A Snowy Walk At The Top Of The World; Faulty Memory Nepal
In which our narrator takes like 5,000 words to describe one sunrise.
Sometime during the night, a thick layer of ice had formed on the inside of the windows. I was asleep in a narrow single bed, wearing every item of clothing I had with me, tucked into my sleeping bag with a pile of blankets on top. Toque on my head, scarf wrapped around my neck. Each breath visible and hanging around in the air for too long. The frozen-over toilet was making funny noises, a low rattle and a kind of gasping sound, but the funniest sound of all was coming from outside.
“MISTER DAREWWW. MIIIIIIISTEEEEEER DAAAARRRREEEEEUUUUWWWWW. WAKE UP! WAKE UP!! LOOOOOK!”
I smiled, my beard making a soft crunching sound and the ice slushed around on my face. I laughed. What a disaster this had all been so far.
The voice was from a man who called himself Frank, but who certainly wasn’t really called Frank.
“Look! Look!” he screamed again. “Loooooooooooooook Mister Drew!”
His voice was coming from outside of the icy window. I started peeling off layers of blankets, wormed out of the sleeping bag, and shuffled toward the window. Through the ice, the faintest pink light could be seen desperately peeking out of the distant darkness. With some effort, I began twisting the handle on the window, shaving ice with each attempt, until finally the latch was free. The window wouldn’t budge at first, but a couple of sharp yanks on the handle sent shards of ice flying and let a blast of cold morning air into the room.
I pulled the second half of the window open and stuck my head out into the morning air. Frank was standing a floor below in his heavy coat, which was unzipped. His head and hands were bare and he puffed big white breaths as he waved and shouted good morning. He exuded both warmth and cold, stomping his feet and smiling his smile and laughing loudly. “Look!” he shouted again. “Come down!”
Surely the whole village would wake to his racket, I thought. But when Frank stopped shouting, all was still. The snow from the previous afternoon hadn’t settled, but everything was coating in a layer of glittering frost—all the windows of all the simple teahouses, all the corrugated metal on the roofs, every blade of grass in the tiny clearing where Frank was standing—a frozen scene in a little town at the top of the world.
And behind that frozen scene, the most stunning sight in the world: the crown of the Annapurna range of the Himalayas, snow-capped and reaching for—no, having reached to—the heavens, slowly being set ablaze with the rising sun. First the tallest peaks catch the reflecting orange and red, and then as the sun comes up a little more, some of the lower peaks follow, become lit, become fire and snow for a breathtaking moment. One by one, seven of the ten tallest mountains in the world revealed themselves to the day, to my gaping and uncomprehending and dumbly smiling face as I hung out of the window on the second floor of the teahouse in Ghorepani, Nepal.
I thought it would be difficult to arrive in a place like Ghorepani with as little preparation and research as I had done. I had come to Nepal for a lot of different reasons, trekking the least of them. I had to leave Lebanon to renew my visa, and one of the cheapest flight options had been—improbably—to Kathmandu (via Sharjah, on Air Arabia). This discovery prompted hasty googling, which revealed that a couple of weeks in Nepal would be cheaper than a week somewhere in Europe. It was Christmas, and travelling during Christmas in Asia always thrilled me.
My original itinerary didn’t really suit a trek. I had planned to spend a week or so in Kathmandu, the mere whisper of the name evoking mystery and magic. I wanted to wander the narrow streets, drift around pagodas and stupas, soak up the ancientness, take (now lost) photos, devour curries. I’d also previously been in contact with some animal rescue organizations who had vaguely said things like, “If you’re ever in Nepal, let us know.” I had put out some feelers about a story on working elephants in the jungly border region with India, so had set aside a few days to travel to the Chitwan area to play around with elephants. The schedule was loose, but pretty full.
Besides, most treks take a long time. The overdone and troubled Everest Base Camp trek takes two weeks. The Annapurna Base Camp trek takes about 10 days. The full Annapurna Circuit is even longer—three weeks or so—depending on how badly the altitude batters you and on how the weather cooperates in the high passes. And besides, trekking takes training. It’s intense. It’s uphill a lot of the time, and then it’s downhill—often in equal proportion to how uphill it was. And besides! There are few rewarding short treks in Nepal, most of the one-or-two days trips being described as fairly urban, or difficult to get to, or ugly, or some combination of these things. And so, I only planned for a trek in the sense of “if there was time after the elephant story for a couple of days of hiking, I might go hiking. Not trekking.” I packed running shoes and one pair of long pants and one hoodie. No jacket. No gear at all.
