Final thoughts...

After final goodbyes to our porters, we caught a minibus taxi from Nyapul to Pokhara.  To visit central Nepal and bypass this beautiful town could well be considered the height of folly.  It is, quite simply, one of the most scenic places I have visited, possibly even rivaling Switzerland’s Lake Lucerne.  So far as I can work out from my map, three rivers congregate in the western end of the Pokhara valley irrigating at least a hundred square kilometres of farmland and ultimately, disgorging into Phewa Lake around which the town is arranged.  Towering over all of this are vast hills some of which are nearly 1000 metres higher than the town itself.  Pokhara’s trademark feature, apart from the lake, is the quietly brooding and highly sacred Machapuchare, attempted once in 1957 but now forbidden to climbers. 

We stayed in Baidam district which has all the benefits of Thamel in Kathmandu though is considerably sleepier and less boisterous.  The place abounds in roadside cafes and wonderfully exotic restaurants with terrific ambiance.  The shopping is sublime too – my advice to any visitor is to shop for souvenirs here and not in the capital.  Prices are better and the selection a good deal more varied and inspiring.  My most vivid memory of Pokhara was the profusion of paragliding operators - I counted over 15 companies offering this service.  Flying usually commences at about 8 in the morning and weather permitting continues throughout the day.  The skies over Pokhara are continuously speckled with the canopies of dozens of rigs while only slightly higher up; eagles, hawks and vultures circle playfully in the thermals.

After a comfortable night, we flew back to Khatmandu where we enjoyed a happy reunion with Sandra and Colin Harris.  They were full of colourful yarns about Sandra’s experiences in a Khatmandu hospital as well as of Colin’s 3-day battle to get insurance to cough up.  All told, the expense of the evacuation and medical care came to R100 000.

From here on however, I felt my holiday beginning to unravel:  the streets of Thamel were bedlam and choked with tourists.  As I jostled my way through some last minute souvenir shopping, I detected the beginnings of a stomachache that would only get better 3 days after getting back to South Africa.  The next day, this condition greatly tarnished my guided tour of Khatmandu’s main religious shrines.  Apart from feeling unwell, my memories are mostly limited to grimy, ancient temples, nerve-wracking encounters with the city’s famous apes and the morbid spectacle of the Pashupatinath funeral pyres belching black oily smoke into the atmosphere.  Give me the mountains over the city any day.

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Since getting back, people have been asking me what I took from the trip that I wouldn’t have acquired from a normal beach vacation or a holiday in Europe.  One person said:  “so what conclusions can you draw from all of this?” as though something objective should be distilled from the sensory and emotional overload.  Perhaps things need to be left in a state of overload?  

But for the sake on wrap-up, let me give it a bash.

At one level, I have unique memories of the fleeting acquaintances I made whilst trekking.  There was Jose the Spaniard, an eccentric loner who walked mostly in a garish pair of red Crocs and who carried a bright red umbrella to protect him from the sun.  There was Andre the Brazilian and ill-fated Yak photographer who travelled to Nepal on his own because he’d fallen out of favour with his girlfriends.  “They broke up with me because they think I love my mountain bike more than them” (er…Andre, if you are reading this, perhaps the bike isn’t the problem).  There was Sander and his talkative guide Tilak who enlightened us to no-end on the culture, history and geography of the Annapurna region.  There was Fred and Rita, an elderly couple from Idaho who were fit as fiddles and doing the Circuit without porters.  

There is something unique about journeying with perfect strangers.  No one really worries about who does what for a living although such things are occasionally discussed.  The main thing is that you are accepted for who you are – a fellow sojourner who has the same apprehensions, endures the same hardships and who has come to enjoy the same mountains as the next guy.

From this diverse group, I also got a glimpse into the true meaning of unplugging.  It’s one thing to go away on holiday and call it relaxation.  In reality however, very few people have perfected the art of recreation.  Mea Culpa.  I spent most of my time worrying about where the next litre of water was coming from or how I would cope with the effects of altitude.  Yes, I did manage to relax enough to read Doug Rogers’ excellent book “The Last Resort” but that didn’t really count.  Well, certainly not alongside an Israeli family we came to know.  The Cohens had gotten unplugging down to a fine art.  One member of the party had brought along his guitar while another carried the hookah.  On rest days or in the early evenings, the family would sit around singing their favourite songs, smoking cherry scented tobacco and generally not taking things too seriously.  “Aren’t you worried about the Thorung La?”, I asked as I returned to the Lodge exhausted from an acclimatization climb.  “We’ll worry about that when we get to it,” said the father, man named Eyal – “with things the way they are in Israel, we relish every day we can”.

Also, for the first time in my life, I got a real taste of the meaning of teamwork.  Our little group of five, consisting almost entirely of perfect strangers, gelled quickly as a team that got on well and which cared about one another.  The catalyst was the shared commitment to not retracing our steps back to where we started the trail at Syange. 

Finally, I gave a lot of thought to my work as a marketing consultant.  The week before leaving, I’d been involved in an abortive workshop where the findings of a project I’d been working on for two months were summarily rejected.  For at least the first 4 days of the trip, I found myself railing at the protagonists concerned, agonizing over how they could have been so resistant and short sighted.  At one stage I angrily decided that I hated my work as well as the bureaucratic, unimaginative assholes I have to deal with.  Naturally, I quickly reminded myself that without work such a trip would have been utterly impossible.  I Thank God for all the work gigs, even the "bad" ones.

But as the trip progressed these frustrations receded.   In their place came the simple rhythm of rising before dawn, of walking, eating and going to bed early in rustic settings.  It was a world of spectacular night skies, rushing rivers, towering mountains, humble people earning an honest living – a world free of the intrusions of phone calls, Facebook, Twitter and crappy, monotonous advertising.  It was a world where even a little is enough.   

Could I have lived like this indefinitely? – of course not.  But it was sweet relief while it lasted. And in this state, the mind-bending grandeur of the Himalaya really took root in the soil of my mind.  It was the culmination of many childhood desires I didn’t even really know existed.  There were days it was so intoxicating I could hardly hold a thought in my head and so simply wept with joy at the privilege of being there.  To mangle the final lines of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, the Great Gatsby, I had come face to face with something commensurate to my capacity for wonder.