Political and Seismic Instability

Before dawn Sean’s watch beeps. The room is cold, I’m warm. I really don’t want to get out of my sleeping bag. But I peek out the window again at the mountains and shuck off my sleeping bag. My boots are cold and stiff and my feet are reluctant to go in.

Krishna is in the hallway when we emerge from our rooms. We check that we have gloves and headlamps. I have no gloves so Becca lets me borrow the windshells from hers. We walk down the steep stairs and out into the darkness. The flagstones are slick with frost. We proceed back up the hill and turn along a sidestreet and up more steps and across another hotel’s terrace, where some other tourists are arranging themselves for the same morning walk. A little farther and we pass through a gate where a sign announces Poon Hill. Here the path grows steep. Our headlamps light the narrow trail, a gully worn down through the dirt to the icy stones and tree roots. The frost on the leaves is thick and sparkling. When we emerge into clearings the stars are as well. I stop to remove my wool sweater so that I won’t overheat, and take in a view of the hills, a slow fog wave rolling over the saddle, the blue mountains above everything.

The path crosses into the open, among frozen bunches of grass and burrs. Then we’re at the hilltop, and the light is coming up behind the broken clouds in the east. We walk around the viewing tower which was built at the hilltop for little purpose other than to make it impossible to have an unobstructed 360° view. I climb up to have a look around, but having the roof supports in my field of vision annoys me, and I’d rather have my feet on the ground. Like the other fifty-odd people who’ve arrived to catch the sunset, we mill about trying to keep warm. I put my sweater back on and stick my hands in my jacket’s side vents. Krishna shivers. Despite his assurances, he’s not as warmly equipped as he ought to be. (I’ll have more to say about guides and gear in part seven, wherein the weather takes a swipe at us.) Becca and Sean and I move from place to place, finding ways to brace our cameras for the long exposures needed to get an image in the predawn. I clear a spot in the frost on a wooden bench. The sun comes up fast. There’s a lot to look at.

Becca takes this picture of Annapurna South (left, 23,684 feet) and Machhapuchhre (right, 22,942 feet), which stand to the southeast of Poon Hill.

She also takes these of the Dhaulagiri massif, north of Poon Hill. The big one is Dhaulagiri (26,795 feet), the seventh highest peak in the world, and the sixth highest in Nepal.

I wade through some burrs to take this one.

Once the sun is up all the tourists start taking pictures like these.

The Thai women who’d abandoned their guide in Tikhedunga are there, all making the peace sign when their pictures are taken. The English man who’d been kicked by the pony is there as well, with his wife or girlfriend, and he reports that his knee and ankle are in good shape. They thank Becca again for her help.

We come back down the hill considerably less cranky than we were when we climbed out of our sleeping bags. The trail is still slippery with frost. Back at the Green View Lodge, we order a round of oat porridges and Tibetan bread and get our things packed. Sean videotapes the food preparations in the kitchen and the woodfed clay stove and I make my coffee on the counter there. Again, my coffee apparatus draws a lot of curious attention from the Nepalis. (Admittedly the AeroPress is a strange device. It’s also the best coffee maker there is for camping and trekking—it’s small, durable, and makes great coffee.) Sean and Becca and I are likewise fascinated to see Tibetan bread prepared. It’s basically a pan-fried doughboy. The woman who cooks it at the Green View drops the dough into the oil and snips it twice with scissors, perhaps to keep it from overinflating. It’s delicious stuff, and when I decide I want to be a fatter person, I’ll learn to make it.

Both Sean and Becca left their hearts in Ghorepani. They both had their pictures taken with the objects of their crushes. These are the two sisters who run the Green View Lodge.

This is a puppy en route from his birthplace near the Annapurna Base Camp to an illustrious career as a dog in Bouddha.

I myself didn’t fall in love in Ghorepani. This curly-haired pony did bat her eyelashes at me, but I think she just wanted an apple.

Finally we’re on our way. Despite its auspicious beginnings, though, the day will be the hardest one of our trek.

Yesterday, ukaalo, all uphill, Krishna told us. Today, waraalo, all downhill.

