Namaste and Welcome to the Himalaya

What do Chris Bonington, Norman Pyhrenferth, Sir Edmund Hillary and now Janet and John Anderson all have in common? Hint: they all did it in Nepal. Hint: they all lived to tell about it. Although, in our case, there were moments I wondered whether that would be the case. Hint: none of them ever saw a yeti while doing it, although we came pretty darn close.

John and I have now joined the ranks of those who have trekked in the tallest mountains in the world, the Himalaya. When someone now says, "The Himalaya are big"; we can say "Yes, they are." When someone says "The Himalaya are rugged"; we can nod in agreement. When someone says, "They are brutal to hike"; we can show them the stretch marks where our muscles shoved at our skin in protest. Will we ever brag loudly in public places that we have hiked the Nepal Himalaya? After all this pain, you better believe it.

For eight days we hiked into the mountains and valleys and across the rivers of Nepal's Middle Hills to reach Annapurna Base Camp. It might not qualify as a mountain expedition worthy of the history books, but that's only because those writers didn't talk to me first. It certainly felt like an expedition. And after 15 days, when we finally came full circle and reached a paved road that could take us back to Pokhara, we had traversed more land on foot that we had ever thought we could in a single trip. I still maintain that had I been shown a relief map of the trek before we started, I would have laughed, put down my pack and quit right then and there. But our two dimensional, highly inaccurate map made the trek look feasible, and that steady line going up the page look like a gradually sloping trail.

The Annapurna Sanctuary is rated three stars out of five on the difficulty scale in most books we read. Of course without ever having trekked here before, that didn't mean much to us at the time. Our route began in Lomlie and ended at base camp at 4100 meters with a thousand ups and downs in between. What follows is my account of our two week trek into the Himalaya, a description of the people we met along the way, the mountain villages where we stayed, the spectacular scenery we saw and our exhilaration and exhaustion every step of the way.