Then, the elephant story turned out not to take too long after all, and I found myself with a free week. I was sitting in Chitwan, sipping thick, sweet chai and writing notes, and realized I was less than a day’s terrifying bus journey to Pokhara, the sleepy town at the base of the Annapurna range from where all expeditions start. I hopped the bus the next morning, found a cheap hotel for that night, and outfitted myself on the fly for one of the world’s great treks.
I had thought this would be difficult; it wasn’t. Pokhara’s main street comprised of hotels, restaurants, and outfitters. In front of every shop stands someone purporting to be a guide or a porter. Inside every shop is someone selling the park pass and entry permit required for the trek, and offering rental everything. Within two hour of arriving, I had rented a cheap pack that would later save my life with its cheapness, a sleeping bag, a warm jacket, a windbreaker, a toque, a scarf, a flashlight, a headlamp, and more. I had also hired Frank, who was loitering around outside of the shop where I rented all of my gear.
Oh, Frank.
Frank was a porter. He was not a guide. He was very clear about this. Annapurna has strict rules on this: porters can be hired to carry your stuff but not to lead you on a trek, guides can be hired to lead you on a trek but cannot carry your stuff. The idea is to create two jobs in a high-demand industry, but I’m not convinced it works. Most people I met on the trek had only hired a porter, and Frank—despite his protestations—proved a pretty handy guide once we were on the trial. He organized all of the accommodation, found restaurants and suggested meals, and would often point at things along the way and say, “Look!” When I’d ask what I was looking at, he would repeat, “Look!”, this perhaps being the moment he was not allowed to guide.
Frank was married and had three kids under the age of nine. He was a sherpa and had worked the Everest routes for many years, but when his children we born he moved to Pokhara to work treks on the far-less-dangerous Annapurna Circuit. He had summited Everest countless times, one of the thousands of sherpas who do so without boasting, making nothing of the feat. He described it like he was heading out to the supermarket or walking the dog, not scaling the world’s tallest mountain. His English was shaky but charming, and though I only understood a quarter of what he said I found his company pleasant and reassuring. We spent four days walking together, sometimes in silence but mostly in that kind of staccato chat that happens on hikes, when most of what you are saying is to the back of someone as they clamber up a trail ahead of you. We ate all of our meals together, and he tried to show me how much easier it was to have curry and rice with your bare hands than with a spoon, a trick I never mastered.
At the time of my trip (2014), it was a requirement of the Annapurna park pass that you hire a guide or porter, or both. Some trekkers found a way around the rule and were going it alone, some mark of bravery or independence that is totally unnecessary. These treks are not so difficult as to require help. I could have carried my own sleeping bag, probably. The requirement is there to boost the local economy and to provide specifically skilled people with work opportunities. But for me that’s not the point, either. Sherpas are synonymous with Nepal, and experiencing any part of its Himalayan culture while pretending they don’t exist, while scorning their services or knowledge, is simply foolish. I chose sensibly to enrich my experience by speaking into the back of Frank, and he repaid the gesture in kind, speaking into the back of me for four hilarious days.
There are two trailheads for the Annapurna Circuit, one of which is Nayapul, about 40 kilometers from Pokhara. The outfitters who had sold me my park pass and connected me with Frank (by pointing outside and saying, “Hire him!”) arranged a car to take us to the gate of Annapurna Conservation Area, where permits are collected and maps distributed. Frank arranged the permits and spread a map out on the ground, where we squatted and he showed me our route.
We planned to walk five or six hours this first day to one of the low-lying villages. It was, Frank explained, a bit too late in the day to tackle Ulleri, a small town at the base of the first real ascent. Frank recommended the town of Tikhedhunga, and we set out for there casually.
