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10/8

Where to begin after so many long, trying days? How about the blizzard. Well, Jonah and I decided we felt well enough not to turn back on account of altitude sickness, so we looked forward to “complete” our trek after a long day over the Thorung La pass, a jeep from Muktinath to Jomsom, and a flight the next day to the tropical jungle city of Pokhara. Pokhara, as it turns out days later, is not so much a literal city as some kind of unattainable symbol of better fortune, when our troubles will truly be gone, it will be warm, it will be no ones turn to endure the sleepless night of vomiting, and our calfs and thighs won’t tenderly bubble with each step.

We started our day over Thorung La at 3:30 AM, in order to make it over the pass in time for the sunrise. My night was full of nervous anticipation, tossing and turning throughout a musical, victorian era dream. We threw together our packs and went to the lodge in Thorung Pedi for breakfast-no one was hungry. “Cool Guy” asked me to teach him a walking bass line, a promise I had failed to keep the night before when the lodge was stormed by Spaniards and we quietly retired to an early bed. Wemet “Cool Guy” the day before-he DJ’d our lunch with Rufus Wainwright and Sigur Ros. We started to talk about music, swapped our ipods a bit, previously used exclusively for Lord of the Rings on tape, played his old busted high action guitar with a metal slide, and then really started to get down. He was an amazing jazz guitarist, and with two guitars, a jaw harp, and a recorder, we were able to play through a surprising amount of jazz standards like “Blue Monk”, “Giant Steps”, and “Autumn Leaves”. We soon moved onto Bob Marley, Nirvana, untill we were stright up putting on a concert for the packed lodge of 50 Israeli’s, Kiwis,Spaniards, Germans, Swedans. Occasionally the crowd would go completely silent, as in our most tenderest 3 part harmony during “King of Carrot Flowers”.
After teaching “Cool Dude” a walking B flat bassline, we were off, but the rain of the night before had turned to sleet which saturated our bags and gloves. After an hour of steep, uphill,freezing, stomach achey climb, we turned off our headlamps in favor of the illuminated dark blue of the snowy mountain. Beyond hope, we’d see a Snow Leopard stalking from the rocks above. I myself walked in the back, my nervous stomach ache producing abominable gas. Suddenly, emergency struck-I saw a tea house in the clouds upwards, rushed to it, waited for an attractive British woman to finish a rambunxious diarreah, and walked into the ugliest bathroom that has ever existed on this earth. This one lacked even a hole in the ground- it was a walk in closet, with a cracked corrugated tin door that didn’t close, with shit everywhere, in all corners, mostly liquidy, and a few with blood in them. Looks like most tourists are fighting the same demons we are.

I walked on greatly relieved, and the sleet had turned to a gentle flurry, much easier to keep warm in, as the snow could be brushed off the packs and clothing. As we ventured further, the flurries changed to considerable snowfall. Sam started to complain of windedness and stomach pain, the same first symptoms of what Jonah and I had just gotten over, truly an ugliest of bugs. By the time we reached the pass, at 5416 meters, we couldn’t keep our eyes open with the wind and snow whipping our faces, and we were pretty freezing in our raincoats and fleece pants. We had a highest,most expensive cup of tea, and started our descent through 4 biomes, muddy and steep downhill.

First out of the snowy, arctic chill, was the barren rocky slopes that the demon in Kourosawa’s “Dreams” inhabits. Then colorful algae and moss started to appear on the rocks. This transition gave us a gateway to what life on mars must surely look like. Orange and red, spikey, video feedback patterns contained therein. It started to rain again when grassy patches started to appear. Soon we were sloshing through mud among rice paddies again. After lunch, 9 hours from days beginnig, we hustled through heavier rains into the twon of Muktinath. Now entering the region of Mustang, famous for its wild horses, and we see some grazing on the way into town.

