Days 240-242: Relaxing and Hunting Buddhas

I followed through on my intent to take things easy. The first day in Bangkok I just wandered around some of the local streets looking around and getting food, but never ventured far from the hostel. The lunch I had deserves special note. One of the staff at the hostel recommended a little hole in the wall Thai curry shop down the street when I asked for suggestions, and it was an amazing one. I got the chicken Massaman curry, and it was almost certainly the best tasting meal I've had my entire trip - and only cost me about $3. I ended up eating at the same place on several other occasions since it was just so good.

On the second day I ventured a bit further abroad. There was a special festival going on which resulted in many of the famous Buddha statues in the city being free to visit for the day, so I decided to hunt a few of them down. The first one I visited was a giant standing Buddha facing a temple.

Despite having every intention of walking everywhere, I gave in to a smooth talking tuk-tuk driver who took me to the next two stops on my list, as well as a Thai suit shop I argued with him over but he insisted was mandatory. When will I ever learn... Besides that, he took me to a temple famous for its lucky Buddha, and to the Golden Mount, an artificial mountain with a temple built on the top.

After trying to take me to a few more unscheduled stops I just gave up and paid the driver and told him to let me off so I could just wander on my own some more and check out random places. Other than the tuk-tuks and the occasional pushy shopkeeper the people of Bangkok were brilliant though. Throughout the day I had 3 or 4 people volunteer directions or just stop to talk to me and recommend things without any expectations, and after that good, friendly samaritan vibe is something I've missed since Japan.

Third day I did a little shopping (not buying anything, but looking around at least) and got a much needed haircut. I still had a few days left in Bangkok, and as I was feeling better with each passing day I planned to be a bit more active with my remaining time in the city.

Day 239: Kathmandu to Bangkok

I had another early flight out of Kathmandu, but the airport wasn't as far away as it is in many cities. I got a taxi around 5am and put it to the airport with plenty of time to spare. The Kathmandu airport is much smaller and less developed than any of the other airports I've used so far, but the check-in process went smoothly and my first flight to Delhi for a layover went fine. In Delhi I had a 3 hour wait for my next flight and got some lunch in the airport, then it was off once again on a flight to Bangkok.

With all the time zone changes it was already evening when I got into Bangkok. I took the airport train into the city and then switched to the skytrain to get to the area my hostel was in. It was a bit tucked away, but a really nice and modern hostel. Although my stomach was feeling much better now, I was still feeling pretty worn out and planned to just take the first few days in Bangkok easy.

Day 238: A Few of the Sights

Wanting to get in a little sight seeing in Kathmandu, I split the cost of a taxi for a few hours with two girls from Brazil with similar plans. There are far too many things around to see everything, so we decided to visit The Boudhanath, a famous holy stupa at the outskirts of the city, and Swayambhunath, or the Monkey Temple, which stands on a hill in western Kathmandu.

Boudhanath is a dome stupa that is a regular stop on Buddhist pilgrimages in Nepal. It's surrounded by colourful prayer flags. There isn't all that much to do at the stupa, but it was interesting just walking around it watching the others in prayer. In one section Buddhist monks were doing a sort of full-body prostrations very similar to doing a burpee.

After spending some time at the stupa it took quite awhile to reconnect with the girls I was sharing the taxi with due to a communication problem. In the meantime I sat in the car park for an hour chatting with our driver and the a guy who was acting like an automated ticket machine, only obviously not automated. He'd just sit there with a big binder and write down the time every car entered and then rush up with a big stack of bills in his hand when it tried to leave and get them to pay depending on how long they'd been there - normally something like 20 cents. I don't know how people managed before computers, I really don't.

After the girls finally showed up we went to the monkey temple. Not surprisingly, the monkey temple has a lot of monkeys in it, and the families of monkeys here happen to be considered holy monkeys. I always enjoy watching animals, and monkeys especially. I probably prefer the intelligence of the larger primates, but watching hoards of little monkeys running amok feeds some destructive pleasure impulse.

The temple isn't just about monkeys. It's a busy center of religion and culture, and filled with beautiful old architecture. The position up on the hill also gives the place an expansive view down at the sprawl of Kathmandu.

After the temple we went back to the hostel. I had one last night out with my roommates, although I pulled out much earlier since I had an early flight in the morning.