I had left my suitcase at the hotel in Pokhara and was carrying only a small backpack with my camera and a couple of days’ worth of clothes. I insisted on bringing my tripod for early-morning or late-night shots, imagining the stars spread out across the sky in the thin air, bright and perfectly framed by jagged peaks. The tripod was attached to one side of the rental backpack with some bungee-type fasteners that were impossible to completely tighten, so the tripod would bounce slightly with every step. It took all of 15 minutes for this to become annoying. Frank would sometimes point at the bouncing tripod and say, “No good!” and laugh in my face. It felt good to feel seen.
The trail begins as a wide dirt road and is very flat for the first two hours as you meander away from Nayapul. It was a warm December afternoon, and I felt too hot in pants and a long-sleeved shirt, and was soon walking in a t-shirt, comfortable and happy. Frank was being careful not to overstep his role as porter and offering very little by way of guiding, apart from leading the way. Not that there was much to look at in these lower sections of the trek. At this altitude, Nepal wasn’t especially pretty nor especially interesting. These were the service towns of the Annapurna region, and looked the part: low cement buildings with heaps of construction equipment laying around, food stores and tourist shops selling the same souvenirs as in Kathmandu, as in Ghorepani, as in Pokhara. Tourist shops on a trekking route baffle me—they obviously have enough business to survive, but who is buying a t-shirt or a penis-shaped bottle opener labeled “Himalayas” here, at the start of a days-long trek?
After a quick-but-late lunch of curry and rice at a little riverside restaurant (the river being mostly dry) the trail began to rise, and we wound our way gently upwards, toward the Himalayas. Across the valley, we could see the beginnings of steep green slopes, but there were few signs yet of the mountains proper, those snowy peaks scratching at the heavens. The hills were home to terraced farms growing what I assumed were rice and tea (unverified by Frank), half of which were already in deep shadow and half of which were in bright sunshine, a peculiarity of the folds of the landscape. The path narrowed pleasantly and became tree-lined and then totally tree-covered, the temperature dropped.
Here on the narrow dirt trail, we began to be overtaken by local couriers. Before the 2010s, there were no roads here at all. When I visited, the oft-maligned road to Mustang, at the crest of the circuit, had not been totally finished, and its impact was not yet fully felt. The guidebooks and trekking websites talked about it as a shortcut for the end of the trek, an unpleasant descent of dust and noise. But at the time of my visit, everything needed in the towns along the trail was still being carried in by hand. Everything in the villages had to be walked in.
This is one of the most startling and charming aspects of Annapurna: young and youngish men carrying stuff. That beer at dinner? The case was carried here by someone. The chickpeas in your curry? Carried. The lights hanging low over the table: carried. The generator that powered the lights. The beds on which you sleep. The tables and chairs. The bricks in the walls. The corrugated metal sheeting that makes up the roof. Carried, carried, carried.
I could barely wrap my head around it then, and now in the easy convenience of our lazy age, it seems even more preposterous. I was being overtaken in the afternoon breeze by men with toilets strapped to their backs. One had an entire plastic cistern on his shoulders like a backpack, with yellow rope securing it around his shoulders and a strap on his forehead helping him stay upright. It was five times his size, yet he bounded up the trail ahead of us and was soon lost to sight.
The couriers didn’t always go it alone. Every so often, a soft jingle of a bell could be heard above or below on the trail, and anyone within earshot would push to the side of the trail and yell, “Donkeys!” Sure enough, before long, donkeys laden with packs and tied together in a long train would lumber past, neither slowing nor stopping for anyone along the paths. In these moments, it was essential to push as far off the trial as possible. The consequences of failing to do so, or of trying to take a photo of the passing donkey train, could be severe. Foreshadowing!
It felt like no time had passed since we picked up the park permits and began the trek when suddenly we entered a little town and Frank turned around to porter/guide me. “Wait here one kind moment,” he said, his English often falling into these sorts of adorable expressions. I sat on a stone wall (was each stone carried here?) for a few kind moments while Frank went to negotiate a room for the night.
Here's another exceptionally charming part of trekking in Nepal. In 2014, there was no such thing as an advanced booking, because there weren’t really any hotels along the route, or internet here. Or phone reception. Accommodation could be found mostly in teahouses, restaurants with rooms tacked on. You just showed up, knocked on doors (really, had Frank knock on doors), and slept in simple rooms in single beds. Prices ranged from “order your food here and you can have a room” to about $8 USD a night, then. Some teahouse rooms had private bathrooms, but in winter running water was determined by the outside temperature, and what water was running was often freezing cold. The teahouses always had a huge common room with a woodstove and a kettle of chai, hot food, and a few hikers and their relaxed guides or porters. Each day on the trek would end by flopping into these warm places, dazed and happy, to wait for that hot meal and idle chat with people who had exactly the same day as you.
