Day 17: Birethanti - Pokhara

Our teahouse dining room, as seen from the road.

Last night, I turned off my watch alarm so we could sleep in as much as we wanted, but apparently our bodies had slept enough by 7:15am and we were up and ready for breakfast.  We ate under a covered patio, and had a terrific view of Machhapuchhre, also called Fish Tail mountain, and the sunrise.

Waiting for breakfast.

Our view of Fish Tail

Also our view.

Also our view...oh well.

I chatted with the woman who runs the teahouse and found out about the bus situation – what times it ran and how much it would cost – so Sam and I would know what was going on and not be idiot tourists when we arrived in Naya Pul.  Then, we packed and set out by 8:30am and walked at a quick pace so we would arrive in Naya Pul in time for the 9:00am bus to Pokhara.  We breezed through the shantytown section of Birethanti, where the townsfolk were busy with what Sam calls their “national pastime” of pounding rocks with hammers to create smaller rocks: they sit on piles of rocks, pounding away on them and it makes me appreciate our mechanical rock crushers.  We had a nice and cool walk and arrived in Naya Pul exactly at 9:00am, in time to see several trekkers making their way through the trashy, noisy, dirty, chicken filled village.  I was very glad we had not spent the night here.  There were two Israeli trekkers, looking fresh and clean and obviously newly arrived, heading toward us, so I stopped them and asked where the bus had dropped them, because we weren’t exactly sure which direction to take.  They indicated up a dirt embankment, so we climbed up and there was the main road.  

Our last photo on the trail - bittersweet.

As it happened, we popped up right at a taxi and the man leaning against the car wanted to take us, but I told him we wanted the bus and he, nodding his head, said to wait where we were.  It was obvious that we were in the right place, because there were food vendor stalls and an assortment of non-trekker people milling about on the side of the road with apparently nothing to occupy their time.  Just as I was making non-English conversation with a woman, a bus pulled up and Sam asked the ‘door boy’ if it was a bus headed to Pokhara.  It was.  We double-checked.  It really was, so we climbed aboard – I say climbed because we literally had to climb over sacks of rice and other grains to get to empty seats in the back of the bus.

We had a nice carnival ride to Pokhara with great views of the mountains, set off against the now lush green landscape of the lower elevation.  The bus made a couple of stops to add and subtract passengers, but mostly it bumped and swerved and jerked along the twisting two lane road, bali music blaring from a couple of overhead speakers.  Several people got sick at various points during the journey and I understood why there were barf bags stuffed into the seats.  The swaying ride didn’t bother me, though I feared it might because I hadn’t traveled faster than a brisk walk in 16 days, but no, I was fine and even enjoyed my peanut butter sandwich saved from breakfast.

Annapurna South

Machhapuchhre

At 10:45am, the bus arrived in Pokhara and made a couple of stops before the bus manager called back to us that we should get off at the next stop.  So, we made our way back over the sacks of rice and stepped off the bus when it stopped and found ourselves in the midst of a large crowd of people waiting for various buses in the blazing hot sun.  Traffic congested the streets, people shouted, horns beeped, and the cacophony was a sensory overload to two trekkers accustomed to hearing tree frogs and wind in the trees.  However, I was extremely proud of myself, because I didn’t stand there at the base of the bus steps with wide eyes wondering what to do, but jumped into action and started walking toward a taxi stand.  I asked a man where the bus stop was for buses to Lakeside and he pointed up and across the busy road.  Sam and I carefully made our way there and joined a group of brightly dressed locals, but there was a line of taxis also waiting in the area and Sam wanted to take a taxi, rather than wait for the bus, so we wedged ourselves and our packs into a tiny taxi car and were relieved to be out of the direct rays of the sun.  Our driver asked where we wanted to go and I said, “Lakeside” and he launched the car into the river of traffic.  The only exciting detail about the ride was an enormous brown and white cow sitting in the very center of the road, just relaxing like she was working on a suntan, while cars zoomed around her.  Our taxi man asked if we had a hotel and I said he could take us wherever he wanted.  This suited him just fine, because hotels and taxi drivers have an arrangement where the drivers get a small finder’s fee for bringing tourists to “their” hotels.  I wasn’t concerned, because if we didn’t like the hotel he brought us to, we could just walk down the street and choose one we liked better.  He pulled up to “his” hotel and Sam paid him 300 rupees, I think (about $3 usd), and we made our way inside the dark and moderately cool building.  The taxi got his hotel payoff from the manager and then the manager and Sam went upstairs to see a room while I waited downstairs with our packs.  The room met Sam’s approval, mostly because he didn’t want to look for another hotel, so we decided to stay, paid the 1,000 rupees, and flopped on the hard beds to rest our road weary bodies.

Waiting for a room.

After we had recuperated and skyped home using the hotel’s free wi-fi and my iPod Touch, we unpacked and decided to go out for lunch, it was 1:00pm, and do a bit of exploring.  Lakeside is the touristy district of Pokhara and is located beside Phewa lake.  Pokhara, specifically Lakeside, serves as a sort of basecamp for Annapurna trekkers, so we were definitely in good company here.  There was a festive feel about the place as people walked along the streets or puttered past on scooters or rumbled along on motorcycles.  We ate lunch in a back garden of a place called Silk Road.  I don’t know what I ate, some sort of rice and curry, not quite dal bat though, and had a “chocolate” milkshake: there was a taste in it that I couldn’t quite identify, but the drink was tasty nonetheless.  I could have sat there all afternoon in my swing chair, but Sam was ready to go explore some more, so we strolled down to the lake.  There were tons of tourists; since the sun was still baking hot, we didn’t linger there long.  We window shopped our way back to our hotel and took a nap until 5:30pm.

A lot of bikes...and rocks.

Sam thought this was great.

Love this chair swing.

Chocolate milkshake

Tal Bahari Temple is on an island on the lake.

A very full boat headed to the temple.

Sam, finding knock-off merchandise for sale.

For dinner, we decided to go to a pizza place we had passed earlier, so we strolled down the hushed, but still busy street to the simple pizza joint.  They have a strange way of handling the ordering and paying of the pizzas, which are all made to order and cooked as individual, dinner plate sized pizzas, so we were observant and got the process correct, as if we’d been ordering there our entire lives.  Our food arrived quickly and we devoured them nearly as quickly, while listening not to the usual bali crazy tunes, but to Aerosmith.  My milkshake was just that: milk that had been shaken.  We had a good laugh about it as we made our way, in the dark, back to the hotel, passing our lunch place that was having a live music party at that moment, and climbed to the hotel roof so I could get a couple of night photos.  I was able to take a few, right before half the street lost power and went black.

Pizza delivery bikes.

Super excited about this pizza.

It was 8:00pm when we made it back to our room and got the ancient tv to work and clicked through the channels until we found BBC and heard our first world news.: North Korea was threatening to missile South Korea, at the exact time we will be flying into Seoul.  I turned off the tv – who needs world news anyway.  We went to bed with the top windows open for fresh air, because the room was stifling, but I feared the bugs would get us; we slept with the bathroom light on, because I was convinced cockroaches wouldn’t crawl about if it wasn’t dark, but the light was only on when the generator was working, so it randomly turned off and on all night.