Start of Annapurna Circuit
Saturday, September 29th, 2007We made it! Woohoo!
Anyway, to preface this, I have wanted to do this trek for a very long time. I’m not sure why. Actually, I just wanted to be able to accomplish something on this adventure of ours – something tangible. But, of course, it was not without its challenges…
Day 1. Kathmandu>Dumre>Besisahar. Okay, this kind of sucks as a day 1 since all we did was ride buses but after getting off the “tourist bus” in Dumre it was a crazy bus ride to Besisahar. I’m VERY GLAD we did not have window seat because I’m not sure I’d still be sane right now.
Day 2. Besisahar>Ngadi. 4.5 hrs. 820 M>930M. We decided to make it kind of a short day because, after all, we hadn’t done anything particularly active for quite some time now. Can you say, no muscle tone? Anyway, because we started the trek during “monsoon season” we had to take off our boots a few times to go wading through some streams. Fun times. And John, who has either some incredible boots or perhaps just some luck convinced me I could go across this one stream with my boots on since he made it across without getting wet – I ended up with the most soaked socks ever and had to wring them out on the other side. Darn that John! We stayed at this neat little guest house called Seasons and the restaurant was called Sore Back. If this wasn’t a bit of foreshadowing to come, I don’t know what is!
Day 3. Ngadi>Jagat. 5.5 hrs to 1300 M. This day started out just fine – our first really good hill up to Bahundanda, met a German guy that fell face first into a rice paddy, then as we were heading up to our destination, Jagat, my eyes started to itch. Like I had 20 contact lenses in (which luckily, I had my glasses on at the time). And it never got better. So, John was rinsing my eyes out every couple of ours throughout the night hoping they would get better.
Day 4. Jagat. No way I was going anywhere – still rinsing out my eyes but they were starting to close. We got some kind of semblance that this was a common occurence from the owner of the guesthouse but his English was really sporadic and our Nepali was even worse. John’s eyes started to itch.
Day 5. Jagat>Bahundanda. John’s eyes started getting red and closing up. We decided to go back down. Our intention was to go to Besisahar since they had a hospital there. We hired 2 guys to carry our bags and headed down at 6 in the morning. We got to Bahundanda a few hours later and found out this red-eye thing was happening all throughout Kathmandu. We got some drops called Ciplex (with Cipro in it – that stuff that you use if you have really bad diarrhea) and headed to Mountain View hotel for a couple of days of R & R.
Day 6. Bahundanda – rest.
JohnCin