Barry Backpacks Around the World

The rafting trip began as most journeys of this type do by taking transportation to the river. I arrived at the Ganesh Kayak shop around 7:00 a.m. and deposited my things that I wouldn’t need with the shop keeper along with leaving most of my money in his safe. I then shared a taxi with a Frenchman to the bus station. We took a Kathmandu-bound bus to the town of Mugling. Also on the bus was an American woman doing the rafting trip. We were dropped off in the middle of the street as the bus driver didn’t know of the hotel where we were supposed to wait. It turned out that the hotel where we were told to wait changed names. After finding the hotel, we had tea while we waited for the main group coming from Kathmandu. The trip bus arrived around lunch time. The whole group (4 Nepali guides, two western guides, and 10 customers) had dal bhat at the hotel. I don’t think I have described dal bhat yet. It is the main staple dish of Nepal. Many Nepalis eat only this twice a day. Dal is a lentil soup and bhat is rice. It is usually served also with a curried vegetable of some type and a flat fried bread. It is about the only all-you-can-eat dish served in Nepal. We then bordered the rather ramshackle bus to continue the trip. We drove all day through farming communities and dry dusty towns until we finally reached our destination for the night around 9:30 p.m. After once again eating more dal bhat, we went to bed in the extremely basic hotel. Read the rest of this entry »

Tomorrow I leave for an 11-day rafting/kayaking/camping trip on the Karnali River. My diahrrea is gone. I am still not 100% yet, but I am going to take a chance. I was originally going to go on November 12th and go back to Kathmandu to get my India visa while I waited. This date is not so certain, though, so I am going on an earlier one. Instead of going straight into India from West Nepal, I will probably now cross the border in East Nepal like I orginally planned. I will again not be able to update the blog until I get back. I will leave you these two mind expanding topics to consider during my absence.

1. By far the most popular music in shops and TV is Hindi Pop, yet every Nepali cell phone appears to have Beethoven’s “Fur Elise” for the ringtone. Why?

2. In Kathmandu Thamel one gets bothered by all sorts of salesmen for things like pashminas, hashish, knives, etc. The Pokhara tourist area is different. The only people calling out to me are barbers who want to shave me all the time (my face that is) even though all the other shops exist. Why?

Day 19 was spent hiking to Deurali. Deurali is the highest lodge one can stay at before getting to the base camps. The hike started with a 1500 ft descent down stone steps to the river and then climbed an equal distance back up the other side of the valley. It then turned into a much narrower valley that serves as the entrance to the sanctuary. The trail was ill behaved most of the day and continuously went up and down. The views were obscured by a fog that hung around all day. It was a very damp night.

Day 20 was another foggy day. We walked the remaining four hours to the Annapurna Base Camp and checked into the lodge. We caught small glimpses of the surrounding peaks throughout the day, but only briefly, as the fog rolled around. Most of the day was spent eating, reading, and sleeping.

Day 21 finally saw a break in the weather. We were up before sunrise to watch what else, but the sunrise. The moon was about half full. One could see satellites whizzing overhead. The sun made its debut at about 6:00. The mountains were on fire in the light with some turning a bright orange. We finally got the sense of being surrounded by the mountains on all sides. After this show, we decided to try to hike to the Annapurna 1 Base Camp. This involved climbing down slope and then walking on a glacier. The glacial surface was covered in rocks though at some points the ice could be seen. We never made it as the distance was further than anticipated, and we didn’t want to be stuck on the glacier if the fog came in. Coming back from the hike, we headed back down the valley to Bamboo Lodge for the night.

Day 22 saw me get sick. I woke up with a cramped stomach. I only got worse throughout the day. By the time we got to the 1500 ft step climb to reach Chhomrong, I was exceedingly weak. I had to stop at one point sit down because I was dizzy. I did manage to make the climb up to the lodges. Here we stopped where we had spent the night previously. I tried to put down a bowl of noodle soup but couldn’t finish it. The owner of lodge let me use one of the rooms to take about a two hour nap. I woke up filling a bit better and decided to walk some more. After an hour, I had to stop. I was sweating buckets and had trouble walking straight with my pack. We stopped about two hours short of our intended destination of Ghandruk. I didn’t eat hardly anything that night and spent about 13 hours in bed suffering from what I can only describe as feverish dreams. I felt very flushed and hot.