It’s six hours downhill by the estimate of every Nepali we ask, but for us eight, descending by endless stone stairways through terrace farms, stone walled buildings with thatch roofs, stone walls ringing terraces where water buffalo stand grazing amid the stubble of last season’s rice. The day is sunny. The valley, which grows more expansive as we descend, is lush and the light like honey. The land looks impossibly fertile. Banana trees grow between the fields, red flowers like poinsettias on tall shafts arch over the road, sprays of bright orange marigolds grow in every flowerbed in front of the houses and along the stone walls, stands of bamboo twenty feet high sway in the breeze.

The relentless downhill is hell on Sean’s knees and mine. By the time we stop for lunch, we’re griping about knee pains and making jokes about our age and infirmity to Becca and Krishna, and by midafternoon, the two of us are limping and sidestepping down the steep stone steps. I lean heavily on a ski pole borrowed from Becca to spare my aching right knee as much of each impact as possible. It’s not enough. Still, the scenery becomes more and more impressive and it makes the stumping along worth it. Whole landscapes here are tilted over, striations in the stone not unlike terraced fields but slanted and on a grander scale, wrought by tectonic uplifts that render the concept of horizontality absurd. Every pebble is either resting at its angle of repose or else currently rolling into the gulf. The river gets closer, the farms more picturesque, the stair steeper. Sometimes it is an improbable stack of granite blocks pretending to be a stairway, or two stairways side by side, a new one beside an an old one that’s collapsed, undermined by a landslide or by the inevitable pull of gravity in the steepness of this landscape. Yet many people live here. The entire day is spent walking through farmland. The people have staked themselves against the steepness: they’ve built level terrace after terrace down the face of the mountain and planted rice and radishes and yellow-flowering mustard.

The river gets closer and the earth in places is visibly tumbling apart, too steep to bear its own weight. We cross chalky, dusty stretches, calcium scars exposed by past landslides. The dirt glitters with mica. The village streets are paved with dull slabs of gray and white marble. Outside the villages, marble is used for stone walls as well. Cows and buffalo stand in the small fields and watch us pass and every person, nearly, greets us saying Namaste! and even those who don’t, when greeted, respond without fail. The children hold out their hands and ask for eschool pen, sweets, chocolate, mithai, never for money like they do in the capital.

Becca and I, talking with Krishna, learn the Nepali words for up, down, steep, slippery, switchback, horse, donkey, mule, porter, thigh, hurt, heavy.

We have lunch in the village of Sikha, in a little gardened yard overlooking the depths of the valley we have yet to descend. Without thinking of the consequences in terms of the latening hour, we order momos, which take a long time to prepare because each one has to be folded up by hand. At first we’re glad for the rest, Sean and I especially, but an hour later, when we still have no lunch, we start to fear that we won’t be able to make it to Tatopani by dark. We talk for a while with two women at the next table who are medical students from Holland, interning for a few months in Pokhara and currently on their way to a cataract surgery field clinic in a village near Beni. We pore over our maps and try to calculate how many hours it will be to Tatopani, and to Ghasa the next day, and, if every mile hurts like today’s have, whether we can possibly make it to Tukche where we promised Amanda’s and my landlady we would stay in her parents’ hotel. Finally lunch arrives, vegetable and egg momos (no momo sauce but quite enjoyable) and uncommonly spicy tomato noodle soup. We bolt it down, I put on my habitual midday dry socks, we put our shoes back on, and we’re on the road again.

Half an hour before dusk we arrive, finally, at a village on the river and sit on the stone bench across from the ACAP office while Krishna goes inside and shows our permits. This moment of rest is worth every rupee of the guide fee. Where we’re sitting, we can hear the river. Dogs wander past on their errands. Ponies chew and stamp in a crowded paddock above us and one of them kicks another in irritation. A grubby girl alternately wheedles for a school pen and keeps tabs on her baby brother who, without pants or underwear under his shirt, is trying to get himself into trouble with his newfound walking skills. After a few minutes Krishna is done and we have to get up. My knees and thighs have already stiffened. He assures us we’re very close to the town of Tatopani, just another fifteen minutes’ walk. We’ve been fantasizing about Tatopani all day. The town’s name means “hot water” in Nepali and yes there are hot springs there. We’ve discussed how sore muscles swell in hot water, making soreness and stiffness worse, but good sense is clearly going to be trumped by the desire to soak. All we have to do is stumble the last mile or two.