Frank was only gone a few minutes, then emerged without the bags to lead me to a restaurant where the owner greeted us warmly. We arranged ourselves by the woodstove, and I felt calm, unexhausted. There weren’t many other people here, so Frank and I passed an hour or two eating and chatting. I asked him about his family and his past. He asked me what Canada was like. We shared some beer. We misunderstood one another often, laughed, and when, at one point he pantomimed a version of me walking with my tripod bouncing ridiculously, I felt like I had made an unlikely friend.
By noon the next day, I considered Frank an enemy. At no point in our conversation the night before had he really explained what was waiting for us that morning. We had deliberately stopped short of Ulleri because it was “very up,” as per Frank. He didn’t think I could make it on the first day after that little ramble from Nayapul. I still don’t know if he was right.
Ulleri, like so many things in Annapurna, is a baffling place. Ulleri is the name of a town, but it’s used synonymously on the trial to mean “that place with all the fucking stairs.” Exact numbers vary, but the most precise count I could find online is 3,767. Three thousand, seven hundred, and sixty-seven stairs: all laid down by hand, all that stone and effort. The stairs begin just below the town and extended well above it. Over the course of those thousands of stairs, the trial gains nearly a kilometer in altitude. Frank was right. It’s very up indeed.
(The CN Tower has a mere 1,776 steps, which is just embarrassing, really.)
The climb takes about two hours, and there’s a little rest stop restaurant half way where you are encouraged to break for chai and pet the stray dogs, an offer I never decline anywhere in the world. Someone is selling souvenirs. It’s incredible, all this crap hauled all the way up here to be placed on a stone wall and passed over by people like me. The first half of the climb hasn’t been too bad, really. It’s not especially steep going through the town, and it’s only as the halfway point nears that my calves start to remind me I’ve been walking upstairs for an hour. It would be harder, more tedious, if the scenery were different. But as we climb, the first views of the Annapurna peaks begin to emerge above the dark green hills of the forested valley.
The first peak to appear is Annapurna South. It’s over 7 kilometers tall, a geological fact that my brain cannot grasp. Ulleri is at about 2,000 meters elevation, meaning this mountain is somehow a further 5,000 meters up. How does anyone ever climb up it? Why do they even bother? It’s just so tall.
I struggle throughout the trek to grasp the scale of these mountains, but that’s what mountains are for. It’s healthy to put ourselves in shockingly huge places, to feel humbled and made small by the world. I’ve felt the same comforting smallness in the Sahara, or out at sea, where our insignificance is most starkly realized. There’s something both calming and terrifying about these places, or maybe something calming about being terrified of them. It was in Ulleri that this tremendous sense of calm settled in, a feeling that would linger well beyond this trek. More or less.
The first test of that serenity came a few minutes later, on the second half of the steps. Away from the village, the stairs narrowed and grew steeper. They were unevenly spaced, some quite deep and others only allowing for half a shoe. We climbed slowly, turning around often to take in the view behind us, but still overtook other trekkers.
Because there are so few towns along the trail and limited places to sleep, you tend to run into the same people day after day. You wind up in the same restaurants at lunch and the same teahouses in the evenings, and overtake and pass each other often throughout the day. My favourites were a group of six or seven teenagers from Malaysia who were here on a high school graduation trip. They were even less prepared than I was, some of them walking in flipflops and shorts. I had seen them that morning at breakfast in the teahouse and caught them here in the upper sections of the stairs, sitting at the side of the trail joking and laughing. They clapped as we passed, and I did a silly little bow to greater applause. A cap was dothed. They asked Frank how much farther it was to the top, and he just smiled mischievously and carried on. When I saw them later that evening in Ghorepani, they looked cold and exhausted, but bewilderingly happy.
I almost didn’t make it to Ghorepani.
