Blogs from Annapurna, Nepal, Asia - page 39

just leting you know that i have been trekking around the himalayas for the last 11 days around the Annapurna Circuit. amazing. trekking through wonderful villages, stunning views, loving it! have now done the hardest parts of the trekking, the most challenging was yesterday (5416m over the thorung pass) & it felt great doing it! cant believe i found internet here, but anyway, just so you dont worry about me not getting in touch...expect no contact for the next 1-2weeks too as im still trekking & dont want it to end!!!! more details to follow later!! ... read more

I woke up to a real problem. My nose was sunburned. Badly sunburned. The whole thing was covered in blisters, which all seemed to burst the second I woke up. My nose was one big mass of red, sore, pussy broken blisters. It was not good. I kicked myself for not being more careful. I had coated my face with No. 30 sunblock early in the day yesterday, and thought that one application was enough. But since I kept stopping every 10 minutes to blow my nose, I figure I wiped it all off fairly quickly. High altitude, in the snow, is not where you want to expose any of your skin to the sun. Claire and Sim thought it was sort of funny, since my "tan line" made a funny mark across my face. I ... read more

I can hike very slowly. Very, very slowly. But I have never hiked as slow as I hiked today. Knowing I would be slow, due to a lot of uphill in our path, Claire and Sim zipped off and left me to go at my own pace. We made plans to meet up in a village called Yak Kharka, where we would make sure everyone was free of the symptoms of altitude sickness before hiking on. Our ultimate destination today was a place called Thorung Phedi, the last stop before going over the high pass, Thorung La. We had to get there in order to do the high pass on schedule -- it would cost us a day if we stopped short of Thorung Phedi. But just getting to Yak Kharka was slooooow going. The altitude ... read more

Our maps aren't the best trail maps ever, but they do have very informative -- and entertaining -- notes about the terrain we are hiking through. Some note that there are "acres of marijuana," while others warn of a "steep descent." Today's hike had this promising note: "Peaceful Forest." However, before we could get there, we had to make our way along something not so peaceful, something pretty nasty: a road. It's not actually a real road yet, only a stretch of road under construction. A road no motor vehicles can drive on, since there's no way to get any vehicles up here, at least not yet. But it was a road nonetheless, blown out of the mountainside. Claire, who, if you remember, has hiked this circuit before, pointed out where the trail used to go. ... read more

I woke up feeling a little better, having lost that fluey, sick as a dog feeling that tries to force your eyelids closed. But I was still hacking up great gobs of phlegm and pulling out boogers blackened, I'm assuming, from all the pollution I had breathed in on the bus trip from Kathmandu. As we listened to a local man coughing, clearing his throat in the most grotesque way, then spitting (a common sound here in Nepal, and throughout Asia, according to Claire and Sim), we came to a realization: I just had the same illness that everyone else here has! All the children have runny noses, and all the adults are coughing away. This country is one big respiratory illness. Today I was able to hike without too much trouble, though it was still ... read more