The heat

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It didn't take long for me to lose my long hair. By the end of the first day, it was soaked with sweat from hiking in the tropical heat, and no amount of soap could coax a lather out of it. So I had Claire chop it off. Luckily, Claire was prepared. Having been traveling through Asia for months, she was used to both cutting her own hair, and to cutting Sim's. It's just so much easier to maintain a short do when A) traveling, and B) hiking in the heat. So I now sport a cute little bob instead of the long stringy locks I left home with.

There was little else I could do to adjust to the heat, though. It took no time for clothes to soak through with sweat, and not just our shirts. My pants kept getting drenched in funny places that kept Claire and Sim -- and a few villagers, no doubt -- in stitches.

It was unbelievably hot as we wound our way through more villages and fields of rice carved into the mountainsides. Claire said we would soon be wishing we were back in this heat, though we weren't really sure we believed her.

Some people on the trail reacted to this heat by, well, taking off their clothes. The Nepali people are not crazy about baring too much skin, and the advice is to keep thighs and shoulders covered. Some folks didn't get the memo, apparently. While stopping for a snack of banana pancakes, we saw a guy stroll past in the most obscenely tight shorts I had ever seen. I mean, NOTHING to the imagination. This would have been obscene on the beach back home. A nudist colony would have found it obscene.

Later, the group the guy was hiking with came up behind me as I stopped on the trail to take pictures of a pretty view of the village up ahead, Jagat, our destination for the night. I would have stepped aside if I hadn't been fumbling with my polarizing filter at that moment, but looked and saw they had plenty of room to get around me, though it meant stepping on a couple of rocks.

That, apparently, was not good enough for this group. They literally plowed right into me, forcing me off the trail as I continued to juggle my camera equipment. A good 15 or so of them came through before I was able to get back to what I was doing. I think this is when I seriously began to dislike the large groups of trekkers out here on the trail.

Then again, things aren't always as they appear to be out here. Case in point, the little girl who followed Claire and I down a long hill from her village of Bahundanda. She kept pestering us: "photo, photo, photo," she said. She giggled as she grabbed ahold of one of my hiking sticks, "helping" me down the mountain.

Hardened, I suppose, by our time in Kathmandu, where everyone wants something, usually rupees, even for something as simple as taking their picture, we kept trying to shrug this little girl off. I pushed on ahead to get away, though Claire lingered behind.

It was Claire who finally figured out that all the little girl wanted was for someone to take a picture of her on a digital camera, so she could have a look at herself. Claire finally did oblige her, giving the chit a little thrill. She deserved at least that for her determination in pestering us all the way down a mountain.

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Photos

The tropics
Fields of rice carved into the hills, on our second day of walking.