Day 237: How Not to Recover

Kathmandu Valley is full of temples and stupas, and it would have taken me a lot longer than the two real days I had to see everything, even if I was at full health. Unfortunately I wasn't even at full health, or anywhere near it, and my priority was really to rest and gain back energy, so I didn't get to do all that much sightseeing.

My first full day in the city I didn't venture too far from the hostel. I wandered around the surrounding streets of Thamel, which is where a lot of the backpackers stay and so full of touristy shops and restaurants. I walked as far as the historic Kathmandu Durbar Square and down to the Bishnumati River. The streets were really run down here, and the river was choked with garbage, so I didn't feel too keen on exploring deeper in.

The evening began with rambling conversations involving such characters as an English drug dealer, a French space engineer and an Australian hippie and led to us going to a bar with a live band that was performing an entertaining mix of everything from Pink Floyd to Radiohead to traditional Nepalese music. Deeper into the night we ended up at a Nepalese club, which was a fascinating experience. In western culture, dancìng in clubs is largely female, and the males tend to just all do the same boring stuff and try not to make a fool of themselves (at least this is my personal observation). In Nepal, people go for it. There seems to be a lot of Indian/Bollywood influence, but people (guys especially) are just there to be active and have a good time. The hilarious part was the discovery that because we're white, we apparently are assumed to know what we are doing. This meant that no matter how wildly/terribly we danced, they would subtely copy us, absorbing our stylish western dances. Fun night out, but long nights of drinking and shishas is probably not the best way to recover from severe illness.

Days 235-236: Rocky Road

In the morning after my trek I was still unable to eat or drink. I was getting a bit nervous at this point, because I'd lost a lot of water through vomitting and diarrhea and wasn't able to keep any replenishing liquids down. I extended my room for another day and found a local pharmacy to get a bunch of medication. In the end they recommended 3 sets of pills and some packages of salts you mix with water to make gatorade-like drinks for dehydration. All that cost about $3 total, so I just took everything. Back in my room I researched what I'd bought since I'm paranoid like that, and threw out one of the pills on the spot as it's supposed to be prescription only, and had way more risks than benefits associated with it, especially for what my problems were. The salt drink was terrible, but after popping the other pills I found I could keep liquids down if I sipped small amounts every 15 minutes or so. I mixed the salt drink with some mixed fruit juice I'd bought and worked my way through a few glasses of that throughout the day. By the evening I was still feeling quite weak but hadn't thrown up anymore, so I went ahead and booked a new bus ticket for the morning.

The bus ride to Kathmandu was actually smoother than I expected. It was a bit faster than expected, and while the road is narrow and high up in places it wasn't as bad as some of the other rides I'd expecienced over the last few months. I had bought some granola bars in Pokhara which had been my only food since I was trekking, and even though I still wasn't feeling at all hungry I was getting pretty weak. When I got into Kathmandu I gave in for once and got a taxi to my hostel and stayed in resting for the afternoon. I finally went out for dinner with a few of the other people in my room and had a vegetarian thali, which was my first real meal in something like 60 hours.

Day 234: Final Descent

The final day was the most physically difficult for, since it was almost entirely downhill. The persistent impact on my knees makes them really sore after awhile, and while I can relieve it a bit by changing how I walk that usually leads to other parts of my legs getting destroyed. It was also one of my favourite days in terms of scenery. We got a last final look back at the mountains in the morning, but throughout the day we passed through little farming villages spread over the extensive terracing I'd been appreciating from afar on earlier days, and we just got a much closer look at the culture.

The end of my trek coincided with the beginning of the Tihar Festival (the Nepalese version of Dipawali), and from a child's point of view it seemed to be something of a cultural equivelant to halloween. At each village along the mountain as we climbed down groups of children would block the path and dance and sing a festival song and try to get you to give them money to let you pass. At first it was cute and fun, and the amount of money they wanted was like giving them 10 cents, and apparently they'd use it to buy things for a festival picnic. The problem was that there were a lot more villages and children blockades then I had small bills, and I wasn't going to start giving away all my real money. We had to start coming up with different strategies to sneak around them or let others blunder into them then sneak by while the kids were distracted. Sometimes there was nothing to do but to plough through with little kids hanging off your arms and dragging along behind you until they eventually gave up and went for easier targets.