We cross a short cable bridge north across the river whose descent we’ve been paralleling all day, then a longer cable bridge over the wide Kali Gandaki which the smaller river joins. The Kali Gandaki is relatively low this time of year. In its wide bed it rolls around boulders and in pebbly shoals. Glacial sediments make the waters a clear deep turquoise. We hurry across. The far slopes above the river are already in shadows. Becca and Krishna and I make it across and wait for Sean while a mule train queues up on our side of the bridge. We shout to Sean to hurry but we can’t be heard over the rush of the river. Sean sees the mules though, and hurries across, and after he steps off the bridge, the mules start across. From the bridge we climb a steep switchback, wary of having another pack train roll rocks down on our heads. We pass through a small village and a construction camp where men are cooking and drinking at the end of their day. They sit around gas flames in the open-fronted shacks and watch us pass. Soon we start up another switchback improvised out of the sliding gravel slope. Above, the road mounts onto a sheer rock face. We walk a ledge for a couple of hundred yards, the river almost directly below and falling into deep shadows. We pass a place where we have to take care not to hit our heads on the overhanging stone, or trip over the chopped rebar sticking up from the reinforced trail edge on our right. The road crosses among fields on a wide tongue in the river. It’s now fully dark. It takes me a moment to realize we’ve entered the village of Tatopani because their electricity is out. The homes and shops are candlelit. The streets are almost completely dark. We continue along the street and people stand in the candlelit doorways and watch us.

Krishna shows us to a hotel. A boy with a candle leads us up the stairs to our rooms. Sean and I are giddy with soreness. The boy presents us with the customary menu and order pad. We discuss whether to eat first or go straight to the hot springs. The boy advises us to wait until morning for the hot springs, because it’s dark and the village lights are out. He seems to think it’s dangerous but we can’t ascertain why. Are there bandits? Wild animals? Are Nepalis just afraid of the dark? Probably they just want to close the kitchen early. We decide to defer further discussion until beer can be obtained to sharpen our reasoning. In the hotel’s dining room, Krishna also tries to persuade us not to go out tonight. We have headlamps and sore muscles and we’re undeterred. Sean and I drink a beer each, and become more undeterred. Finally we get our bathing suits and towels and headlamps from upstairs, and the four of us walk back through the dark streets. We turn down an alley in the direction of the river. The alley becomes a path, with a little stream running alongside. The path is rough but easily navigated. In a few minutes, steam swirls up in the beams of our headlamps and Sean finds himself spotlighting a naked man wading in the pool. We cross a low causeway to a shack on the other side, where a couple of young men are listening to Hindi music on a transistor radio by candlelight. Important bathing amenities are for sale, such as beer and Pringles. One of them collects our twenty-rupee fee and we wander off into the shadows to change.

The hot spring fills a cement pool at the base of a cliff. We sit on the submerged step and soak and groan appreciatively. We float a little. We eventually convince Krishna to climb in. I float around in search of where the water enters the pool, where it’s almost too hot, and sit there for a few minutes. Soon the other visitors have left and it’s just the four of us in the pool, and no lights other than our headlamps and the band of stars visible above the walls of the gorge. This is a more or less perfect hot springs wallow and could not possibly have been improved upon by daylight or electric lights. We decide that the Nepali standard for an optimum hot spring visit is not the same as the American one. After a while I notice a smell in the air that I haven’t smelled since early November in Kathmandu, a night-blooming jasmine called raatiko rani (“queen of the night”). It’s a spectacular overwhelming perfume. On the way back up the path I find a vine of it overhanging the path and put my nose in among the pale flowers and breathe in and the smell is dizzying.

On returning to the hotel, limp and loose from our soak, Sean and I order another beer and we all have a more determined look at the menu. Where we crossed the confluence just before dusk, our path converged with the planned route of the motorable road from Beni to Jomsom. Much of this road is unfinished, but Beni is accessible by car, so, being closer to a roadhead, Tatopani’s hotels have more extensive menus than the guesthouses of other villages on the route. Sean sticks with his plan to eat only dal bhat for dinner, but I’ve worked up a craving for animal protein, and the chicken sizzler I order, when it arrives, handily upstages Sean’s dal bhat and Becca’s lasagna. It’s half a deboned chicken smoking and sizzling on a griddle and smothered in gravy that’s bubbling and caramelizing on the iron. By the time I’m done with it there’s nothing left for the dishwashers to do.