In Muktinath, a famous pilgramage site for Hindu’s and Buddhists alike, we visited the temples before second lunch. The Buddhist temple boasted a spout of natural gas that someone lit on fire 150 years ago, and it has never gone out. At the lodge where we took our lunch’s sequal-”Return of the Lunch 2-Back to Lunch”, we met a group of college exchange students visiting from Kathmandu, toasting to the concept of “No more jeeps!!!”. Psssshh… They treated us to tea, spiked or not spiked, and we got a girl’s email to meet up with in Kathmandu, if we ever do return. After lunch we quickly find a jeep to Jomsom, where our 7 AM flight departs from the next morning, to Pokhara. Which will only be possible if the rain ever stops, as they are quick to cancel flights on account of rain…

We get to Jomsom at 6 AM on the first of many consecutive longest days ever, all our belonings drenched, needing a good meal, a hot shower, and a bed to pass out in. The restaurant in the lodge we stayed in smelled like fish puke, Sam used all the hot water in his call for “first shower” and there were only two beds in the room, so Jonah gracefully took to the floor, as we both passed out at 8. Sam’s demon had other plans for him though. He was up all night, shitting and puking even more than we had.

The next morning we were awoken with the news that our flight to Pokhara was indeed cancelled. We’re told that if we hurry throgh the unrelenting rain, we can take a series of Jeeps and get to Pokhara by the next night. We catch some kind of offroad bus, to point A on our list of vehicle transfers. Our road takes us through the river bed, flooded by the recent, unseasonal rains, and 10’s of buses and cars are stuck in the mud and rushing water. Half of our bus gets out, and crosses the series of streams by foot, to reduce the weight of the bus. Somehow, our bus is the first across the stream, and we press on in our humanity-less bus ride, where the culture of South Asian commute is very dog eat dog, which resulted in even the westerners unplugging their manners for the sake of best possible seat finding. Soon the road is blocked again-This time, a Jeep is stuck where it tried to cross a landslide, with a line of 5 buses and more cars behind, stopped, people wandering outside in the rain and communally trying to dig out the jeep and fix the road so we can all get through. Jonah helped dig, but Sam and I watched from a nearby cave with binoculars.After hours, it was our buses turn to crawl over the hump. Our bus went on, hours delayed, and eventually, we faced a landslide uncrossable, and short of our destination, an hours walk from the nearest town, we were instructed to get out of the bus with our luggage and walk. I would not have been keen on the idea had I not been trekking for the last few weeks, used to it.

We reached a town in some clouds called Ghasa. That night we smoked the marijuana that we had picked from the trail a few days before, in the environment that it originally comes from, and still today grows in tall trees as a weed. It was weak in potency, as we were told it would be, but gave us a feeling of clearheaded relaxed-ness. Jonah’s yoga session turned into an elf dancing celebration. It was still raining hard, but this was a moment of relaxed clarity, looking out at the hills from the balcony of our hotel from within a raincloud that had been soaking us for days now. The next day we had a 9 hour day of commute to look forward too. All the roads and highways in the Himalayas were closed due to flooding and landslides, but we had a deadline to make in Pokhara. We would have to continue on foot, and complete the entire Annapurna circuit.

To our surprise, the rain stopped the next day. Sam and I were awoken by an exhuberant, yoga happy Jonah exclaiming “Brothers! The sky is as blue as Vishnu’s skin! The rain has passed! Hooray!!” A stroke of luck, but Sam was as sick as ever, having suffered another gross, sleepless night. Our bodies were starting to really catch up with our bold new itinerary. Before setting out on yet another truly longest day ever, Sam started to cry out of nervous tension, having to do it all again, again. We had a brothers hug and were off on a long, downhill day, by far the most milage I’ve ever covered in a single day, and booking it through the whole day at a heroic pace, dictated by Tenzing, who kept under exaggerating distances to make us seem stronger and in a better boat than we were in. When we took a break, we could see that even he was feeling it, limping from the counter to our table to bring us our sodas. Sam fell going up the stairs at the end of our day. We were 11 hours exhausted, and so rested 11 hours of sleep to do it up again.