Annapurna Circuit

Finished the Annapurna Circuit today. By "finish" I mean that I got to Jomsom, the first place you can fly out of, and decided that while this has been quite an enjoyable trek, there are other things I would like to see in Nepal too. Like elephants and living goddess festivals. So my plan now is to fly to Pokhara tomorrow, go to Chitwan National Park to go on an elephant safari, and then make it back to Kathmandu in time for the living goddess festival, Indra Jahtra.


In total, I hiked about 84 miles (including side trips), with a total elevation gain of about 15,000 feet, and the highest point was Thorung-La pass at 17,769. I took a bus from Kathmandu to Dumre, then another to Besi Sahar, then another to Bulbule. I only hiked for an hour the first day, accompanied by a group of guided Israelis (I met about 25 Israelis on this trip- the one group of 16 really upped their majority). I stopped in the outskirts of Ngadi, before I learned that you should stop in the last hotel in the village, not the first, so you have less to walk the first day. In this case, I was about 30 minutes outside actual Ngadi. Oh well. The next day I hiked to Jagat and met a lot of people on the trek, including a group of Euros, a few more Israelis, and a couple of Norwegians. This trip was pretty cool just because of all the people I met, and also because I didn't have to carry a tent.



For the first few days everybody seemed shocked that I was hiking "alone," which seemed ironic because I was not alone; I was with all of the people who were shocked. I usually hiked by myself, but I kept passing and being passed by the same people, and usually ate lunch with some people. The trail also links a lot of villages, so there were tons of locals coming through. The 2 times I got lost (both on the first day and followed by a group of guided Israelis- not sure how good their guide was) some guy with a donkey came by and told me I was going the wrong way within 5 minutes.


The scariest part of the trek was, for me, water crossings. As most people who have gone hiking with me know, I tend to get kind of scared of having to cross streams. Irrationally scared. But this trip has, if anything, cured me of that. At every sketchy crossing I was with friends, including the one where you basically had to walk through a waterfall. There are some Israelis with pictures of me doing this.


I also found out, in the waterfall, that my jacket is no longer waterproof. It's about 10 years old, this is logical, but I tested it in the sink before I left, but apparently I did not leave it in there long enough. This was kind of a problem since it's September in Nepal and it rains quite a bit. Eventually I used the trash bag I was using to keep my down dry to keep my core dry. At least my gore-tex pants are still waterproof.


I also found out that I brought way too much warm stuff. It's actually pretty warm here in September. I did not need my down jacket nor my mountaineering gloves and I probably could have gotten away with just using blankets and not bringing my sleeping bag. I crossed Thorung-La pass, the one at 17,769 feet, in my jacket with a short sleeve and long sleeve t-shirt on top, liner gloves, and gore-tex pants over zip-off pants. I never would have imagined I'd be this warm at that high of an elevation!


To acclimatize, I hiked up to Ice Lake with my new Swiss friend Oliver, and then spent a day hiking around the hills around Manang with various Europeans. I visited the Praken Gompa where the "100 Ruppee Lama" gave me a blessing for my crossing over the pass for, you guessed it, 100 ruppees!


I then hiked up to Letdar, where a bunch of us bonded over Yahtze and hot chocolate. All of the other American women I met on this trip were from Oregon or Washington, which was pretty cool. It started raining in the evening, and pretty much rained constantly for the next couple of days. I stayed at Thorung Phedi the night before the pass with the Norwegian couple, the Spanish couple, and the sick Israeli and sick American. Myself and the Norwegians and the lone Israeli started off at about 6:10am, everyone else having started from High Camp about 1000 feet higher, but I didn't want to sleep that high. By the way, the Thorung Phedi Base Camp Lodge is pretty cool. It stopped raining hard about 10 minutes after we started, but sort of rained intermittenly the rest of the time. This was annoying, because it was pretty warm, and I couldn't figure out whether to wear my long-sleeve t-shirt or my jacket. But since my jacket isn't really waterproof anyway, I just wore my long-sleeve t-shirt most of the time.


The only altitude sickness problem I really had was shortness of breath, so I just had to hike slow. I was also a little nauseous, but this may have been from waking up at 4am. Our Isreali and one of the Norwegians, Tora, had pretty bad headaches that didn't get better until they got almost all the way down.


The day after the pass crossing I visited Jhong, a small village across the river from Muktinah, and then walked to Kagbeni. Pretty much everyone else had gone directly to Jomsom after crossing the pass, but Kagbeni was supposed to be a cool little old village, and it was. It is very old, the gompa (Buddhist temple) being over 500 years old. The little streets were barely streets, more like corridors. The old capital of Mustang used to be located there, and the fort is still there, actually attached to where my hotel was. There were cows, goats, and donkeys roaming around, and animist protector figures at the entrance to town. It was probably the most unique village on the circuit, I was surprised that so many people skipped it. However, I ran into the Norwegians there, and they recommended I go to Tiri, which is a little village about a half hour north of Kagbeni and is the furthest north you can go into the Kingdom of Mustang without a $500 permit. That was also a pretty cool village, with a very very old gompa where the paintings seemed more Hindu than Buddhist, and a random guy picking peaches gave me a couple. The Norwegians also recommended the apples, but I didn't find a guy picking apples.


The last couple hours of the trek were also pretty difficult. I got a couple more water crossings, including a big river, and then walked about an hour and a half in a huge wind AND rain with a Spanish couple. No easy finish to this trek.