Sleep falls on me tonight like a lead blanket. I wake once in the night to the clanging of mulebells and the clatter of hooves on the slates below our window. In the morning, the muscles of my legs are as sore and stiff as they’ve ever been in my life.

We cross a footbridge to where Nepal’s other government’s officials have their checkpost. Below us turquoise water tumbles in a ravine and bright red and yellow and purple flowers grow in the rocks. Krishna shows our ACAP and TRC permits while we wonder how many checkposts there are per mile on this trail. But soon we’re on our way, and we won’t see another checkpost for several days.

We walk mostly uphill on the wide trail, passing under rhododendron and orange trees and stands of high bamboo. Nettles grow on the stone walls. Frequently we pass wide stone benches, built into the walls along the roadside or enclosing the trunks of big shade trees. These are rest areas, where porters and tourists and old women alike stop to rest. At some of these places women sell oranges from woven baskets. We stop to drink water, to put on sunscreen, to strip off our jackets. We pass people every few minutes, a good number of them tourists, though they’ll be less frequent in coming days.

The weather is sunny and hot and I worry that I packed too many woolens. The road is a dirt footpath, inaccessible to automobile traffic, with frequent stairs made from large fitted slabs of granite sunk firmly in the dirt. In usage it’s less trail than highway, and built as solidly as anything of asphalt. Pack trains pass regularly, mules and ponies and donkeys, the animals wearing tin bells with wooden clappers that clunk as they walk, announcing their approach from around the switchbacks. They are laden with plastic weave or burlap sacks full of potatoes, rice, beer and soda bottles clinking; with red propane tanks hung upside down one on each side from the packsaddles’ wooden bows; with plastic jerrycans full of kerosene; with parcels of sewn-up plastic that have the recipients’ names written on them in black marker; with suitcases and duffels and hikers’ packs. The drivers follow behind the last animal, one or two per train, carrying switches, clucking or shouting Ha! at the mules and ponies or slapping their rumps if they get bunched up or stop to munch the greenery. Many of the animals wear halters with colorful rosettes knitted on the forehead pieces, with reflectors sewn onto them, with ribbons hung below their ears, with gold and red tassels swinging from their breasts.

Most goods that travel to and from the villages of the Kali Gandaki river valley in the districts of Kaski and Myaagdi and Mustang through which we’ll be trekking are carried there by porter or pack train. Many of the villages along this route have never been visited by automobiles or motorcycles. Jomsom, the capital of Mustang, is not connected to the rest of Nepal by motorable roads. Some things come into Jomsom by plane but it’s a small plane, nor is the freight cheap. There’s a road under construction from Beni to Jomsom. It will be years before it’s finished. For freightage purposes the river is unnavigable, rocky and steep with too much water in the summer and too little in the winter. For the trekker, this inaccessibility means an area relatively unspoiled: picturesque villages and farms, clean water and air. Tourism makes up most of the area’s economy outside farming, and the local governments have encouraged the booming guesthouse business and prioritized keeping the environment clean. There are drinking water stations in many villages, providing free, safe water to the locals, while charging a small fee for tourists.

We skip lunch and arrive in the early afternoon at our first guesthouse in the village of Tikhedunga. We step into the courtyard, which is open to the road and flagged in the same stones, while Krishna arranges rooms for us. The price is a very agreeable off-season rate, 50 rupees a night, or about 70 cents US. We are shown our rooms off the second story balcony overlooking the courtyard and presented with menus and a pen and order sheet. After cleaning up a little and changing into dry socks we go down and sit at a table along a railing off the back of the courtyard, with a view into the gorge partially obstructed by a bamboo grove. We eat tomato soup and delicious panfried potatoes with garlic and seared sliced peppers and onions. Krishna teaches Becca a tabletop game where small pucks are flicked across a chalk-powdered surface, ricochet and collide and ideally land in one of the pockets at the corners. It’s like a cross between pool and air hockey and I’ve seen it all over the place since, though I’ve forgotten the name.

