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.

Day 16: Ghorepani - Birethanti

Rustling and shuffling could be heard through the thin balsa wood walls, even as my watch alarm beeped at 4:30am.  Nobody was being noisy or talking above a whisper, but I knew for certain that a great many people were on the move.  In the dark, we collected our slow-processing minds, water, and the camera, and stumbled outside to join what Johnathan called the “congo line” of trekkers making their way up the dark hill to see the sunrise.  We climbed up stone steps and roots serving as steps for about ten minutes, until we reached a ticket booth and paid the 500 rupees per person to continue climbing.  (Poon Hill is a tourist attraction and people come from all over to climb the 1,102ft hill to watch the sun rise on the Annapurna Massif.  They usually do a short loop trek that begins in Nayapul and climbs up to Ghorepani and then wraps back around for a 4-day journey.)  Some people had to go back to their teahouses, because they didn’t know they had to pay an entrance fee – I’m glad I read ahead of time and we had money.  Sam paid for our entrance while I sat in the bushes off the trail to get a photo of the trekker headlight procession as it snaked its way up the hill; it is possible many who saw me thought I was doing something else in the bushes, because I got some strange looks from passerby…oh well.

Trekker headlights.

It was about 5:10am when we passed through the gate and began the slow step-by-step climb and Sam left me to go my own pace while he zoomed ahead of the pack.  I actually passed several climbers at the rare wide places in the single-track stairway.  It was very dark and I was glad for my super bright headlight: most of the time, the trees were so dense, all I could see were the dust covered shoes of the stranger in front of me, the clicking trekking pole tips of the stranger behind me, and the stones and roots on which we were climbing.  It was strange to be climbing in the dark with hundreds of other people who were speaking all sorts of languages.  In a particularly rare wide spot in the trail, two lines formed: a fast lane and a slow lane, and since I was packless and jacketless, I got into the fast lane which made good time as the trail twisted and switch backed through the trees, with only a few slow points where there were bottlenecks in the trail or some rude people were clogging it.  I found myself in front of some Americans; their accent crisp and unusual to my Nepali adjusted ears was easy to identify from other English speakers.  After introductions made in the headlight glow, we started making jokes and enjoyed the climb to the top of the hill.  As we went, the early dawn began its approach and I reached the top by 5:50am to find Sam patiently waiting for me with his hands in his pockets to keep warm.

Trekkers making their way up the hill - blurry because of all the bouncing of the platform.

There was an observation tower that I made a beeline for and climbed up to the top to grab a prime viewing spot right next to the rail.  As I mentioned before, sunrises here aren’t all that spectacular: a little pink and then just simple light.  I found myself standing between a Russian and a Japanese, who both had bulky, black SLR cameras and tripods – I smiled at them and held my little teal green camera aloft.  We three waited.  Hundreds of people poured up the trail, onto the flat hilltop, and washed up the platform to squeeze and ooze into every available foot of floor space.  The platform bounced and swayed and I feared the spindly steel legs of the structure would be insubstantial for such a weight as the tourists subjected on the platform.  We, the multitude, waited.  Cold wind swept up and over us, as the sun began its rise.  Slowly, my side of the platform was rewarded with a slight pink alpenglow on the mountains.  Cameras snapped and clicked and zoomed.  People jostled for position – failing to budge people at the rail, middle platform viewers passed their cameras to railing platform viewers, hoping the person who ended up taking a photo for them would be a decent photographer: I have no idea how everyone kept track of who’s camera belonged to whom as black cameras and cell phones were passed back and forth.

Alpenglow on Dhaulagiri.

More light now.

India is beyond those hills.

Machhapuchhare (Fish Tail)

Glorious sun.

I miraculously found Sam in the throng on the ground, we took a few more photos, and then headed back down the trail, just as the last few stragglers were making their way up to the hilltop and the little coffee shack next to the platform was opening its shutters and taking orders.  We ran into my guide friend from last night and chatted for a minute.  He said he thought 500 people were now at the top of Poon Hill; indeed it was very crowded.

Annapurna South

Annapurna South

Dhaulagiri and rhododendrons.

Headed back down Poon Hill.

So, by 7:15am we were back at our teahouse and I stood at the little reception booth by the front door and gave the breakfast order for Sam and me – someone behind me started laughing and it was my Nepali guide friend again: he gave me a hard time about ordering so much food, like I did last night, and pretended to not understand me when I tried to explain that the order was for Sam’s breakfast too.  We had a good laugh about it and he joked with the other porters and guides that I would one day put them out of business because I was a “tough girl.”  Johnathan found us and we all ate breakfast together and discussed our plans for the remainder of out trek.  I was feeling sluggish after the early morning exercise and breakfast, but we eventually left at 8:45am, as tired hikers with messy hair and rumpled and dusty clothes were streaming back to their teahouses for breakfast or naps.

Met Johnathan at a little store after descending Poon Hill.

Day 16: I don't have enough fingers, but it doesn't matter because it's the last day, yay!

We had a very nice and fast morning of hiking and passed through another rhododendron forest.  The trail was soft and mostly all downhill and the shade from the large sweetly scented flowering trees kept the air cool and refreshingly moist.  

The third donkey had propane tanks - a walking bomb.

Oh the places you run into people: met back up with the Israeli couple while waiting to use an outhouse.

Nicest toilet we'd seen in awhile.

