We ended up booking a four-day trek with the travel agency at our hotel, and we
piled into the car with our guide to head toward the Kathmandu valley
rim for some trekking. It wasn't what we originally had planned for our
grand trekking adventure, but hey, plans change when people get the
mother of all beat-downs from Tibet.
We drove about an hour from Kathmandu out to Sundarijal. The goal for the first day was to cover 16km in about five hours until we arrived at Chisapani.
The first three and half hours were hell. All we did was climb continuously upward on uneven terrain and it was positively boiling. It felt like being on a never-ending StairMaster in a sauna with four days worth of supplies strapped to my very sweaty back. It was hard to even enjoy the scenery as I had to keep my eyes glued to the ground to make sure I didn't twist an ankle or anything. But I did enjoy the random animal passing by. Why, hello lunch. Beef or chicken - I can't choose.
I wish. Our lunch consisted of a soggy tomato sandwich and a croissant, all washed down with a mango-like juice. I've never done so much physically on such crappy food, and my body was feeling the difference.
Anyway, I figured that if we were in too much pain, we could always just pick the marijuana plants that were growing along the side of the path and smoke it. Kidding.
Chisapani turned out to be teeny tiny - just a collection of a few worn down hotels with no more than a handful of rooms each. There wasn't anything to do or buy so we stocked up on toilet paper and water and sat about twiddling our thumbs. It was only mid-afternoon so it wasn't like we could go to bed so what do you do when you've finished your trek in a one-cow town (literally)? Go for a walk, of course! But the views were totally worth it - the valley is beautiful!
After meandering about for a while, we headed back to the hotel restaurant for some dinner and then went to bed at 7:30pm. Cause that's how we roll.
That's when a group of young Nepalese bikers showed up in the middle of town and decided to party it up. Of course. They struck up quite the ruckus and didn't stop all night. I didn't think that you could have so much fun with a few cans of Pringles, some beers, and music blasting from your boombox, but what do I know? At one point, they were doing flips off of the balconies.
They kept that shit up all night until I was ready to march out there and dump some water on all of them. But for the fact that our room had no electricity so I couldn't see where I was going, and it was just as likely that we didn't have any water either. *Sigh*
We had barely gotten any sleep before it was time to get up again to head to Nagarkot. We had a lot of distance to cover - about 24km - and our guide set a hard pace. The weather wasn't as hot as the previous day, and we were making pretty good time. It wasn't as hard and a lot more interesting than the day before - the path undulated up and down, and we even had to go through a small jungle.
I even got to see a goat or two - things were looking up!
That's when everything started to slowly fall apart.
One of us started feeling pretty ill, another complained of a "burning groin," and I was about to get caught in the worst thunderstorm of my life. What started out as little raindrops in the early afternoon all of sudden broke out into torrential rain when we were less than an hour away from our hotel and as tired as I was, I had to haul ass to some shelter. It was raining so hard that I got wet through the rain poncho my guide had lent me. Insanity.
We took cover under a couple of ramshackle refreshment huts to see whether the rain would let up, but of course it didn't, so we finally just made a mad dash for it while trying to avoid getting hit by lightning. By the time we arrived at our hotel, I was soaked to the skin and shivering like mad from being so cold - all I wanted to do was take a hot shower to warm up. But of course the electricity was off at the hotel, which meant no hot water for a shower or tea.
We were all feeling pretty sorry for ourselves by then, and one of us was feeling more and more ill by the moment. Some things are just not meant to be, and we had to throw in the towel and head back to Kathmandu.
Once we were back in Kathmandu, we just focused on getting our health back. I still had my wicked cold that had me blowing my nose until I had no skin left and a cough that would cause any bystander to take one giant step back. And I was the healthy one!
We really didn't do much except count the days until our flight back home. There was one thing that we were keen on seeing before we left, and that was the Monkey Temple!
Obviously, it has the traditional temple stuff since it's a temple...
But we had seen all the temples and prayer flags and wheels before. What we hadn't seen were monkeys!
They were pretty much running around wherever they pleased and dive-bombing into their pool to cool off.
I had a lot of fun watching them, especially since I had my rabies shots, thank goodness. It would entirely be in keeping with the tone of the trip if I had gotten bit by a rabid monkey. This one looked pretty chill - monkeys that do yoga probably wouldn't bite, right?
As awesome as the monkeys were, I was ready to go home. I had been away and out of touch for over three weeks, and it felt like Christmas morning when our departure day finally came around. The power outage at Kathmandu airport, the six separate pat-downs I got on the way to the plane, the ridiculous rules at New Delhi airport and the bother of obtaining an Indian transit visa - it all felt worth it when my plane finally touched down 21 hours later at London Heathrow after leaving Kathmandu.