As Sean and I are finishing up our beers a Nepali man strikes up a conversation with us. He’s a guide, distinguished from most Nepali travelers by his Gore-Tex windshell and good boots. He pulls up a seat and orders another round of beers for Sean and I and soon we’re talking and this man is getting increasingly drunk. Krishna, who doesn’t drink, is casting glances at us, and we’re exchanging smiles amongst ourselves. He’s guiding a group of ten Thai women, he tells us. He’s been guiding for years. He’s an expert on the region, and other regions as well. He frequently interrupts Krishna to give us the benefit of this expertise. Later, over dinner (a very tasty dal bhat with greens and radish achar), he’s sitting with his clients and shouts over them in a drunken outburst, something about mountains. In the morning we’ll see him stumble out of his room with vomit dried on his collar to discover his clients have left without him. Sean and Becca and I agree that we’ve gotten very lucky with our guide, especially now seeing how it can go badly. We’ll talk with a shop owner a few days later in Jomsom who’s sincerely worried that the guide requirement, instated only this past October, will drive away tourists. It’s a valid concern. If you get a guide like this, will you be eager to trek in Nepal again? Will you recommend the trip to your friends?

The second day’s walking, as Krishna warned us, is almost entirely uphill. We walk through terraced farmland where buffalo are chewing at the lower branches of trees. The villages perch on the slope overlooking a wide and extensively terraced gorge. It pains the mind to try to imagine the amount of work involved in carving these terraces out of the mountainsides. We pass the last of the tourists we shared the hotel with in Tikhedunga, and we’ll be the sole guests at each guesthouse from here on out. The road is now almost entirely of stone, hand-fitted slabs of granite, horse dung dried and sifting between them. It winds in narrow streets among brightly painted stone buildings with blue corrugated or slate roofs. All of the buildings are oriented to the road, whose flagstones are joined to side yards and restaurant terraces. Chickens roam freely everywhere. Huge red or white roosters stand on the stone walls and puff their feathers and berate us as we approach. Big woolly dogs sleep on the stones. Some of them are large enough that they might be intimidating, were they not all so lazy and good-natured. Occasionally they’ll get up and trot alongside or ahead of us for a ways with their fluffy curled tails bobbing. None of them ever barks. Restaurants are common, with gazebo-like dining platforms hanging over steep drops and spectacular views. The forested slopes above are in a cloud. The snowy shoulder of Annapurna South can be seen at times in the breaks.

We stop for lunch on the terrace of a large restaurant, eat noodles Chinese style and mashed potatoes sticky with cheese while the first cold breezes of the trek blow from below. An English hiker coming up the road walks past a muscular pony and pats its back and it casually kicks him in the back of the knee and sends him sprawling on the stones. A crowd quickly gathers. Becca prevails upon the man to let her wrap his knee. She’s a trained wilderness responder, and the horse didn’t break the man’s leg, so all around it’s his lucky day. We continue upward, casting a warier eye on the pack trains that come more frequently down the hill.

The trail climbs into rhododendron forests, the trees’ branches gnarled and creepy with moss. There are fewer people, and the remoter areas of the woods have a haunted feel. The overarching branches make the road into a tunnel. We cross a concrete bridge over a rocky draw where turquoise water churns, and the stones are littered with red leaves. The concrete railings of the bridge have been broken off by some past flood fifteen feet above the current water level and their rebar armatures are exposed and twisted and rusting. On the far side we climb into a meadow and are met by a herd of goats that overspill the path. They have young kids among them, that gambol and bound with all four feet in the air at once. One of them climbs to the top of a rock in the midst of the herd, can’t find a way down, and leaps for it. The shepherds are a man and a young boy. After they’ve passed, we see no one for a while. We walk past a seemingly abandoned stone house and I look into the breezeway and see what at first looks like a child sitting there, until it looks up at me with an alarmed white-ringed monkey face. It leaps away and out of view down the hill. Did you see that monkey? I ask Sean and Becca, but they didn’t see it. There are movements in the trees. Half a dozen or more of these large gray monkeys are watching us. They emerge onto the trail behind us to watch us walk away. A pair of them leap a stone wall and run through a fallow field just downhill from the trail, alternately chasing and tackling one another and stopping to watch us suspiciously. These monkeys are not like the Kathmandu monkeys. They’re larger and more muscular and they seem more territorial. It occurs to me that walking past them alone might be a bad idea. I ask Krishna if they ever attack people, and he says, Yes, alone? Definitely attack. I don’t know if this means they’re definitely known to attack, or if they definitely will attack. I let the vagueness stand because I don’t have the Nepali skills nor Krishna the English skills to work it out in a reasonable amount of time, and I’m more interested in keeping a close eye on the monkeys in the field to our left.