By 10:00am we came to Ulleri and the dreaded stone steps.  By most accounts, there are between 3,200-3,400 steps down to Tikhedhunga and they consist entirely of stone, are of irregular heights, and are exceedingly steep: I did not count them, but they seemed to go down into eternity.  By this time of day, the sun was brutal and the stone steps seemed to radiate the heat, as if to add to the grueling experience; I ran out of water about half way down the steps, but there wasn’t anything to do about it, so I continued descending step after step after step.  We caught up with some young porters attached to a large group of trekkers and they were fun to hike with for a time: they were just typical boys, yelling and laughing as they jumped down the stairs trying to best each other.  Sam and I walked quickly as we navigated our way through a small settlement to prevent the boys from passing us and we left them in our literal dust when they eventually paused to take a break.  Near the end of the steps we stopped in some relative shade so I could fill up on egg power (boiled eggs from breakfast as a snack) and we rested from the heat.  Our entertainment was in the form of a passing donkey train that took longer to pass us than we wanted to wait, so we weaved our way through donkeys as they were going up and we were going down the steps: it was tricky, but we, seasoned trekkers, had dealt with crazy yaks and irritated buffalo, so we were not daunted by burdened down donkeys who whacked us with their swishing tails and tried to pitch us forward to tumble the rest of the way down the stairs.

So many steps.

Eventually, mercifully, we arrived at a suspension bridge at the edge of Tikhedhunga at 11:45am and watched boys swimming in the river as we crossed and staggered into a teahouse built into the muddy cliff.  The place was filled with perhaps a million flies and a dozen Nepalis eating dal bhat.  The flies should have been our clue to leave and go up the trail a bit further to a different teahouse, but we were too exhausted and thirsty to grasp the obvious.  I ordered fries and a ginger tea.  We had to wait an hour for our food to be served and were severely disappointed with it: my potato chunks were covered in grease and barely cooked and the tea was hot water with bits of ginger in it.  Sam and I agreed that the longer the food takes to arrive, the more likely that it will not be edible.  I added some of the honey that came with Sam’s chapatti to my tea and made it reasonably palatable.  So, an hour later, we left, not much rested or less hungry than when we arrived.  We met up with that large group of trekkers we’d passed on the steps and merged with them for awhile, until the weather began to thunder and rain and the group stopped so they could put on rain gear.

Feeling silly about being with a bunch of day tripping trekkers.

Hope it's a controlled burn up there.

Sam and I did not stop, because we knew the rain would pass.  The group caught up with us after we had stopped a few miles up the trail, because I had to use the outhouse at a teahouse.  Sam said I’ve gotten pretty good at spotting toilets – often they are camouflaged or not marked and look just like one of the many little shacks that cluster around teahouses and other buildings.  I’m an outhouse expert.  We chatted with the group for a bit and then we hit the trail again as the wind began to gust.  It was rather brutal and gusts would knock me backwards, so I would stagger down the trail; it also began to rain again and grew cold, so we stopped at a little hut outside of another teahouse so I could dig out my gloves to wear.  A few trekkers were taking shelter there and one of their porters smirked at us and said, “Too difficult, huh?” But we shook our heads and replied, “No, it’s just rain” and stepped back out of the hut and continued along the trail.  In between bursts of soaking rain, my pants would dry from the wind.

Bamboo leaves flying horizontal in the fierce wind.

The trekker group, diminished in size somehow, perhaps they left some to wait out the weather, caught us again as we were fooling around taking pictures and we all hiked into Birethanti at 4:00pm.  Sam and I were nabbed by the ACAP checkpoint and then since our stuff was out, we crossed the bridge and found the TIMS checkpoint too.  Then, we backtracked through the village to the bridge and found a teahouse up on a hill, where we would have a nice view.  Sam had to do a bit of coaxing to get me to agree to the teahouse, because there were more stairs involved, but I eventually agreed and climbed the extra 18 steps up to the teahouse.

Colorful Briethanti.

Our first dinner we ordered at 4:30pm, as soon as we arrived, and then we unpacked.  Priorities.  The food was ready a half hour later and was disappointing: my tomato soup was chicken broth with chunks of tomato and was so distasteful I couldn’t even drink the broth.  My hot chocolate was tasty, though, so all was not lost.  We went up to our second-story room, more steps, and took a nap until 8:00pm when our second dinner was supposed to be ready.  In the dining room, we looked out the now dark windows as we ate dull food and watched headlights wander all over the hillside and people in nearby teahouses eating dinner by candlelight, like we were.  Flashes of lightning behind one of the hills towards Nayapul, tomorrow’s destination, lit the sky and added to the atmosphere.  Things were relaxed.  It was our last night on the trail.  We lingered in the dining room because a trekker came in for his dinner and he turned out to be the cheery guy from Indonesia whom we met way back in Bhulbhule; we swapped trail stories and shared in our mutual success at completing the circuit and it was great to end the evening with him.

Every single door lock to every single room we had made this noise - some rooms were more difficult to open than others:

On our way to our room, we went up to the roof because I wanted to try to get a night photo of all the little lights on the hillside, but the weather had turned cloudy with rain and the rooftop was where all the porters were sleeping and we felt that we were invading their space.  So we retreated and headed for our beds.

My failed night photo of the lights.

Data

Starting elevation: 9,429ft

Poon Hill elevation: 10,531ft

Ending elevation: 3,408ft

Distance: 14 miles

Weather: variable