Well, a new day always seems to make things seem better, and today was no exception. We started walking at 7 AM and walked all the way to Chame, arriving at 5 PM. We stopped for breakfast around 8:30 and I mistakenly ordered 2 orders of eggs, so I got 4 fried eggs and french toast. Shari ate about half an egg (her stomach was much worse than mine) and I ended up eating all the rest. It actually tasted pretty good (the french toast was different than ours, but not bad). It was also a little bit cooler today and the hills didn't seem as steep. We went through three check points where they checked Nar and the boys' passports. The first two checks were done by the local police, but the 3rd was done by the army (with uniforms and guns).
The place we are in tonight is much nicer and cleaner. The room is brick for the outside walls and new wood for the inside walls, and the toilet is very clean. I took a shower and it was very nice (much better than last night's shower). We are going to eat around 7 PM and then I'm going right to bed. We are actually one day ahead of our schedule because we hiked so long today.
I bought 2 rolls of toilet paper from the store across the street from our tea house and it was "highway robbery" - 70 Rupees a roll. We are paying only 120 Rupees for our room tonight and Shari paid only 30 Rupees a roll yesterday. (I actually think they made a mistake, and it was supposed to be 70 Rupees for the 2 rolls). Oh well, you can't get by without toilet paper.
Another interesting thing I saw here was a "mini saw mill." I passed some men sawing logs and was struck anew how much we take for granted. Everything is done by hand here. They cut down the trees with a hand saw, and then saw it into boards. Two men were cutting a tree trunk into boards about 4 inches by 6 inches by 10 feet with a double hand saw and the boards were unbelievably straight. Then we saw other men carrying the boards on their backs to wherever they needed to go.
The hiking today was also nice because the trail was much cleaner - less trash, less mules and therefore less droppings. It looked cleaner and smelled cleaner. Also, the scenery after lunch reminded me of home. There were some trees with red leaves, lots of pine trees and dead leaves on the path with the river rushing by below us and big tree-covered mountains around us. It looked like the Canadian Rockies, or out west in the States.
It had rained last night, so the air was clear this morning and we got some nice views of Annapurna with all the snow on top of the peaks. You really need to be here to appreciate the scenery. Pictures are hard to take because you lose the perspective of everything together if you try to capture the details of anything, but you lose the details if you just take distance shots.
4/25: We planned to have a shorter trekking day today so we decided not to start until 8 AM. Nar recommended we eat breakfast in our tea house because there wouldn't be any good places along the way. We did stop for lunch about one hour before Pisang, but I just had a candy bar, orange soda, a couple of coconut cookies and a few pieces of Nar's chilis (very hot) that he put on his noodles.
It was clear when we first started, so we got good views of the Annapurna Mountains today. The Nepalese section of the Himalayan Mountains includes eight of the world's fourteen "eight-thousanders" (as mountaineers refer to peaks over 8,000 meters/26,247 feet). Also eight of the world's ten highest peaks are here. Everest is at 8,848 meters/29,028 feet and there are four Annapurna peaks - the highest is 6,501 meters/21,329 feet.
We are staying at the Maya Guest House in Pisang. We are at about 10,500 feet, and tomorrow we will trek to Manang at 11,614 feet. We will have to stay there for 2 nights because once we reach 10,000 feet we need a rest day. We can then ascend only 1,000 feet per day after Manang, so we will stop at 3 places before we go over the Thorung La Pass (17,769 feet0). We had a pretty conservative schedule and we will go very slowly, so hopefully I won't get altitude sickness.
There are about 4 groups of people who all seem to end up at the same place every night - two young women from Australia (Tara and Vanessa), Manu and Elsa from France, a German couple, and three men from India and all their guides and porters. We are getting to know them a bit as well as getting to know more about Nar, Singa and Pratik. It's the best part of the trip - the people. We are learning about life in Nepal, which is very hard. It's a very poor country with almost non-existant health facilities and a poor educational system, but the people are very nice.
Elsa and Manu are two friends from France who are trekking the Annapurna Circuit together. Manu is a software engineer and he lives about 5 kilometeres outside of Paris. Elsa has been working in marketing for Nestle, but will start a new job for Decathalon (the same stores we have back home) at the beginning of June. She has been living in Paris, but will get a new apartment outside the city when she returns home. We hope to visit them when we get to Paris.
Their guide's name is Mingma and we sometimes call him Mr. Why Not because he says "Why Not" to most suggestions we make. Their porter is Jingbu.
I showed Singa and Pratik and a few other guides and porters my MP3 player, my radio and my Lingo device. Joshua gave me the Lingo for Christmas and it tells world time, does language translations, is a calculator and a metric and currency converter. It has a full keyboard so Singa was showing me how he spells his full name and I showed him Shari's and my names. Singa has been to school and speaks some English and knows some math, and he had a great time using all the features of the Lingo. Pratik taught himself to speak English, and he speaks it pretty well. Everyone also like the radio and MP3 player and they all listened to some music for awhile.
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