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Annapurna Sanctuary Trek, Day Four: Beat of Your Drum

May 23rd, 2007

I woke after a peaceful night’s sleep. It was just starting to get light outside. Abs was already up and brushing his teeth. I ventured outside and stood on the lawn gazing up at the silhouetted mountains. I looked at my watch: it read 5.20am. Holy bat mobile! Twenty past five, in the morning, and I was up with no alarms and no express plans to get up so early. And it felt wonderful.

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Annapurna Sanctuary Trek, Day Three: Company in my Back

May 22nd, 2007

The huge Annapurna range was visible from my bedroom window. All I had to do was turn my head whilst lying in bed and there they were; giant seven and eight thousand metre high peaks. I didn’t wake up to this view though. I woke at the ridiculous time of 4.40am, in order to walk the forty-five minutes up a series of stone steps to the nearby lookout of Poon Hill in time for sunrise.

Now, I’ll be honest (as opposed to the rest of the time, when I mostly just make shit up), I’m not normally much of a morning person. But when I reached that lookout at 5.45am, and saw the first rays of a new day’s sun strike the majestic peaks of the Dhaulagiri range across the valley, peaks that had previously been resting, oblivious to the oncoming day (that’s the thing I’ve grown to love about the mountains; they’re so quiet and peaceful, yet dramtic, and dynamic in the changing light), the smile that grew across my face lit up the sky.

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Annapurna Sanctuary Trek, Day Two: Blame it on the Tetons

May 21st, 2007

The second day’s trekking would be one of our easiest. A simple three hour climb up to Ghorapani. Technically, we weren’t actually on the Annapurna Sanctuary trek yet. Ghorapani lies on a path known as the Jomson trek. But just a 45 minute walk from Ghorapani is the famous lookout of Poon Hill, and taking in tomorrow’s sunrise from there was the reason we’d come this way.

After an early start, we arrived at Ghorapani by 11.30am. The views from the village itself were said to be spectacular, but for us, all we saw was cloud. And so we rested in the guest house by the fire, reading, drinking tea, and eating delicious pasta with vegies and cheese. It seemed strange to be eating so much better out here in the mountains than I had been in Kathmandu (dhal baat twice a day does get a little monotonous).

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Annapurna Sanctuary Trek, Day One – No more crap tunes. Please!

May 20th, 2007

I’ve just returned to civilisation after ten days trekking in the Annapurna region of the Himilayas. Surprisingly, my legs aren’t actually sore. I seriously find that really weird. I’ve just spent five hours a day climbing up and down stairs, for a week and a half, and my legs feel fine. What the jelly is going on?

The other thing that’s weird at the moment is that I haven’t seen Bec for eleven days. Unfortunately, her dodgy knee meant she couldn’t come on the trek, so I was accompanied by Abs, another Melbournite who is volunteering with Umbrella. Bec has been back in Kathmandu with the kids, she arrives here in Pokhara (the main town near the Annapurna region, from which all the treks in the area begin, and where we’ll be hanging out for the next few days) in a few hours, so forgive me if the words that follow on this page make no sense – my mind is a little distracted!

Now, let me just say, if you’re ever speaking to someone about travelling, and they casually mention trekking in Nepal, (“Oh yeah, Nepal, I went trekking there for three weeks back in ’02.”) as though it was as simple as nipping out to get a pint of milk, let me assure you that that person is a wanker. Because trekking in Nepal is really really really, bloody, hard!

Really!

(Although, I am a bit of a pansy, which if you’ve read any of this website over the past couple of years, you’ve probably worked out for yourself.)

So anyways, on to the trekking!

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Trisuli River: Float on

May 9th, 2007

Kelly poked her head around the door and in a thick, serious Irish brogue asked: “Dave, can I please see you for a minute?”

Kelly is the volunteer coodinator at Umbrella, and I felt as though I’d been called aside by the teacher.

“Ah yep, what is it?” I asked sheepishly once outside.

“We need a male volunteer to accompany two of the older boys from Gauri Shanka on a two-day white-water rafting trip.”
“Sorry, what’s that?” I asked, a little disbelieving.
“It’d be all expenses paid, courtesy of the Lincoln school. They’re paying for the two boys and a volunteer to chaperone them. Would you be interested?”
“Well, I was planning on taking a series of cold showers HELL YEAH!”

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Swoyambu: Lacking the essentials

May 7th, 2007

During my first week in Nepal, the most important lesson I learnt was this: attempting to register a peaceful night’s slumber whilst simultaneously clencing one’s butt-cheeks to prevent diarrhoea-related anal leakage is even more difficult than it sounds!

I learnt this lesson whilst sleeping in a house that had a squat toilet and no running water.

Thank fuck the kids are cute!

