thewills'wanderings

As part of celebrating Adventure Specialties 25th anniversary trekking and climbing in Nepal was a perfect choice for a celebration. What was even better was that with a bit of juggling around we could fit it in to our world trip plans.

Tim, Lyndsay and Mark wanted to attempt a high peak so it was decided that trekking in the Langtang Valley for all of us with some high peaks for the “real” climbers would be a good option. We employed Sherpa Adventures to arrange it for us, which went right against our good old kiwi do-it-yourself style. We are sure are glad we did though, it was great having everything arranged for us.

Heading off from Kathmandu, we had the 12 of us, 5 porters and Hari our absolutely wonderful ,hero guide who now feels like part of the family. We had a private bus to get us to the start of our trek. The bus ride was a gruelling 10 hour trip on a very hairy, scary, dirt, rocky, road high up in the mountains where there seems to be only room for one vehicle but the drivers seem to be able to deal with on-coming traffic. For me the bus ride there and back was by far the hardest, scariest part of travel so far, Now that I’m back, safe and sound, I can look back on it without breaking out in a cold sweat. As you can imagine Tim loved it.(very sick man!)

For me, the trek itself was an amazing experience. To be honest endless days of walking or tramping as we’d call it in NZ, doesn’t really appeal, but when you’re walking and sharing the path with Nepalese people going about their daily lives carrying their huge loads as well as their babies sometimes, well that’s a different story. It was funny coming across yaks wandering along with or without their owners.

For the first 2 days we were walking in the forest and could spot monkeys in the distance which the girls loved. These are beautiful monkeys who mind their own business and could be seen jumping across the boulders in the raging river. (These monkeys are unlike the revolting, scabby, aggressive monkeys that we encountered at Monkey Temple in Kathmandu. Here we were walking up the long staircase to the temple where there were monkeys everywhere. The girls thought they were cute until one lunged at Michaella. She did well and threw her water bottle at it which it ran off with. The locals seemed to be amused at the terrified western children and their slightly neurotic mother. It was a horrible place with not only stroppy monkeys but mangry barking dogs as well. )

Anyway, back to the Langtang Valley. We walked about 6 hours each day for the first couple of days and it was mostly uphill. Charlotte spent most of her time on Tim’s shoulders but as she warmed to Hari, our guide he soon had Charlotte riding high on his shoulders. We were going to hire a porter just for her but decided against it. She didn’t walk as much as we would have liked but it was hard with people offering to carry her whenever she started to complain. We continued to climb up and after a few days and just a wee bit of sickness in camp(see later post) we arrived at the village of Kyagin Gompa which is about the height of Mount Cook. Here we were based for 8 nights while the boys set out on their climbing expedition. Being based in a little village like this with 4 children and limited resources was quite a challenge and with no computer for me to waste time on, I must admit to feeling a little stir crazy at times. We had 2 days of snow which livened things up a bit and tried to get creative by buying some wool from a local lady and making pom-poms. Even Tim(19) and Nick(17) joined in with the pom-pom making, not something they’d do back in NZ, I’m sure! Michaella made some knitting needles by wittling away some sticks and had a go at knitting.

We spent a lot time eating and talking about eating while in the village. While on the trek, you stay at tea-houses which are set up for trekkers and the lodge owners cook everything for you. Because we stayed longer than usual we got to know them really well and spent quite a bit of time watching them cook our meals on the wood-fire stove. It was amazing seeing what they do with no electricity and limited resources. When everything has to be carried on someone’s back to reach the village you start to value things a lot more and appreciate the effort it takes to even do the simplest things. , swimming in a freezing cold riverWe got to know the menu very well and with no animals allowed to be killed in the Langtang our diet consisted mainly of noodles, rice, chapati, Tibetan bread, eggs and potatoes. Everything was made from scratch so it often took a while to get our meals, but hey, we were in no hurry! Charlotte’s favourite was finger chips and a boiled egg. 5 plus a day went out the window. Never mind! One of our favourites was the potato momo which was really like a potato pie. Michaella often had 2 of these a day, no wonder she was the only one who gained weight on the trek! A big surprise on the menu was snickers/mars momo. This was a shallow fried mars or snickers bar in pastry. Yummo! This was Ashleigh’s birthday cake on the 8th May, which we all enjoyed!

