Nepal greeted me with taxi drivers shouting at me, all trying to get my business, but they didn’t know that I had a secret weapon- a preplanned pickup. I found the sign with my name on it and a man I didn’t know yet but would soon be spending hours with each day, my guide, placed a necklace of bright orange marigolds around my neck. “Welcome to Nepal!” We drove to my hotel where I was dropped off to spend the rest of my day napping and catching up on news with my exciting middle-speed internet. I met the man I would be trekking with, a German political science professor at the University of Idaho, and was given a brief orientation before we all headed out for our welcome dinner.
The next day we took a seven hour bus ride to Pokhara, Nepal’s second largest town, before starting the trek on my third day in the country.
My goal was to get to Annapurna Base Camp. After the first and second days, climbing hours of stairs in the intense sun, I amended that goal to getting to Base Camp without passing out, a distinct possibility for me after keeling over for no reason in Belize early this year.
The heat didn’t make the landscape any less beautiful, with its rolling green terraced mountains and the little villages made of stone dotted throughout, but it did make the hiking more difficult. I really struggled the second day, when the trail was covered in manure from the donkeys and cows and the sun beat down without mercy- there was no cover. But I persevered, and the next day was much gentler, still mostly uphill, but in the forest, where the terrain felt familiar and my lungs didn’t feel like they were about to collapse.
The landscape shifted over the week I spent climbing up and down the mountains, starting with those dappled hills, slowly morphing into the tall snowy Himalayas and then back again. Some of the views made me ache with the foreign foreboding nature of them standoffish places covered in mist and scrub, while the waterfalls were overwhelming with their great height and ferocious roaring, which was often the only sound echoing through the large valleys, drowning out the little mountain birds. The beauty of that place seems angry, untamed, wild in the purest and truest sense. That is terrifying, which pulls youin, exciting you with its mystery and relatively safe danger.We crossed through sections of the mountain totally swathed in mist, like the clouds were resting on the earth, giving the land the ethereal, cinematic quality that fantasy films are so good at evoking.
The mountains aren’t the only source of natural beauty along the trail, although they do dominate the minds of every trekker. We passed through dense forests, walking on trails that were only pretending to be trails, but were really streams, under a canopy of bright green leaves so thick you couldn’t see the sky. The forest here isn’t quite the deciduous forests of home or the lush tropics, but somewhere interestingly in between, with dropped leaves on the ground, rubbery plants hanging from the sides of cliffs and brightly colored and fantastically designed insects buzzing all around.
This is a water rich country, with streams trickling across the trail every few feet and a mighty waterfall with a rickety wooden bridge to be crossed seemingly at every turn. There are different types of waterfalls too, not just the ones that angrily hurl themselves off the sides of the mountains racing towards the ground and stampeding through the valley, but also the long thin model-looking falls who tumble off the edge of cliffs gracefully as if to saygoodbye to the earth and hello to the heavens. There are miniatures, hiding in the cracks of rocks, peaking out at the passing hikers like kittens hiding behind their mama and the rocky falls which are slower, but just as noisy as the water bounces from boulder to boulder, somewhere in between waterfall and river.