Day 23 I did not feel as dizzy and just wanted to be done with the trek. I hired the husband of the lodge owner to carry my pack up the huge hill to Ghandruk as I didn’t have the strength in me. The diahrea also started. Thankfully there were lots of villages along the way. In Ghandruk I once again took my pack as the walk was down hill from there. We walked to Naya Pul and caught a bus to Pokhara. We had to ride on the roof as the bus was full. I spent the 1.5 hour ride trying to keep my stomach settled. At the bus station, we caught a taxi back to Lakeside. I barely made it back to the hotel in time to use the bathroom. I spent the night watching TV.

The next day I started taking some Ciproflaxin as I was still dizzy and had diarhea. I also worked on my blog and began to up load pictures. Today my diahrea appears to be slacking off but is not completely gone. I am still dizzy at times and don’t have much of an appetitie. I did go see a kayaking company about my next adventure. There is a 10 day rafting trip down the Karnali river on November 7 in West Nepal. I have to go back after lunch and speak with them about it some more. I will make my final decision, hopefully tomorrow, if I feel better.

Notes:

I have uploaded my Nepal pictures to date in the blog. Now that that is finished, I am going to take a nap.

Day 12 saw us begin the descent. Some of us (not me) were more reluctant than others to leave the cannabis themed and filled hotel. We decided to do a rather short down hill walk that day to the town of Kagbeni (9240 ft). The walk is down a broad and barren valley topped by snow capped peaks. This town is most notable for two things. First it is one of the main entrances to the Kingdom of Mustang. This is an area of Nepal that still maintains its own monarch. It costs $700 to go trekking here for 10 days and one must go as part of a group. Secondly Kagbeni is home to Yak Donalds complete with Golden Arches. There is also a knockoff 7/11. Kagbeni is set next to a braided river. Upstream, the river flows through an arid valley that leads to Mustang. After checking into a hotel in Kagbeni, Steve, Colin, and I set off to explore the town. Paul was using the Internet and the girls had decided to walk further. We first walked through some orchids on the outside of town before heading through some rice fields. There we encounted women making hay. After saying hello, we headed up a nearby peak to get a view of the town and Upper Mustang. We didn’t know, but we had actually illegally entered Mustang. We found this out by walking back into town past signs warning people not to go any further. We ate that night at Yak Donalds which served disappointingly small yak burgers. Read the rest of this entry »

Reader Warning: The following article is very long. To save time, the reader is advised to go ahead and let his/her eyes glaze over and begin predrooling.

Well, I am back now from my epic 23 day hike around the Annapurna Sanctuary. The scenery was stunning and the weather was good when it really counted. I did get sick in the end but that will be told in due course. To keep the article length down some, the article will probably not be as detailed as normal and I will hit the high points. For those interested in following along, there is a good map of the towns in the Annapurna trek at www.yetizone.com under Annapurna trek Active Map. Read the rest of this entry »

My trip itinerary was purposefully arranged to help me adjust to traveling in less developed countries and to practice traveling skills like using buses and getting around. Besides Fiji and Easter Island, which are very small and speak Engligh, I started out in developed nations. I then moved on to China which is sort of a midway nation. Traveling here is a bit more of a challenge due to the language barrier. English is probably spoken the least here of any regularly traveled Asian nation. Nepal is my first foray into a true developing nation. Outside of the Thamel tourist ghetto, Kathmandu lacks a lot of infrastructure. A lot of English is spoken here, though, so it’s fairly easy to get around despite the fact that many of the streets have no names in English or Nepali. Directions are neighborhood- and landmark-based. Read the rest of this entry »

Getting to Kathmandu was fairly exhausting. One of first obstacles of the morning was the blackmarket moneychangers. There were about five of them between the hotel and the restaurant. In China you really don’t get a better rate on the blackmarket, but you can avoid the hassle of using the Bank of China which is exactly what you would expect a Communist Bank to be. Simple operations like changing money involves lots of paperwork, ID’s, and time. We told them we would change money to Nepali rupees after we ate breakfast and paid for the hotel room. The group of five still came into the restaurant with us, and we had to shoo them away. They randomly kept popping in to see if we had finished eating. Finally after eating, I traded my remaining yuan and some US dollars to rupees. (1USD = 64.5 Nepal rupees). After breakfast we hired a minivan to carry us to the Nepal border station which lay about 8 km down a switchbacking road from the Chinese station. Unfortunately we were soon engaged in the local pastime – the traffic jam. The Chinese border office was not yet open, and vehicles were already lined up to get across. Our driver informed us that we should just go stand in line at the border as we would have to go through seperately from the vehicle anyway. We decided to trust this man with our bags as we had hired him through the hotel, and he really couldn’t go anywhere anyway due to the traffic snarl. Read the rest of this entry »

