hills to the left of me, mountains to the right, here i am stuck in a valley with a view...

So. Where were we. We went to sleep on moving beds in Scotland and awoke into a London morning, and then before we even knew what was happening we found ourselves back in the reassuringly chaotic streets of Kathmandu. And immediately slipped back into the rhythm of Nepal, the intervening months in Europe becoming a shimmering mirage in our minds.

Our first few days were spent form filling and queuing in Kathmandu (Kathmanqueue?) and then it was time for the much more important brotherly reunion. So we dodged the rain and hail the night threw at us to meet and welcome Harry and Alex with hugs, and got ready to set off on a journey that would carry us through the heart of the Himalayas. 

We began in BesiSahar. The purpose of this town, I suppose, is to fill with relief all the trekkers who find themselves trudging out of it. Unfortunately once you leave its dusty underwhelming streets you have a good 4 hours of walking up roads along which the construction of a huge hydro-electric station (financed, I am fairly certain though I have nothing in the way of evidence except a few Chinese signs, by China) is a constant. This is not great for the morale of four trekkers who set themselves off on a 3 week trek based on the assumption of seeing some pretty spectacular natural beauty. Thankfully the last hour of our walk this first day took us up up up, into hillier, greener, more soothing pastures.

From here on in our days were one....we woke- early always as there is not a lot to do in a trekker's night once you have overdosed on card games-, then we ate, then we trekked, usually we stopped for our lunch of 'Trekker's Fuel' muesli bars (which were so highly regarded in the beginning that we would collect every spilt crumb and became so hated after two weeks that, now, to even look at the packaging turns my stomach), then we trekked a little more, then we found lodgings and we simultaneously collapsed on the bed and dove upon the menu in the manner of starving castaways. And this, essentially, is what you do when you trek in Nepal. Of course, it is all against a backdrop of some of the most impressive mountains in the world, so immediately something as mundane as going to the toilet becomes an exercise in wonderment.  

The mountains were not giving themselves away easily. This was one of the very first, very exciting peeks of the peaks that we had on our second or third day (it's all a bit of a blur now). This was also the place where we began to feel the kilometres in our legs and stopped for some impromptu street yoga, much to the amused bemusement of the locals.

Up and up we went. Every day the views produced more gasps and excited pointing from us. But one thing that is pretty much constant in the Himalayas (all Nepal in fact) is the Tibetan prayer flags. At home they flutter from the veranda of that one house on the street where the hippies live but in Nepal they adorn everything from temples to Bodhi trees to bridges. I can't work out if their presence on those uncertain bridges which join two river valley walls, the river rushing far far below, is an appeal for safe passage or purely aesthetic...

As well as prayer flags, there are these. Name? I don't know. But they are stone and they have a seam of prayer wheels- which are to be spun sequentially, all of them, in a clockwise direction- all down the middle. There are often flat black or white stones carved with beautiful Nepali script scattered about the place too. 

On our way up to the widest pass in the world we decided we may as well take a little detour to visit the highest lake in the world. A tour of superlatives. Later we will add: the longest time without a shower, the highest altitude we have achieved, the happiest I have ever been to catch a Nepalese bus. But for now we are on our way to the lake. And we saw this very stylish yak, with flowers in its ears. 

We walked across this incredibly dangerous section of 'path'; essentially about a foot of slightly less steep gravel where miss-step ends in probable death. This was the scariest part of our entire trek. Pretty cool picture though. And worth it. The lake, although frozen into an oval of white, was set amongst the most perfect, whitest, cleanest (still on the tour see?) mountains I've ever seen. We were almost completely surrounded by them. We heard an avalanche. And after a very arduous climb- remember we were at an altitude of about 5000 metres, which in human speak means every 5 or 6 steps we had to stop to catch our breath- and some biscuits by the frozen oval, we rewarded ourselves with some impro-skiing (toboganning without a toboggan) back down the slopes, reducing what was a 1 hour climb into a 5 minute thrill. The wet jeans were totally worth it. My body objected a little to the extremes I was subjecting it to and gave me an afternoon of altitude sickness after our return from the lake, but it was very good preparation for taking on the pass a few days hence.

A few days hence: 5000 metres is quite high; it gets quite cold. This is what we found adorning our guesthouse when we arrived at High Camp, the final stop before Thorung La; world's widest pass and 5500 metres above sea level. This night was probably the coldest I have ever been while sleeping. I wore all my clothes. Even gloves.

This is where we were though. The cold is secondary when you wake up to this.

And this. This is the famous pass.

We are triumphant. We have done it. Now all that remains between us and civilisation is a very steep descent and another couple of days. We celebrated (how else?) with water and Trekkers Fuel (whenever I say this in my head it is written in lightning and surrounded by exclamaton marks).