Somewhere near the top of the Ulleri stairs, we heard the now-familiar jingling of the bells on one of the donkey trains. The sound was coming from somewhere up the trail, beyond the stairs. We were in an especially narrow section, only a couple of meters across, with an earthen wall on one side of the stairs and a low wall and precipitous drop on the other. The bells grew louder and hikers ahead of us yelled “DONKEYS!” as per the custom.
Frank looked momentarily nervous, then ushered me across to the non-exposed side of the stairs, where he leaned heavily on the earthen wall, trying to make himself smaller. I mimicked him, leaning on my right shoulder and pressing myself into the wall just as the man leading the donkey train came half-running, half-hopping down the stairs. The donkeys followed, moving quickly, laden with recycling and trash bags, not especially heavy things but bulky.
The donkey trains were always a bit hilarious, because it was impossible to predict what would be on them. You’d hear the bells, hear the shout, and then they’d come flopping into view, plastic barrels shaking around on top or piles of blankets or massive bags of rice or tea or whatever. I always wanted a slightly closer look. This was not always a good idea.
I leaned ever-so-slightly away from the wall and something on one of the donkey’s packs connected with something on my ever-jostling tripod, strapped as ever to the side of my rented pack. I was instantly dragged backwards, moving with the donkey down the stairs. I somehow kept my feet and it’s only by sheer luck that I didn’t fall over backwards, or get dragged under the hooves of the 20 animals rushing down the hill. No, not luck. It’s only by the sheer cheapness of the bungee cord on a cheaply made rental pack that I wasn’t badly injured at the top of the Ulleri stairs. After only a few awkward backwards downhill steps, the cord snapped, my tripod went flying into the path where it was repeatedly kicked and trampled and smashed, and I was able to press myself back against the wall and not suffer a similar fate.
Frank had gone completely white. He’d somehow managed to turn himself around so he was facing down to where I was standing, breathless and not quite clocking how dangerous that had been. We didn’t speak while the rest of the donkeys stomped past. When they were gone, he let out a low whistle and smiled.
“Lucky,” he said. “Very lucky.” Then he laughed his reassuring Frankish laugh, and we set to work picking up the 47 pieces of my tripod.
It was with a new lease on life that, several hours later, I arrived in Ghorepani. A light snow had started to fall and the air had acquired a genuine chill. Frank had a specific teahouse in mind for the night, along with every other guide and porter on the trip. The dining hall was packed, the fire roared, and the steam rising off the momos all created such tremendous, misleading warmth.
An hour later, I was freezing. I don’t remember having ever felt as cold as that night in Ghorepani. The first night in the lowlands had been so misleading: I’d slept with the sleeping bag on the floor beside my bed, the blanket that the teahouse provided was more than enough. But here, with multiple blankets and the sleeping bag and everything else, I lay in the teeth-chattering room, shaking myself awake over and over. My breath froze into my beard, then thawed when I stuffed my head into the sleeping bag, then froze again, and so on all night. In desperation in the middle of the night I tried to have a shower, turning the tap to full hot and waiting and waiting for the water to approach warm, not realizing that most of the pipes were frozen and that the hot water was solar heated. I stood in the freeing bathroom fully clothed until these facts dawned, then trudged damply back to bed.
Frank’s shout of “MISTER DAREWWW,” when it came, was a lifeline. Being awake and moving around would be warming, and I set about it quickly.
When I tucked my dumb smiling head back inside the teahouse room to go join Frank, I was already starting to feel warmer. I went downstairs and before the sun had fully risen was standing in little clearing behind the teahouse, where I tried and failed to capture any excellent photos. The early morning light called for a tripod and longer exposures, but I was reduced to attempting hand-held landscape photos that didn’t turn out. I laboured and became frustrated with the camera, with my cold and trembling hands, and soon did the sensible thing and gave up. I was wasting value minutes of this spectacular view trying to record it, and admitting defeat was freeing.
Instead of trying to capture the moment, I did a thing I’ve since partly forgotten how to do: I simply stood around and took it in. I looked, and my god, what I saw. I watched as the sun rose and saw the changing light on the snowcaps, watched as it flushed out of its subtle pinks to a fabulous red and then to nothing, to normal daylight, peak by peak across the range.
