Sleep

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Finally, a good night’s sleep. It’s taken two weeks but I finally slept. And slept I (and Dave) did. Through the night. The late morning. Part of the afternoon. About the only times either of us were up were to relieve upset stomachs, get breakfast and let the maid in to freshen up.

The maid had to be in for a real treat when she came in to clean. She was greeted by my pile of stuff at the foot of my bed then, after making her way to the bathroom, she must have discovered the leftover wash water in the bucket from laundering my pants last night. The wash bucket that is used to hold clean water for people’s use in lieu of toilet paper. The wash bucket that at this moment held a mass of putrid water turned brown from the dirt that was on my pants. I would have loved to have seen her reaction.

Apart from sleeping, I read some more this afternoon and unsuccessfully tried to sell some trekking gear back. There is a strike going on today so everything is closed. Hopefully this won’t affect our trip to the airport tomorrow.

On the way to dinner we came upon a strike-related march that the Maoists had arranged. Hundreds of Mao communist supporters - predominantly young, impressionable males - stormed down the street with fire torches. I wonder how many were there cause it looked fun and how many others have no idea what exactly it is they are supporting.

The dinner was a bit shorter than the last one but much of it went the same. We spent the first half hour giving additional advice on the website and some new tips now that we have a much better grasp on what the treks entail. Some of the most sound advice I could give is making sure they cover in detail everything the trip involves - the good with the bad, demonstrating how they are qualified to bring the most out of the former and their experience in mitigating and dealing with the latter. Present this info for free and have it searchable so even people planning on using another company or going at it alone will find the Third Pole site. Not only will it potentially enhance their business, it will also build a lot of goodwill with potential clients. I suspect that much of this was lost on them.

We also filled out a brief paper survey on the trip. In front of everyone. This was a bit strange as usually these things are anonymous and done after a proper amount of time to reflect. Dave suggested using an online system to deal with these two issues and for results tracking. Again, I doubt that happens.

My big comment on the survey, after noting I had a worthwhile experience (which is true), was about the lack of sanitary conditions of food, water and accommodations along the trail. It’s something that really needs to be improved. Part of the allure of the Himalayas is roughing it but the constant threat of being poisoned because of the complete lack of hygiene just detracts from the experience. If things were to improve it would be only under a forced hand of the trekkers demanding better conditions. As a gateway to this, I suggested that a union of the trekking agencies attempt to improve basic hygienic conditions (eg, the washing of hands by food preparers after using the toilet). More than likely we’ll see a man on Mars before this action is taken but it needed to be said.

For dinner, we had chicken, spring rolls and noodles with cheese (Dave was repulsed and refused to eat the latter). For dessert we had yogurt with bananas. Everything was adequate but it didn’t compare to the burgers yesterday.

After thanking our generous hosts, we left around 8:30 to prepare for an early morning departure to the airport. We’ll have to come back here to get a special tourist bus since all other transportation will still be down as a result of the strike.

Once we got back we hit our racks for one last time in Nepal.

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