Finally we reach a long building with the aspect of a church, on account of its many wooden-mullioned chancery windows. It lies in a quiet mountain hollow, drifts of fallen leaves on the ground, brown and gray hillsides and pink roses on a trellis, an autumn scene out of a germanic fairytale. We stop for a while and Becca pets a dog that looks part husky. We exchange a few words with a shy teenage boy selling knitted goods. The churchlike building seems prepared for a banquet but there is no one to attend. Chickens look on. A sheepskin is drying on the corrugated roof of a shed. We move on, down into a ravine, across a stream, and up into Ghorepani. With its stone buildings and stone walls and cows standing and chewing cud in the yards the place could pass for rural England. After a short discussion weighing good views against good accommodations, we continue up the hill a few minutes more to Ghorepani-Deurali, a small village in the saddle of two hills with a view through the clouds at the flank of a snowy mountain.

The town has the remote and wild beauty of an American mining town from frontier days, complete with ponies hitched at a hotel railing and a public watering trough. The hotel that Krishna leads us to is a three-story building on the ridge, the Green View Lodge. We’re the only guests. We’re given the last rooms on the third floor, at the end of a long corridor of closed blue doors. The hotel is quite cold. The internal walls are plywood and exposed two-by-fours with the electrical cords for lights and switches stapled to them. There is no insulation anywhere, and over the course of the day as we’ve climbed into higher altitudes and clouds, it’s become clear that it’s going to be a chilly night. First Sean and then I take advantage of a hot shower in a stall that opens onto the courtyard. I stand my hiking boots upside down against the door so as not to get water in them and strip out of my clothes, socks last, and put my feet on the cold slate floor. I turn on the water and scald myself happily until the bare electric light bulb goes out. In the faint daylight coming over the top of the door I dry off with my chamois swim towel and force my damp legs into long underwear. Then I join Sean and Becca in the guesthouse’s common room, by a stove made from an oil drum. The beautiful proprietress in her wool scarf and unruly hair feeds split rhododendron logs into the fire and we hang up our socks to dry. Becca and Sean and I talk American politics and the two sisters who own the hotel sit and listen and have a quieter conversation with the young man who will later be introduced to us as the cook.

When we retire to our bedrooms they are deeply cold. The sleeping bag is a welcome shelter. Sean and I wear our wool caps to bed. I wake periodically throughout the night and pull the curtain and peer out the window at the moonlit mountains, three or more peaks now standing in the dim cold moonlight, waiting for our predawn hike up Poon Hill to see the sunrise. A cloud arches over the mountain like an ice rainbow cast by the moon.

Taking the trek to Jomsom and Muktinath was Sean’s idea. When he first contacted me and said he was coming to Nepal, he was already determined to do this trek, inspired in part by the impression made on him years ago by Peter Mathiessen’s The Snow Leopard. (Amanda doesn’t like this book. I have no idea if this is why she didn’t come with us.)

Sean and I were in the process of making preparations when, a couple of days before we were to leave, our friend Becca asked if we wanted any company. We said certainly, and she ended up contributing the lion’s share of the logistical work. Her boyfriend did NOLS (National Outdoor Leadership School) with a guy named Amrit who works for the trekking agency Borderlands, and he set us up with a guide and arranged our TRC permit. As of October of this year, a new law went into effect requiring foreign trekkers on the major routes in Nepal to be accompanied by at least one guide or porter. It seems to be mainly a make-work law, and certainly benefits the trekking agencies, but it also has the potential to degrade more than enhance the experience for trekkers here. (More on that in part two.)

