Stairs, stairs, and more stairs. Oh yeah, and the Himalayas.

The night before our first trek out of Pokhara, we went out for dinner and ate wild boar curry at a happy hour at a bar we found which was playing live music and offered lounge chairs on the terrace overlooking the lake. It was dark, but we could still see little lights on the other side of the water of families who live in these incredibly remote areas on mountains. We also accidentally ordered two drinks each, but c'est la vie. Then we ordered one more because it was still happy hour and a "dirty banana" sounded like a really good investment (it was). Pokhara is a charming little area, and much, much cleaner than Kathmandu. They apparently also have power outages, but the hotel we got uses a back-up generator for those several hours per day. Despite the fact that it sounded like there was a truck waiting outside our window to take Dumbo back to the jungle, it was still nice. It's almost like a beach town, with a lot of tourists and a strip of hotels, restaurants and shopping, all next to the enormous Fewa lake. A little more laid-back than Kathmandu, much less crowded and much less polluted. We liked Kathmandu a lot, but I could feel my throat starting to react to the extreme amounts of exhaust you constantly breathe in there, along with the incense and ... occasional monkey poop. The weather was beautiful that day, so of course we went out without our umbrellas and decided to go for a post-dinner stroll. And of course it started raining exactly when we were about to turn around, about 15 minutes away from the hotel. It came down, though. The Hindu gods were just urinating all over us. It didn't let up, so Seth and I walked back to the hotel in the rain, just accepting the fact that we'd have to let the sun dry our clothes the next day on our trek. Because of course it would be sunny. Right? 

Wrong. The first day, we walked for 3.5 hours, and it came down in buckets for approximately 3. Eventually Seth and I accepted the fact that we'd have to pay too much money for a big plastic cover for our backpacks, and also that we'd have to use our Japan-level tiny umbrellas. These things were made for chiwawas, I swear. We figured out how to jerry-rig them to our backpack straps and attach a giant piece of plastic to each of our 20-pound bags, and set off.

A rare moment of less rain

The path that day was mostly dirt road for jeeps with some gravel, with pretty easy inclines and eventually amounting to 500 meters that we climbed over the course of three hours. It was a breeze (except for the whole swimming through the rain part) and we thought:"This is going to be too easy. We should have gone to Annapurna base camp, or Everest base camp! We are such good hikers." We ate lunch and dinner at our first tea house (tiny hotel area), witnessed a Buddhist ceremony performed by Tibetan sherpa monks for a reason I still don't really know but has something to do with a rite of passage maybe, then spent the night at the lodge where we ate and read books.

Rite of passage or naptime? Either one sounds pretty cool.

A few people we talked to said they were nervous about the next day. Something about stairs. We shrugged. We'd just climbed to the top of Hideyoshi Toyotomi's tower a week before, and that was eight tall floors! We can do stairs. Wrong. The next day, Reywati our guide took us to a place they call the THREE THOUSAND STAIRS. I have no idea if that number is accurate, but god did it feel like it. Try to imagine big slabs of rock. Now, imagine them in stair form. Now, imagine you are going up these stairs, and every time you think you see the end, it's not the end. Imagine doing this for FIVE HOURS. I'm being conservative here, because we hiked for about seven hours (starting around 7:30AM) and we didn't climb exactly that the entire time, but it took up a good chunk of the time. Also, because of global warming, monsoon season has not been as predictable as normal. Usually in September, the skies would be at least mostly clear and we would be able to get some kind of visual reward for hanging out on the never-ending stairclimber. But instead, we were inside a cloud. The whole time. It didn't rain as hard as the day before, but it drizzled, and we couldn't see more than about a 25ft radius from ourselves. Reywati is very kind. He's about 5'3'' and has a body built like a soccer player (although his sport of choice is Nepal's national sport kobardi, which involves running into another team and holding your breath until you reach the finish without getting tackled to the ground, but I digress). The point I'm trying to make is that this is extremely easy for him. He's not even wearing hiking shoes, but rather shoes that resemble crocks which he uses to walk through water and kick heavy rocks into a safer place for us to step on while holding an umbrella (and while we wobble on rocks across streams). After the first two hours or so, Seth and I wanted to fall over and attack the next donkey we saw and eat the whole thing. He hardly broke a sweat. He looked so bored going at what I've named his "tourist pace," but didn't seem to mind and has been carrying a bunch of apples and pomegranates for the two fat Americans to munch on for when we start to whine that our feet hurt.