It was stunning. I had never before and have never since seen something to rival the sheer natural beauty of the shifting hues on these tallest of mountains. Whenever asked, I list this as the prettiest place I’ve ever been, but in truth it’s not pretty especially, but something far grander, sublime and ridiculous and comprehension-defying.
These experiences leave a mark on you, the traveller. I stood in that little clearing changed somehow. More fundamentally calm, maybe? More aware of breathtaking beauty, but also aware of its fleetingness, of its here-and-gone-ness. Aware too that the most special things are not always ours to hold on to, that they warm our face for only the briefest of moments and then are gone, probably never to be repeated. At a certain point we must accept this and leave the clearing.
So, I left the clearing. I had a chai and some eggs for breakfast at the long tables of the teahouse, and I felt warm and elated. I had seen the magnificent.
An hour or so later I was on the way out of Ghorepani, hiking the steep trail up to the ridiculously named Poon Hill, the highest point on this short trek. The view was magnificent—of course it was—and we all lined up to take our photos of the distant crown of peaks, but I felt wild and protective of the scene I had witnessed that morning. These were the same mountains, but unadorned now with their gorgeous dyes. I urged Frank to leave a bit ahead of the other groups so we could be first along the trail, and he gladly obliged. As we descended Poon Hill—a string of words I never thought I’d type—we passed the Malaysian schoolboys climbing the other way, flipflops sliding around on the icy ground, all smiles and puffs of visible, icy breath. “Fucking hell, man!” they said with their giant smiles. “This is pretty slippery, huh?!” Then they slipped on up the trail.
The weather had by this point started to truly turn, the blue cold skies growing dark and menacing. Snow fell in earnest then, and the walk along the ridge between Ghorepani and Tadapani—where we’d spend our last night—was icy and tricky in spots. As the first on the trail, I had long stretches with no footprints in the snow to walk into, which was eerie and beautiful. Frank pointed out monkeys in the rhododendrons, jumping from branch to branch and shaking snow to the jungle floor, a spectacular and ludicrous sight. I didn’t catch the type of monkey and didn’t care to find out. That’s the kind of journalist I have always been, one not that into monkeys.
We made short work of the day’s trek and arrived early to the teahouse in Tadapani. The water was working, and I took tremendous joy in a hot shower, and then joined Frank in the dining room, where he was gathered with the other porters and guides. They were talking about football, and I mentioned being a Liverpool fan and that there was a game that night I was a bit sad to miss. (I have a peculiar obsession with not missing a match, and haven’t in now almost 20 years.) Instantly, the table stood up and the men ushered me into the kitchen, where the staff of the teahouse were squeezed around a round table in front of an old TV. I had found the Tadapani Liverpool Supporter’s Club, and was half-dragged, half-pushed to the center of the circular bench, the best seat in the house. Beer was sourced from somewhere, the huge bottles of Nepalese pilsner that had to be carried up here by someone, probably those murderous donkeys, and I spent a lovely two hours shouting and cheering and drinking beer while Liverpool dispatched Norwich City easily. The world felt so big and so very small.
The final part of the trip passed quickly, a short and easy downhill walk from Tadapani to Ghandruk. Frank dallied in each small village we passed through, seeking out things to point to and say “Look!” A precariously placed football field. A small house with a dozen mewing lambs, born only hours ago, that wandered with us for a while and tried to nurse at my pants, thereby preventing me eating lamb for many years. A temple here, a temple there. Prayer flags. A funny sign. Was he sad that trip was ending, and he’d have to go back to his normal life? Or was he just in love with these places, the football field and the lambs and the temples and the falling snow?
No matter. He pressed bravely downward, and within a couple of hours were in a parking lot-slash-river outside of Ghandruk, where the world’s least-reliable looking taxis were waiting eagerly. Frank waved to one in particular, all smiles again, and threw his and my bags into the back of a jacked-up Lada (or similar, don’t quote me). We drove down a winding dirt road, fording the river where it flooded the turns in the road—water up to the doors—and the air grew warmer and the surroundings greener and lusher. We turned at some point onto a paved road and rumbled toward Pokhara, the mighty Himalayas growing smaller in the car’s lone wing mirror.
***
Loved it. Sounds like an amazing place.
Mr Drew!!! I love your writing. I could practically feel Lake Pokhara’s cold embrace again while reading this.