Climb Every Mountain, Or At Least Catch a View

So how do you get out of India quickly as I so desperately wanted? Take an overnight bus to an overnight train with a quick stop in Varanasi to see the Ganges river, to a 6 hour morning train (which broke down) to a 3 hour bus (yep broke down again) to the Nepal border just in time to catch another overnight bus. By the time we arrived in Pokhara, our first stop in Nepal, we were exhausted but extremely happy to be out of India. Let's just say it was a trying month there and I had hit my limit a few days earlier on India as a whole. We were more than ready for the peaceful town of Pokhara.

Nepal is a small country with the tallest mountain in the world. In fact it holds many tall mountains and our goal in Pokhara was to find a group trek to view some of these mountains. Unfortunately, good old monsoon season stood in our way. Usually you can see the mountains from town, but the monsoon brings in daily rains and the clouds never lift. Undaunted, we decided to head out on a trek with the hopes of seeing something, and if not then the quiet time in the mountains would do us some good.

We arranged a porter through our backpackers. With the monsoon comes low season and very few tourists to fill group treks so Chad and I were on our own with the porter. The day before we were to head out we hiked 4 hours to the World Peace Pagoda, high atop a hillside outside of Pokhara. No views from there but on the way down we did get hit by the other wonderful part of monsoon season, leeches. Leeches are everywhere during the monsoon and they quickly latched on to Chad's legs and shoes, but surprisingly did not touch me. Maybe Chad is secretly a leech?

The next day we met our porter, Dhan, and headed out on a two hour bus ride to the trail head in the Annapurna Conservation Area. Dhan was an interesting man. He was the married father of two and ran a small shop selling chips and cigarettes when he was not filling time as a porter. He was part of the lower local 'caste' and scraped by on what he could earn off of the tourism industry in order to put his kids through college (he had two college aged kids and he was 37...Nepalese marry young). He enjoyed his nightly cup of local moonshine when on the trail and emphatically told us very seriously that the yeti did in fact exist (he had not seen one but many of his friends and family had found footprints and had lost livestock to the yeti). Dhan had been a porter for the past 13 years and besides hauling most of our weight, he left us feeling safe and secure as there had historically been numerous muggings on the trails during low season.

Our four day trek started out at 3000 ft and wound its way up to near 11000 ft by the third day. The final day and a half would then be spent winding our way back down the valley via a different trail to our starting point. Along the way, communities of locals were spread across the valley in numerous small villages, usually containing no more than a dozen buildings. When were tired, we stopped to rest at trailside stands and drank milk tea (I now actually enjoy the stuff) and snacked on granola. At night we stayed at local 'tea houses' on the trail. The tea houses were no more than small simple hotels with an adjoining kitchen for food. The rooms were simple to say the least and cost $1-$3 a night for the both of us! We spent the evenings sipping tea around a pot belly stove and eating dal bhat, the local curry of lentils and beans, along with rice. Dhan would tell stories of growing up in a small mountain village, helping out on the farm and hunting snow leopards (or tigers as he continuously called them). If anyone ever visits Pokhara and see's a man in a Sports Basement tee, it is no doubt Dhan as Chad gave him his.

The mountains stayed hidden behind the clouds for most of our trek. The downfall of visiting in the off-season is the rain and clouds but the upside is that we had the countryside to ourselves. Trails that normally received 250+ new trekkers daily in high season were lucky to have 10 this time of year. We welcomed the peace and serenity as we plotted along. We awoke before dawn on day 3 to attempt a nearby hill that had 360 degree views of the Annapurna mountains, but found a torrential downpour outside. By the end of day 3 we had only been able to view the huge peaks for a handful of seconds in between cloud cover but on the fourth morning Dhan woke us up at sunrise to beautiful mountain views of the surrounding mountains, some reaching over 25,000 ft tall! Overall the trek was definitely something neither of us will ever forget. It was a excellent way to relax after our month in India.

Oh, and in case you were wondering.......
Final Leech Count Chad: 5
Final Leech Count Colleen: 5
Number of leeches we pulled off our shoes with salt sticks before they were able to attach to our skin: hundreds