Even though the path is mostly stairs, we were really surprised at how well-maintained it is. Reywati explained that it's the "main highway" from the bottom town of Noyopool to the Annapurna base camp. Then how, I asked myself at first, do they actually make BUILDINGS of concrete with restaurants and beds and tin roofs and toilets (sometimes)?? Well, my question was quickly answered after we passed the third group of five to ten load-bearing donkeys being herded up the mountain. Basically what happens is they each get about 60kg (130-ish lbs.) of stuff, and then a guy in flip flops walks behind them, whipping them with a stick or a whip if they take a break when they're not supposed to.

Badass donkeys coming down asshole stairs after a trip up asshole mountain

Also, porters. Porters are guys who carry lots of weight (up to 45 or 90lbs depending on the area) for any purpose. You can hire a porter if you're hiking and you don't want to carry all your stuff and he'll take your backpack, or if you're building something like a guest house on the mountain and the donkeys can't be trusted to carry the enormous windows because they might break them. So how, you might ask, do porters carry these heavy loads up the mountain? Well, that's a great question. They strap the loads to their foreheads. At some point the cost-benefit ratio of putting a backpack around your waist with the straps doesn't cut it anymore, so they do it the traditional Nepali way: they have a basket, or a backpack, or in some cases a big glass window pane, bring a strap around it and fix the strap on their foreheads (sometimes with a folded towel under it to make it more comfortable), then just bend over a little and voila. Don't try this at home kids: foreigners trying to do it have broken their necks, since any movement in a particular direction can literally paralyze you. It's amazing to see and I know it's their job, but I'm really glad we didn't hire a porter because I would feel like a total asshole watching someone else carry all my stuff by their forehead. The tops of my hips are starting to bruise from my own 20 pounds of burden, but I definitely don't want to triple or quadruple that onto someone else for my own comfort. Usually though, it appears porters graduate to guides like Reywati, whose job now consists of babysitting foreigners on long hikes to see outstanding views and getting free room and board on said hikes, which beats some other jobs.

Badass porter and Seth with slightly less badass 20-lb. backpack (also notice asshole stairs)

Anyway, this morning we woke up in Ghorepani at 3:45 in preparation for a clear sky to watch the sunrise from Poon Hill. We had climbed 1,300 meters the previous day, then we hiked another 400 by the light of the moon for an hour to witness a view of a section of the Himalayas with about 50 to 75 other tourists. It was spectacular, and perfect timing for the only clear skies we've seen thus far, in all three days we've been hiking. We saw Annapurna 1, Fishtail, Dhaulagiri 1 (which is over 8,000 meters) and several other mountains I really couldn't remember if my life depended on it.

WE MADE IT TO MOTHER F-ING POON HILL

We must have asked poor Reywati the names of these mountains about 47 times, but eventually we just took a video of him telling us the names again so we wouldn't have to ask. We could have seen even more if there had been even fewer clouds, but we took what we could get. It was the reason Seth wanted to come to Nepal, and thank Buddha (or Vishnu, or the Shinto kamis or whomever) he got it. I did a timelapse photography of the sunrise and it turned out really well.

Then we walked down 400 meters back to Ghorepani and had breakfast. And then, guess what?? We went up another hill, for an hour, and got to the same elevation as Poon Hill. Rephrased: This morning, at 4:30, we walked up 400 meters, saw the sunrise, went back down, ate breakfast, AND THEN WE WENT BACK UP. Oh sorry, THEN WE WENT DOWN. Very far. For two and a half hours. Oh yeah. THEN WE WENT UP. For another half hour. My butt muscles are so pissed off. And so are my feet, from going downhill for so long.

So, so tired.

Map of Poon Hill Hike (which we are doing, in case I did not make that clear)

And that brings us to our guesthouse, which, as we've officially come to expect from Nepal, has very steep stairs. Up to the room, then back down a hill and up a hill again to the dining room for dinner. Then back down the second hill and up if the first you forgot anything (phone charger), like some kind of cruel joke. I can't believe I will be doing this again tomorrow. But! We shall be rewarded at the end of the day with hot springs.

Some observations on the point of view I have acquired:

