I'm starting this post from room number four of The Happy Heart Hotel in Panchase Bhanjyang. My toes are freezing, tingling, tortured under the thick white blanket, but the rest of me is finally warming up. My sinuses burn from an infection I've been fighting for months and my right shoulder aches from Ellie's straps.
Just the right one, though. Come on, Ellie. If you're going to make my back hurt, at least spread that shit out.
Matt sits in the bed beside mine, reading by flashlight and complaining about how crap his book is. I told my Kiwi that the dim room light was quite bright enough to read by and that his flashlight was redundant, but he paid me zero heed. Probably because he knows that I the reason I have horrible vision is because I read by dim light as a child.
It was a long day. A hard day. A frustrating day. A day wherein I would look up at yet another interminable mountain of stairs, check in with my body and feel...
"Matt, I have no energy left. Nothing."
I'd slept nary a wink the night before. Even though my body was exhausted and the luxurious mattress consisted of more than a thick blanket draped over wooden planks, I'd tossed and turned and blown my poor, glutted nose the whole night long.
Our meager breakfast did not measure up to our glorious dal baht dinner. Trekkers must not really do breakfasts in Nepal. Matt ate a crunchy piece of lamentably small Tibetan bread and I ordered an egg with chapati.
I will need to eat again quite soon, my belly rumbled its discontent. That whole "Dal Baht Power 24 Hour" stuff is pure codswallop. I'm famished and it's only been 15 hours.
We settled our bill with the owner of Himalayan View Tea House, received some mildly disorienting directions (something about following red and yellow markings), and then set off towards Panchase Bhanjyang.
Matt and I hiked for nearly an hour without spotting any of the alluded to red and yellow signs. I began to worry that we might have taken a wrong turn somewhere.
But I'm always worrying that I've taken a wrong turn. So. This is just normal. It would be abnormal if I wasn't worrying that we'd taken a wrong turn. But... but I would be so disappointed if this hour was spent walking in the wrong direction. With how hungry I am, how much my throat, eyes, ears hurt and with how the trek from Bumdi to Panchase Banjyang is five hours on its own.
"Can I have a pain killer?" I asked as my sinuses careened out of control.
Matt reached into his rucksack and handed me two pills.
We neared some houses and Matt went about his very important job of asking whether or not we were walking in the right direction and I went about my very important job of looking like an amiable sidekick.
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| I'm a horrible human being. During my childhood, I watched an dangerous amount of a show wherein vegetables tell bible stories. One of the songs in Veggietales features a water buffalo. And walking through the hills of Nepal, I could not get the song out of my head. So I sang it. Like the horrible human being I am. Over and over and over again. I don't know how Matt survived. |
In a random village in the middle of Nepal's nowhere, we chanced upon a Frenchman from near Marseilles who spoke perfect English.
It was surreal.
"You missed your turn," the Frenchman informed us. "You'll have to walk back and turn left at an intersection with a big tree and a little hut."
"We can't keep going this way?" Matt asked, shielding his disappointment better than I was shielding mine.
"You could hike straight over this mountain," the Frenchman looked at us skeptically. "But it's very hard. No, it is better to go back the way you came and turn left."
And a five hour day turns into a seven hour day. Just like that. Oh well. This is just part of what happens when one decides to take a trek through Nepal without a guide.
So we reluctantly retraced our steps, found the intersection with the tree and the hut, turned left, and lo and behold, discovered our first yellow and red mark.
Most of the day's journey was through dense jungle. No spectacular views of the Himalayas or Phewa Lake.
Just trees, vines, ferns and heaps of fucking stairs.
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| Matt found a proper walking stick and wanted to give it a boring name like Mark. I told Matt that he had surpassed his quota for boring names, so Matt chose the name "Empedocles". Then Matt, his Greek philosopher walking stick and I continued our toilsome trek through the jungle together. |
My stomach rumbled angrily. My legs ached and my sinuses screamed. I'd run out of tissues long ago and had resorted to what Matt says Aussies call a "Bushman's Hanky". Which is the unpleasant (but quite useful) maneuver wherein you close off one nostril, exhale rather vigorously, and send whatever gunk might be hanging out in the opposite nostril rocketing towards the ground.
I walked behind Matt so he couldn't observe my incessant use of the "bushman's hanky."
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| One of our few views. These moments made it all worthwhile. |
By the time we arrived at Panchase Bhanjyang, Matt and I were both utterly exhausted and ravenous. I found myself observing rubbish on the side of the trail in a completely new light. Usually, this hippie is perhaps a bit overly judgmental when it comes to discarded cookie bags, popcorn bags, crisps bags, etc.
But today, I found myself looking at the bags not with judgment, but with avid interest.
Could there be anything left inside?
We checked into our guesthouse and purchased crackers, chocolate and crisps to tide us over until our dal baht was ready.
Dinner was long in coming, but delicious. Matt and I sat around a small cooking fire with four or five Nepali trekkers and watched the two middle-aged sisters who owned the guesthouse prepare our meal. We warmed our freezing hands and feet by the flames and drank warm cups up raksi, an alcoholic beverage for which Matt holds much disdain.
Eh... it's warm. At this point, I would find it near impossible to reject any warm beverage.
After devouring multiple, enormous helpings of dal baht, Matt and I returned to our simple room with its two small beds and no bathroom. I'll put own my pen soon and suggest to my Kiwi that instead of continuing to slog through his crap book, he might let me read Mark Twain aloud to him.
I love when people let me read aloud. Then the book becomes a shared experience. When I think about books read aloud, I think about the people who read them. My mother reading all that Henty at the breakfast table. Janet reading me poetry on the wrappings of Chocolove bars. I remember their tone. Their inflection. Their energy. They become part of the experience.
So I'll read to Matt from Mark Twain's "Some Learned Fables, for Good Old Boys and Girls."
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