We've done the pass. We're bad-ass. 

Then we started the journey down. The lower we got, the warmer it was and the more the scenery began to resemble what I imagine Grand Canyon country to be. It was less spectacular than what we had just left, but quite beautiful still. We were in good spirits too. In acknowledgement of the feat we had just pulled off, we were on our way to enjoy some juicy yak burgers at a place called (in what can only be described as a stroke of genius) YakDonalds. Our expectations weren't actually that high...the visit was mostly because we couldn't let a pun that good pass us by. Happily the burgers were delicious. I am now a fan of yak in all their incarnations.  

I also like goats. Because they are so nimble and their horns are so very funny. These goats we met while wandering around a little village famous for its apple products (we sampled crumble, pie, juice, brandy and cider), on our way back to civilisation. The walk back down was quite pretty...lots of blossoming trees, the mountains still in the background, tiny villages perched here and there. But there was no denying that there was certainly less enthusiasm among our group. We had done the pass, the hard part was over, we were no longer in mountains and, to be honest, we were fairly sick of walking.  

So beautiful though the mountains undeniably are, we happily caught a bus down to Pokhara to enjoy beers, momos (dumplings), chocolates and sunsets on the lake, three days after crossing the pass. 

Satisfied in the knowledge that we had walked 208 kilometres in thirteen days.

And I will leave you with this...remember, always go clockwise...

an ascent into madness

Don't worry, I just was very proud of that play on words so I wanted to use it in this post- we aren't really going mad. We did spend the last week ascending higher and higher above sea level though (that's the pun- you get altitude sickness and go a bit mad if you go too high too quickly).

After leaving Chitwan we caught the bus to Kathmandu to deal with some beaurocracy and have some real coffee, then we had an extremely long and at times terrifying bus ride north. From Kathmandu to the town of Syabrubesi in Langtang National Park is only 190km...the trip took 9 hours. There were cliffs involved and buses that were at 3 or 4 times capacity- from this I think you can probably guess how we felt when we arrived. (Funnily enough, that wasn't the worst bus trip we have done in Nepal).

The trek through Langtang National Park was lovely and scenic though- if a little tough on the legs. Syabrubesi is at 1470 metres above sea level and at the end of 3 days walking we were at 3870 metres. It was a steep climb but there was no lack of tea houses, restaurants or snack shops along the way if we needed an energy boost. As well as enterprising Nepalese, we saw monkeys rustling in the trees above our heads, waterfalls and the occasional snowy peak in the distance. As we got higher the scenery slowly changed and the monkeys gave way to yaks, the forest to open plains dotted with shacks and Tibetan prayer flags until we were walking in a valley surrounded by mountainous forest on one side and snow-covered mountains on the other. It was a spectacular view.

Although we weren't at a ridiculously high altitude (by Nepalese standards) the air did get thinner and thinner and on our last morning of walking we were stopping every half an hour or so, just to catch our breath. Admittedly I did have a cold, which didn't help. I was exhaustedly relieved when we came over a peak and saw the final town sitting just in front of us.

The town, Kyanjin Gompa, is home to 10 or 12 lodges, 2 bakeries (one of which sold us the best apple pie we had in all of Nepal), yaks, ponies and lots of mountains. It sits in a valley entirely surrounded by them. The mornings were quite sunny and warm so we sat outside with snow on all sides and enjoyed the vew. It also snowed every night, so every morning we would wake up to a thin layer of white over everything- unil the sun came out and melted it all, ready for the next evening.

Will has developed a new passion now, in the form of mountain climbing. So while I lay in bed trying to get rid of my cold, he was out in the cold, climbing the highest easily accessible peak in Kyanjin Gompa. He made it to the top and can now proudly say he has climbed to 5000 metres above sea level (for the un-mountain inclined that is only 500 metres lower than Everest Base Camp).

After that success we headed back down to warmer weather, to reward ourselves for our efforts with a deep-fried snickers bar. (We were rewarding our brains and tastebuds, not our hearts or arteries). And since then we have had the most horrendous 36 hours I have probably ever had. I'll put that in a new post. Stay tuned!

good morning Vietnam.

It is raining in Hue, a town on the central coast of Vietnam in which we have found ourselves. Two days ago there was a flashflood. It isn't the ideal weather to be doing much at all, apart from sitting in cafes or watching movies in bed. But, I hear you ask, how did we get from Siem Reap to Hue and what adventures have we had on the way?

Well....

We were able to catch the bus to Bangkok, though the schemer who sold us the tickets and promised the bus would take us to the airport spoke not a word of the truth and we sat fuming on the bus as it drove straight past the airport and into central Bangkok, from where we had to go back exactly the same way as we had just come to go to the airport.