- I get excited when I get to sit on a toilet, instead of squat over it. If it flushes (instead of having to scoop water out of a bucket and doing a manual flush), well, I feel like a queen. Especially when I remember to bring toilet paper. Last night we had our own private toilet and gas powered-shower, and it was glorious even without the sink. Oh, but we had to turn on the gas out of an enormous gas container, then one of us had to hold a button because it was broken while the other showered, and vice versa, and then we realized we didn't have towels and the room was freezing, so we had to use our sarongs then hang them up to dry. But still... private toilet.
- Even here, in the foothills of Nepal, in a village that can only be reached by foot, yak or donkey, THE BEDS ARE STILL MORE COMFORTABLE THAN IN KOREA. I would just like to say, that's pretty sad, Korea. Maybe some food for thought.
- New foods I love: yak cheese, Tibetan bread, roasties (big fancy hash browns), and curds with fried things.
- The caste system is very prominent here, and effects everything. This probably doesn't surprise a lot of worldly people, but Reywati explained that since he's a Brahman and the highest caste, he will sacrifice a billygoat (or several) during their holiday Gadhimai in October, whereas lower castes will sacrifice a yak which they can share with other families. (In Gadhimai, animals are sacrificed to appease the gods, then eaten. We're talking lots and lots of animals.) Also he didn't really understand what was going on in the Tibetan Sherpa ceremony because it wasn't his caste, and different castes practice different forms of the same religion. There are 104 castes in Nepal. It's all very fascinating.
- It's totally normal now for us to see a chicken or ten just kinda wandering around outside a restaurant or a store or guesthouse. Also, cows. Not in the mountains, but cows hang out everywhere in Pokhara. Goats, donkeys sometimes ducks and buffalo, roosters waking us up (whenever they want, not just at dawn): these are all completely normal parts of this surreal life we have now gotten pretty used to.

Next time we write it will be done from a hotel room in Pokhara, in two nights. I'll have another update then! :) Seth slept through the entire making of this one so maybe he'll have more to say then.

And now, a few more pictures...

There is a mountain there.

Holy cow, right??

Pano shot with a lost explanation of which one is Anapurna II etc. somewhere in my memory card

Seth in his hiking boots and Reywati in his crocs, on the way down from Poon Hill (dat sun tho)

Bhaktapur and Paradise in Pokhara

Good news everyone! Tomorrow we will set out on a trek near the Annapurna Mountian Range. The trek is called Poon Hill and it's super popular among backpackers. Our itinerary is as follows:

Friday: fly to Pokhara
Saturday through Wedensday: trekking from Mayapul, Ulerig, Ghorepani/Poon Hill, Shinadanda, then back to Mayapul and Pokhara
Thursday through Sunday: sightseeing etc. in Pokhara and Chitwan National Park
Monday: Take a bus back to Kathmandu
Tuesday (the 22nd): off to Hanoi

We are really excited and relieved the rest of the trip was planned for us by our trusty hotel owner and his trekking experience and connections. Our wallets took a beating, but that's why we're on vacation! When we get back Seth wants to go see the Himalayas in a plane! We'll see how the weather is, and how our wallets are feeling then.

So now, the past few days in a nutshell:
To recap Thursday, we went to Bhaktapur. Similar to the day trip we took to Patan, Bhaktapur is another ancient city which we're super glad we saw, even though there's a lot of tourist-specific pricing. The buildings and temples were impressive and beautiful. They are medieval in origin, and Bhaktapur acted as the captial/central hub of Nepal from the 8th to the 15th century. Our cab driver, who we met taking us to Patan, drove us to Bhaktapur and gave us some tips on the city. He explained that since the Nepalese government is fairly corrupt (and what government isn't nowadays?), it jacks up the prices for tourist spots all over the country. So, like before at Pashupati, it cost a certain amount per head to get in. Our driver, Assok, told us how to get around these rules and get into the city, undetected, which was super cool of him, since we were trying NOT to bleed money.

Patrice in front of a super old temple

We wandered down an alley or 10 before we got too lost. We came up to an alley that put us right next to the entry gate: much too close to not be seen. So, we sighed, and turned around to start walking the way we came, and then heard a "psst." We turned around and one of the elders sitting on platform motioned for us to go just around the corner. The 5-year-old nearby old confirmed his instructions with a nod of his head. The people of Bhaktapur had come to our aid!!

So, we made it in, no problem, and then walked through the city, meandering and taking pictures of all the cool old buildings and streets. Unfortunately, we turned down the wrong street for some street samosas and missed the gate (those samosas were like a damn delicious Nepali poison apple). A guy stopped us and said we needed a ticket, so we said, "ok, we'll just leave." We then walked the perimeter of the city trying to find our new way in, but eventually found our way back to Assok at the taxi spot. We were pretty defeated and were ready to go back to Kathmandu. Assok could see that we needed a morale boost from getting caught, so he suggested going south to see the pottery market. So, we did.

Scenes from Bhaktapur

Even more cautious than before, we snuck through even more alleys to find it. I guess the potters hadn't set everything up yet, but there was an old man making clay bowls on his spinning wheel. It took him about 30 seconds to make one and then start the other. An efficiency unequalled. We walked another 50 feet up the hill to Taumadhi square. Like nervous little squirrels, we peeked around the corner expecting a gaurd, but...there was no one there. But there were the most impressive temples I'd seen thus far. I forgot to mention, the whole morning the sky was overcast, but by the time we got to Taumadhi square, things started to clear up. We could see some of the mountains that cup the valley and had an even better view from the top of the largest temple:

(Patrice provided for scale)

We walked to the cafe next door and ordered lunch: our beloved masala tea, and aloo paratha (like a quesadilla with curds) and the other was paratha (fried naan/bread) with a curry soup. Of course, it was the best food ever. So, with our bellies full, the sun shine doing its thing, the incredible sights and ambiance to keep our zen thing groovin', we quickly got the morale boost we needed. 