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Dhaulagiri: Part of the Family

May 1st, 2007

We met Conor on the afternoon of Sunday Arpil 22nd. After spending three days in Thamel, the backpacker district of Kathmandu (which is hardly Kathmandu at all, given it’s Western style bars, trekking stores, travel agents and internet cafes), it was time to head out to the orphanage.

It was sort of strange meeting Conor, given that Bec and I had been reading his travel blog for a couple of years now, and that we’d been in regular email contact for the previous five or six months. But as he took us on a tour around the orphanages, we hit it off like the old buddies we felt.

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Kathmandu: The how’s and the why’s

April 29th, 2007

So, how did we end up in Kathmandu volunteering at an orphanage? It’s a fair question, and one Bec and I were asked numerous times during the six weeks we were home in Australia in March/April of this year.

Towards the end of last year we came up with the idea of volunteering somewhere for three months after our UK visas ran out. Tanzania, on the East African coast, was the number one option back then. But that all changed after a guy by the name of Conor Grennan, travel blog writer extraordinaire and super-hero to orphans across Nepal, announced he was opening his own orphanage in Kathmandu. I’ve recommended his blog here before, and he’s just transferred it all to a new site – go and check it out www.conorgrennan.net

We contacted Conor about coming over to Nepal to help him out, and now, six months later, here we are! Family and friends were frequently asking us who we were volunteering with, and simply answering “Conor” never seemed to satisfy them, damn info-hungry folks.

“Yeah, Conor’s a friend of ours.”
“Oh ok. So, how do you know him?”
“Er, yeah, um, through the *cough* internet *cough*.”

Upon meeting Conor here in Kathmandu, he said he had the same problem when telling the other folks at the orphanages of our impending arrival:

“So my Australian friends arrive in a few days…”
“Cool, so where did you meet them?”
“Yeah, well, haven’t really done that whole ‘meeting’ thing yet.”
“You’ve never met them?”
“Er, no.”

The orphanage Conor set up is located amongst the seven or eight orphanages I mentioned in the previous post, run by the Umbrella organisation. These guys seriously helped Conor out when setting everything up, and whilst his orphanage (called Dhauligiri, after one of the nearby Himalayan peaks. Yeah, it’s just the eighth-highest mountain in the world or something) is independant, it is also sort of part of the Umbrella system. It’s like one giant family, all these orphanages within a few minutes walk of each other. It’s just that this family has around two hundered and fifty kids running around in the yard. Each of the orphanages/houses is named after a Himalayan peak: Sagamartha (that’s the Nepali name for Everest), Machapucchre, Gaurishanka, Annapurna, Amadablan etc. So if these weird names pop up in this here wee blog over the next few months, don’t go freakin’ out or anything.

Hopefully that gives you enough basic background to ensure the words I put up here make some sort of sense.

And again, check out www.flickr.com/photos/becanddave
 for photos…….

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Nepal: Balance

April 26th, 2007

We stepped from the airport; a red-brick, two-story building set in a dusty field. A group of locals sitting at a card table under the verandah ushered us over. The sign at the table said something like “official taxis”. That was good enough for us. A a quick discussion about where we were headed, a young lad grabbed our bags and beckoned us to follow, and we were led to the taxi. It was an old, beat-up red minivan.

Our bags were thrown in the back, and we squeezed onto the dusty old bench seat. The sliding door was caught on its rollers, and took four attempts to close. I reached for a seat belt out of habit. Nup, no seatbelts.

The driver took off down the bumpy road. The drive into town was crazy in that “oh-my-god-I’m-going-to-die-but-hey-this-is-kinda-cool-and-look-there’s-a-cow-in-the-middle-of-the-road” kinda way. The road was barely wide enough to fit two cars, let alone the cars, vans, motorbikes, tuk-tuks and cows that seemed to be heading in every direction.

Bec and I were (well, we still are, actually) in Kathmandu. Capital of Nepal.

Damn, it felt good to be on the road again.

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Edinburgh: Of Mice and Scared Little Boys

September 22nd, 2006

The two most likely ways you will jump a foot into the air whilst standing naked and half-asleep in front of your toilet at 4.16am taking a pee-pee:

1 – You wake up enough to realise that, in fact, that is not the toilet you’re standing in front of, leaving you thrashing about in semi-darkness like a first-day-on-the-job fire-fighter who has yet to master the art of keeping the hose steady, searching for the correct drain.

2 – A mouse practically tap dances over your toes, whistling a famous tune from some Broadway show you can’t remember the name of.

The second of those happened to me this morning. Although by saying practically tap danced, I mean sort of tap danced, by which I mean I saw a flash of something small and brown out of the corner of my eye darting along the bottom of the door frame about six inches from my foot. Of course, in my barely-conscious state, I couldn’t be sure it was a mouse, just that it was small and brown, which means it could’ve just as easily been a number seven billiard ball, or, say, Gary Coleman (yes, these are the things that go through your head at 4.16am).

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