1st): dharapani (1960m) to chame (2710m) - 15 km
day 4 (nov 2nd): chame (2710m) to humde (3420m) - 20 km
day 5 (nov 3rd): humde (3420m) to yak kharka (4110m) - 16 km
day 6 (nov 4th): yak kharka (4110m) to thorung phedi (4420m) - 7 km
day 7 (nov 5th): thorung phedi (4420m) to muktinath (3800m) via thorung la (5416m) - 10 km
day 8 (nov 6th): muktinath (3800m) to jomsom (2760m) - 20 km
day 9 (nov 7th): jomsom (2760m) to kalopani (2530m) - 22 km
day 10 (nov 8th): kalopani (2530m) to tatopani (1190m) - 25 km
day 11 (nov 9th): tatopani (1190m) to ghorepani (2750m) - 10 km
day 12 (nov 10th): ghorepani (2750m) to nayapul (1070m) via poon hill (3210m) - 17 km
12 days is quite fast to do the circuit. it's not a race or anything, but it was hard not to feel a bit proud when guides that we talked to were visibly impressed. keep in mind that we took no rest days to acclimatize and so our schedule was a bit more compact.]
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