It was very weird to have no meals to cook or dishes to do. I can’t actually remember doing anything that resembles housework for quite some time now. When we got back from the trek our clothes were all so filthy that I took them to the laundry and got them all cleaned. We had 20kg of dirty washing!

While at the village we got an insight into lots of aspects of village life. Most people in the village are Buddhist and one day our tea-house had a big ceremony to replace the prayer flags fly from flags on the property. Two priests came and they spent half the day performing rituals, chanting, burning incense banging gongs and throwing various things up in the air to appease the gods. It’s hard to understand a religion that is so tied up in rituals when as Christians our faith is so free of these kinds of things. It was fascinating though, to see it and the girls were really interested in the process.

The village is quite close to the Tibet border and so there is strong Tibetan influence. Where we were actually was part of Tibet not long ago and the people and their dress was quite different to others Nepali people further down the valley. For a small country the diversity is amazing. There are more than 60 different languages and branches of ethnic groups which makes for a very complex society. Hari, our guide was a great source of knowledge as we continually asked him to explain things we didn’t understand.

As Christians, we were blown away to find that Hari was also a Christian. This is not at all common in Nepal. He took us to a few lodges who were run by Nepali Christians and it was awesome to hear of their lives here and the inspiring stories of how they live out their faith. Just yesterday a church was bombed here in Kathmandu and 2 people died. We were going to go to an English church this morning but have just heard that all church services have been cancelled because of yesterdays bombing. We had been invited for lunch after church by a kiwi family, so now we’re going straight to lunch and missing out the church bit.

After the guys returned from their climbing expedition we then proceeded to head down with a week long side trip to some the Gosaikund Lakes. The mountains were stunning and we got some fantastic views of some big peaks. I kept having to remind myself and the girls that “wow, we’re in the Himalayas!”

We had a great walk out to ,some of us swimming in a freezing cold river on the way and stayed in Dunche for the night before catching the bus back to Kathmandu the next day.

Now, I told you that the bus ride up was bad, well the bus ride back was worse. We were all ready to leave in the morning and were packing our final things ready for our bus to pick us up when we are told that our bus has got stuck in a landslide on the way to get us and it’s still sitting there about an hour away but that we can get on a public bus and by the time we get there it should be dug out and then we can get on it. So, you can imagine my stress levels. Many questions are running through my mind. Landslide? If we get out of this one, won’t there be more? So, we had 10 minutes to get our bags out on the street so they could be thrown on the roof of the public bus and then we all squashed into the bus with the locals. Charlotte wasn’t too impressed with the lack of space and was starting to cry when a nice man gave us his seat. There are advantages sometimes having a wingy 4 year-old! The boys all ended up on the roof of the bus and they had a great time. At one point there were 26 people on the roof! After an hour or so, we reached our bus which was blocking the road and we spent some time moving rocks and pushing and watching in horror as the driver tried to move it without toppling over the cliff. We were finally ”on the road again” and the rest of the trip wasn’t too eventful ,though my palms didn’t stop sweating for a few more hours! The girls loved all the drama and slept a lot of the way home after the initial excitement.

Arriving back at our guesthouse was soooo nice. We’ve been enjoying all the luxuries and now that we’ve been in Kathmandu a while, we feel like pro’s and things feel quite familiar and not so chaotic. The New Zealanders all left this morning so we’re back on our own again.

Tomorrow we fly back to Bangkok and head north to Chiang Mai to begin our South-East Asia adventure.

The journey continues…

Photos coming soon

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 23rd, 2009 at 9:10 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.