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.