We then hopped back in the cab with Assok and drove back to Kathmandu. While there, we found out that one of the guys who always says hi to us in the morning was the owner of the hostel. Not only that, but he also had a trekking business. So, we stepped into his office and set everything up in about an hour. Awesome! The remainder of the evening was spent with our new friend, Saurav, who took us out to try some momos (like really good dumplings) and tongba. Tongba is a lot like Argentinian mate (a tea), where there are ground up leaves and you put hot water in them and then drink the liquid out of a straw that has a filter on the bottom. Except tongba has millet, and it's alcohol! It was delicious, tasted a little like Japanese sake, and would have been even better if it had been cold outside. Anyway, Saurav is the cousin of my Aunt Patti's friend and colleague. He's a really cool dude, and we like him, so you can too! He too, as it turns out, runs a travel agency, so if anybody interested in going anywhere, we know a guy. The name of his company is Caligo. He's on facebook.

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Drinking Tungba!

So that takes us to today. We got up this morning and left about half our possessions in the care of Trekker's Home, the amazing hostel to which we shall return when we spend our last night in Kathmandu. This way our bags only weigh about 16 pounds, as opposed to the 35 we had before. Anyway, this morning we took a plane to Pokhara -- oh I'm sorry, did I say we "took a plane"? I meant we climbed into a tin can with a bunch of Koreans out of a really sketchy domestic airport. Actually it wasn't that bad. The plane was 3 seats across and had a really nice flight attendant who happily gave us a caramel, peanuts and fanta! Also, and this is very important for people who have known Seth for a long time: the name of the airline was Yeti Airlines. No joke. The yeti is supposed to have been "seen" or "tracked" in Nepal so I guess a smart person decided to capitalize, and what a great decision. I also wanted to share that the first woman of three patting me down at the airport -- there was no metal detector -- found my bag and said, "This no. What is this." I said, "it's an ostomy bag." "Money bag? No." She indicated I would have to take it off. "No." I said. "POOP BAG." Confused, and possibly a little terrified, she waved me through.

The views of Nepal from the plane were breathtaking. I mean wow. The lush, green mountains all peaked right into the clouds. Some of the water was extra blue. Sometimes we were flying just above the elevation of the mountain peaks. 

Pictures obviously do no justice.

The hotel is $35/night and it's the biggest, fanciest one we've seen on our entire trip. We have a guide who picked us up from the airport and took us here. His name is Reywati. HE IS A SHERPA. Look, the only thing I think of when I think of Sherpas is Owen Wilson's character on Zoolander who is walking through his reallly awesome house and introduces Zoolander (Ben Stiller) and their friend to his Sherpa buddies, wrapped up in really warm clothes and chilling together. So to meet a real Sherpa and know we're going to be hanging out with him for the next 5 or 6 days and he's going to be telling us about all the effing amazing things we're seeing, well that just makes me really stoked. In fact, as I write this I am sitting on the balcony at our hotel and I can see an amazing screensaver-worthy mountain poking up behind the green one in front of me.

EDIT: Reywati is a Brahman, which is the highest Hindu caste. It sounds cooler to have a Sherpa, but is more realistic to have a highly-educated person who can speak English. Oh well, we really like him so he can be whatever the hell he wants.

Don't mind the awkward infrastructure, it's actually really nice here.

 I saw Reywati walking up to the hotel. I pointed out the mountain and he told me the name: Fish Tail, and that it's 6,000 meters high. He knows all the elevations we'll be walking to (up to 3,210 meters) and apparently all the names, too. He's been to Everest Base Camp, up to 5,000 meters (of course he knows the exact number but I definitely don't remember) and he doesn't need oxygen at that elevation because, and I want to be very clear here: he is a Sherpa. His English is great. We took him out to lunch and then he showed us around a temple on an island on Fewa Lake, where a monk put rice with the red powder on our heads again.

 Fewa lake, by the way, is also gorgeous. We have gone from beautiful, polluted chaos in Kathmandu directly to paradise in Pokhara. In fact, if the name "Paradise in Pokhara" isn't the title of something, then nobody has been paying attention.

Well, we're off tomorrow! Not sure how much wifi we'll be getting on Poon Hill but Seth and I will be sure to keep a record of what we do.