The route we chose begins outside Pokhara, in the village of Nayapul, and goes via Jomsom and Kagbeni up to Muktinath and back to Jomsom. This route is known as the “apple pie trek” because it runs through Nepal’s apple country, and the popularity of the route is such that the tourist infrastructure is well developed here, so if you want, you can eat apple pie every night along the way. The peak season is in September and October. We got a few warnings that December might be too cold but Vishwa assured us we’d be fine, being Americans and thereby accustomed to colder weather than Nepal generally experiences.

We bought plane tickets for the return flight from Jomsom to Pokhara, US$69 each. Between Kathmandu and Pokhara we took the bus. Sean and I nearly missed our 7am bus from Kathmandu because we assumed we could get a taxi, but none was to be had. We took a local bus and then a minibus, crammed aboard with our backpacks among the wary morning commuters. The bus to Pokhara was a luxurious Mercedes with only half a dozen passengers. It left only a few minutes after we’d thrown our packs into the storage compartment and climbed into our reserved seats. Bottled water was handed out, and the massive bus began to nudge its way among the taxis, motorcycles, bicycles, and pedestrians. In half an hour or so, we got clear of the traffic and began to ascend through the sungolden smog, the sun rising among the shadows of brick factory smokestacks and new buildings in the outskirts of the city, bristling with rebar, and we rose into the hills and the clean air.

The road to Pokhara winds through the lush terrace-farmed valley of the Trisuli River. This is one of Nepal’s main highways, a two-lane blacktop comprised mostly of hairpin curves one after another above hundreds of feet of canyon, for two hundred kilometers. It’s a well-built and well-maintained road, with concrete barriers in many places to prevent or at least discourage vehicles from plunging over the side, and it’s wide enough for two large vehicles to pass. Nonetheless, the sheer curviness of it, and the ever-present chasm, prods at the coddled western driver’s sense of mortality. It’s usually a given that in a plane crash, everyone dies. Here, the same is true of bus crashes. (Note to parents/family/friends/others who love us: Most bus crashes in Nepal happen at night and on less well-maintained local buses. Drivers are drunk or fall asleep, or there’s a mechanical failure, poverty being a harsh taskmaster when it comes to automative maintenance. But out of our concern for you, Amanda and I will try like hell not to be on one of those buses. Besides, this bus ticket came with perks such as an included lunch and a no-livestock policy.)

The bus arrived in the early afternoon in Pokhara and we climbed down into a gaggle of pestering taxi drivers offering to take us to various hotels. We were meeting Laurie, who lives and works in Pokhara as an interpreter for the U.N. High Commission for Human Rights, and we were planning on staying at the hotel where she stays. None of the drivers had heard of this hotel, though they offered up at least three hotels with similar-sounding names. We got ourselves loaded into one man’s taxi, but he was apparently the navigator, not the driver. When he tried to get into the passenger seat Sean shooed him off and got in instead. There was no room for him. But a few hundred yards down the road it became apparent that our driver had no idea where we were going. He hadn’t asked us. We stopped him, got out, found another taxi whose driver, by virtue of not being part of the bus park feeding frenzy, was presumably more trustworthy, and proceeded to the more easily located Pokhara office of Borderlands, where Amrit had arranged to have our TRC permits waiting along with our guide and 250 rupees change.

From there we walked to the hotel, dropped our things, went and found Laurie at the U.N. office and had tea with her. While she finished her workday, we went for a paddle on the lake. The snowy slopes of some massive mountain peeked out for a while from the clouds. Later we met Laurie for Newari food, eaten under a thatch canopy by the lake, and returned to the hotel with her through the peaceful Pokhara streets. Pokhara is Nepal’s second largest city but the lakeside neighborhood is so utterly pleasant that Becca and I were soon rehearsing arguments to convince Amanda and Anna (Becca’s friend, whom she’s here visiting until spring) to relocate their research. Pokhara is warmer than Kathmandu in the winter, and the air is clean, and the nearby mountains and the lake provide the sort of picturesque setting which is essential to good Ph.D. research. I’ll post our new address when the arrangements are finalized.