We slept at the airport and caught our early morning flight to Hanoi. Hanoi is a fairly insane city. The noise is constant, there are literally millions of motorbikes and the smog is thick. There is a lot to explore though...crowded little alleyways, cafes, restaurants and shops.

We did a bit of shopping, a bit of eating and a bit of sightseeing.

We got accosted by a lady who forced us to take pictures of ourselves with her wares, the afterwards it was 'you take photo now you buy! you buy!'...but we didn't. We ran away.

Our first night there we saw a show of water puppetry, an old art form originating in northern Vietnam. It was great. There was a band of musicians accompanying the puppets, which were made of wood and stuck on the end of long poles at the end of which the puppeteers were in control as they hid behind a large wooden facade. The puppets re-enacted various scenes from Vietnamese life, but it was all done in a shallow pool of green water. My favourite part was when two water buffalo stopped working in the field to have a fight then a little man had to separate them...imagine that scene (you have to imagine it because tickets were more expensive if one wanted to take photos, so obviously we took no photos) in water, with funny looking wooden puppets and sound effects in Vietnamese. Oddly funny.

We also saw some sights...Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum (though we didn't get to see the man himself, as his body is currently in Russia for restoration), the Temple of Literature (Vietnam's first university) and we caught a bus out to the suburbs and found our way to the Museum of Ethnology, which housed a very interesting account of Vietnamese life, both past and present.

Will got his faced shaved with a razor finally (he wanted to since Phnom Penh).

The Temple of Literature.

We escaped the smog and the traffic and the people on a train up to the mountain town (former French hill station) of Sapa. Where it was actually quite cold, but the air was amazingly fresh. And he fog was incredible...it engulfed all of the surrounding mountains until we were basically in a town in the clouds.

We hired a motorbike -I didn't drive!- and explored the mountainous roads and a waterfall in a national park. We met a lady from a nearby village (or, actually, she met us) and she took us over the mountain to have lunch at her house in a small village of 100 people.

The 'Love Waterfall' and me trying to make a loveheart (it's a subtle reference to the name...it's ok if you didn't get it)

A pause in our mountain trek and our lovely guide Chou.

After we had our fill of the slow pace and fresh air of Sapa we caught the train back to Hanoi, in order to continue on to Halong Bay. And I think that might be a good place to leave this entry, or it's going to end up being too long and you will all get bored...so see 'good morning Vietnam continued' for Halong Bay and Hue.

further a-field

After we laughed with relief at making our flight off Phuket, we had a look at our trusty guide book to find a guest house in Chiang Mai, a town in the north of Thailand, and our next destination. We decided on what looked like a winner, cheap and comfortable with internet and a restaurant. Until we got there and it was closed....since it was nearly 11 at night we weren't being to picky and just went to the next cheap, open place we could find. Apparently it was a place filled with elephants that liked to wake up irritatingly early.

After not too much sleep (because you must never have TOO much sleep....hmmmm) we left the noisy place and went back to our first choice. Then we went to book an overnight trek for the following day and to find trekking shoes, which suddenly seemed like a very important addition to our backpacks.

At 10 the next morning we were picked up and met our trekking buddies which included a father and daughter from Barcelona, a girl from London, a guy who was Canadian but was living in Afghanistan as he served in the army and two German boys who had that odd German way about them. After driving for a while and stopping occasionally at places that gave us opportunities to buy things, we had some fried rice for lunch and then set off on our trek for the day. Our trek for the day involved walking to the top of a really, really big hill where we would sleep for the night in bamboo huts, but it turned out the Germans thought it was a race up the mountain and charged off ahead leaving me to wonder if I was indeed an obese couch potato. Apparently not though, they just wanted to prove themselves. But the exercise was worth it in the end...

We hung out in the little village on the mountain for the rest of the evening and after dinner when we all realised we had no playing cards and there was no TV our guide showed us riddles he made with toothpicks and none of us solved any of them. Then he sung acoustic Thai songs to us with his guitar and when he offered his guitar around nobody else could play it. Then we realised we were probably the worst group ever.

The next day we set off down the moutain at a leisurely 10am. It was far far easier than climbing it, though a challenge presented itself in trying not to slip down the near vertical sections of slippery mud we were walking down. We got to the bottom and found our elephant friends who were going to take us for a walk around the river.

Then we rafted in the river. That was my favourite thing to do. After we had rafted a little (but not too much because I think the wet season makes the river too dangerous in some sections) we did some bridge jumping and then we were back on the road to Chiang Mai.

We had a bit more of a poke around Chiang Mai then we caught the bus to Chiang Rai, further north and nearer the border crossing into Laos. Nothing remarkable happened in Chiang Rai...it's a nice little town and there was a monsoonal thunder storm while we were snuggled up cosily in our $5 a night guest house. This is how we entertained ourselves.

And I think I might leave you all to ponder that...