Advertisement
Published: October 27th 2007
Edit Blog Post
Boy with sheep
The boy, and his herd of stubborn sheep, which had me laughing to the point of really serious pain. Sometime in the middle of the night, I woke up and knew something was wrong. I was sick. Big time. I was prepared to get any number of stomach ailments. I came fully stocked with 5 years worth of Immodium, as well as several super-duper antibiotic pills my doc said would knock out any diaherreal problems I might face.
But did I get a stomach ailment? Noooooo. I got a nasty, horrible cold. And I had no cold medicine. No cough syrup, throat lozenges, sinus meds. None. Nothing.
It was one of those colds that starts with a sore throat and a chest filled with phlegm, but no way to cough it up because it hurts too much to cough. And the head is all fuzzy with that "I'm sick with the flu" feeling. This one would have had me calling out sick to work for sure. I kept thinking: There was no way I could hike today. Not like this. I needed to stay in bed and sip tea all day instead.
After a fitful night of drifting in and out of sleep, I crawled out of bed at 7 a.m. and knocked on Claire and Sim's
Finally -- Tal!
It took at least twice as long as it should have...and it nearly wiped me out, but I made it, finally. door.
"I'm sick," was all I said. I could have actually said any words, and they would have known, the words filtered through three tons of phlegm.
They weren't happy about it. We had a schedule to keep, and being sick would throw us way off, cost us a day off we had hoped to spend in a better place, one with hot tubs and bars with cold beer. Jagat was fine for one night, but not a place anyone wanted to spend a whole day doing nothing while their hiking partner suffered in bed with the flu.
So, while I crawled back into bed for another hour or two of sleep, they went down to breakfast without me and hatched a plan: they would find me a porter to carry my pack, hoping that by making the hike easier, I would be able to do it. I agreed to give it a shot, since I didn't want them stuck in the village all day with nothing to do.
It was a horrible hike. I vaguely noted that it was actually quite pretty, and for a healthy person would have been a fairly easy jaunt. But
Beer bottles
Sim and the place where we stayed in Tal. Note the beer bottles lining the walkway. every step was torture. I could barely breathe, so even the slightest uphill was painfully slow. The porter tried to be a good servant, hiking right beside me, checking on me frequently, until I told him to go on without me. I just wasn't in the mood for anyone's company.
I did manage to laugh once, sort of. At the edge of a village, I came to a road block caused by a huge herd of sheep. They must have thought they were headed for the butcher, because they did not want to move. A little boy was trying to urge one on by pulling on its horns, but only landed on his own butt. When he finally managed to pull one ahead, it broke free and ran back into the herd.
It was really funny, and I started to laugh, but, damn, it hurt too much. So I kept the laughter to myself, for fear laughing out loud might cause me to start convulsing with a really painful coughing fit.
Near the end of the hike, I did start coughing up great big balls of yellow-green phlegm. Man, it hurt!
I thought I'd never make it, even without my pack. I had no business being on the trail that day. Then I hit a hill that seemed to just go up and up and up and up, and I stared at it, totally discouraged and not even sure I could do it. I asked my porter where Tal, where Claire and Sim were waiting for me, was. Up and over, he indicated with hand gestures and a few words of broken English.
By now, the porter was getting a little frustrated with my slow progress. He had hoped to get me to my destination in enough time to hike back to his village before dark. I assured him that Tal was as far as I was going that day, since our original destination had actually been another village further on. That seemed to calm him down a little.
It took a good hour, but I finally got to the top of the hill, where I could see Tal alongside the river below. Anxious to crawl into bed, I practically skipped down the hill, bumping into Sim at the outskirts of the village. To my relief, she announced that she and Claire and been just as beat by that last hill, and had decided we should all stay in Tal that night. Good, I said, because I wasn't planning to go any further that night. Just getting to Tal had taken everything I had.
I took my pack from the porter, gave him 700 rupees, and followed Sim to the room she had already reserved for me. I shed my hiking clothes, crawled into bed and fell asleep right away. It was 4 p.m.
Later, I filled up with hot mint tea, which Sim had brought to me in the largest Thermos bottle in all of Nepal. I didn't have the Western meds necessary for a bad cold/flu, but I had mint tea and garlic soup -- almost as good. Maybe even better.
So I sipped mint tea, Claire and Sim sipped black tea, and we all shook our heads at other trekkers, who were sipping beer. Sure, we love beer as much as anyone else, but we were three days of walking from the nearest road. Where were those beer bottles going to end up?
Well, some of them ended up as decorations in front of the lodge. They were used to line the walkways, and actually looked pretty cool. But, as Sim discovered, more of them decorated the back of the lodge, where they were tossed into a great, big trash heap. Shame, shame.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.145s; Tpl: 0.014s; cc: 9; qc: 49; dbt: 0.0921s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb