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.