Eventually we got back to town and caught the bus back to Pokhara. My legs were feeling pretty bad at this point, and by the time I'd moved my bags to my new hostel I was pretty exhausted. I had only booked a single night and was planning to take the bus to Kathmandu in the morning, but that plan was thrown into jeopardy when after having a nap I discovered I threw up anything I ate or drank. I'm not sure if it was caused by dehydration, or by some of the tea I had along the way not getting boiled properly, or just the accumulation of multiple days of bad hygine, but I went to bed feeling pretty terrible.

Day 233: The Third Day

We got up nice and early around 4am on the third day of the trek. After piling on some warm clothes we started the night climb up a few hundred meters, along with all the other people who came for the sunrise. As we climbed the wind brought the first (and presumably last) few flakes of snowfall I've had to deal with on my trip (I have been through 3 hail storms, however). We got to the summit with time to spare, but things were looking pretty ominous. In the gathering light we could see that the mountains were almost completely covered in clouds, and at times the clouds would come right over us so that we couldn't even see each other, let alone the mountains. Ultimately the wind picked up and blew most of the clouds away before the sun had risen.

We climbed back down to our tea house for breakfast, then it was off again. I'd known since the start that the third day of the trek was the killer, and it didn't disappoint. We first climbed down into the valley then immediately had to climb back up to over 3200m, then back down, then back up... Often people do the Poon Hill Trek as a 5 day one, and this was the day where we had to make up most of that lost day. We also ran into some drizzle, and kept pushing the pace to try to keep ahead of any major rain which would make the path muddy and horrible for hiking. There were beautiful transitions in scenery as we started off in cold pine forests then moved our way almost to tropical jungle as we continued to descend and things got hotter and more humid.

By the time we finally stopped for the day we'd covered a lot of ground and were at the last real town before getting back to where we had started. This would leave us about 5 more hours of trekking to go on the last day.

Days 231-232: Ascent

The trek I settled on doing was a 4 day (3 night) one that leads up to Poon Hill in the Annapurna region. I chose Poon Hill for a variety of reasons. It had been recommended to me by 3 or 4 other people who had done the trek, and it was supposed to have a good mix of mountains views, rural villages and a great range of scenery. At only 4 days long it is one of the shorter treks, which suited my timetable, and it doesn't go much about 3200m, so I wouldn't have to rent any heavier clothing or carry a sleeping bag. I went through an agency for my permits and guide, and while their package cost more than it would have to do it myself, it was much easier to set up and just had me being more confident since this was first real trek and I didn't really know what to expect.

I met my guide, Nirmal, in Pokhara early in the morning and we took a taxi out a good distance to Nayapul, which is the starting village for most of the treks in the area. Despite the post title, the first two days were hardly a pure climb. Much of the time we would follow the trails partway up the side of a hill, then come around the side and go down a bit. Overall though, we kept creeping up in elevation.

Things were pretty quiet most of the time, but we were hardly the only people on the trail. We met other trekkers along the way, and we seemed to keep running into the same groups over and over through the course of the trek, so that I came to know a few of the groups in particular quite well. In the afternoon of the first day, during a rest stop, we got talking to a group that consisted of another Canadian, her guide and porter who were doing the more ambitious 10 day trek to the Annapurna base camp. All of us got along well, and our paces matched up well, so we ended up trekking together until the end of the 3rd day when our paths split. Beyond the first couple hours there were no roads, so we also passed supplies heading up the mountain on pack horses/mules, and huge herds of sheep being slowly led down the mountain to be sold in the larger villages. The sheep herds created big logjams at some of the narrower places, and sometimes we'd have to just stand there for 15 minutes watching while they were encouraged through the section.

The climbs were my strongest sections, and there were a few points in the first couple days where during some long sections of stairs I'd have to slow down and wait for my guide to catch up. After a couple of these they somewhat jokingly nicknamed me Mountain Tiger. It wasn't long-lived though. The down sections, as I had feared, killed my legs, and later in the trek my endurance flagged somewhat, although we continued to make incredibly good time (at least going up) throughout the entire trip.

We spent the nights in tea houses, which were basically just spartan little guest houses specifically for trekkers grouped into little villages along the way. They provided small, unheated and uninsulated rooms and some manner of toilet. Many of them had showers as well, but they generally weren't very clean, or hot, and except in emergencies being dirty was preferable to being damp and freezing. The menus were pretty simple, and after being warned about some of the food by other trekkers I mostly stuck to the local staple Dal Bhat. Dal Bhat is a mixed platter that normally contains rice, dhal (a lentil soup/sauce), potatoes, and some sort of vegetable curry/chutney. It's cheap, and since they make lots of it for all the locals you know it's fresh and they'll give you extra portions if you want them.