In the early morning, we took in the view from the balcony of the Hotel Supriya. There was fog on the lake and a near-full moon above. Laurie gave me a cup of hot coffee. Krishna Lama, our guide, waved to us from the narrow hotel walkway between two gardens where a water buffalo could be heard grunting from behind a hayrick. We invited him up, situated our bags, said goodbye to Laurie, and went down to the taxi Krishna had arranged for us. I tied our backpacks to the roof rack. On the way out of town we bought a few baked goods from one of the “German bakeries” that are common here. Money somewhat confusingly changed hands, so in the cab I explained the process known as “Jon’s Delicious Reckoning” to Sean and Becca. The taxi broke free of Pokhara’s traffic and began the climb into the hills, to more and more enticing views of the Annapurna range. Krishna explained to us about the striking mountain Machupuchhre (“Fish Tail”) which is deemed holy and is therefore off limits to climbers. Which is fine. I didn’t want to climb it anyway.

On the way up into the hills, we fetched up behind stopped traffic due to a small protest. It apparently had something to do with students, hence the burning tires.

But this quickly dispersed and we were on our way. We stopped at a checkpost to show our ACAP and TRC permits. Another couple miles up the road, we were dropped at the trailhead in Nayapul. We arranged our packs, paid our driver, and started out.

Sean and I are off tomorrow to hike from Pokhara to Jomsom with our friend Becca. Amanda is staying home to work, alas.

We’ll be back in Kathmandu, if all goes according to schedule and the planes are flying out of Jomsom in a timely manner, on the 14th or 15th.

Our friend Ashmina returned to Kathmandu from her artist’s residency in Denmark last month. Shortly after she returned, Amanda and Laurie and I went with her to her studio at Bal Mandir (“Children’s temple”). The building used to be a Rana palace. Now it houses a private primary school and an orphanage. The building is all crumbling and pigeon-haunted grandeur. In front is a lawn, ringed by spindly pines and cypresses, where older children play soccer. There’s a sculpture garden where resident artists have carved, to varying degrees of completion, imposing blocks of marble that lend the place the air of a classical ruin. Morning glories are climbing on a wire fence and nearly submerging the older, weathered statues in a side lawn.

(Marble must be cheap in Nepal. We see it everywhere. For Americans the words “marble floors” imply elegance and expense but I’ve seen marble floors here in stores that sell dusty Chinese electronics and counterfeit cosmetics.)

In a side yard, mustard and radishes are growing in neat plots and laundry is hung out to dry. Children run everywhere. We watched from a third floor gallery outside Ashmina’s studio as a schoolmaster directed a game with thirty children in one of the courtyards. We couldn’t make out the rules. A dog making an exploration of the place watched with about the same degree of understanding from under a tree in the corner.

In her studio, Ashmina took a pile of prints from a cabinet and turned them one at a time and held them up for us to look at. She held some of them up to the sunlight coming through the window and the wrought iron gridwork so that we could see the threads sewn into the fibrous paper, radiating like a network of capillaries.

On our way out, Ashmina’s friend Om gave us a tour of the sculpture garden, and we acquired an entourage of curious children who demanded that I take their picture in various combinations, posed atop various blocks of marble. After each picture I would show the camera’s viewscreen to the children who were in the frame and they would all crowd around trying to grab the camera to turn it for the best viewing until Ashmina warned them not to touch it.

After our first visit to Bal Mandir, Ashmina and Amanda and I went (finally) to buy some plants for the apartment. We followed directions to a nursery, found that it wasn’t where it was said to be, returned too early to pick up some dry cleaning for Laurie, and were led up to the roof by the dry cleaner who pointed out where the nursery was. We walked over there, picked out plants, then Amanda went to retrieve the dry cleaning and returned in a taxi which we packed until it looked like a rolling greenhouse. We drew a number of stares from people we passed in the street.

We’ll need about ten times that many plants before we can transform our terrace into the sort of rooftop garden that our neighbors have, to our great envy. (They also have chickens up there, that we can hear but not see, and a Tibetan mastiff, that we can hear and, when he pokes his big furry head out between the terracotta pots to woof at the street dogs, we can see him as well. Everyone has a dog or five here, if only because the street dogs claim us all equally and are part of the commons, but having a dog for your roof adds that extra touch of domestic refinement.)