I had one more adventure near Lhasa before heading out on the seven day trip to Nepal. On Wednesday morning Greg, Kera, and I, along with four other people, were shuttled by van to the Denchen valley. There I met up with the first of the three horses that I would ride that day. Before continuing, I should say a little about Tibetan horses and riding styles. The horses are smaller than western horses (more the size of a large pony). The stirrups on the saddles tend to be non adjustable, and the saddles are not cinched as tight as on western horses. The saddles are also a hodge podge of styles including wood, steel, and old British calvary saddles. You can imagine what happens when someone of my height gets on a short horse with short stirrups. The ride though fun left me cramped and bruised. After meeting the horses, we mounted them and went on our way riding through several small villages and along an arid mountain valley. My first horse (the Toyota Corolla of horses) responded well to commands but was very thirsty. He stopped at every watering spot and drank copious amounts of water. I could feel him swelling up like a balloon. I had to constantly hurry the horse along to catch up with group. After lunch, we switched horses. This time I ended up on a grandma horse (the Buick of horses) with graying mane. She couldn’t be hurried and was content to stay in the center of the pack. She appeared to have a male admirer who wouldn’t leave her side despite repeated attempts from his rider. At one point another male horse appeared to show some interest but was dismissed with a kick from my horse (while I was on her). My last horse of the day was a male (sports car horse). This was the first time that I have ever galloped (or very fast trot) on a horse. At one point I almost fell off the horse sideways due to the loose saddle but managed to right myself. The saddle of this horse was very male unfriendly. It had a foward lean that squished me against the saddle horn. Not good when going fast on a horse. During the ride we were accompanied by a young colt whose mother was part of our pack. The colt was constantly backing up to convenient trees to get a good scratch on his rear. It was also interesting to see the ruins of the fire stations high on the hills. The Tibetans used a system very similar to Lord of the Rings to alert neighboring villages of imminent invasion. They would light fires atop tall hills. Each within sight of the next station. Read the rest of this entry »

Ivone and I caught a taxi to the Xining train staion around 9:00 pm. I would have thought that the train station would be a little less crowded at this time of night, but I thought incorrectly. We got in the “line” for the metal detector and proceeded to be pushed, knocked, and corraled toward the metal detector. Once there, we placed our bags on the x-ray conveyor and went through the metal detector. One of my bags appeared to not make it through. Understandably concerned, I peeked into the x-ray machine. I couldn’t see my bag. I walked around the metal detector and found that the string on my bag was caught. Ignoring a policeman telling me something (he probably didn’t like me on his side of the detector), I undid my bag. We then proceeded into the waiting room. We sat down. On my side was an older Tibetan couple and next to Ivone was a Tibetan family consisting of two sisters, a child, and the grandfather. Ivone spoke with them with the help of a monk who spoke some English. I entertained the older couple on my side with my digital camera. This soon turned into a mini daycare session as someone brought over a screaming infant in the hopes that my camera photos would help calm the baby. It apparently worked. Other participants soon joined my slide show. It soon came time to board the train. Ivone and I were traveling hard seat (third class) as no other tickets were available. Read the rest of this entry »

After writing the last blog entry, I left the Internet cafe to head back to the hotel. While enroute, I was distracted by what looked like an orchestra setting up to play in a paved square by the river. I decided to hang around to see what was going to happen. The show started about a half an hour later and opened with a group of children dancing flamenco and salsa on the stage. Other acts followed involving various singers and dancers performing to Chinese music (with the exception of a couple waltzing to “May I Have This Dance”). I could tell the show was put on by local groups as they often made mistakes which led to laughter and corrections. If this wasn’t enough entertainment, another group soon set up very near them and began a saxaphone and trombone ensemble with a huge crowd of townspeople singing along with them. Next to them about 50 people began line dancing to their own music. A fourth group began doing exercises next to the dancing group. All this took place in a space of about 100 meters or so. I felt as if I were at a multi-ringed circus as I kept running back and forth between all the groups watching. The noise level was tremendous as they were all competing to be heard. Read the rest of this entry »