By the end of the second day we were in Ghorepani, just below Poon Hill. The plan was to get up very early, climb the last couple hundred meters up to the hill and hope for clear weather to see the mountains at sunrise.

Days 228-230: Diverging Paths

The bus ride from Chitwan to Pokhara was a scenic one along winding mountain roads. Since we had a private bus we could get the driver to pull over to the side of the road to enjoy a few especially scenic spots along the way. The best stop was at a long bridge suspended over a river valley between the mountains, and it made for an excellent way to stretch our legs.

Pokhara, especially the touristy lakeside bit we were in, is a really fun place. It's definitely touristy, but touristy in a kind of hippie/adventurer way, geared towards nature lovers and young people and with lots of cool bars, restaurants and shops. I'm not normally much of a shopper, but it turns out I love traditional Nepalese fashion and could have replaced my entire wardrobe for a quite reasonable price if it wasn't for the fact that the clothes are a bit bulky, tend to recommend hand washing and possibly will all fall apart in a month. I did manage to pick up a few things without too drastically altering the variety of my travel wardrobe. Another type of shop everywhere in town are trekking shops with trekking clothes, backpacks and other equipment. The stuff is all quite obviously counterfeit, but even counterfeit stuff for the right price has its uses. I replaced my old 36L backpack with a pseudo-"North Face" 50L one. The old one had served me well, but I just needed something with more support and cushioning and I figured it was a good time while they were cheap and just prior to me doing any trekking of my own. Otherwise, we just had time to hang out around town and relax some. I visited the lake a few times, and on our second day we got up early and drove up to one of the nearby hills to watch the sunrise.

After the sunrise most of the group wussed out and took the bus back down to get more sleep, but a few of us decided to hike down the trail back to town, passing through some of the small farmsteads along the way.

The rest of the group was continuing on to Kathmandu for the end of the tour, but I decided to stay behind in Pokhara to do my trekking first before continuing on. I lost out on one night of accomodations from the tour, but I just didn't see any point in taking the 6 hour bus ride to Kathmandu, then back to Pokhara, then back to Kathmandu. I spent one extra day on my own in Pokhara relaxing and setting things up for my trek. In hindsight, I could have managed to do it on my own for less money, or tried to contact a guide directly instead of going through one of the many agencies around, but I just wanted something safe and convenient and not do anything too ambitious for my first real multi-day trek.

Day 227: The Wild Side of Nepal

Most people tend to associate Nepal with its mountain panoramas (at least I did) and don't realize just how diverse an environment the country has. The Chitwan National Park is made up of jungle and savannah, and has a complex ecosystem of plants and animals.

In the morning of our second day we took trucks out to the park and went on a 3 hour nature walk in the park with a local guide. There are no fences or cages, so obviously each walk is different and you can never fully anticipate what you'll see. In addition to the gorgeous landscapes we managed to spot a wild boar, many spotted deer, a wide variety of exotic birds, mating crocodiles, and ultimately a wild rhino. The last two of this list were the rarest and most interesting. Our guide had never seen crocodiles mating in the wild before, but the rhino encounter was the most thrilling. There are quite a few rhinos in the park, but often deeper in, and normally when you spot them it is as a figure off the distance. In our case, we ended up rather closer as we didn't see it until we were almost on top of it. It got a bit aggressive, and we had to stand there quietly for quite awhile until it finally stopped snorting and went back to eating.

We went back to our lodge for lunch, only to discover a python hiding in the bushes of our laneway.

In the afternoon we went back to a different part of the park for a jeep safari. The safari wasn't as fun as the morning walk because there was tall elephant grass on both sides of the trail for long stretches and that, combined with the noise of the jeeps kept us from seeing many animals. We did see more crocodiles and deer, and we did spot a lot more birds and a monitor lizard up a tree.

Deep into our safari we stopped at a crocodiles and turtle breeding compound and got to look at some of the local crocodiles from a bit close vantage.

With the sun starting to set we headed back out of the park, rowed back across the river and got picked up and taken back to our lodge. As I was readying for bed a soft chirping alerted me to the last animal of the day - a gecko sharing my room for the night.