Damn, it felt good to be home.
We drove about an hour from Kathmandu out to Sundarijal. The goal for the first day was to cover 16km in about five hours until we arrived at Chisapani.
The first three and half hours were hell. All we did was climb continuously upward on uneven terrain and it was positively boiling. It felt like being on a never-ending StairMaster in a sauna with four days worth of supplies strapped to my very sweaty back. It was hard to even enjoy the scenery as I had to keep my eyes glued to the ground to make sure I didn't twist an ankle or anything. But I did enjoy the random animal passing by. Why, hello lunch. Beef or chicken - I can't choose.
I wish. Our lunch consisted of a soggy tomato sandwich and a croissant, all washed down with a mango-like juice. I've never done so much physically on such crappy food, and my body was feeling the difference.
Anyway, I figured that if we were in too much pain, we could always just pick the marijuana plants that were growing along the side of the path and smoke it. Kidding.
Chisapani turned out to be teeny tiny - just a collection of a few worn down hotels with no more than a handful of rooms each. There wasn't anything to do or buy so we stocked up on toilet paper and water and sat about twiddling our thumbs. It was only mid-afternoon so it wasn't like we could go to bed so what do you do when you've finished your trek in a one-cow town (literally)? Go for a walk, of course! But the views were totally worth it - the valley is beautiful!
After meandering about for a while, we headed back to the hotel restaurant for some dinner and then went to bed at 7:30pm. Cause that's how we roll.
That's when a group of young Nepalese bikers showed up in the middle of town and decided to party it up. Of course. They struck up quite the ruckus and didn't stop all night. I didn't think that you could have so much fun with a few cans of Pringles, some beers, and music blasting from your boombox, but what do I know? At one point, they were doing flips off of the balconies.
They kept that shit up all night until I was ready to march out there and dump some water on all of them. But for the fact that our room had no electricity so I couldn't see where I was going, and it was just as likely that we didn't have any water either. *Sigh*
We had barely gotten any sleep before it was time to get up again to head to Nagarkot. We had a lot of distance to cover - about 24km - and our guide set a hard pace. The weather wasn't as hot as the previous day, and we were making pretty good time. It wasn't as hard and a lot more interesting than the day before - the path undulated up and down, and we even had to go through a small jungle.
I even got to see a goat or two - things were looking up!
That's when everything started to slowly fall apart.
One of us started feeling pretty ill, another complained of a "burning groin," and I was about to get caught in the worst thunderstorm of my life. What started out as little raindrops in the early afternoon all of sudden broke out into torrential rain when we were less than an hour away from our hotel and as tired as I was, I had to haul ass to some shelter. It was raining so hard that I got wet through the rain poncho my guide had lent me. Insanity.
We took cover under a couple of ramshackle refreshment huts to see whether the rain would let up, but of course it didn't, so we finally just made a mad dash for it while trying to avoid getting hit by lightning. By the time we arrived at our hotel, I was soaked to the skin and shivering like mad from being so cold - all I wanted to do was take a hot shower to warm up. But of course the electricity was off at the hotel, which meant no hot water for a shower or tea.
We were all feeling pretty sorry for ourselves by then, and one of us was feeling more and more ill by the moment. Some things are just not meant to be, and we had to throw in the towel and head back to Kathmandu.
Once we were back in Kathmandu, we just focused on getting our health back. I still had my wicked cold that had me blowing my nose until I had no skin left and a cough that would cause any bystander to take one giant step back. And I was the healthy one!
We really didn't do much except count the days until our flight back home. There was one thing that we were keen on seeing before we left, and that was the Monkey Temple!
Obviously, it has the traditional temple stuff since it's a temple...
But we had seen all the temples and prayer flags and wheels before. What we hadn't seen were monkeys!
They were pretty much running around wherever they pleased and dive-bombing into their pool to cool off.
I had a lot of fun watching them, especially since I had my rabies shots, thank goodness. It would entirely be in keeping with the tone of the trip if I had gotten bit by a rabid monkey. This one looked pretty chill - monkeys that do yoga probably wouldn't bite, right?
As awesome as the monkeys were, I was ready to go home. I had been away and out of touch for over three weeks, and it felt like Christmas morning when our departure day finally came around. The power outage at Kathmandu airport, the six separate pat-downs I got on the way to the plane, the ridiculous rules at New Delhi airport and the bother of obtaining an Indian transit visa - it all felt worth it when my plane finally touched down 21 hours later at London Heathrow after leaving Kathmandu.
Damn, it felt good to be home.
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